Pan

enrevanche, you were missed. To everyone else, I'm really glad you came. It was nice to meet some new faces and say hello to people I knew from before. The 10 of us had a wonderful time! We had the following cold dishes: Shredded Chicken w. Spicy Sauce Beef Tendon in Red Chili Sauce Chinese Eggplant w. Garlic Sauce Jelly Fish w. Sesame Oil Sauce Cold Noodles w. Red Chili Sauce The eggplant is a favorite of mine and was great, as usual. I'm also a big fan of the flavorful jellyfish dish, though some of the crowd seemed not to like it as much as I do. We were unable to identify the green herb in the green sauce. The beef tendon is another cold dish I get regularly. It has more than just hot oil; it includes a blend of spices (5-spice powder, perhaps?) and cilantro, making it superior to Grand Sichuan's rendition, in my opinion. I had forgotten how great the cold noodles were, just fabulous! The chicken was also nice. The size of the cold dishes was smaller than I remember, but you'll see later that that's hardly cause for complaint. For hot dishes, we ordered: Diced Chicken & Peanuts in Hot Pepper Bean Curd w. Spicy Minced Pork Minced Pork w. Cellophane Noodle Lamb Home Style Dried Sauteed String Bean Fresh Tilapia w. Hot Pepper and Black Bean Shrimp w. Sizzling Rice Smoked Tea Duck The last 3 dishes were ordered because our waitress advised us that the cold dishes were small and there wouldn't be enough food. She was right. We finished virtually everything except for a bit of the pork dishes, which one of the party took home. The lamb was delicious: Sour and spicy. The tilapia was the only dish that was a little too spicy for me - the little pieces of small hot pepper were really potent. It was a really tasty dish, though, and I'd gladly order it again. The shrimp with sizzling rice (which was really rice cakes) also included slices of bamboo shoot and mushroom and was unpeppery and soothing. The bean curd with spicy minced pork was another standout, partly because of some sourness in the sauce. The cellophane noodles were pretty hot-peppery. The tea duck was a little salty, had a robust smoky taste, and came with some good sauce. Really, all the dishes were tasty. I thought the least interesting was the diced chicken and peanuts in hot pepper, which wasn't the dish I thought I had had before. And here's the kicker: With a generous tip, the meal cost only $14/person (I owe you $6, =Mark!)!

Hi, everybody. In August, my mother will be presenting a paper at a conference in Changchun, and she's decided to make it a family vacation. I would love some advice on good places to eat in these cities. My mother doesn't eat pork or fish but does eat some types of seafood, fowl, and red meat. Also, my parents are not likely to want to spend really large sums of money for single meals, like $100 per person or something, and my father has to eat lightly, anyway, so I don't think imperial banquets are for us. In addition, while we seem to be set on a hotel in Beijing, recommendations of comfortable hotels with air conditioning in the other cities would be welcome (I guess Changchun will be taken care of by the conference). Any other recommendations for how to make our stay as pleasant and fun as possible are also welcome (for example, should we give Guilin a miss and stay in Yangshuo?). And if any of you live in one of those cities and will be there in August, we'd love to meet you! I see some threads on Beijing. Are the recommendations in this one still current? How about this one?

There's a vegan bakery right near me, but I decline to talk about it in this thread.

I didn't find fault with the review but haven't been to the restaurant. Yeah, I think that reads as a 1-star review.

I like beef tendon, too. Duck gizzards are also nice. I also enjoy a casserole of pig heart that I get at a place called Yummy Noodle in Manhattan's Chinatown.

There have been good South Indian eateries in the Edison, New Jersey area for at least 9 years. At that time, they were mainly serving the local South Indian community, and my then-girlfriend and I were usually the only non-Indians in a place at a small strip of stores on, I think, Route 18. I think there's been a very slight proliferation of South Indian places in New York, mostly within the past 10 years or so.

You wanna make something of it?

Does leg of lamb count? If not, how about pigfoot noodle soup?

Now, you're trying to argue that it's a "general consensus" that the Times is an "ultra left-wing paper." I'd call that a highly tendentious remark, but more importantly, one which would tend to provoke strong responses on an off-topic subject. So please, let's consider that tangent closed. You write: You may have felt I was implying a personal animus toward Bruni on your part. You may not have any personal animus toward him, but you have taken strong exception to his reviews. So let me rephrase my question: When is the last time there's been a main New York Times restaurant critic whose reviews you generally liked?

Kew, the sura I had in Kg. Merchang in the 70s did not taste of chicken at all, though chicken was one of a large number of ingredients in it.

