FoodNerd!

There is a Hyderabadi restaurant here in Waltham called Kabab & Tandoor. I went to it once when it was still a temptingly dumpy little hole. It was delicious, very spicy and offering lots of dishes unfamiliar to me, and it was full of people who I assumed to be native consumers of the cuisine. Yummy. So when I noticed that they’d moved to a fancy new storefront right on Main St, complete with gilt script on the sign, I thought perhaps that was a good sign, that they were coming up in the world and the spicy dishes were perhaps turning enough profit to pay for some banquettes and fancy lamps.
We went to the new and improved version tonight, and the food is still really good. There’s a full menu, which makes it a lot easier to figure out what you’re eating, and there were more not-Indian folks in the place for sure. It offers a mix of familiar Indian-restaurant favorites and unfamiliar sounding things, often involving goat or mutton, which to my way of thinking is always a plus. The decor is really rather good, with soothing mustard yellow and leaf green on the walls, modern lamps (detectably from Home Depot but who cares, they chose the one attractive lamp at HD, so bonus points for them!), and some appealing art.
We got a chhole, which was well balanced and sparkled with raw onion and cilantro, and a paneer makhni, which was a rich red creamy spicy treasure. I suspect they make their own paneer, as it had a very good texture and there was plenty of it. There was also a goat passindai, an earthy meaty gravy full of chunky soft-braised goat and herbs. The raita was unusual, very runny and as it turns out quite spicy. I asked the waiter and he said they mix the yogurt with cream, and spice it with garlic and ginger and green chilies. Delicious, especially on the chhole.
We were too full to try the sweets, but there’s a full roster. We’ll be back many times, to try all those things we’ve never had before, and perhaps we should bring friends, so we can order more dishes… Yum!

We stayed in the new Ace Hotel on 29th and Broadway for the second half of our NYC trip so as not to outlast our welcome with friends who kindly let us stay in their apartment for a few days. It’s a rock-and-roll sort of place, but friendly, luxurious, and conveniently located.
Especially if you want Korean food. The K-town strip of 32nd St between 5th & 6th is stumbling distance away, and frankly it’s about the only good food in the area. Since we were having lunch, and I needed to get back to work fairly promptly, we didn’t go for the full-on charcoal bbq experience. I dug up this article, and when we saw jambong praised to the heavens, we were sold.
And Shanghai Mong delivers. There’s a long menu of normal-sounding Chinese dishes, but I recommend you do as we did and most of the other diners were doing: get noodles.
The jambong is excellent, a rich buttery broth with lots of squid and miscellaneous sea creatures amid a tangle of onions and carrots, a handful of mixed mushrooms, and lots of good noodles. (Not quite up to the heavenly standards of Garden House, according to tallasiandude, but nom nevertheless.)
The jja jang myun was new to me, though I’d seen it in many restaurants and coveted it. The same noodles, but in a rich thick black bean sauce with chunks of potato and braised meat. Comfort food at its finest, and not spicy at all, for those of you who fear the monstrous redness of Korean dishes.
I got a split dish, with one side full of jambong and the other full of jja jang myun. Tallasiandude went with full-on jambong. The panchan are limited to just yellow daikon, some salty preserved radish, and an excellent, tangy kimchi that I suspect is either homemade or obtained from some badass maker in the city. We were in and out of there in an hour, stuffed to the eyeballs and happy as can be.

We were loose in NYC without much of a plan this time. One day we stumbled out of our pals’ downtown apartment for lunch, took a taxi to Chinatown without an actual destination, and tried the first Chinese noodle place we saw.
Happily for us, Noodle Village was awesome. I was unfortunately hungover — damn this encroaching middle age — so I got a bowl of congee with black preserved egg and pork. This pork was richer and fattier than what we get at Vinh Sun, and it was really good, just what I wanted. Tallasiandude got his usual too, a bowl of thin egg noodles in soup with shrimp-filled dumplings. These were huge and particularly good dumplings, with fresh shrimp and good flavorings.
The xiao long bao were a bit of a disappointment, doubly a blow given the recent demise of Wing’s Kitchen; we still have no quality source on the east coast. They were a bit thick and chewy, and the filling was too sweet. Not terrible, but not good either. The jiao zi, on the other hand, were top notch, filled with lots of garlic chive and pork, and fried supercrunchy just the way I like ‘em.

