GOOD EATS NYC 2023 (A Blanket Thread)

JenKalb · December 30, 2023, 1:52am

Really falling Behind in posting with recollections of the mega trip to Argentina just completed fading…Christmas Eve we made our maiden visit to HAINAN CHICKEN HOUSE, first but not last! Limited but good menu, we selected the two meat combo with chicken rice the house poached hainan chicken and char siu roast pork belly. The dish was presented in a brown paper envelope, with the traditional dips on the side. Rice (two balls) was full of flavor, meats were perfectly cooked, the pork was very delicate and moistwith just the right amount of fat and seasoning. Tip top.

Companion dishes were char kway teow, funky, delicious, plenty of wok char and full of clams and shrimp
And watercress with oyster soy dressing, a favorite

We finished with delicate pandan flavored pudding accompanied by a super buttery coconut disc and tea.
Not large portions but all this, with professional friendly service and, a beer and a calamansi lemonade came to $65.

small_h · December 31, 2023, 12:55am

Filing under “this is why I’ve gained weight in 2023.”

Babbo last night:

I am unable to avoid ordering egg raviolo when I see it on a menu, and this one was extremely satisfying, in all its runny yolk/excess of ricotta/brown butter glory. Not quite up to the level of Rezdora’s, because the butter was too much muchness. But I still liked it A LOT. The crudo was less successful, although the fish was of excellent quality. It wasn’t cut that well, though - there was some sinew. And the number of toppings - pomegranate, hot pepper, onion - was distracting.

And then I went to House of Joy for dim sum this morning. Excellent har gow, tofu skin rolls, fried whitebait, green pepper stuffed with shrimp paste. Disappointing salt & pepper squid, eggplant stuffed with shrimp paste, rice rolls, spicy cucumber. It was a ridiculous amount of food, though, and although I made a concerted effort to restrain myself, what am I supposed to do when the shrimp and chive dumplings come around? I ask you.

JenKalb · December 31, 2023, 3:28am

your pictures make it look like the dim sum is getting bigger and bigger too!

small_h · December 31, 2023, 4:01am

I have small hands.

Saregama · January 1, 2024, 4:57pm

New thread for 2024:

FlemSnopes · January 2, 2024, 1:03am

I feel bad that I have been derelict in posting about the meals that Toni and I had during our 30-day NYC trip back in August-September. The people in this group were so helpful and and so welcoming, which was a big part of why we had another tremendous food vacation. We’re hoping that we’ll be back for a third month-long stay in summer 2024, which should happen if the landlord of the apartment where we stay doesn’t pull it off the short-term stay market.

I like lists and rankings, so I’ll start with a summary. I use the following scale to grade restaurants - Outstanding, Excellent, Very Good, Good, Okay, Bad – complete with pluses and minuses. It’s obviously false precision to the point of silliness to grade such widely varying types of restaurant meals on a fixed scale … but it’s how I’m wired.

Here’s where we ate and the grades:

