Pan

I had a banquet at Sweet 'n Tart tonight, in celebration of my birthday (which was on Feb. 2). I set the menu in advance, and they were nice enough to print copies of the special menu and set one at each of the two tables we occupied. Appetizers: Deep Fried Crispy Spring Roll Pan Fried Turnip Cake Stuffed Eggplant Main Dishes: Garlic, Ginger & Scallion Crusted Crispy Chicken Stuffed Bamboo Piths with Asparagus Orange Flavored Prawns with Chili Shredded Fish with Asparagus Sauteed Chinese Broccoli Braised Bean Curd with Mushroom & Vegetable Pan Fried "Chile Sea Bass" in French Style Dessert: Sticky Rice Ball with Hazelnut It was a real challenge to make a menu for this group of people. Of the 17 people who came (plus one baby, but she eats only mother's milk), three are vegetarians, one eats mostly vegetables and very limited protein for health reasons, one eats nothing but vegetables and certain kinds of fish in non-kosher restaurants, and at least one other person eats no pork and no fish. In the end, there was more than enough food for everybody. The dinner started off inauspiciously, though, as I had thought I had ascertained in discussions with a manager beforehand that the turnip cake would be vegetarian, and it turned out to be the traditional lobak goh with pork in it. It was tasty, but I wouldn't have ordered it for this group if I had realized what was in it. The spring rolls were good spring rolls and I thought a good choice for the group, but there's not much else to say about them. The stuffed eggplant had a delicious sauce and I considered it the standout from among the appetizers, even though the fish stuffing was a little fishy. Not everyone ate theirs, but I believe that all pieces were finished, in the end. The chicken was excellent and probably better than the version I had had at Congee. I believe there had been five spice powder on the skin, and the accompaniment was very tasty. We had them exclude the soup (chicken soup, I think) that's usually in the bamboo piths stuffed with asparagus. It definitely tasted different from when Mascarpone and I had gone the other time, but was perhaps equally good the purely vegetarian way. The prawns were considered the real standout by my crowd, and there were no leftovers of that dish. Mascarpone and I noticed that there was less chili than when we had eaten the same dish downstairs (the banquet was on the upper level) -- and in fact, I mistook it for another dish -- but it was quite good this way, too, and the staff had probably guessed right that toning down the chili was good for my group. Interestingly, I didn't detect any peel in the dish, either. I thought the shredded fish with asparagus was terrific, but there were leftovers. It was really in bite-sized pieces rather than shredded. I can't remember the specifics of the taste, but I have some leftovers, so I might come back to this tomorrow. The Chinese broccoli was much appreciated. It was good-quality produce (very green and leafy), kind of bitter, and simply but well sauteed with garlic. The bean curd was another dish that was quite good, though perhaps not a standout and certainly not on the level of the great bean curd and mushrooms dish at Congee Village. But that's another kind of dish. This was really a kind of Buddha's Delight, and a good rendition. It included lettuce, carrots, black mushrooms, and scallions, and the bean curd had a nice creaminess inside. The Pan Fried "Chile Sea Bass" in French Style was an unusual dish, and a New Years special. From what I remember, it's cooked in Grand Marnier or Cointreau, it was nicely crispy, and while it had a clear ginger taste, the strips on the fish were not ginger but, I believe, came from the really big green Chinese pears. I liked the dish. The Sticky Rice Ball with Hazelnut was a recommendation of Niki, the manager I worked out the menu with, and it was surprisingly outstanding! The outside of the rice ball was filled with shredded coconut, and friends of mine deduced that the insides included white chocolate. You really owe it to yourself to try this some time. It was way better than having a regular birthday cake! Service was good, except for some communication problems. When they were taking away individual servings that hadn't been touched, my mother and I said that we wanted them to keep those so that people could take them home later. At the end of the meal, management claimed that all of that food -- including parts of the two whole chickens that hadn't been placed on our table -- had been thrown away. In the end, I was given a very small amount of food to take home. I'm sure the food wasn't thrown away but was either served in individual portions to other patrons or given to the kitchen staff to eat. Is it just not done to take leftovers home from a Chinese banquet? But despite a couple of complaints, I feel like they did a good job for us and I would consider them for another banquet. Every dish was at least good, while a few were significantly better than merely good. The check was some $498 plus tip (with the tax being $38 and change, I said a tip of at least $80 and probably a little more was necessary). Another birthday banquet was happening at the same time on the other side of the room, and from the dishes that passed, it looked like a more traditional Chinese banquet. The owner, whose name may have been Spencer, came by and we shook hands. He's from Hong Kong. I believe I wrote somewhere that this restaurant is Taiwanese. It is not, though there are some Taiwanese dishes on the menu.

