A Tiger In The Kitchen

The Breslin: Gastropub, Grown Up

This is the sort of restaurant that The Breslin is: You will arrive on a Monday night to find the restaurant full and the bar jammed with the studiedly -- and also studly -- casual set. The wait, they will say, is 45 minutes to an hour.

You have a drink, some snacks and 45 minutes go by. An hour passes. There is still no word -- even though a stroll through the dining room shows that there are not one, not two, but a few tables that have been sitting empty for a bit.

At almost 90 minutes, it's getting a little tiresome. Nearby Koreatown is starting to look like a surer bet for dinner -- but just as you start to gesture toward your bar waitress for the check, you spy her spotting you and then sprinting over to the hostess for a quick discussion. Faster than you can say "Check, please," the hostess is by your side, telling you that now, there is a table open.

You consider leaving because, well, this is all a little bizarre. But you decide to stay -- and it's a good thing you do because what's on the dinner menu, it turns out, is worth waiting for.

But you really wouldn't expect anything less or different from owners of the Spotted Pig, the small West Village gastropub that quickly became the place for Leonardo DiCaprio spottings when it first opened in 2004. 

Mooncakes: The Taste of Sweet Rebellion

 

You know you're walking into a hardcore kitchen when the first thing you see is stacks upon stacks of boxes filled with gorgeous home-made mooncakes.

The women on my Dad's side of the family in Singapore -- they're fearless cooks.

Pineapple tarts, bak-zhang (glutinous rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves), black vinegar-braised pig's trotters? They could whip those together with their eyes closed.

Recently, however, the task at hand was Chinese mooncakes, eaten to mark the Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls this Saturday.

Now, there are a few old stories that explain the reason for eating these little cakes, which usually are filled with sweet lotus-seed paste and come either with a thin, baked crust or a soft, pliant dough skin that's scented with pandan, a vanilla-like flavoring used in many Southeast Asian desserts. My favorite is the one of Ming revolutionaries planning to overthrow the Mongolian rulers of China during the Yuan dynasty and spreading word via letters baked into mooncakes. (Julia Child would've been so proud!)

During my Singaporean girlhood, I'd known the stories, I'd eaten the cakes. As for making them? That seemed so laughably difficult it never once crossed my mind.

It turns out, however, they're incredibly easy to make -- you just need the right teachers.

A Mouth Full of Booger

Slowly and carefully, Greg and I chewed, on the verge of both laughter and disgust as we tried to put a name to what it was we were tasting.

"It's like a bad taco," Greg said.

"Tequila or margaritas -- regurgitated," I said, thinking suddenly of a college night long, long ago.

It was actually vomit that we were sampling -- vomit-flavored jelly beans, to be precise.

When we had passed a display of rather unappetizing-sounding new Jelly Belly flavors at the Fancy Food Show in New York City, we had known it was a silly gimmick but hadn't been able to resist. And so we spent some unpleasant minutes with mouths full of centipede (which tasted like grass and earth), skunk spray (as billed) and canned dog food (think Chef Boyardee). (Canned dog food and centipede are new this year.)

Drawing the line at Baby Wipes, we decided to walk away while our tastebuds were still intact.

"I still taste Booger in my mouth," Greg whispered as we slunk away.

Well, somewhat intact, I suppose.

When Brittany Was Our Oyster

The rain was coming down, not hard, not gently -- just with enough of a tap-tap-tap firmness to make us think more than twice of not stopping at all when we spotted the little oyster shacks by the Cancale bay. 

This being June, we knew we were technically in the wrong month for oysters -- if you still believe the "you should only eat oysters in months with 'R' in their names" theory. But we were in Brittany, which reportedly produces a quarter of France's oysters every year.

These oysters, they had to be tried.

A View From The Road: A Kaya Picnic

File this under the "all food porn and no substance" category: 

It's a gorgeous, sun-drenched afternoon in Singapore. The sky is impossibly blue, there's a light tropical breeze rolling through, humidity feels non-existent.

All this called for an impromptu backyard picnic of home-made kaya (Singaporean coconut jam) on walnut bread.

A good life, indeed.

How to Wrap Bak-Zhang

I have new-found respect for bak-zhang hawkers.

I'd never given the pyramid-shaped, glutinous-rice dumplings much thought -- until I learned how to make them.

And boy, let me tell you, if you're not naturally gifted in the ways of origami, you're really in for it. (Unless you enjoy hearing the pitter-patter of rice beads skittering across the floor as clumps of braised pork pelt your toes.)