skchai
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Posts posted by skchai
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I suppose I have no problem understanding the decision to allow oneself a fall in ethical grace. On the other hand, that does not mean that I have to look at such publications with any sense at all of respect, for if such is the case with tainted restaurant or wine criticism presented as genuine, so may it well be with the next political candidate or social movement.
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Best,
Rogov
I agree with you completely on this. While the tempatation may be stronger at small newspapers and selling out therefore easier to understand, it is still an ethical failure in any case. An there are people like Virginia Gerst who are willing to give up their jobs rather than succumb to this. . .
Thanks for your thoughtful comments!
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Marukai operates a number of 99-cent stores here and on the West Coast, which a basically transplated 100-yen stores, since most of the products on sale are from Japan (only a 11%* markup!) Food storage containers are the things that get me all excited - numerous shapes and sizes, for all needs, and not flimsy. Here are some small sealed pouring containers we got to store homemade syrups for shaved ice:
*Edited to correct for outdated exchange rate!
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Jason, you'd be surprised. I don't think the prices for pineapples here are that much cheaper. Yes, we don't have to pay for transport across the Pacific, but the cost of land is so high - at least in Honolulu - that stores tend to keep prices high to pay for their rents.
However, you're right that at least we can get ripe pineapples instead of the evil green ones!
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BTW, I agree with Holly about not asking in advance about taking pictures. While it may seem a courtesy to do so, it simply seems to put people on edge. If I just take pictures without asking, I've never had anyone really pay attention to me. If I ask, then the staff feel uncomfortable making a decision one way or another, and have to ask the owner, who's often not there. So then they want me to write a letter proposing the reasons why I'm in the store etc. On other occasions, they do ask me if I want free samples, and I have to explain that I don't. To summarize, it seems the staff prefers not to be asked.
But, unlike Holly, I've never had an occassion when the owner attacked me personally. . .
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Very interesting point, Mr. Rogov. One that's worth an entire thread. But is isn't the pressure for newspapers to "whore" themselves to advertisers in part a function of size? Large-circulation papers like Ha`aretz would not lose much financially if a single restaurant withdrew its advertising because of a negative review. A smaller, suburban or rural paper like Ms. Gerst's needs every advertising account it can get - this comes from ancient personal experience working for a small local paper in Hawai`i. Hence the tendency to sell out is that much greater . . . might that be just as important as the difference in the personal ethics of the publishers involved?
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Reminds me of "chico roll" (sp?) the strange Australian hybrid of the meat pie and the spring roll. . .
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This is about as polemical as I'm going to get. . .
Given that we are a tropical island nation enriched by the culinary traditions of dozens of world cultures, the lineup of produce on the shelves of Hawai`i's supermarkets and even farmers' markets is surprisingly similar to that in, let's say, Topeka or Milwaukee. This emptiness is more noticeable when you compare it to the wide range of Asian and local dry goods and packaged items that you can find on the shelves everywhere on the islands. Yes, we have ready access to daikon, bok choy, etc. but that's hardly anything to write home about. What's really noticeable is the kind of produce that isn't available.
Except in Chinatown and a few unexpected places (like Daiei!), it's not that easy to get access to the numerous tropical fruits that can easily be found in the tropical markets of Southeast Asia - mangosteen, rambutan, jackfruit, and the durian, fruits that could presumably be grown here as well. Even within familiar fruit families such as the banana and mango, only a couple of the most common varieties are available at best, far fewer varieties than for apples or pears, which are obviously not tropical fruits. Even the lychee, one of the most common garden fruits on the islands, is only available sporatically.
What's even more disturbing, in my mind, the two primary staples of native Hawaiian cuisine, and cuisines across much of the Pacific, fresh kalo and breadfruit, are unavailable on the shelves of most Hawai`i supermarkets. You can get packaged poi and taro chips, but fresh kalo on the other hand is harder to get. . .
What types of produce would you like to see more of?
And why do you think there isn't more available already?
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Recently picked up really cheap copies of The 100 Greatest New Orleans Creole Recipes and Antoine's Cookbook by Roy Guste at my local used bookstore. Both were a joy to read. The Antoine's Cookbook has got to be one of the best-organized and most complete restaurant cookbooks ever written, with well over a hundred of their dishes spelled out in detail and context, a long history of the restaurant, ancient photographs, reprints of old menus, etc. The Creole Recipe book is equally detailed and even contains a recipe for Oysters Rockefeller. Guste's encyclopedic knowledge and love for Creole cuisine really comes through.
Made me wonder why the Alcatoire / Guste family doesn't hand a management role in the restaurant back to him before it slowly slides away into irrelevance. . .