What's a sassenach?

For those who don't remember, the San Gennaro Festival on Mulberry St. used to be controlled by the Mafia, until they were busted during Giuliani's time in office.

Chufi, you realize you're selling your picturesque city big-time with those photos! Even more tourists (this time, food-loving ones) will be beating down the doors. As for me, not this summer, but one of these days.

Roast chicken stuffed with apples is an old recipe, so that's chicken with fruit, though the apples usually aren't eaten in that combination. Also, I would think that Duck a l'Orange has a long history of being served in French and French-influenced restaurants in the US, too. And does fish/seafood with lemon count?

I've never seen black sesame bars with cumin! I'd get one. I much prefer purely sweetened preserved fruit to the kind with salt and other stuff like licorice, hot pepper, saccharine, artificial color . . . In the mid 70s, I used to get all manner of sweetened preserved Chinese fruits at the first multi-level department store (2 stories) in Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia. My favorites were Pinguofu (apples), cherries, and pears. I can't find any of those here, and even in China, they were hard to find in 1987 and harder to find now.

What is poke, Kris?

Pan, have you tried South Indian filter coffee? It's got that smooth, creamy, almost chocolaty taste that the candies have.[...] ← Nope, never tried it. I'll keep that recommendation in mind.

I'm enjoying your pictures, David. I don't recognize all the fruits, but buah pinang is called areca nut in English. It's bitter and has narcotic properties, and is traditionally taken with sireh leaf and kapur (lime). A quick web search produced a page in which areca nut leads off an annotated list of "Non-Edible Nut-Like Fruits." Nangka is called jackfruit in English, and the unripe nangka is used among other things for sayur, a savory dish of basically non-sweet vegetables boiled in coconut milk with chillis, which is used as a side dish to accompany curries and so forth. I believe I also remember it being cooked with belacan in Terengganu. Those are some great rambutan at your in-law's! Enjoy all the wonderful, fresh Malaysian produce and the company of your relatives and friends, and have a safe remainder to your trip! (In other words, selamat jalan. )

Back in 1992, I had the pleasure of eating several times in a mid-priced restaurant in Nice serving cuisine from La Reunion. That was fabulous food, and I wish that style would spread (rather than the restaurant closing, which unfortunately happened during the succeeding year). The food was such a mixture of subtlety and powerful flavors, like a very spicy fish curry with red grapefruit and green and pink peppercorns. And the reason it's a propos here is that it felt like a sort of cross between Indian food, French food, and something else (probably African influence, as La Reunion is way closer to Madagascar and the African mainland than it is to India). I also frequented a Vietnamese restaurant in Nice which seemed to have decent patronage and of course had the obligatory wine list, but there's no question that the reach of Vietnamese food in France is nowhere near the reach of Chinese food in the U.S. Also, I think it's more common for Asian restaurants in France to claim to be serving two or more different cuisines (e.g. Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese) than in the U.S.

What do you think of the recipes posted at http://www.webtender.com/?

When I eat in Chinese restaurants, I'm quite content to have tea plain, especially when a good chrysanthemum or jasmine tea is served. I had a quite flavorful and pleasantly complex jasmine tea in a Malaysian restaurant in Flushing last (Thursday) night. In non-Asian restaurants, I usually have tea with lemon. In Indian restaurants, I like to have masala chai, and I also enjoy Chinese bubble tea in various flavors. I have sugar in tea when eating in restaurants representing countries where adding sugar to tea is the thing to do, e.g. Middle Eastern places (Yemeni, etc.), I like herbal teas, but that's really something different as they don't contain tea leaves.

