Pan

A friend and I had a late dinner at Sweet-n-Tart Restaurant (not the Cafe) on 20 Mott St. tonight. To my surprise, a search of "Sweet" +"Tart" in the title of a previous thread produced only this thread on a banquet at Sweet-n-Tart, so let's make this the thread for specific comments on this restaurant, and I hope to hear from many of you on your experiences and thoughts. In short, our meal was quite good. You could say we had a "piggish" meal. In order of arrival, the Beijing Style Pork Chops ($8.75) came first. They were cut into bite-sized pieces, lightly breaded and fried, and accompanied by a small coating of a sweet red sauce (not as sweet and much more liquid than "sweet and sour" sauce) that included ketchup as an ingredient. The chops were boneless but a combination of meat, fat, and cartilege. A few sprigs of raw cilantro were thrown in at the end. I thought the dish was tasty though not earthshaking, but my dining companion was less enthralled and said it reminded him of a dish like Lemon Chicken (I responded that I thought it was much better than that). After a while, a dish of Assorted Chinese Sausages with Dried Salted Quail ($11.25) arrived. Also included in the dish were a large number of broccoli rabe spears. We both liked this dish very much. The quail seemed to have a bit of cod liver oil taste (presumably, farmers put cod liver oil in the quails' feed, much as is the case with most factory-farmed chickens), but was otherwise good. There were three varieties of sausages: a rather orange-colored, somewhat sweet one; a more porky-tasting darker red one; and a smokier brown/white one, which had distinct layers of meat and fat, rather than being marbled like the other sausages. The broccoli rabe was very nicely cooked and benefited from the influence of a bit of quail/sausage juice.

You all might be interested in wcmckinney's post, Do New Yorkers get BBQ? in the Southeast Forum.

I love good Indian food and like Japanese food. I'm not as knowledgeable about Japanese food as Indian food, but I do gravitate toward explosions of taste more than subtleties.

Fine and good, but a substantive response would be more instructive. Please tell us your opinion and why you disagree with the opinions expressed here (or the nature of their expression or whatever).

So as to avoid the phrase "sebiji biji hazel." You pointed to buah berangan, too. I guess there really isn't any one word in Malay that is precisely equivalent to the English word "nut." And, for that matter, "nut" doesn't cover all non-legume seeds in English, either. Sorry for the off-topic tangent. Let's talk about other shaved ice desserts. What's the fundamental difference between cendol and ais kacang?

Robb, I enjoyed your presentation very much, and it's nice of you to post in this thread. Do you have any take on the discussion so far? Have we described the panel discussion accurately? How serious do you think Lolis Elie was in his remarks about New Yorkers and barbecue, etc.?

I think of beans as seeds that grow in pods. It was odd to me to find out that hazelnuts are called "kacang hazel" in Malay, and I did come across that appelation last summer. I would have thought "biji hazel" would make more sense, but who ever said that any language has to be fully consistent? English isn't, with "peanut." Incidentally, when did peanuts cease to be called "kacang Jawa" in Malay?

What was the other part of the reason? Were they expensive, too?

You're welcome, SWoody. All in a day's work.

Congratulations, and get used to the spotlight! All of us who perform for the public need to be as comfortable as possible in shmoozing and gracefully accepting compliments.

But wongste, peanuts are a type of bean. I don't know of anything that isn't a bean being called "kacang," do you? By the way, since "other shaved ice desserts" are referenced in this thread, what about Sago Gula Melaka? I like that! How far back does that go? I didn't have it in the 70s, for whatever that's worth.

Usually spelled "Hakka." Here's a website about the Hakkas.

Thanks for the link, Bloviatrix. I posted a response to the review in the Bruni, Babbo and The NYT Reviewing System thread.

Bloviatrix posted a link to Bruni's second review, of Megu in the Megu thread on the New York Forum. Megu had come in for a mixed reception from eGulleteers, and Bruni also gave it a mixed review. I found this review much less straightforward than his Babbo review, but that makes sense to me because he himself found the menu at Megu confusing and seemed to me to have felt conflicted about the restaurant. Here is the conclusion of the review, where he ultimately wraps up a complicated review and ends it clearly: Nice line, "the roe not taken." I think the review served its purpose and I feel like he gave me a good mental picture of what Megu, a place I almost surely will never visit, is like.

You have to get back to Italy, Steven!

That really is odd. Thanks for the report.