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Put me down too. See, you already have a readership!
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I once was given a "Mattar Paneer" (Peas and Paneer) made with tofu at a restaurant called Moghul, in Itaewon, Seoul. At the time (late 1980s), I think it was the only (allegedly) Indian restaurant in the entire country.
There are recipes for Kerau Ra Tofu Tarkari (Peas and Tofu Curry) and Tofu Kauli Ra Chyau Ko Tarkari (Tofu, Cauliflower, and Mushroom Stir-Fry) in the Nepal Cookbook (Dehli: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1997), written by the Association of Nepalis in the Americas. No mention in the book of whether tofu is used as a paneer substitute in the U.S., or is also common in Nepal itself. However, the use of the English pronounciation (tofu), which derives from Japanese, seems to indicate that in either case it's a recent addition to the cuisine.
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That, I believe, was the view of many U.K. critics. They didn't have much use for the book or effects, but everyone praised A.R. Rahman's music. Of course, in the U.K. production, half of the songs were remakes of his own filmi numbers. In the Broadway version, I heard that there are more original music, some not even by Rahman. . .
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BTW, the Calcutta Cookbook is more than an update of Bangla Ranna. It has one chapter, also called "Bangla Ranna", which is in some ways a very condensed version of DasGupta's earlier path-breaking work on Bengali Cuisine. However, the other chapters focus on different communities, ranging from Moghul influence, Anglo-Indians, and a chapter on minority communities, complete with discussion of Sino-Indian cuisine and the small Baghdadi Jewish community.
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Nice article by Joan (wonder what she has been working on recently?) about the upscale uses of imu-roasted pulled pork. Of course, we hear about Alan Wong's "da Bag", but also some more, say, unlikely conconctions such as Randal Ishizu's Kalua Oysters Rockefeller with lomi-tomato hollandaise.
Waikiki banquet hall serves last meal
House of Hong, around for 40 years, succumbs to the decline in demand for large-scale multi-course Cantonese-style banquets.
Del Monte bulldozes pineapple memories
The pineapple variety triangle garden at Poamoho Camp was once a major attraction for tourist and commuters. It's now being destroyed for redevelopment, and the ex-pine workers who have lived at Poamoho for generations are being told to pack their bags as well. . .
Whatever happened to Hari?, by Betty Shimabukuro
Hari Kojima is inducted into the Hawai`i Culinary Hall of Fame. Since he left "Let's Go Fishing", he's been in private business, but jokes about running for public office!
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Not the usual Chinese fare at Pah Ke's, by Wanda A. Adams
Wanda writes about a special lunch she had at Raymond Siu's often underappreciated place out on the windward side.
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On Dong Restaurant
1499 S. King St.
Honolulu HI 96814
947-9444
Chinese food as served in Korea can be divided into three different cuisines (at the very least). At the highest price level is the chunghwa jeongshik, which consists mostly of rare delicacies such as sea cucumber, abalone, and pine mushrooms served (usually) in bland, gloppy, cornstarch-laden sauce that seems to be a parody of Hong Kong-style banquet dining. At the lowest level, you have ramyeon and the like, which is really a Sino-Japanese carryover from the colonial days. In the middle, you have what most Korean people think of as "Chinese food": Northern-Chinese influenced, Koreanized cuisine consisting of noodle dishes such as cchajangmyeon and cchamppong, as well as simple dishes of fried meats or seafood in spicy and / or sweet sauces.
The usual history is that this last style of cuisine arose in Seoul during the early to mid part of the 20th century among hwagyo, Chinese (or in some cases Korean-Chinese) immigrants from the border regions between China and Northern Korea, as well as from Shandong Province. Given their background, they brought with the an array of flour-based dishes that were soon adopted for Korean tastes and ingredients. Cchajangmyeon is the prototypical "sauced noodle" dish, made with fermented bean sauce, while cchamppong is the prototypical "soup noodle" dish. Other popular Sino-Korean dishes include kkamppunggi, fried chicken served with a spicy garlic sauce, nanja wanseu, fried meatballs served in similar spicy sauce, and rajogi, a somewhat softer dish of boneless chicken. All these dishes are typically named in transliterated Mandarin rather than Korean pronounciation of Chinese characters, which accounts for the copious double consonants (now that I've further transliterated it into English, that is).
