Gary Soup

At $5.95/oz., I guess it's worth the risk.

Count your blessings. You get the good stuff without guilt.

Wake me up when we get back to 1961/1962. Does anybody remember a restaurant called Le Vert Galant? I never ate there, but lived immediately upstairs from it in the summer of 1962. (I believe it was at 58 W. 48th.) In 1961 I worked at the Top of the Sixes (666 Fifth Avenue). That's the last entry in my culinary resume. I was the flaming dessert wagon attendant, if you need to know. I was paid bubkes but got all the food I could eat.

I hope you didn't base your judgement on the displays in the front window. Some of the pastries look like they have been there since the shop first opened. I can't go in there without a preconception that everything is over the hill. I would think that the mooncakes reviewed by Picky Eater were freshly made, though, as the review was during the mid-autumn festival season. Garden Bakery is one that I have never though of in terms of moon cakes, but then I'm not a moon cake fan.

It doesn't sound like something I'd want to try at home. You might start with excercising with barbells to increase the strength and endurance of your forearms

It's no secret, it's Shanghai Dumpling Shop on Balboa & 34th. (I can give you directions when you are ready). I'm planning to take my NYC daughter there next week when she visits (getting out of town during the Republican convention). I think I'll check to see if the crab dumplings are available now, or only during Dungeness season locally. Dungeness crab is alway available, but this time of year it's brought in from further north, and kept in tanks (sometimes too long).

I was wondering about that myself, because often "crab" xiaolong tang bao is a mixture of crab and pork. There's one place in SF that makes all-crab xiaolong bao, but you have to order a day ahead and get a monster-sized order because they do in a whole dungeness crab for your order.

It is September 28, 2004 Tuesday. Since I heard "Eastern Bakery" mentioned a few times... can anybody tell me the street it's on (and the cross street)? I will be in SF again tomorrow and would like to drop by and pick up a few to try. Anybody knows the Chinese name? (In China Town, Chinese business names are much more prominent than their English ones) 720 Grant Avenue at Commercial St. (That's between Sacramento and Clay St.) You can't miss it, it's got pictures of Bill Clinton shopping there in the window. (He stopped by for a photo opportunity).

Yeah, right, BB. I'm guessing it was one of those "I-don't-dare-come-back-without-it" kinds of "surprise."

It's gettin to be that time of year again, kids, so here's the mooncake thread. Lets KICK IT UP ANOTHER NOTCH!

Er, not too romantic if your partner is allergic to seafood. Ooops! You are right -- kinda forgot about that! sorry - no Cioppino! I did mean to say "shellfish", not "seafood" as Carolyn and Katie correctly understood. Cioppino is nothing if not a battle with shellfish in the shell in a bowl of tomatoey chowder. Even if nobody's allergic to shellfish, it's still a struggle for me to feel romantic when I'm wearing a tomato sauce-stained bib, I have to say.

I can't answer that, but I think I recall seing halal Chinese food in Flushing. Downtown Flushing is New York's second Chinatown, and worth checking out, too. It's very easy to get to, just take the #7 Subway from Times Square or Grand Central Station all the way to the end of the line, and you're in the heart of it when you emerge from the station.

Er, not too romantic if your partner is allergic to seafood. I second the Koi Palace recco. It's worth the little extra time and driving to find. If they don't want to drive, Harbor Village might be a good alternative (though considerably pricier). It's also elegant and usually subdued enough to be considered "romantic" as well. HV is also a good option for dim sum (I'm NOT a Yank Sing fan) if they don't want to deal with the joyful noise of Chinatown dim sum parlors. If they do, I'd suggest Gold Mountain or perhaps Lichee Garden. For a Chinatown dinner, I'd pick the consistently very good Great Eastern; R&G Lounge is something of a crap shoot, and Louie's California Chinese Cuisine is still struggling with an identity problem, IMHO.