In a previous thread, Jason reported on his awful meal at Cipriani Dolci. That and my lunch today inspired me to start a thread where we can praise what's good at GCT. I hadn't had time to pick up lunch in my neighborhood while on the way to visit a friend in Tarrytown this afternoon. I got to the lower level of GCT, ticket in hand, some 12 minutes before my train's scheduled departure. As I stepped off the staircase, I noticed an outlet of Pepe Rosso, part of the Pepe chain of quality paninoteche/trattorie. They weren't selling the panino caprese which I usually have enjoyed on visits to Pepe Giallo on 10th Av. near 25 St., but they did have a panino di prosciutto. For $7.50, I got a very good sandwich of prosciutto, excellent-quality fresh arugula, and fresh mozarella on good press-toasted bread. They made it for me in 7 minutes, I paid and got on the train with a few minutes to spare, and I was able to have an enjoyable lunch instead of showing up hungry. Where do you like to get something to eat or drink on the way to or from the train in Grand Central?

I went to Mama's once and found it eh. Do you think it's possible they had an off day?

I actually know a woman who ate extremely unripe papaya for the purpose of aborting a fetus. It caused her to throw up a lot in addition to miscarrying. Sorry if that was a disagreeable remark in a thread about tasty food...

Mascarpone, glad to see you got home OK. I think I speak for both myself and mascarpone in saying that the Union Pacific experience and even just the cuisine itself are not for everybody. But I think that someone who goes in with a curious mind and is willing to approach the meal in a spirit that allows him/her to enjoy the product of an imaginative and idiosyncratic mind, engaging in analysis but not trying to find faults, would have enjoyed the meal we had.

Rich, I will refrain from discussing your allegations about the political positions of New York newspapers, because we are not here to argue about such things here. This is not ePolitics, and non-food-related articles are off-topic for discussion. That said, I'm curious to know which food critics for the Times you've liked. More to the point, who was the last main (over-$25) food critic you liked?

One thing all of us can do is politely cut conversations short when the other person is on a cell phone in a place where there's a captive audience, such as on a bus or subway or in line at the post office. My ex-girlfriend has no land line, only a cell phone. Whenever I found out I was speaking to her while she was in such a place, I would make the conversation quick and indicate that I was cutting it short out of respect for the others and looked forward to talking to her later. She has never held it against me. But tommy's point about volume is also well taken. I never have any beef with someone who has a cell phone conversation on the bus that is almost inaudible to other passengers. The worst is "GUESS WHAT?! I'M ON THE BUS!!" Yeah, you and 35 other people know that. Now, shut up! My main beef with cell phone conversations is that, even if they are not so loud as to be unpleasant purely in terms of volume, they are usually boring.

I drink barley tea often in Korean restaurants. Yesterday, I went to a ramen place in New York that served barley tea that had a much stronger roasted flavor that made me think at first that it was coffee!

Thanks for the info on sura, Kew. The sura I had that had chicken as an ingredient was sweet! It also tasted strongly of cardamom, which I don't see as an ingredient in the recipe you posted. I never had sura that had any topping; it was eaten by itself and was a rich sweet. Somewhere, my mother has a recipe on an index card (I remember seeing it), but we don't know where it is. If it turns up some time, I'll try to remember to post it.

As I mentioned in the thread about Wolfgang's Steakhouse, I didn't think much of this review, and that's the first time I've really found that degree of fault with any of his articles since he was hired for his current position. I agree with Fat Guy that it's probably "a waste of time and space to have the fine-dining critic review steakhouses and assign them stars." But what I'm not ready to do is write off Bruni simply because I didn't find this review very interesting or informative, having been spoiled by the folks here who are much more knowledgeable and interesting to read about steakhouses - most of all, Wesza, who I daresay knows more about meat than Bruni and any 10,000 other people you might think of will learn in their whole life. Methinks some of the sharpening of knives that happened before Bruni even showed up, paused briefly, and has been more and more reaching a crescendo on this site (mixed metaphor alert!) may be partly due to the mere fact of his position as chief New York Times food critic and the enjoyment people get out of criticizing a critic, any critic, and trying to cut him/her down to a shorter stature. Not all critics suck, even those who work for the higher-profile old media. Like it or not, we can't expect every review by Bruni to be good, nor that he will know everything about every aspect of dining and restaurants. I'll cut him a lot more slack than one or two reviews. I've enjoyed his forthright expression of opinion and have hope that he will grow in this job.

I didn't like this review either. We heard more about his arteries than anything else. At first, it seemed slightly funny, but not the nth time. And I didn't learn anything very useful about either Wolfgang's or Luger from this review. Several eGulleteers have done much better reviews of steakhouses. Wolfgang's is probably pleased with the positive aspects of the review and the 2-star rating, but the main thing I learned from this review is that Bruni probably shouldn't be reviewing steakhouses and should leave that to a special guest reviewer. I'm not writing Bruni off as a critic on that basis, however.