Ondong Restaurant (Andong Banjeom to its Korean customers) is a typical Sino-Korean restaurant along the lines of thousands of others in Korea and throughout the areas where the Korean diaspora has settled. Like most Korean-run Chinese restaurants in the U.S., it offers a full line of Sino-American standards such as sweet sour pork, beef broccoli, etc., but if your're interested something different, go directly to the parts of the menu that say "House Special" and "Cookery List". You'll know it's Korean-run if the first thing they offer you are little plates of raw onion with black bean sauce, as well as pickled radish and cabbage kimchee.
We always order cchajangmyeon when we go there, since the kids love it, like Korean kids everywhere. In fact, I think they actually did a poll that showed that cchajangmyeon is the #1 most popular food of all among Korean kids, playing the same role as pizza or hamburgers in the U.S., and curry rice or tonkatsu in Japan. Better make sure they aren't headed to any public gathering after the meal, though. While Northern Chinese cchajangmyeon tends to be brown, and based upon soybean paste, Korean cchajangmyeon is based upon black bean paste, and will turn the front and sleeves of your kid's clothes pitch black as they dig into it (though it does come out in the wash).
At Andong, the cchajangmyeon noodles and sauce come in separate bowls so that you can mix it together yourself; I guess it gives you a better view of the ingredients before you mix them up.
The black bean paste has been combined with soy sauce, beef broth, malt syrup, and cornstarch, which in turn have been combined with stir-fried chopped beef and seafood with onions, garlic, small chunks of radish, etc. Good cchajangmyeon noodles are supposed slightly chewy - not because al dente, but because they've been kneaded to the point there the gluten holds up under boiling. Somehow, small slivers of cucumber are the standard garnish in restaurants everywhere.
Once you mix things up, the noodles start to look pretty scary, but the sauce is addictive, with an very high savoriness level provided by the large amount of fermented black beans (and sometime enhanced with MSG) offset by the sweetness provided by the malt syrup. It goes down very easy, and it's not hard to bolt it down very quickly if you're not paying attention.
Not so for cchamppong, the other of the two pillars of Sino-Korean cuisine. I must confess I have no idea what Northern Chinese chhamppong is like. However, I can say that that Korean chhamppong is nothing the Nagasaki champon, another adapted version of the original. The Nagasaki version is made from a pork bone broth, while the Korean version is made from a seafood broth made red-hot by generous amounts of Korean chili. The broth is usually so spicy it'd difficult to do more than sip small amounts of it at a time from your plastic spoon, held in your left hand, while you manage the noodles with your chopsticks in your right hand.
The "chunks" inside the broth include a lot of stuff - cabbage, onion, green onion, tree ear fungus, carrot, chili pods, squid, tiny shrimp, and octopus, in addition to the chewy noodles. Like cchajangmyeon, cchamppong can either be thought of as a full meal, or as the finale to a more substantial meal including separate entrees. In the latter case, the cchajangmyeon and cchamppong play the role of starch in the meal, and plain rice is rarely eaten along with them (unless it is used to soak up the extra sauce that remains after all the cchajangmyeon noodles are gone).
As in Sino-American and Sino-Indian cuisine, the Sino-Korean cuisine is heavily populated by entrees based on battered, deep-fried chunks of something in thick sauce, even though such kinds of foods are pretty much absent in traditional Chinese cooking, whatever the reason. I don't know why this is, I guess deep-frying tends to make just about any kind of food accessible to the outsider. One thing that can be said in favor of Sino-Korean fried-and-sauced foods are that they usually not as candy-sweet as the kind you find in Sino-American menus. Even the Sino-Korean version of sweet-sour pork, tangsuyuk, is typically higher on the sour than sweet, and lacks the garish red food coloring of the Sino-American version.
We decided to order kkamppung ojingeo, or fried squid served in spicy garlic sauce. Here is it is, particularly crisp and with minimum cornstarch, just as it ought to be. It's interesting that mid-range Chinese cuisine in Korea tends to be much more restrained with the use of cornstarch than high-end cuisine, but that's just the way things are:
If you're not into deep-fried food or noodles but want to explore the Sino-Korean culinary universe, one very representative dish is buchu japchae, stir-fried Chinese chives and beef, which are typically served with small steamed buns. You can also order wang mandu, larger version of these buns, filled with a very Korean mixture of ground beef, bean thread noodles, and onions.
Ondong / Andong is located on King Street at Kaheka, close to the Ke`eaumoku area that passes for K-Town in Honolulu. There are two other Sino-Korean places in close proximity; I'll try to review them at some point when I get around to it. The best way to find parking is to enter via Kaheka, going into the parking lot that the restaurant shares with Plumeria Barbershop (sponsor of unintentionally funny commercials on the Korean radio stations) and the Honolulu Futon Company. It's validated parking during the day, but free at night. The entrance is on the opposite side of the parking lot, but you can get in directly by cutting through the narrow, hallway-shaped kitchen. The chefs are used to it so the more or less go about their business, but make sure you don't knock over bowls of marinating pork or get splattered by hot oil in the process.