8/15 - Trad Room, Bed-Stuy - Excellent
8/16 - Ali’s Trinbago Roti Shop, Crown Heights - Very Good
8/17 - Rangoon, Crown Heights - Excellent-minus
8/18 - Indian Table, Cobble Hill - Malvan meal - Outstanding-minus
8/19 - Queens Night Market, Flushing Meadows - Excellent
8/20 - Village Cafe, Midwood - Excellent
8/21 - Doctor’s Cave Cafe, Bed-Stuy - Very good-plus
8/22 - Le Bernardin, Midtown - Outstanding
8/23 - Atlas Kitchen, Manhattan Valley (?) - Very good
8/24 - Peaches, Bed-Stuy - Excellent
8/25 - Mariscos el Submarino, Jackson Heights - Excellent-plus
8/26 - Wadadli, Bed-Stuy - Very good
8/27 - Kubeh, West Village - Excellent-minus
8/28 - Zaca Cafe, Bed-Stuy - Good
8/29 - Zanmi, Prospect Lefferts Gardens - Good
8/30 - Mama Kitchen, Bed-Stuy - Excellent-minus
8/31 - Nana Ramen, Bed-Stuy - Excellent-minus
9/1 - Saraghina Pizza, Bed-Stuy - Excellent-minus
9/2 - Katz’s Deli, Lower East Side - Excellent
9/3 - Chavela’s, Crown Heights - Excellent
9/4 - Fray’s Cuisine, vendor at the annual West Indian Day Parade, Crown Heights - Excellent-minus
9/4 - Hop Lee, Chinatown - Good
9/5 - Leli’s Bakery, Astoria - Good
9/5 - Sabry’s Seafood, Astoria - Excellent
9/6 - Maya Congee, Bed-Stuy - Excellent
9/7 - Royal Rib, Bed-Stuy - Excellent-minus
9/8 (& leftovers on 9/14 on the bus back to Arlington) - Foxface Natural, East Village - Outstanding-minus
9/9 - Chuan Xia Tian, Sunset Park - Very good-plus
9/10 - Sofreh, Prospect Park - Excellent-plus
9/11 - Teranga, Midtown East - Good-minus
9/12 - Je T’aime Patisserie, Bed-Stuy - Very good-minus (Toni’s grade is higher)
9/13 - Mama Fox, Bed-Stuy - Excellent-minus

I’ve already discussed some of these restaurants on Hungry Onion and won’t repeat those discussions. I’ll post short discussions of each of the rest of the restaurants separately.

New York is a wonderful place to eat. Y’all are lucky to live there.

FlemSnopes · January 2, 2024, 2:27pm

We skipped seeing John Cale at Prospect Park to go to the famous Queens Night Market instead. We got there right at 5 pm, when it opened, and the lines were very short and we had no problem finding seats at the picnic tables.

We had Oaxcan mole (from Nixmatal) (photo below), Persian rice (including a crunchy tahdig) and beef with turmeric (from Joon), and Fujianese drunken pork (from MuahChee Alley). They were all very good (the drunken pork) to excellent-minus. Several of these dishes got partially eaten before I took a photo - Toni was hungry and I was slow.

A cut above was roti Jala with beef rendang and roti John from Lemak Kitchen (Malaysian). Roti jala is a very lacy crepe concoction, very showy in its preparation, served with an excellent portion of beef rendang. Roti John is basically a hot dog omelet. This was delicious and pretty food, which makes me even more determined to someday get to SIngapore and Kuala Lumpuur for the street food.

The combo of Indonesian desserts from Moon Man was outstanding, especially the pue pancong, a coconut pancake. Apologies for some of the first photo being partially eaten; Toni was just quicker than me that afternoon. In the close-up, you can see the browning from the dessert being hand-torched.

But to me the most interesting and the most delicious food we had that evening was the Filipino food we got from Chick’n Rodondo. We got Adidas, Betamax, chicken liver, and Walkman skewers.

The only weak skewer of the bunch was the chicken liver skewer. I grew up eating fried chicken livers, which is a good way to cook them. Of course, a liver is full of blood and frying a chicken liver traps all that delicious blood inside. But the Filipino chicken liver skewers let the blood drip out so they were crumbly and dry, so dry they were a little hard to swallow.

The Adidas, Betamax, and Walkman skewers were all outstanding. Apparently, they got their names in the early 1990s. The Adidas skewer is grilled chicken feet, the Betamax skewer is grilled cubes of pork blood, and the Walkman skewer is grilled pork ears. All three were delicious. The Betamax skewer was nice and juicy. I don’t know how they managed to keep that pork blood on the skewer, but they did.
The Adidas skewer was superb too. I’ve only had chicken feet stewed, not grilled, but these were crunchy and delicious, very different from the texture of the chicken feet you get at dim sum places. And the Walkman skewers, pig ears cooked over charcoal, were the best pig ears I’ve ever had.

Really friendly, informative people working at Rodonda too.