A friend who may choose to identify himself and I had a wonderful meal at Union Pacific tonight. I'm very tired, and I don't know if I can do much justice to this kind of meal in words and problematic pictures, anyway, but I'll try to do what I can while the memory is still pretty fresh. In many ways, it was a weird experience, but it turned out to be weird in a good way, truly exhilirating! When you approach the restaurant, you don't see its name (you may see a sign that says "Union Pacific Service Entrance"), but you see the address "111" in white lights - as if it were a cool club for people in the know or some classy bar like the Temple Bar, and that if you don't know where you are, you aren't in the know and aren't cool. The door is kind of mysterious, too. And then you walk in and see an artificial waterfall and a room with weird decor. The hostess was friendly, and we were walked upstairs and seated in a rather dark room (which created problems for picture-taking, as I tried not to use the flash [though I did by mistake once or twice], so as not to disturb patrons). From reading previous comments of eGulleteers on this restaurant and Chef Di Spirito, I was unsure what to expect. We were given funky-looking plates and menus: No, that is not raspberry sauce on the plate, though our waiter joked about it. We were brought bread that was nothing notable, and which I don't bother to provide a photo of. But the amuse tipped us off that this was likely to be a good trip: This was a rollatine of chicken with various other ingredients (shredded daikon, shallot or some kind of sweet onion, red onion, cilantro and carrot I think, and black sesame powder on the outside - doubtless, I'm leaving something out, and I should mention that our waiter mentioned all sorts of things about ingredients, but if I had written them all down, I couldn't have enjoyed the meal as much). I commented to my dining partner that someone who was so inclined could nitpick it, but that I was having too much fun to want to do anything but enjoy it and didn't even want to think about what criticisms people could make. It was an imaginative combination of tastes that worked for me. We both ordered smoked eel with watercress, red grapefruit, and pickled radish for our appetizer. It was a sizeable appetizer, breaded only on the top (flipped over onto the plate, I figure), and excellent. On the bottom, there was a sauce that by itself was too peppery, but in context helped the dish a lot. Our waiter told us it was a Turkish pepper yogurt. This dish had a comination of protein taste, salty, bitter (the watercress), peppery - it was imaginative and really worked: We chose two different main dishes. I chose soft shell crab: I'm sorry for the out-of-focus picture but can't figure out how to improve the focus. Anyway, this dish was another winner. It was lightly salted and came with mustard greens (bitter) and watermelon (sweet), benefiting by being eaten in that combination. My dining partner's dish was more "Western," at least at first: Steak with thin asparagus, garlic chips, and maitake mushrooms. But my friend noticed some Japanese influence (other than the name of the mushrooms), which our waiter told us was miso aged so as to make it sweeter. This dish was very good, too. We both thought the desserts were knockouts, though we differed slightly over which we were most impressed by: There are four desserts on the plate. Clockwise from the top is a hazelnut tuile with puffed rice and hazelnut sauce (fantastic, with the puffed rice just slightly salty against the overall sweetness and richness of the dessert), buttermilk panna cotta with mango sauce (I was most impressed with this dessert, which combined the sourness of buttermilk with the tangy sweet-sour strongly mangoey sauce; I could imagine Suvir and Hemant making a dessert like this), extremely rich dark molten chocolate cake with huckleberry sauce, and very strongly natural-vanilla-tasting ice cream with dark chocolate stick. Following this, we were given additional little desserts I somehow didn't take pictures of. They were pates de fruit of raspberry or huckleberry (sweet but with tang), chocolate-and-powdered-sugar-covered almonds, and shortbread biscotti with little chocolate chips and a sprinkling of powdered sugar (not very sweet at all but good). This was food for the intellect as well as the palate, and we had extensive discussions with our fantastically knowledgeable and just generally great waiter about the cuisine. By contrast with my experiences of Vong some years ago as seeming to me watered-down Thai food, this seemed to me a genuine fusion, imaginative cuisine that worked. We had the following wine with our meal: It was a great wine, and a brilliant choice to go with two different meals, working with everything except the dessert (with the dessert, the wine was a little sour). The wine added I believe $48 in total onto the $30.04 Restaurant Week dinner menu, and was well worth it, as it added another delicious and fascinating dimension to our dining experience. As a parting shot, I offer you this view of the rafters of the main floor dining room and part of that dining room, as seen by me from the upper level: Bottom-line verdict: It was a great experience, and I would go back.

Thanks, Erin. I knew they weren't importing zebra meat from Africa and serving it uncooked...

I used to be a in chamber group with an Armenian-American guitarist who had spent time as a visiting artist in Yerevan. She was an excellent cook who made delicious dolmas, I remember in particular. I sort of also remember some good meat-and-wheat dishes and things with lentils. Something with tomatoes, too. I'm sorry we lost touch with each other - though not exclusively because of her cooking.

What a terrific idea, bakerbabe! Some could be stripe-shaped, too. Watermelon and honeydew stripes? (Is honeydew close enough to white?)

Great report, Lauren! What's zebra lasagna?