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Continuing great work, Episure. And where did you learn all those Hawaiian words?!
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Bleudauvergne, I haven't seen any recipes, since its generally seen as a restaurant dish. Kudzu starch is sometimes sold on its own as an (expensive) thickening agent, but I'm not sure if this is suitable for making into noodles.
Joan, I'm not surprised that chik noodles are available in LA Koreatown. Just about everything Korean is available in LA Koreatown, including some stuff you can't find in Seoul.
I started a topic a while ago on the Southeast forum called Eat Kudzu, and it got some interesting responses. . .
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Korean chili powders come in many different varieties (as do Indian). The coarse flaky kind is the type usually used for kimchee, which there is also a more finely ground type that is used, garam masala-like, to top off sauces just before they are served.
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Hmm. . . have to admit I've never even tried cooking with Indian hot chili powder. I always did the opposite from what you wife does, substituting Korean chili powder into Indian recipes. Didn't realize that there are major differences. . .
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Just posted a description and couple pictures of the tabletop tteokbokki offered at Yuchun Restaurant in Honolulu:
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Went back to Yuchun Restaurant a little while ago and had their tabletop tteokbokki, where the dish is cooked more or less right in front of you. Tteokbokki is a dish of cylindrical Korean-style ricecake, tteok, cooked with various meats and vegetables. There are two basic styles - a home style, which usually involves stir frying and finishing with a soy-based sauce, and a restaurant style, associated more or less with Korean snackshops (bunshik jip), which involves large amounts of chili powder and / or gochujang (hot bean paste).
In old-fashioned bunshik places, the tteokbokki was cooked over coal (not charcoal, coal) fires, which effectively made it impossible for eaters to breathe or taste anything. Thankfully, Yuchun, which is not a bunshik place anyway (it's actually interesting that they have tteokbooki on their menu given that their specialty is naengmeyon), uses a gas burner. It also attempts a fairly deluxe version of tteokbooki, one that includes carrots, fat green onions daepa, asian cabbage baechu, fishcake (eomuk), and chewy noodles known as ccheolmyeon. A big dollop of gochujang is place on top and a little water poured in before the heat goes on:
After it's been boiling away for a while, the waitress starts to stir the sauce to reduce it and so that residual rice flour from the tteok starts to thicken the sauce.
The result still has a thinner sauce than you would see with tteokbookis elsewhere, but that's not a bad thing. Chewiness runs through the final product. The different kinds of chewiness offered between the noodles and tteok is perhaps the most interesting textural sensation here. The fishcake holds up enough to keep its (desirable) rubbery texture. Even the baechu, which absorbs a surprising amount of the sauce, is chewy, losing its crispness but not becoming soggy.
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Lopaka, are there a lot of Hawai`i local-style restaurants in Mountain View and the rest of the bay area? I lived there around 10 years ago and it was impossible to find anything. . .
PPC, great thread on Fodor's site. Are all the threads that great? I especially like the part where the various posters were comparing the patty / price and scoop rice / price ratios. Never had the Sidestreet Inn Loco-Moco, but the posts make we want to try.
BTW, in order to access the site, you need to register. . .
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Shannon, an excellent desecration of food! BTW, where did you get that calendar? Was it a Hormel product?
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I've just attended the second annual Waikiki SpamJam and have posted a full report on my SpamBlog in Hawai`i Forum.
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The Spamjam street festival has come and gone: We arrived at 5:30 and had promised some friends that we would meet them at 6:30 near Duke's Beach to watch their daughter's halau dance at the nightly torch-lighting ceremony, so we didn't really spend too much time there. Still, I managed to extract enough pictures by rear-ending my way through the crowds, then suddenly pivoting to snap the off-center shot.
Yes, there were crowds, often full of bewildered tourists. My wife ended up on the sidelines with a nice couple from Colorado who had a hard time believing that there could actually be a festival devoted to Spam. "We assumed that you couldn't even get Spam in the stores here", the lady exclaimed. Something about everyone in Hawai`i being so healthy, etc. Presumably they waited to get back to the hotel before starting to question the competence of their travel agents.
One of the joys of browsing Spamjam food booths was seeing the desparate lengths the participating hotel kitchens would go to find something, anything, to do with Spam that would not instantly destroy any reputation they have of producing fine Hawaiian Regional Cuisine.
