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Pan

eGullet Society staff emeritus
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Everything posted by Pan

  1. I won't try to answer your question, but I will throw in another wrinkle: What's called "Rice and Beans" in the South and Latin America is called "Rice and Peas" in Jamaica.
  2. Bryan, you say that your meal took 4 hours. I'm curious how long you waited for your first course, because the thing that really caused me to consider 11 Madison Park not worth returning to was the total lack of service and lack of ability to flag down our waiter for really, really long periods of time. In a Danny Meyer restaurant, you expect exemplary service, and we certainly didn't get that when we were there. In previous visits, before Chef Humm was installed, I had very good service each time. That night might have been a fluke, but my parents were so turned off by the experience that they're reluctant to go to a high-end place again. My mother likes Hearth very much, but Hearth costs maybe half what we spent at 11 Madison Park. The two times I've been to Hearth, service has been terrific, and we have never been waiting for a long time to have any food.
  3. Hasn't cloning been shown to rapidly accelerate aging in sheep? Then how do we know there may not be something dangerously different about eating meat from cloned animals? I think we do not have enough data to compare cloning to artificial insemination and should be cautious about cloned sources of meat.
  4. Pan

    Dinner! 2007

    "Masin" means salty. Was there salt in the dish? More chile than you wanted was probably authentic, but you mention black soy sauce but not belacan (shrimp paste). Was there belacan in the dish? Belacan dishes have lots of belacan in them, and it makes them brown.
  5. Happy new year, Elie, and thanks for sharing! Your dinner looks wonderful!
  6. No apologies necessary! Happy new year! Do Vietnamese people make a big deal over the Western new year? I noticed the cyclist with the dust mask on his nose and mouth. Has there been an explosion in car ownership and traffic in Hanoi, with accompanying serious air pollution, like in Chinese cities today? If so, how has that affected the experience of outdoor dining at stalls and so forth? (I'm presuming people eat on the street often? Tell us more about food and drink stalls in Hanoi.)
  7. Great stuff, Suzy!!!! One offhand comment about rambutan: It's true that the most common variety of rambutan has to turn red to be ripe, but there is a smaller variety grown in Malaysia that is green when ripe. I don't remember the specific name of that variety, but I've eaten it and it tastes very similar to the red rambutan, as I recall. I don't distinctly remember what the difference in taste is.
  8. Happy new year, Janet (and everyone else)! Impressive clickable list there!
  9. I also look forward to reading the rest of this blog because Vietnam is beautiful. One question: Do they make banh mi or something similar in Hanoi, or is that strictly Saigon food? What kinds of sandwiches, if any, are traditional in Hanoi and environs?
  10. I envy you for having access to a shop with artisanal Chinese candied fruits and such. Do you get them much? I love candied lotus root and lotus seed. I also love candied yellow haw, which I got when I was in Beijing, and pingguofu - candied apples, which I used to get in Malaysia, imported from China in the 70s, but can't find anymore. That same department store used to have delicious candied pears and cherries, too. I can't find those, either. I love the cheongsam, too.
  11. What a handsome family you have, Suzy! (I promise to try to make a food-related comment the next time I post. )
  12. What fun! I'll look forward to enjoying the rest of this blog. Thanks for doing it, Suzy.
  13. I'm glad that didn't really bite you in the behind this time, but I learned the hard way: Set your alarm clocks to 24-hour time, always! I have both my alarm clock and clock radio set that way. It's really helped me.
  14. Pan

    IL Toscana

    That makes sense. The Tuscan, as opposed to Tuscany.
  15. Pan

    Critical Mass?

    They're local compared to you, I do believe, but what percentage of them are B&T? I wonder who's keeping stats on that. There are people from some distance away who keep tabs on what's "hot" in "The City." We Manhattanites aren't looking to eat in "The City"; we live here. A trip to "The City" is an oxymoron for a Manhattanite. So the question is only whether we want to eat locally or take the subway downtown (etc.). But now think about the folks from Connecticut and Massachusetts and New Jersey and Pennsylvania who want to come in for a Broadway show and go somewhere that's "trendy and fabulous."
  16. Pan

    IL Toscana

    Daniel, I have to ask you: Is it really called Il Toscana? That's ungrammatical in Italian. It should be La Toscana.
  17. Hawaii? SuzySushi?
  18. Gastro, have you tried the expensive dim sum at Chinatown Brasserie?
  19. Anne, I grew up with a fictive grandmother who was definitely a Southerner. She was a Baptist from Mississippi, and she's the one who introduced me to soul food (aka Southern food) like sweet potato pie, cobbler, shortbread, collard greens, etc. You're right; there's no question that there is a type of Southern cooking that is recognized by white and black Southerners alike. This New Yorker knows it.
  20. Pan

    Critical Mass?

    For several years, my family would go to Jo Jo for perhaps three birthdays a year (my birthday, my mother's or father's birthday, my brother's birthday). We were repeat business, but I didn't consider us regulars. I am a regular at Teresa's, where I eat perhaps an average of once a week. I don't know if it's worth discussing what "regular" means in another thread.
  21. This site generates random pretentious menu names. Some of them don't make sense, but I find them pretty funny. Your mileage may vary. Reload the page to see a new dish name. "Chez Louise Menu" If you'd like to put any seriousness into this thread, you can talk about whether you find these kinds of long menu descriptions helpful, pretentious, or/and funny. (But there's probably another thread for that.) Or you could just enjoy the linked site.
  22. How's that? Well, in the end, I brought the Chilean wine, and because so many other people brought wine, it wasn't opened and I didn't have a chance to taste it. Oh well. The other wines I had there were serviceable to good.
  23. Nancy, how crowded was it?
  24. The concept of "Southern" as an ethnicity is interesting, but I don't equate ethnicity or even identity with ancestry. My ancestry, as far as I know, is Jewish with a little Romany thrown in. Geographically, it can be traced to a bunch of parts of Central and Eastern Europe, and also the Caucasus (which I left out before). If you ask me about my identity, right now, I'd say I'm human first, a New Yorker second (New York City, not New York State), and an American third. (But if a time of extreme anti-semitism comes, I'll be Jewish first.) And I am by no means unique among New Yorkers in feeling an identity of "New Yorker" (or for some people, "Brooklynite") strongly, and more strongly than my identity as an American. But that doesn't cause me to say my ancestry is New York. I do take the point about the "muttiness," though. If you think about it, Ashkenazic as a designation for a Jewish ethnicity (probably the most accurate way for me to describe the bulk of my ancestry) is kind of mutty, too. Ashkenaz means Germany, but Ashkenazim lived throughout most of Europe and have since fled or immigrated to a whole bunch of other countries, picking up all kinds of aspects of local cultures and intermixing their genetic material (both voluntarily and due to rape) with that of some of the non-Jewish locals along the way. In the end, however, we're all "mutts," and all of us are descended from Africans, if you go back far enough. Some of us just have more recent African roots. I'm not sure how to relate this back to food, but I'm sure one of you will.
  25. Pan

    Baked/fried plantains

    I do not find that bananas shipped to the U.S. ripen properly no matter what, and I think there's no substitute for tree-ripening. Based on what achevres has written, plantains may be different in this respect. And that would go some way toward explaining why bananas here tend to give my stomach a hard time but plantains (including tostones, which are in fact deliberately unripe and starchy) are OK for me. In Malaysia, bananas are great for my digestion!
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