The parts to this meal at Queens Night Market were delicious and interesting, but the whole was even better than the parts. The sense of diversity of diversity and abundance at Queens Night Market made me very happy.

The recent NYT article saying the continued existence of the Queens Night Market, at least in its current form, might be in jeopardy due to political disputes about the Israel-Hamas War was just another deeply depressing item in a year in which the public sphere was even more depressing than usual (or maybe I’m just settling into a grump old man persona).

FlemSnopes · January 2, 2024, 3:23pm

After a Sunday afternoon Brooklyn Cyclones game in late August, Toni and I took a short ride over to Village Cafe, an Azerbaijani restaurant in Midwood. Even though Pete Wells in the New York Times had ranked it as one of the 100 best restaurants in NYC back in April, I’m pretty sure we were the only non-Azeris there and it was a nice quiet place to eat a late afternoon dinner. (SteveR is familiar with Village Cafe, so I suspect it’s probably on the beaten path for the regulars here.)

We pretty much stuck with the dishes recommended by Pete Wells.

We got the “Journey to Baku” salad, made with grilled eggplant, tomatoes, and red bell peppers. It was very good,

We got two kinds of kutaby for appetizers. We’d never had a kutaby before, but they are very thin flatbreads. One was stuffed with minced lamb and the was stuffed with spinach, scallions, dill, and cilantro. Both were spectacularly good.

For mains we got the small lamb ribs kabob over rice, which was fatty and good, and the djiz biz, which the NYT recommended if you like liver – it combines small pieces of onion and potato, with lamb liver, lamb hearts, lamb kidneys, and lamb testicles. Toni can get tired of liver pretty quickly, but the kidneys, hearts, and testicles were more dominant in this dish so Toni really liked it (as I did too).

All in all, it was an excellent meal and the people watching was great. We couldn’t finish all of it, even though we tried, and we had a great doggy bag to take home. As it turns out, reheated djiz biz makes a great breakfast too.

Village Cafe:

Journey to Baku eggplant salad:

Lamb kutabi & greens kutabi:

Djiz Biz:

Lamb ribs:

The owners have a liquor store in the parking lot, which we stopped by to pick up a bottle of bourbon. It felt like wandering into a liquor store in Tbilisi. We skipped the bourbon (the only American bourbon they had was Jack Daniels) and got a couple of things from Georgia instead (chacha and wine, if my memory is correct).

FlemSnopes · January 2, 2024, 3:36pm

Doctor’s Cave Cafe is a quirky little basement-level place in Bed-Stuy (near the Nostrand Avenue and Kingston-Throop stops on the A/C line), run by a husband and wife team, open for breakfast and lunch (8 am - 4 pm).

We got takeout from there – a grilled pork sandwich and a jerk chicken sandwich, both on excellent ciabatta, a side salad, and some grilled zucchini. It was all very savory and really hit the spot. We were planning to go back, but they took a three-week vacation that kept them closed until the day before we left. If we actually lived in Bed-Stuy, based on our one meal I’d say this place would be in our regular rotation.

SteveR · January 2, 2024, 4:02pm

Damn, you guys eat a lot!! It took me years to get to most of the places on your one month list.
Just one thing for the Brooklyn locals reading along: Chavela’s delivers to a reasonably wide geographic range. And does it well: fresh and timely.

JenKalb · January 2, 2024, 9:15pm

all looks terrific! If you guys ever cook, it is pretty easy to make - and its really a regional salad, Ive had versions of it in Georgian restaurants and we were introduced to it in Uzbekistan.

FlemSnopes · January 3, 2024, 5:09am

I’d love to hear about that Uzbekistan trip sometime. Central Asia is definitely on our list, but it is hard to get to so it never quite rises to the top. The closest we’ve come is a trip to Georgia (with a day trip to Armenia).

FlemSnopes · January 3, 2024, 5:38am

I won’t waste my time or yours by adding much to the tens of thousands of words that have been written about Le Bernardin. The $125 prix fixe lunch is a great deal and the place absolutely lives up to the hype (and the service was somehow both very formal and friendly).