So in all the salty fatty ecstasy over Mr. Chang’s pork offerings, I have neglected to mention anything about the sweets. These are not inconsiderable.
For a start, when we went the first time, there was a lemon verbena soft serve on the menu at Milk Bar. I regret not having room for it that night, as it was gone from the menu by the time we got back. We tried the Cereal Milk^TM which was pretty good as a novelty, tasting just like cornflakes gone soggy in whole milk and then frozen. We also tried the Strawberry Shortcake, which was surprisingly nasty, with a very odd tang to it that seemed to be due to the shortcake aspect. But softserve in exciting flavors is just the pleasing frivolity that Mr. Chang wants it to be, and NYC is eating it up.
We tried the Crack Pie^TM which was indeed a buttery little minx, and the Candy Bar pie was a big fat Reese’s Cup in a crust.
The real gem, though, and I am pretty sure it’s not a hidden one by any measure, is the Compost Cookie^TM. It’s a big pile of crumbs and scraps all baked up together with some butter and sugar and flour. It’s got potato chips in it, and coffee grounds, along with more usual things like graham cracker crumbs and oats and chocolate. So every bite hits a caramel-salt-mocha note that just makes me happy all over.

Our Saturday night dance outing was up the street from Momofuku Noodle Bar. We initially forgot this fact, and went to Jaffa Cafe on the recommendation of the ticket girl. There we had an adequate berry cake and a bowl of tzatziki masquerading as cucumber-yogurt soup, which was fine but tallasiandude was still hungry — at which point we realized what was but mere blocks away.
One dark-and-stormy-flavored soju slushie, served with fat bubble-tea straws. Two Beau Soleil oysters with cucumber-yuzu puree, then an order of pork buns. Then another order of pork buns.
NOM.
But we went to the Momofuku Noodle Bar hoping for noodles, and for some reason the late-night menu doesn’t have ANY noodles. Oh, cry for us, we had exquisite pork buns instead.
So we went back for lunch the next day. Heh.
Their pork ramen is probably the best I have had. Rich flavorful broth, with good thin noodles, two types of braised pork, bamboo shoot, scallion, fish cake, and nori. Almost too much pork, really, for the summer weather, but who’s to complain?
We also got bibim gooksu, more noodles with a Korean sweet-spicy sauce, shredded nori, salted cucumber, and a soft-fried egg. Corn off the cob with butter, fingerlings, scallion and bacon from Benton the country ham guy. More rice cake cylinders fried to crispy and swaddled in sweet-spicy sauce, too sweet for some but somehow compelling for me, with just a dusting of scallion and sesame seed. And a couple more orders of pork buns. I mean, duh.

OK, so apparently I am late getting on the David Chang bandwagon. I just found out about him a few months ago watching reruns of No Reservations, but he’s been around long enough to have 3 restaurants in Manhattan, wackily restrictive reservations policies, and an internet backlash.
I don’t care.
The man is a deranged genius and I love him for it. Read the reviews I linked to — they’re completely accurate in describing his combination of trendy East Village bar atmosphere, haute cuisine technique and ingredients, low-rent comfort-food concepts, Korean flavors and raw unapologetic gluttony.
Any person who puts a whole section for country hams on his menu is OK with me. And if said person also decides to offer a bo ssam spread of braised pork shoulder bigger than my head along with insanely-great homemade kimchi and beautiful raw oysters and rice and lettuce, I am on board. Just as I am with the platter of two whole fried chickens, one southern-style, one korean-style, that can be had at his noodle bar.
Some of the criticism is justified. $18 for the few slivers of cured hamachi we had was a bit much — it was delicious and clever, but dishes like that are where Momofuku is gleefully extracting cash from the hipster masses.
On the other hand, 5 people ate that pork braise, and then 7 more ate the leftovers. And it was fucking fantastic both times. The meat was soft, moist, oozing with fat, as glorious as any slow-smoked cut I’ve ever seen, with a sweet sticky skin and perfect rich flavor. I about shoveled that kimchi into my face with a spoon it was so good. Apparently people go gaga for the ginger scallion sauce, which was admittedly good, but holy crap that kimchi!
We also ordered a fried rice cake dish that was cylindrical Korean rice cakes snipped into bits, crisp-fried in a wok, and served with a spicy sauce, ground pork, and chinese broccoli. This was probably the most delicious thing we ordered short of the pork. The snap peas in xo sauce with mint and crumbled hardboiled egg gave it a mighty challenge. Addictively good, both of them, and probably gone from the menus even by now. DAMN YOU, David Chang!
At least he throws us all a bone by keeping the pork belly steamed buns constantly on the menu at all 3 of his establishments. I don’t care if he does buy the buns frozen from chinatown. They taste great, the pork belly is perfect, soft and dripping fat, and the balance with the hoisin and lightly pickled cucumber slices and finely sliced scallion is dreamy. The fact that you can have such a thing in the middle of the night, or drunk, or both, is just gravy.
(pictures will come when yahoo stops douching around and lets me back into flickr)