I have to say that I was mightily impressed with Jean-Talon Market on my brief visit. It's what San Francisco's Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market can only dream of being when it grows up (oh, screw organic). I haven't tasted strawberries, raspberries or blueberries like that since I was a kid and picked them in the wild. And Ma, I'll eat all my green beans if they look like those. And what about the bricks-and-mortar fromageries, saucisseries, boulangeries, and whateveries surrounding the market? Worth at least half a day of shopping by foodies on even the busiest travel schedule, even if you can't get it all through customs

The dreaded "A" word is one I try to avoid, as I consider it almost meaningless. Cuisines are the happy product of cross-fertilization and discovery, at least since the age of navigation. Just imagine the days of no tomatoes in Italy, no chilis in China, no potatoes in Germany of Ireland, no peanuts in southeast Asia, etc. If authentic means anything, it means true to something we remember from a given time or place, no matter how recent or how worthy or unworthy of re-creation (you might find an "authentic" Frappucino in Zimbabwe, but so what?). Last week I was traveling the back roads of St. Lawrence County, N.Y. and we stopped at a roadside diner frozen in time that served up an authentic circa 1950 Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast as a main menu item (my mother ordered it, and prononced it good). And let me tellya about my wife's authentic Shanghai luosang tang!

Sorry, xiaolong bao are akin to what New Yorkers usually call soup dumplings. They can be seen as a subset of soup dumplings, though I tend to think of xiaolong bao as a model and other soup dumplings as variants. "traditional" xiaolong bao are smallish, with a base no bigger than a 50-cent piece (for those of you old enough to remember those) and sometimes smaller.

On a 2-1/2 day visit to New York last week, I had a Quixotic plan to sample the xiaolong bao at up to four different restaurants. Of course, my schedule and logistics limited my ambitions, but I managed to get to two. I settled on Moon House in my sole half-day in Chinatown. I had narrowed my list to either MH or Yeah Shanghai Deluxe, and Moon House appeared, on first glance, to be a little closer to the bone. The ambience of Moon House did not disappoint, as it had the look and feel of a family-run-hole-in-the-wall in any Shanghai neighborhood. All of the staff, and most of the customers, spoke the staccato and melodious central Shanghai dialect. I was also delighted by the fact that, as in the very shrine of xiaolong bao in Shanghai, the food arrived by dumbwaiter from the nether regions of the shop. I also had a chuckle when when the counter girl muttered some salty curses in Shanghainese at the dilatory unseen cook downstairs who was slow in producing a takeout order. (Her outburst also reminded me how much I was already missing my wife, who did not make the trip with me.) Unfortunately, the verisimilitude ended where the food began. The xiaolong bao were in the Joe's Shanghai mold of being overly large, and well-souped but with a broth that was lacking in intensity of flavor. Worse, the wrapper was thick and way too chewy, as if it had been prepared too far in advance. The accompanying congyou bing (scallion pancakes) I ordered were also a miscarriage, being thick, not layered, and translucently soggy, as if they had been been deep fried instead of shallow fried. Unaccountably, salty soy milk soup was not on the menu (or available off the menu, for that matter) and I had to make do with an uninteresting and bland soup of bean thread vermicelli in a broth with small fragments of youtiao (fried bread). One positive note, in addition to the ambience: the xiaolong bao were $3.95 for eight, which should buy them a little forgiveness. My second xiaolong bao experience on this trip was as an appetizer at M Shanghai, which was not on my original list, but was a last minute inspiration for dinner when we planned to be in Williamsburg. M Shanghai turned out to be a pleasant surprise, probably due to my low expectations. The reviews in the press and the trendy locale seemed to whisper "fusion" (the "f"-word, in my lexicon). It turned out, however, to be not so much "fusion" (probably not enough exotic California veggies at hand) but a lightened-up take on a cuisine similar to what I imagine girth-conscious "modern" Shanghainese are partaking of somewhere at this very moment. There was not a red-cooked pig trotter or a "Su Dongpo" pork-belly in sight. The xiaolong bao at M Shanghai, all things considered, were the best I have experienced in New York to date. The wrappers, though slightly larger and not quite as tightly constructed as xiaolaong bao orthodoxy dictates, were almost of the requisite melt-in-the-moth tenderness, and the "soup" had a desirable intensity of flavor, though a little on the sweet side for my taste. After the fact, it occurred to me that the xiaolong bao at M Shanghai were almost dead ringers for the ones served in Wuxi, notable for the sweetness of its cuisine. We also ordered niangao (stir-fried Shanghai rice pasta), which was a good version but cooked a little too soft; morning glory with tea sauce, a breaded chicken with chestnuts dish, and Salmon with tofu. The latter three were all new to me, but skillfully cooked and well-flavored despite a total lack of the necessary condiments of fat, bone, and gristle mandated in truly authentic Shanghai cuisine. I also had an amusing contretemps with our obstinate waiter, who opined that we had ordered too many dishes for three people, and suggested we cancel the stir-fried rice cakes, "since we would be getting the complimentary steamed rice anyway." It was a suggestion that only a non-Shanghainese would make, to be sure. I insisted on the niangao (we canceled another dish) and informed him that we didn't need to eat the rice simply because it came free. He later brought the niangao simultaneously with two bowls of rice for the three of us and placed the order of niangao directly beside my plate. For the record, other meals which diverted me from my xiaolong bao quest included take-out Cubanos for the A's game at Yanqui Stadium, lunch with my daughter at the Conde Nast building cafeteria (located on the same floor as the offices for both Gourmet and Bon Appetit, hmmmm...) and a decent breakfast at Cafe Henri in Long Island City, which would have tasted better if the place were called Cafe Ennui, as I first misheard.