You can't get a slice of pizza at Sal & Carmine's? Did they go bad? For Mexican, I used to like the place on 85 St. between Broadway and Amsterdam, but that was quite a number of years ago. If we're going to continue with more general discussion of the Upper West Side, though, we'll need another thread.

Todd, I don't think the way he assigns stars is anything like the only "real issue," and I think we agree that "an especially subtle curry" would presumably be one with very mild spicing, so that's not the point, either. My problem is that I don't find that his reviews -- the language of the reviews, not the star ratings -- inspire any confidence that I even fully understand the bases for his judgments, and I'm not even sure he always fully understands the basis of his own judgments (needless to say, I don't trust his judgments or find them very interesting). He has shown himself to be ignorant about various cuisines, and these parsing questions exist mainly because he isn't clear enough in describing dishes, which is presumably (as others have mentioned) why he resorts to describing former convict clients, falling lamps, and other incidental things that I usually couldn't care much less about. Yes, I know, there are people who go to restaurants mainly to look at clientele and at the room. However, that's not why I go out.

I've got some of that right here. I bought a bag for the first time last week in Flushing, Queens, New York. It's an Indonesian product, and pretty good. Ingredients: Sugar, glucose, milk powder, coffee extract, coffee flavor, vegetable oil, salt, caramel. I find coffee too bitter/strong to drink but like this candy.

I was in Changchun for three days last August. For whatever it's worth, it seemed like there were some local kimchi-like pickles, though less hot-peppery. There were also vendors with very good flatbread in a market. Otherwise, though, I'm pretty ignorant about what would be local specialties.

I realized later why it's been a long time between visits to Angon: Something in their cuisine (probably partly the fat?) has been very hard on my digestion each time, and that was also true of my one meal at Mina, though I initially wondered if that time had been due to eating too much rich, tasty food. This is true of many other Indian restaurants in this neighborhood, especially the longstanding 6th St. ones (which are way inferior to Angon and which I don't go to anymore), but much less true of Madras Cafe, which happens to be vegetarian. It's even that much less true of my father's take on Indian food, which is very low-fat. But anyway, I had a very hard night last night and a tough morning and afternoon today.

Great photos, Jason (and the presentations are very appealing)! What's the herb on top of the octopus? The one on top of the poached egg looks like purslane to me, and it seems to reappear atop the tuna carpaccio, along with -- is that jicama? And some red cabbage, or is that red onion? Garnishes interest me.

One slight word of warning: Not all ginger candies have edible paper. The wrapper of Ting Ting Jahe candy is not edible, and it's regrettable that it sticks so strongly to the candy.

The inevitable question: Who was the worst you've seen? Without prejudice to the review under discussion (which I still haven't read), Bruni's been bad enough for me to lose interest and stop reading his reviews. I wish they had given the gig to Asimov, if he wanted it (and I suppose he didn't).

If you can quantify something as "less than 1% [better]," others can quantify something else as "40% better." It's all subjective. For some reason, I'm reminded of the self-reporting pain scale of 1-10. That scale is subjective but still useful to health professionals. The kind of scale we're discussing is a lot less useful and perhaps more akin to 1-10 ratings of people's looks. A lot of people find that absurd, but people do it all the time and there's even a website that's well-known for affording people the opportunity of rating others' looks.

I think in some parts of the U.S., tipping 15% probably is OK. In New York, you are expected to at least double the tax of 8.25%, but I doubt that a similar percentage is widely expected in, say, South Carolina, though I stand to be corrected.

Victor, for whatever it's worth, I eat out very often in New York (mostly in low-to-moderate-priced restaurants), and I seldom witness really bad behavior by customers.

Understood perfectly. I, on the other hand, eschew non-tree-ripened bananas (not only because of taste but mostly because they literally make me sick), but am willing to have cooked non-tree-ripened plantains, whether sweet or (sometimes) as tostones (which aren't ripe no matter what). I don't have much use for winter tomatoes, either.

Bux, you may well be right that the least professional waiters have the most complaints, but as far as I know, all professionals have complaints. Professional orchestral musicians often gossip about conductors, for example -- for both good and ill. (We love the good ones!) Not to mention professional teachers . . .