Superb fish and by far the best lactose-free dessert I’ve ever had.

Peekytoe crab salad:

Grilled octopus:

Grilled yellowtail chanterelles with bone marrow sauce (an odd combination that worked):

Crispy black bass with “bayaldi pinwheels” (i.e. eggplant) with preserved lemon smoky pimenton sauce:

Vegan hazelnut ice cream in a waffle cone:

Peruvian dark chocolate tart with Tahitian ice cream:

And free extra desserts, raspberry (lactose-free), chocolate, and marshmallow things:

FlemSnopes · January 3, 2024, 6:26am

Our next meal was at Atlas Kitchen, which is near Columbia University. We met my first cousin’s daughter (who genealogists say is my “first cousin once removed,” though "second cousin seems more logical), who was then a grad student at Columbia (and is now going through the agonies of interviews for medical schools).

Atlas Kitchen comes with strong recommendations. Dave Cook lives nearby and says it is a solid choice for Chinese dining. It gets a Michelin Bib Gourmand award and Robert Sietsema in Eater.com gives it 3 stars out 4.

I think we probably ordered poorly (for our tastes), because our meal, while very good overall, was very mixed.

The string beans and cucumber salad were excellent (but a lot of Chinese restaurants do this well).

The highlight of the meal was the minced pork with sour green beans. The pickle-heavy taste profile of this dish really hit the spot. If I had liked everything else as much as this dish, the restaurant would be getting at least an “excellent-plus” rating.

We also got the visually striking draped pork belly and cucumber, which is basically strips of bacon and thin-sliced cucumber draped over a wooden rack, with a somewhat spicy dipping garlic sauce below. It looks great, but fell pretty flat for all three of us. It just tasted like steamed, uncured bacon, with a texture that to me is unpleasantly close to what I imagine raw bacon would taste like.

This is probably more a commentary on my unsophisticated palate than the quality of the dish. I recently heard a podcast with Fuchsia Dunlop (the author of several outstanding Chinese cookbooks and a recent history of Chinese food) in which she explained that Chinese cuisine is unusual in that it prizes foods for their distinctive textures as much as their tastes. I was thinking “tasteless and limp,” when I should have been thinking, “this has a fascinating raw bacon texture.”

We also had (at my insistence) the lamb with white radish in dry pot. This had plenty of good flavor, but texture was a problem for me again. The lamb was served skin-on, which means the meat was surrounded by a lot of chewy, thick sheep skin. While I’ve learned to love (rather than trim off) the fat, heavy layers of skin just seem impossibly chewy to me (and more chewy like a tire than chewy like saltwater taffy).

A detour: I’m continuing to have problems overcoming my prejudice against chewy mammal skin. Just before Christmas I had dinner with a friend (and former ESL student of mine) from the Ivory Coast at a Nigerian restaurant in Prince Georges County, Maryland. Even though I knew from Yelp reviews that the dish would be served “skin on,” I ordered the isi ewu (spicy goat head stew). What I hadn’t realized from the Yelp reviews was that where a goat’s head is concerned “skin on” translates to “face on.” I didn’t make much progress toward overcoming my aversion to eating thick, chewy animal skin.

The visuals didn’t help much with the isi ewu:

Anyway, it’s obviously not fair to blame Atlas Kitchen for my ordering dishes whose texture my Western palate wasn’t prepared for (much less for the goat head stew hundreds of miles away) – the minced pork with sour green beans was superb and I’m sure with more careful ordering I could have a superb meal at Atlas Kitchen.

Saregama · January 3, 2024, 6:37am

I think I mentioned this to @DaveCook & @vinouspleasure a while back as a “new (to me) high-end Chinese place near Columbia” that I wanted to try, and was corrected that it’s not “new”

But I still need / want to try it!