Perhaps a little off-topic (not about wine) and a little late (for me), but I'm curious about whether the infamous Screech Rum from Newfoundland can be found in Montreal. On my annual 36-hour blitz of MTL last week, I acted on a request to look for some with due diligence. I hit a number of SAQ's including a couple of fancy ones (on Jean Talon near the market and in the Halles du Gare) but all I got was "never heard of it". Is this a territorial thing? Is Screech too lowbrow for notice? Has anybody outside Newfoundland, New York City or Toronto even heard of it?

Are you saying in Lu Cai, Chuan Cai, Huai Yang Cai, they mainly use soy sauce to cook? I thought they use chili bean sauce 豆板酱 and brown bean sauce just as often. Maybe you don't consider those as sauces? My wife is Shanghainese and she uses soy sauce (or rather several soy sauces) almost exclusively. She probably uses ketchup more than brown bean sauce, oyster sauce, haixin sauce or any other!

Well, this sent me into a tizzy of fruitless Googling. I couldn't find anything definitive on peach counts per bushels, but the largest apple sizes (3-7/8 inches in diameter) come 48 to a bushel, according to this link: Fruit Grading It also suggests that the top normal peach size is 3" in diameter (which should be about 113 per barrell, based on apple sizes). However, this News Flash informed me of a farmer in Michigan who is about to enter the Guiness Book of World Records with a 25.6 oz peach described as nearly 5" in diameter. I suppose if your Oregon farmer had an inside track to some monstrous Flamin' Furies he might be able to fill a bushel basket with a dozen if he didn't top it off. That would be a lot of peach juice drizzling down your chin!

Not to be a nit-picker, but you can bet your pretty neck you were looking at a peck, not a bushel. A Bushel and a Peck

One small exception: in Shanghai, the practice of locals seems to be to round up taxi fares, possibly to spare the driver the hassle of digging for small change.

Sorry- I wasn't be coy about this. I never saw the entry. yes, it is true! I will be starting at the ferry building on Saturday, August 21, as long as I get all my paperwork together in time. Gary, I hope you're my first customer! Since I'm unlikely to sashay over there much before Noon, you'd better hope that I'm not your first customer. Would you settle for first-day customer?

Since it hasn't shown up in this thread, I'll add the following informative link: Chinese Imperial Cuisines

Are you addressing that to me? (I'm on vacation and only have occasional access to the net, so I haven't been paying very close attention, and will be in a better position to shoot my mouth off come this weekend). The Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum (aka Shanghai Art Museum) is "official", hence conservative. Best to start with the private galleries, starting with ShanghArt next door to Judy's Too by Fuxing Park. The Shanghai Museum, on the other hand, is a definite must for anyone who has any interest at all in Chinese antiquities.