Kew, a refrigerator wasn't necessary for ais kacang. There were no refrigerators in Kg. Merchang when I lived there in the 70s, because electricity ran at night only. Every day, a truck (lorry) delivered big blocks of ice to the corner store in the then-center of town (across the street from the mosque) and I believe a couple of other places. The ice was kept in a big wooden bin. It was shaved for ais kacang and to go with cold drinks like Orange Squash. You can't imagine how refreshing Orange Squash with ice was on days in the hot season without air conditioning! (Or maybe you can!)

I thought they were chicken livers, but I'm not sure, and it was a long time ago. I don't remember brain curry being on the menu. It was a wet liver curry with a delicious sauce. We would get dal with the meal and mix the dal with the spicy sauce and eat the whole thing with rice.

Would you consider Korean? Plenty to choose from.

Last Sunday, when I approached 26 St. at the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, I had a serious allergic reaction to all the smoke and coughed on and off for the rest of the evening. But you know what's probably worse than barbecue smoke? That awful charcoal lighter fluid some of my neighbors use fairly often for their own "barbecues." That stuff gets into my apartment no matter what I do, and the only thing I can do about it is put my HEPA filter up to a "high" setting, but it really doesn't help much. I feel like that stuff poisons me, and I wish it were banned.

Am I an India Forum regular? I'm not sure. But during September of 1975, I spent a month in Kuala Lumpur going to the Sekolah Bahasa-Bahasa Moden (School of Modern Languages) to study book Malay. The school was near the Pasar Chow Kit, which despite its Chinese name was in a mixed Chinese/Indian neighborhood with lots of representation of Indians. For breakfast, my father and I had the large roti canai they made in those days or chapatti. A man standing outside would cook up these breads on his griddle and add some kind of curry sauce (chicken or goat, it might have been) or/and dal to it. For lunch, my father and I went to Restoran Alim, a Halal North Indian Muslim restaurant (Punjabi, I believe, and "Alim" means religious in Malay and Arabic and, doubtless, Urdu) that had framed calligraphy of "La illaha illaLah Muhammadur Rasulullah" ("There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Messenger") and Qur'anic inscriptions on the walls. The food was really spicy there, almost too spicy for us, but we enjoyed it. One of their specialties was liver curry, and I liked it a lot and ate it often when I wasn't going for the goat curry or something else. I can't remember ever having had raw mango chutney, only cooked mango chutney, as far as I know.

What a fun thread, Moby! The last time I was in Naples was 1998. I went to Trianon and the Antica Pizzeria Porta d'Alba, just off the northern part of the Piazza Dante to the east. Trianon was an interesting scene - lots of families with small children - and they made only pizza, which you could get with a limited number of drinks. (Acqua minerale and, was it Orangina? I forget whether they sold wine but have a feeling they didn't. Do they have beer?) We enjoyed the pizza there but maybe even more found the whole atmosphere and experience interesting. Service was not effusive but we didn't care; they are a very busy establishment and all they really needed to do was take our order and bring us the food and drinks, which they did just fine. The Antica Pizzeria Porta d'Alba is more of a full-service restaurant, which made excellent salads, for example. My brother and I ordered one salad apiece and then one pizza apiece (more varieties were available than at Trianon, I think - I believe Margherita, Marinara, Con Funghi, Con Prosciutto, Con Prosciutto e Funghi, and Quattro Formaggi) and IIRC drank wine with the meal. It was more expensive but also a bit more formal than Trianon. If it's still in business, I'd be curious to hear any reports on how their pizza and other food are currently. I liked them very much in 1991 and again in 1998.

I can't speak for your customers, but to me, that wording is worse. If you're doing a study of a combination of ingredients, it sounds to me like you're trying to see if they work together and aren't sure. While we all study all our lives, I just think using "study" in a dessert title sounds student-like. The point isn't really that you are or are not experimenting, though I have to wonder whether anything is ever _really_ perfected - I certainly don't think about my music performances that way. But that aside, my main point is, how do your titles sound to a customer? You've got my 2 cents. Now, see if you can find out what your customers think. Would comment cards be too tacky? By the way, I would think it should definitely reassure you that you haven't gotten any negative feedback. Are the desserts selling well?

Here's the thread on "Gay Restaurants." It wasn't that easy to find, and I figured out why: I was using the eGullet search feature, and "gay," being a 3-letter word, can't be used in quotes in a phrase (that produces no results at all), so the best I could do was search the "General Food Topics" board for "restaurant*" and look through the 7 pages of results until I found the right topic. That was an excellent thread, too!

One other thing: I didn't realize Malaysia produced cocoa. Where in Malaysia is cocoa grown?