Here are some examples, each representing a different approach to this intractible problem:
The first, used by the Radisson Prince Kuhio, was to hide the Spam inside another dish and hope it wouldn't affect the taste. This "Sesame Chicken-Spam Rouladen" apparently only had minute amounts of Spam in it, and seems to be to be an adaptation of something that might appear on their convention catering menu. You can imagine the executive chef saying - "Just put a couple slivers in the stuffing, then we can say it has some Spam in it."
The other Radisson offering was "Chiplote Pulled Pork and Spam Quesadillas", along a similar vein. Here it is:
I have no idea what Prince Kuhio, a noted gourmand, would have made of all this.
The opposite approach was taken by the Chart House Restaurant. Instead of trying to hide bits of Spam inside a quasi-HRC dish, they chose to flaunt the Spam saying, more or less, "Hey! Spam IS Hawaiian Regional Cuisine!" Look at the classical HRC presentation of this "Char Siu Spam Bun", with the gratuitious Nalo Greens inside the adapted Peking Duck bun. I'm not sure how they got the Spam to be so purple - but I wouldn't put it past them to have marinated the slices in a mixture of hoisin sauce and fermented tofu.
One way of side-stepping this can-we-make-it-HRC-or-not conundrum is to simply play it for laughs. This is what Duke's Restaurant did with their "Spambalaya", which actually looks more like Spam fried rice. The name of the dish suggests, "But of course, this is not the food we would prepare for our real guests. It is but a joke, ha ha ha." Note also the dendrobium orchid stuck on top of the spambalaya, which suggests not HRC, but rather a deliberate attempt at Tiki-style presentation. It is the kitchen's way of announcing the this is supposed to be kitsch.
Perhaps the dishes that came out most successfully were from places that didn't get all defensive about the use of Spam, but instead just gave it up to you as more or less ordinary food. K Restaurant played this up by offering a wide choice of ordinary plate lunches, and sticking a Spam Katsu amongst them. Of course, K Restaurant is not a high end restaurant, so perhaps they didn't have to worry so much about the HRC reputational aspects. But nonetheless, whatever the reason, you see here a secure restaurant, a restaurant at peace with itself.
Times Supermarket took a similar route, selling a mixed grill of Steak and Spam. The Spam grill chef looked like he was having a good time.
One establishment, or set of establishments, with HRC reputation to uphold did choose a similar approach. The Sheraton kitchen staff, from the Moana Surfrider and Princess Kaiulani Hotels, chose two relatively straightforward but nonetheless ingenious presentations. They get my A+ award. Their first dish, "Teriyaki BBQ Spam, Shoyu Chicken, Kalua Pig and Cabbage" is more or less a riff on the traditional Hawai`i mixed plate. The second dish, the "Spam Katsu Don" was a katsudon (fried pork cutlet on a bowl of rice with an egg, onion, and sweetened soy sauce), where the pork cutlet replaced by a Spam cutlet. This is the one I chose to eat. Both dishes married Spam with dishes that naturally complement it. The Spam and Kalua Pig / Cabbage made for a kind of local-style choucroute or budae cchigae, while the Spam Katsudon ended up being a kind of fried Spam n' eggs with shoyu on rice. O.K., nothing earth-shattering, but nobody thought of it before.
How did the Spam Katsudon taste? My son asked me for one slice, and my daughter asked me for the other one. Then, when I had eaten about 1/3 of the remaining slice, my son demanded the rest, so I had to give it to him and ended up eating mostly rice and egg, which was pretty decent approximation of a tamago don.
They had all kinds of entertainment at the SpamJam as well. Two stages withe live music, mostly Hawaiian music on the Diamond Head stage, and R&B-style on the Ewa side. There was a mini-arcade where you could play all kinds of games, including Spam Car races:
Roaming around the arena was Mr. (Mrs.?) Spam, who would periodically accost unsuspecting kids before they had a chance to run away. . .
What's missing on the produce shelves?
in Pacific Northwest & Alaska: Cooking & Baking
Posted
I think you make a great suggestion, stinkinbadges. I think there is a large group of people in Hawai`i who are quite curious about kalo (i.e. taro) - we're all aware that it's part of the heritage of Hawaiian culture. Yet most people on the island don't know how to make use of it except in a few minor ways. I think if local producers and retailers made a concerted effort to market kalo, they could greatly expand local demand.
I also believe the HRC people could do more in this regard. Yes, they do promote the use of locally-grown produce, but it is usually consists of fruits and vegetables that is have no indigenous roots in the cuisine of Hawai`i or the wider Pacific area (e.g. lettuce, tomatoes). Nothing wrong with lettuce and tomatoes, obviously, but why can't they try to promote local kalo to the same extent?