Pan

I would try these. Someday, I should visit parts of Italy further north than Tuscany and Umbria...

Tonight, my parents, my aunt, my cousin, and her son had a Mother's Day banquet at Yeah Shanghai. Everyone loved the food, and I think it was the best meal I've ever had at Yeah. Service was excellent. For the first time, I tried taking photos and uploaded them to imageGullet. Some were too glary, but please bear with me. As you can tell, I forgot to take pictures of some things until we had already partly eaten them, but at least these photos give you some idea of what everything looked like. We got the following cold dishes: Spicy Cabbage, Kaufu (2 orders), Aster Indicus, Aromatic Beef and the following hot dishes: Fresh Scallop with Chives, Jumbo Shrimp with Chili Sauce, Tofu with Crab Meat, Chicken with Chestnuts, special Duck stuffed with sticky rice and other things (must be ordered at least 24 hours in advance), and Sweet and Sour Chicken for my young cousin. We were given a special freebie of sweet red bean cakes for dessert. The photos start with a picture of the three cold dishes I ordered while my parents and I were still waiting for the others: Clockwise from the left: Kaufu, Spicy Cabbage (sorry for the glare), Aster Indicus. In the center, Jumbo Shrimp with Chili Sauce; in the right foreground, Aromatic Beef; in the right background, Kaufu. Fresh Scallop with Chives The Sweet & Sour Chicken, made specially for my young cousin (it's usually on the lunch menu, not the dinner menu). Tofu with Crab Meat In the center of the frame is the chicken with the chestnuts, but it came out fuzzy. Oh well. Duck, not yet cut up. Duck, cut up. Sweet Red Bean Cakes. The cold dishes were all good as usual. I had never had the chicken with chestnuts before, and it was my mother's idea to order it. It was terrific! It was noticeably alcoholic, having been apparently cooked in some good rice wine. A large piece of ginger was in the pot, too, and my aunt ate that. Also particularly notable is the Tofu with Crab Meat, which was cooked with egg (whereupon the yellow color, if you can see that through the glare). It was a subtle dish, in a good way. The chili jumbo shrimp, which as you can see came with noodles, reminded me somewhat of some of the jumbo shrimp dishes I got in Malaysia last summer, except that it came with those noodles, which had ground pork on them. Anyway, it was a really tasty dish, and we finished it. The duck meat was excellent, but the stuffing got a mixed reception. Among other tastes, a somewhat fishy taste was noticed. It came from some little dried reconstituted scallops, which were part of a stuffing that including dried shrimps, mushrooms, I think fresh celery, ham, and doubtless some other things I've forgotten, in a base of sticky rice. It was a complex stuffing and worth getting once, but next time, I want to get the Beggar's Chicken (another item which requires at least 24 hours notice). The bean cakes were a perfect finish to this feast. I did not have any orange slices, but we were given some. I also did not try the Sweet and Sour Chicken. My parents were astonished that the total bill was only $118 and change plus tip. I wasn't. But of course, I know the restaurant well.

From what I remember, the snails were absolutely killed in shrimp paste. I don't think that's a Chinese technique.

I used to dig for clams in rural Malaysia, but 3/4 of what came up were snails. I never liked them, but the Malays ate them. And I assure you, rural Malays were never highly French-influenced. I'm sure their cooking techniques for snails weren't, either.

Thanks for the links, Craig and Swisskaese. So these are sort of mustarded fruits, not fruits of the mustard plant.

For my part, I couldn't tell you. I've never tried it and wouldn't. I'll just wait until the next time I go back to Malaysia, whenever that is, and have fresh durian there if it's in season and offered to me. Also, oddly enough, my parents love durian but don't like any sweets made with durian. Similarly, I like peppermint in leaf form but don't like anything that's otherwise peppermint-flavored.

Mustard fruit! I've never had that. Does it taste more like mustard seeds, more like mustard greens, or not like either?

I wouldn't count on your getting really good durian in France, Lucy, though there's no harm in trying. But like many other fruits, durian is best when eaten within a day after it's been felled from the tree.

Is it over already? This was a lot of fun! Happy Mothers Day to Victoria and all other mothers, and my greetings also to Keifel.

You're going to post that method (or link to it if you already posted it), right? Damn, another New Yorker! Just kidding. Have fun this week, Hathor.

Are you opposed to eating out on Mother's Day even in inexpensive Shanghainese restaurants? Yeah, this policy is ridiculous. If you had to cancel for some emergency, you should dispute the charge with the credit card company.