…from Perez. Lunch today was machacado con huevo with a whole stack of warm fresh homemade tortillas. I am content.

Friendly Toast part II comes to Kendall Square. YUM.

We got a hot tip from a pal that someone at the Boston Globe had gone so far as to say that a new Cambridge burger place had the closest thing to In-N-Out on the east coast. Obviously we were going to check THIS sort of thing out in detail.
The place in question is Flat Patties, a spot in the Harvard Square Garage that appears to be run by the same people who run Felipe’s Taqueria, which I’ve heard good things about but never yet tried. The folks behind the counter are friendly, and the burger is good, but in our highly unofficial head-to-head competition with Four Burgers in Central Square, they went down hard.

No contest. That Four Burgers burger is pretty damn close to In-N-Out, actually, and has tons of burger flavor. I didn’t even put ketchup on, and I ketchup the hell out of burgers as a general rule. I have no idea what J. Kenji Alt was smoking that day, when he called it flat and flavorless.
In fact, that was the main gripe I had with the otherwise perfectly nice Flat Patties burger: it lacked flavor, even with Swiss and avocado and “special sauce”. I ketchuped the thing, then put on relish.

Given that Four Burgers also had better fries, Coke Zero in the fountain, AND sources their meat from crunchy granola safe-meat farms, it’s a no brainer for me: the superior burger can be had at Four Burgers. If you’re in Harvard Square, by all means have a Flat Patties, but for the closest thing to In-N-Out, you gotta go one more stop inbound on that Red Line.

Tonight I am in Skokie Illinois. I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off because my 4pm client meeting ran well over 2 hours and I barely made it to the car rental shop before it closed at 7, AND i’d left both cell phones in my cube at the office. Dumbass.
Anyway, I was hungry and had a car and couldn’t think where to go, so I thought about it for a minute, to try and remember what I really, really missed about Chicago food that was a) not Perez, b) not Blackbird, and c) vaguely might be sort of near or on the way to Skokie. And then I remembered my last trip to Hecky’s on Halsted, which wasn’t really a Hecky’s despite the desperate baldfaced lies to the contrary from the manager.
The One True Hecky’s is now the one in Evanston… a 10 minute drive from Skokie. Yay!!
I just finished off most of a half chicken and some cole slaw, and it was as dreamy as I remember it, just as spicy and tangy, the meat just as moist, and perhaps even smokier than the Halsted shop’s. I scored a bottle of the sauce to bring home, to tide me over till the next visit — hurray for having to check luggage anyway!
And I think I might head back tomorrow night, to get some rib tips… the adorable cashier kid at Best Buy busted into the hugest grin when I told him I was headed to Hecky’s, and told me that the rib tips are at least as good as the chickens. I personally have never gotten past the chickens, so I think it’s worth a second trip while I am trapped here in the northern burbs. In the name of scientific research and the greater good of humanity, of course.
(Update: the rib tips are pretty good. lots of bone and connective bits, with little nibbles of meatiness and the usual sauce. perfectly worthwhile, but I still prefer the extraordinary chicken.)