Queens – Writing With My Mouth Full

Salt & Fat

41-16 Queens Boulevard, Sunnyside, Queens
$40 each for 4 people, with drinks, with tip
718/433.3702
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Taking advantage of Queens while one of my favorite eating partners is in town from Chicago, we visited Salt & Fat with her brother to check out the scene in what is a very unfamiliar part of the city to me.

Tastiest:
1. Yellowtail tartare with yuzu gel and cassava chips – We got two orders of this because the combination of yuzu and tartare was very good.
2. Pork belly buns – Comparable to the trendiest of them all
3. Fried chicken – Pretty good and happily-salted fried chicken; I didn’t even need the herbed ranch that came with it. The spattering of pickled cubed daikon was a nice touch.

Pretty good:
1. Oxtail terrine – A little salty for me, but it didn’t seem to be a terrine
2. Pork trotters – Crispy and perfect with the slow-cooked egg
3. Truffled beet salad with yuzu crème fraîche – Simple

Notable:
1. Prices – Go now before the prices hike for visiting Brooklynites (as if they will ever leave Brooklyn!)

Weird:
1. Ice creams for dessert – A-plus for effort on the miso-apple, jalapeño-white peach and Thai iced tea flavors, but I felt like they lacked ooomph.
2. Service – Though pretty fast, our waitress seemed unhappy to be there. We had to ask for our pig trotters twice and we wondered if she was distracted.
3. The bathroom – It looked like Sanibel, Florida in there

Taste Good Malaysian Cuisine

82-18 45th Avenue, Elmhurst, Queens
$20 each for 4 people, without drinks, with tip
718/898.8001
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One of my favorite eating partners was in town from Chicago, so I basically forced her to eat in Queens and drag Paul, her Malaysian friend, with her so he can order for the rest of us and show us Malay food in the city.

Tastiest:
1. Kangkong belacan – Call these hollow vegetables whatever you want: swamp cabbage, water spinach, ong choy or phak bung, but they will always be Filipino kangkong to me. Belacan, the Malaysian variety of shrimp paste is deliciously salty–the perfect side vegetable to any Southeast Asian fare.

2. Rojak – This sweet and sour dish had the best combination of texture: cuttlefish (soft), prawn fritters (crisp), cucumber (tender), jicama (crunchy), pineapple (soft), mango (fleshy), sesame seeds (toasty). Named after the Malay term for “mix”, it not only refers to the seafood-fruit-vegetable combo, but also the multi-ethnic Malaysian-Singapore influence.
3. Singapore kari laksa – How can you go wrong with curry as good as this? This bowl of yellow-orange noodles brought back such good memories of my trip to Singapore I almost wept. It turns out the hot broth that burst from my quickly eating the soft tofu squares were too spicy for me in one go. Burning my throat was worth it though.

Weird:
1. Petai beans with belacan and shrimp – Petai beans look like a larger version of fava, but they had a bitter aftertaste that was, for a lack of a better word, weird. And I rarely describe food as “weird”. After some Internet research, I found out why they would taste so weird: they’re called stink bean and resemble the smell of natural gas!

Disappointment:
1. Sizzling pork with marmite sauce – I was warned that the restaurant is now under new management, but that shouldn’t be a reason as to why they would serve a dish other than how it’s advertised. This dish was in no way sizzling–it was just on a plate that resembled a sizzling platter. The pork chops were soft, but lacked that chargrilled flavor I was looking for and tasted more like a bottle of store-bought sauce was lazily poured in.

M. Wells

21-17 49th Avenue off 21st Street, Long Island City, Queens
718/425.6917
$330 for five, with drinks, without tip
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It’s rare that I eat out these days mostly because there’s something in my life now called “mortgage”, but when I do go, I make sure that I’m with a good group of people who appreciate food as much as I do. I was at the Breslin a few months ago with more or less the same group of people and we talked about what and where we were going to eat next while we were eating. We jokingly called ourselves the EatingAnimal Club because we realized how much we liked our red meat and pork. I wanted the rest of them to love sashimi and offal as much as I do, so the premise of eating nose-to-tail came up as one of the unofficial foundations of the club. (The “club” in the name made it sound so pretentious and exclusive–two adjectives we all aspire to be.)

M. Wells was the club’s third meeting. I was glad that everyone was willing to take the 7 train to Long Island City, Queens on a weeknight. When we were planning it, all we could find online was their brunch menu, but it didn’t take a lot of convincing to tell them to get adventurous for dinner–Québécois adventurous.

We all looked at the small dishes on the menu but I was pretty much handed the baton to order for the table. They were out of the “porterhouse pork” and the headcheese sandwich by the time we sat down at 8pm, so we picked eleven other dishes while skipping out on the three salads and a blini. Here’s the line-up of what went in our tummies:

Oyster in sabayon – We all met up at Grand Central Oyster Bar beforehand, so I wasn’t a big fan of this. It was also coffee sabayon! I love coffee-flavored anything, but I prefer my oysters unadulterated.

Whelks and blood sausage – I love me some snails and blood sausage, but I never thought I can eat them together. That said, this was one of the strongest dishes on the menu for me. Both ingredients were doused in dill-garlic butter while the soda crackers kept the strong flavors at bay.

They didn’t have sweetbreads on the menu but the veal brains made up for that. It was soft and smooth like homemade ricotta, rich like creamy butter.