I don't know, T. It's a business district with a lot of office workers who go home to other neighborhoods at night, but it's got a real Asian flavor - primarily Japanese but also Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, even an Indian restaurant or two (but I can't vouch for their authenticity). Seems to be a real Japanese businessmen's hangout, though, with some private Japanese businessmen's clubs around...

In the summer of 2002, I loved Yasube. It's in the 1ieme, but right near the 2ieme.

If the first dish won't be comped, the offer to replace it with something else is in bad faith. At the very worst, if the first dish cost more, one could be charged the higher price, though I find that in very poor form and will hold it against a restaurant. In the first case, I would object to being charged for something I didn't eat and would try pretty hard to get the charge taken off the bill, perhaps to the point of saying I won't pay for it, if I received a really stubborn response. In the second case, I would call the waiter and ask for an explanation, then pay the bill, presumably with a somewhat ungenerous tip, and not return to the restaurant. The only time I can remember having a waiter essentially insist on removing a dish after I asked a question about it (Me: "Is this really supposed to be so tough?" Him: "Yes." Me: "OK.") and then charging me for the higher price of the dish I originally ordered, the attitude of the establishment was distinctly unfriendly, and the whole front-of-the-house crew seemed personally offended by my whole response, which was odd because honestly, I had been polite the whole time, and I wouldn't even ask them to remove the dish until the waiter had insisted like three times. They were at fault. It was a Vietnamese restaurant in Paris 7ieme, and the dish was seiche (the sort of spinal column analog of cuttlefish). The sauce was delicious, but the seiche was so chewy as to be virtually inedible. I've since been to restaurants that serve the same part of the cuttlefish and it's been tender (e.g. in good Greek restaurants). Needless to say, I was not tempted to return for another meal at that establishment. But tipping was a pretty irrelevant issue for a reasonably inexpensive meal in France.

NulloModo, my solution is a little different. I don't expect to pay for something I sent back, normally (though sending stuff back is so unusual as to be sort of abnormal for me), but I do up the tip if the waiter was cooperative.

If it tastes so bad I can't eat it, I send it back, except in a place where I've figured they are clueless and I have no chance of getting anything tolerable, in which case, I either take a loss or ask for the food to be taken away and taken off my bill and then settle up and leave while still hungry. (Note: I seldom send stuff back, so my minimum standards aren't ridiculously high.)

No-one was picknicking in rural Terengganu, Malaysia. Too many insects!

Mascarpone isn't a cheese? What is it?

Your question is interesting, so please don't take my response the wrong way. But I'm just curious: If you find out that picnics aren't traditional in South India, would you therefore decide not to serve South Indian food at a picnic on the East Coast (of the U.S., I presume)? Because to me, the only relevant question would be whether the food would work well at a picnic. The other question, about whether picnics are traditional in South India, is interesting to me per se but wouldn't have an effect on what food I'd choose to serve at a picnic, unless there are relevant practical elements to it (e.g. perhaps utthapams don't fit properly on paper plates and tend to fall on the ground), which would go back to whether the food would work well at a picnic.

MePa?

Victoria, I can't eat raw bananas in the U.S., but I loved eating them in Malaysia last summer! The problem for me is that bananas that reach the Northeast never ripen properly, having been picked weeks too early in order not to rot in transit. Of course, in Malaysia, they aren't picked until they're ripe, and they are in the market by the next day. Here, I can eat fried plantains or banana chips (I especially like the ones made in China using bananas from the Philippines, which I get from time to time at a huge Chinese supermarket in Flushing, Queens, NY) but usually avoid even baked goods with banana in them.

Thanks for the reports! What's the entrance fee for the Boboli Gardens nowadays?

It was really a bar rather than a nightclub, but I really miss the St. Mark's Bar, whose space is now occupied by Tribe. I played there the last night they had music. I used to love their Sunday night open post-bop jams. I also enjoyed the blues open jams at Finian's Rainbow on St. Mark's between 2nd and 3rd, which is now - I just can't remember what it's called now, but unlike the St. Mark's Bar, it was never closed or remodeled, so I'm just missing the music there.

And I was worried because he says he rarely cooks these days... Well, it's true. But what were you worried about?

Oh, and BTW, all of the above assumes that the question is being raised purely in the gastronomic context, yes? Yes. I don't remember what a monte cristo is, but I haven't read the whole thread and someone might have already addressed that.