Yeah, no, don’t give yourself such a hard time, we had a similar reaction to this at Jiang Nan - not texture so much as flat flavor despite the delicious chilli sauce with it — and the pretty presentation too

Interesting — I have never encountered skin-on lamb or goat. Trying to think about how I’d react to this one (probably similarly, as also offal not cleaned the way I’m used to eating it, like the sweetbreads at Mombar way back).

Saregama · January 3, 2024, 6:50am

Looks wonderful — glad you enjoyed it. One of my favorite spots at this level.

FlemSnopes · January 3, 2024, 6:39pm

I wrote a lot about Peaches in Bed-Stuy last year, so I’ll just quickly report that our repeat visit this year was just as good. Excellent source for Southern/Gulf/Cajun food (particularly skilled with friend foods) and very friendly people. My only suggestion would be either to change the bread on the shrimp po’boy to more crackly french bread or just call it a shrimp sandwich (which is excellent even on a soft roll).

Kale salad:

Blackened catfish:

FlemSnopes · January 4, 2024, 5:02am

Dinner at Wadadli Jerk in Bed-Stuy (right across the street from the superb Rodo Foods) is a great experience. The owner is originally Antiguan and had a food cart for several years before opening Wadadli in 2022. The neighborhood has really taken to its jerk and Antiguan specialties, and both the beautiful handmade smoker and the picnic tables are invitingly outdoors, so the place was crowded and jumping on a Friday night in late August.

Great people-watching and great conversations – we especially enjoyed talking to a young couple from the DC area who on an impulse had jumped on a bus to NYC (a first for her) to go to the Spike Lee festival at Fort Greene and who were planning to just stay up all night since they had no place to stay. Ah, to be young again.

The smoke was enticing and the food was very good. The chicken was temporarily out, so we settled for the jerk pork, with rice and beans and plantains. I’d be happy eating this food over and over again. That said, there were flaws. The pork was a touch dry and the jerk sauce was a little tamer than my preference (maybe because the owner is Antiguan and not Jamaican?).

I suspect that if we’d had the patience to wait 30 minutes for the next batch of chicken to be ready, this rating would be even higher, as it seemed like just about everybody in the whole crowd had ordered the chicken.

FlemSnopes · January 4, 2024, 6:08am

We had not planned to eat at Kubeh, but ended up here after the crowds at Dragon Fest, the East Asian outdoor food festival, were just too dense to deal with. It’s a restaurant in the West Village that has a Michelin Bib Gourmand designation. Its specialty is kubeh, which (according to Michelin) are dumplings that the owner learned to make from Israelis of Kurdish, Iranian, and Syrian descent. We’d had one meal from an Iranian-Israeli food stall at a market in Jerusalem many years ago, but otherwise this cuisine was new to us.

The pretty restaurant was an oasis of tranquility after the mobs of Dragon Fest and the servers were extremely gracious. And the kubeh was fascinating and delicious comfort food. You pick your type of dumpling and broth.

We chose the Iraqi mushroom dumplings with hamusta broth, which is made with Swiss chard, zucchini, and lemon, and the Kurdish kiske beef dumplings in selek broth, which is made with beets and celery. Both were complex comforting dishes reminiscent of the made-from-scratch chicken soup that the Beav’s mom probably made for him when he was under the weather.

But the dish we were most interested in was the muhammara. Muhammara (a dip made with walnuts and red bell peppers) is kind of common now, but we first encountered it more than 10 years ago in Madaba, Jordan. Toni has been trying various recipes for it ever since and we order it whenever we see it on a menu. Kubeh’s version, which was topped with walnut pieces and herbs, was so distinctive that Toni was convinced that it must have been made with some nuts other than walnuts. But they insisted that it was just walnuts. It was one of the best versions of muhammara we’ve ever had.

DaveCook · January 4, 2024, 1:39pm

Did you note any specifically Antiguan dishes on the menu? On the many times I’ve stopped by (at least once before a visit to Rodo, too!), I’ve only seen dishes that you might find at many Jamaican food stands.