What's For Dinner #99 - the Orange is the New Black Edition -October 2023

[Saregama]

Mixed Mushroom Japchae using oyster and king oyster mushrooms I picked up in Chinatown the other night.

Gratuitous and unnecessary steak on top (I had some cooked and frozen) that I ended up taking off because it was interfering with the mushroom-y-ness.

Other recent dinners:

HO group meal at Hakka Cuisine:

HO Dinner at Hakka Cuisine

Grubstreet did a write-up a couple of months ago (and Infatuation did a shorter review) — though I found those only while checking if the NYT review was out today. We ate a lot, and hit most of the “advertised” dishes (except the sweet and sour pork over ice - iirc @SteveR loves sweet and sour pork so maybe that was an oversight?) My 2c: I wasn’t sure what to expect from a Hakka place in nyc because I grew up with a completely different branch of Hakka chinese food in India (not Indianized, b…

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French food, not once:

GOOD EATS NYC 2023 (A Blanket Thread)

LIBERTINE We got the duck two ways, the gnocchi, the salad (“we need a VEGETABLE” - no we don’t, potatoes and mushrooms are vegetables!), and ended with the cheese. Oh wait, we also paid for the bread service at the end because the cheese course was a tea saucer of cheese chippings / shavings. The gnocchi was the best dish of the evening - this iteration was prepared with a maitake mushroom sauce. Extremely flavorful, but sadly the gnocchi were really overcooked (soggy / mushy). The duck… we…

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But twice:

GOOD EATS NYC 2023 (A Blanket Thread)

BAR BOULUD Two French meals in as many days may have been a bit much for me, but that’s how it played out. We started with two pates – chicken liver and Normande – both lovely, theres rarely a misstep in that section of their menu. We also had both the pastas on offer (a lamb ragu that was essentially Bolognese, and a mushroom prep) and the boudin blanc (which is my favorite thing on the menu). The mushroom pasta was wonderful – garlic, chopped mushrooms, some breadcrumbs for texture, I thin…

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