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. 

Leftover Turkey Hash Brown Quiche: Dieters Beware

As much as I love Thanksgiving, I may adore the days after the holiday even more.

One word: Leftovers.

Sure turkey dinners with stuffing and corn pudding that have been doused in so much gravy that you have a thick, glistening brown moat on your plate are unbeatable. But this is also a great time to rev up your creativity in the kitchen.

What to do with your mounds of leftover turkey? Our Let's Lunch bunch -- a group of far-flung home cooks who have a monthly lunch date on Twitter -- decided to tackle this question for December.

My answer? A garlicky turkey hash brown quiche.

Scissor-Cut Rice: One Handsome (Tasting) Meal

My New York friend Mark likes to tell the story of how, on his first visit to Singapore, he stopped a group of people near a hawker center, asking them which was the best place to eat in the area. 

"Big scissors!" was the immediate answer.

Which may seem an odd name for a food establishment to some. But in Singapore, the word "scissors" indicates that this is a stall in which you buy a plate of rice, point to a bunch of dishes (usually holding items like tofu, fried eggs or pork chops) and the hawker then piles what you've chosen on the plate and snips it all up into bite-size pieces with -- you got it -- a big pair of scissors.

While this could come across as a rather unorthodox way of serving a meal, let me tell you, places with the word "scissors" in their names often churn out pretty darn satisfying food. In Mark's case, his meal -- which he still regularly recounts with great gusto and yearning -- was at Big Scissors Curry Rice at Maxwell Food Centre. 

Recently, I had the good fortune of discovering another gem in the "scissors" category: Beach Road Scissor-Cut Curry Rice. 

Cowgirl Sea-Horse: Fish So Good It's Got To Be Bad For You

It's always a little unfair to judge a restaurant based on its first week out the gate -- kinks still have to be worked out; the kitchen may not have found its rhythm yet.

Judging from a visit to Cowgirl Sea-Horse just days after it opened, it's a place well worth checking out. If things are only expected to get better after the first week, well, let's just say they're already pretty darn satisfying.

This new seafood outpost of the popular Cowgirl in the West Village has the same Southwestern flavor and Steel Magnolia bartenders that the original restaurant does. But it offers slightly different fare from the chicken-fried steaks and smoked barbecue ribs that have been mainstay of Cowgirl for decades.

On the menu are $12 to $14 seafood gumbos, fish tacos and shrimp cornettas (crispy cones filled with shrimp). Like Cowgirl, it does a good job at what it does -- uncomplicated comfort food. One thread links the two restaurants: there's an awful lot of fried in both places.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.

A Fried Chicken Habit

I have been on a fried chicken bender.

It began with the ladies-of-the-night Thai chicken wings and continued the next day with bright-red Indian fried chicken for lunch and then a dinner of Indonesian nasi ayam penyet, a dish of rice and gloriously crunchy cumin/coriander/lemongrass-seasoned fried chicken that I'm still hoping will make its way across the ocean to New York City.

By the time I sat down to my next meal and saw the Malay fried chicken wings on the table, I knew it was time to admit: I have a problem.

Everyone has a comfort food and mine, somehow, is fried chicken.

A View From The Road: Spam Fries in Singapore

 

Best. Discovery. Ever.

"Luncheon Meat Fries" at Wild Oats  in Singapore -- an amazing bar food that consists of Spam sliced into thin strips and then deep fried.

Surely, this must be the reason God invented pigs.

A Fashion Critic's Bacon-Fat Cookies

 

High-end fashion and bacon fat.

I couldn't think of two things more disparate and yet, flipping through the pages of the New York Times a few years ago, there it was: Fashion critic Cathy Horyn's paean to a recipe for Swedish ginger cookies made with bacon grease that she has "cherished for years."

My first reaction: Be still my beating heart, both figuratively and, quite possibly, literally. The cookie seemed like an insane, artery-clogging idea. The first ingredient listed, after all, was "3/4 cup bacon fat, cooled (from 1 1/2 to 2 pounds Oscar Mayer bacon)."

Two pounds of bacon? Cathy was officially my new hero.