Pan

Hi, Ore, I just caught up on this great thread. Pardon me if you already mentioned it, but what's the name of the town you're now staging in?

You might check to see if the Indian restaurant at the Quality Inn near the hospital and park on the river is still excellent, as it was a few years ago. Here's a link to my Jan 16 2002 rave review of Passage to India.

! I just can't imagine a belacan dish without much seasoning! What in the world are they doing?

Yes, Mocca, and here's their menupages.com page.

First I've heard of anyone eating banana peel, though people have tried to smoke it. (Words from "Mellow Yellow": "Electric banana is the very next craze...")

I love fresh, crunchy jambu air, and I love the look of that rujak buah! Yetty, you realize that with those pictures, you're making people who've never been to Indonesia feel homesick for Indonesia, right?

Empire Szechuan still exists, but does Japanese sushi in addition now. Yeah, and it's sucked for years, but when it was new, I and my family used to like it for a few years. Hunan Balcony opened around the same time, was once acceptable, but was never as good as Empire Szechuan once was, and has also sucked for a really long time.

Not quite, though, because their turkey is terrific. Nice cole slaw too, though that's a side dish.

Laksa, one of these days, I'll try Sentosa again, now that it's on Prince St., Flushing. I passed it up for dinner today because Spicy & Tasty had a table available for one (yum!). I generally found them acceptable when they were in Manhattan. (I've never had Malaysian food that was better than boleh tahan [so-so] in New York, including Flushing, but it costs a lot less time and money than a round-trip flight to KL.) Restaurant Malaysia always served suitably strong-tasting kangkung belacan, but I was a little dissatisfied with other things the last two or three times I was there. You'd think that with all the people flooding out of Ipoh, there would be some really good Malaysian restaurants somewhere around here...

I've eaten on banana leaves before. But didn't you say plantain leaves were eaten? I think of the plantain as a type of banana, as do Malaysians (pisang tanduk=horned banana, and that's their name for the plantain).

I can't speak for everyone, but I certainly have. In fact, some time ago, I started a thread about what are often called "heaty" and "cooling" foods: Food and the Humoral System. I don't think we got anywhere near exhausting that thread, so please post there if you'd like to say more on that topic.

Are you in the U.S.? If so, I can empathize with you. But what I really miss are not so much the banana flowers (jantung pisang=banana heart in Malay), let alone the leaves, which I didn't know you could eat, but the ripe Malaysian bananas themselves. Such a wonderful fruit, and so unlike the stuff passed off as "bananas" in the U.S.

I don't think I've ever had any olives in Baba Ghanouj. I think that adding olives would make it something else.

You have yet to have any asam dishes, any Malaysian curries, and any dishes with sambal belacan, so that's where I'd suggest you start. Take your husband (if he's into it) out to a Malaysian restaurant and order something like Asam Fish Head and Kangkung Belacan, then go another time and have something curried (e.g. jumbo shrimp, crab, chicken, fish) and Petai or Lady's Finger (=Okra) or Long Bean Belacan. You also should get some Kaya (very rich, eggy coconut custardy jam); Jing Fong, which I understand is owned by a Chinese Malaysian from Ipoh, serves kaya buns on weekends at their dim sum lunch. Two other really common Malaysian foods are Nasi Goreng (fried rice) and Mee Goreng (fried noodles). And then there's Bubur and Pulut Hitam, but I'll bet that whatever you get in any restaurant won't hold a candle to what you can get for 1 ringgit at any number of stalls in Kuala Lumpur (but try it, anyway). I don't know where you'd get Nasi Kerabu or Nasi Ulam in New York; does Eastanah have Nasi Kerabu on their menu? I wonder what they use for herbs and vegetables. Traditionally, Nasi Kerabu and Nasi Ulam use fresh locally-grown or/and wild green vegetables available in Kelantan. In terms of Malaysia, I tend to think of pig's intestine as a Hakka food above all; I remember having pig intestine soup in hole-in-the-wall across from the long-distance bus station in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan in the 70s. Practicing Muslims don't eat pig intestine, of course. Of the foods you listed, Hainanese Chicken Rice is a natural. It's so widely loved by Malaysians of all regions and ethnicities. Chili Crab is delicious.

Food Tutor, I'm not one of the cynical ones. By far the majority of my interactions with wait staff are good ones. However, I can certainly remember times when people asking whether everything was alright really didn't mean that as a sincere question. You can feel when that happens. Hasn't it ever happened to you when you were a customer?

weirdly, i have no problem with checkbacks. if there's something amiss, it's a good chance to rectify it without flagging someone down. Right. Unless they don't really want to know the answer to the question. That's when I have a problem with it.

Since you've acted as a rater for Zagat, you know that it's impossible for a rater to rate something 6 or 7 points higher or lower. The rating scheme is a scale of 0 to 3 only. Those ratings are then multiplied by 10 and averaged by the management, so the only ratings possible from individual raters are 0, 10, 20, and 30.

And I think it's an insult to the raters. Just curious: How would you feel if a comment that a restaurant was "not as good as its rating" had been printed?

You may think it's better than its rating, but isn't that comment a pretty total mockery of the "integrity" of the way the rating is reached?

Todd, I disagree in several ways with your remarks about classical music, but I shall refrain from going further down that tangent. I agree more with your remarks about food (though I wonder whether that reflects my lesser degree of knowledge about food history and cuisine as compared to my knowledge about classical music).

My update is that my brother and father sometimes decided to tip in spite of what they knew and I dissented, but that no-one was expecting any tips.

I think it's questionable to suggest that if you find the results credible, that automatically reflects well on the procedure. As for the text comments, they are obviously not arrived at through "democratic" means, and the most notorious was something to the effect that "this restaurant is better than its rating."

I believe on the East Coast of Malaysia, unripe nangka is sometimes used as an ingredient in Sayur, a savory side dish of green vegetables, starchy roots, etc., boiled in coconut milk with plenty of hot pepper. I know that Sayur is made in parts of Indonesia, too, as I used to make a recipe for Sayur Bayam (I forget the exact English name of bayam, but it's a red-and-green-leaf spinach-like vegetable) in Copeland Marks' Indonesian cookbook. Suzanne, I've definitely seen many durians in New York that showed no evidence of having been frozen. Whether they had been frozen previously, though, I wouldn't know for sure. Do you have any idea why it would be illegal to import mangosteens?

Not quite. It was started as a sideline to the Green Tree, from what I recall, probably in the late 70s, and eventually took over the whole space.

Yes. That is, it depends on the recipe. The whole pods are often used.