Escargots and bone marrow – Another combination that perhaps only Canadians with French thinking would come up with. The textures were odd: chewy escargots with slushy marrow fat but I couldn’t stop scooping them up. I would have loved it even more topped with finely chopped parsley and red onion.

Beef tartare – Tartare is tartare and I wasn’t a fan of how saucy their version was. Like my oysters, I prefer my raw meat clean and immaculate. The poached egg was a nice touch, though–much heftier than a quail egg.

The snow crab salad with celeriac was also delicious and, if I remember correctly, went faster than any other dish on our table. The shaved Brussel sprouts was also a nice break from all the fatty dishes. It was served with dry venison jerky instead of perhaps bacon bits.

My favorite dish of the night was the tripe. It was called tripe “pasta” on the menu because I think they looked like cavatellis, but instead of a sauce, they were tossed with crushed smoked herring. The saltiness of the fish was oddly perfect with the blandness of the tripe. I would have this for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The Canuck breakfast reminded me not of Canada but of my breakfasts in Ireland sans the grilled tomato. I ate fried eggs, ham (bacon to us Americans) and blood sausage everyday for a week before I hiked or biked and the dish brought so many memories of that trip.

The tuna was pretty amazing with capers and egg yolk sauce, but I barely remember the butter chicken that my eating mates loved.

If those weren’t enough, somehow a cheese plate made it onto our table. (Good upsell from the staff there!) We were expecting small wedges of cheese but it came as a sticky mess of Winnimere, hazelnuts and candied fruit in maple syrup. I think if I wasn’t full, I would have appreciated the earthiness and saltiness of the dish. It certainly falls under the “weird” category for me and I didn’t need a platter for four of it.

We were pretty bummed when we found out that they had ran out of the banana cream pie, so we opted for the cheesecake, and man, what a cheesecake! Were those Ladyfingers in there? The cake wasn’t ridiculously sweet and we practically fought over it. The solution: take a slice to go!

Put the EatingClub in one room with food and drinks and we get pretty boisterous. The three ladies who shared our long wooden table weren’t too pleased with our behavior, but our servers seemed to like us, offering us a complementary bottle of bubbly for keeping us waiting in between courses and shots of some type of anise-flavored digestifs. We had to cancel a couple of dessert items after the gigantic cheese course and we felt bad that we requested to remove $17 worth of extra charges from our first bill, but we were also good diners and left them a hefty tip for putting up with us. I hope the staff had a good time with us as much as we had eating at their diner-cum-restaurant. We walked out of there, happy and drunk well past midnight, and into the cold Queens night.

Related post/s:
The Spotted Pig back in 2005

Sik Gaek Restaurant

161-29 Crocheron Avenue, Flushing, Queens
718/321.7770
$40 per person for a group of 11, with drinks, with tip
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For one of the Dr.’s birthday celebrations this year, I gathered his favorite people together to share a table at Sik Gaek Restaurant in Flushing, Queens. Everyone had just seen the Anthony Bourdain NYC Outer Borough episode and the cut with Momofuku’s David Chang was the talk of the food world. Because of the hype, I didn’t need to convince our friends to make the trek and even rent a couple of Zip Cars to get there.

I had called a few weeks earlier to save us one of the tables in the corner nook. The restaurant had its loyal following even before the No Reservations episode aired, but seats are even more in demand now. The guy on the phone warned me that if my party was late, they will give up our table–we all came 10 minutes early and they immediately seated us and got us fried eggs for appetizers with cold beers.

If you’ve seen the episode, you know that the main attraction is the live octopus. As much as I liked the cephalopod’s texture in my mouth and the sticky tentacles on my tongue, the hit for me was the seafood pot that was filled with mussels and clams. The broth in the end after every shellfish was consumed and discarded was superb. I just wanted a bowl of it while curled under my warm down comforter.

We also ordered the usual fare of Korean barbecue and kimchi chigae and shared several kinds of panjans, or side dishes. The beer and soju did not stop coming, and soon enough, the Dr. was wearing the restaurant’s house ‘fro while they played the Happy Birthday song in both Korean and English. It was a good family meal with good company.

Ganesh Hindu Temple Canteen

The Hindu Temple Society of North America
45-57 Bowne Street, Flushing, Queens
718/460.8493
$8 to $10 per dish
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I’ll second Anthony Bourdain for this review: vegetarian food doesn’t have to suck. When Scott was visiting from Dubai, I thought of the Ganesh Hindu Temple canteen as our lunch spot because of his new dietary needs. He’s not vegetarian per se because he likes his sushi and won’t turn down a juicy hamburger if it was offered to him–in other words, he’s my kind of vegetarian.

From the Main Street stop off the 7 train, we walked and walked in the rain until we reached Bowne Street. Worshippers were taking off their shoes before entering the basement, so we did the same thing until we realized that people who were only there for the food kept their shoes on. We joined the long queue and waited for our turn to order several dishes that we ended up sharing for lunch. We staked out other groups who were finishing up to get a table and seats.

The rava dosa, a crepe-like Indian pancake from South India, was delicious and light. The hyderabadi green chili curry seasoned with sweet tamarind and yogurt was my favorite because of its tanginess and acidity. The red chili masala is a little spicier but nothing freshly baked nan could not control. The paneer butter masala is my usual order at Indian restaurants so I was glad to try it here. We all loved the condiments that came in different shades of browns, reds and oranges spiked with the whiteness of thin yogurt on the side. The combination of cardamom, ginger, garlic and lemon was a nice sensation in our mouths and gave us strength to walk the long way back to the train.