(Sustainable) Fishy Advice

Dining advice along the Atlantic seaboards.

Here's an amusing collection of silhouettes I received with my order from The Book Depository. Charming, informative, and green, the two bookmarks indicate fishes and marine life that should or should not be eaten according to the Marine Conservation Societies. Unsustainable fishing practices have threatened a number of species with extinction, but numerous tasty morsels still swim in our oceans or can be farmed. Bring on the mackerels and winkles. The Atlantic species are above (beware the Kraken!). The Pacific/Worldwide examples are below (beware the Kraken still!).

This is also my endorsement of the Book Depository, a great site for those looking to buy academic or literary material in Singapore. Free shipping.

What to eat when on the Pacific Rim.

Jolly Glee Pizza (from Pizza Hut)

Roast chicken, turkey bacon, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce make the Jolly Glee a festive pizza. Notice the cherry, too.

Pizza Hut has a new gimmick for Singaporean customers. Previous gimmick here. Instead of actually making tasty products, Pizza Hut now offers a Jolly Glee pizza. It has all the ingredients you might expect from a Christmas dinner – poultry, pseudo-pork, potatoes, cranberries – plus some you didn't know you wanted. Click the picture to see a larger image and guess what else lurks beneath the lattice of crust. I can spy red peppers and onions, but I am unable to swear that the yellow items are simply yellow peppers. The website says it's pineapple. Not satisfied? Apparently there is also cheese in the crust... and a glacé cherry! I knew this was missing something.

Long Beach Seafood

Mmmmm. Seafood.

 A couple of weeks ago the Passengers accompanied some out-of-town visitors to Long Beach, a seafood restaurant known especially for good chili crab. The dishes did not disappoint us, and the staff at the Dempsey location were very kind to the ten-year-old member of our party. He didn't much like seafood, but he was fascinated by the fish, crabs, and bivalves awaiting their fate in bubbling fish tanks. On the way out we were handed a brochure. Click on the image to see some of the delicacies served here. Some of you might find the dishes tempting; others might think them disturbing.

Fearless beauty queen: the logical accompaniment to fresh seafood.

The front of the brochure features an award-winning spokesmodel. I am not sure how Long Beach found a person who holds fresh shellfish with such poise, but I am certain that is why she was selected. She is listed as Ms Intercontinental and Ms Kimberly Anne Byers. Wikipedia says she won that title in 1994. It remains unclear how America's pageant winner landed a gig with Long Beach, but for some reason, the restaurant has not updated their promotional material since then, despite having opened several additional locations in the last fifteen years. Some of you might find their advertising tempting; others might think it disturbing.

You know what this needs? More cheese.

7 cheeses: Because 6 was not sufficient. Click the picture for a larger image.

 I first saw this food product advertised on the MRT. I was shocked. 7 cheeses? How do they all fit on one pizza? How does the fat fit in one person's arteries? What are those freakish globes strewn across the topography?

I would love to know if this 7-cheese extravaganza is available in the USA, Britain, or wherever is your country? Click the link below left to leave a response in the comments.  I am curious about this because Singaporeans are not wildly enthusiastic about cheese.  I have a hard time getting quality fromage here at a good price. It's not part of the local diet, and it even keeps a low profile on the menus of restaurants with international cuisine.  I'm not sure why Pizza Hut thinks this product will sell.

Pizza Hut Singapore is certified halal. That's the little green logo underneath the Facebook tag. This is the reason that the one time I ate Pizza Hut pizza in Singapore I was very disappointed by the sausage, Canadian bacon, pepperoni, and any other toppings usually made from pork. A 7-cheese pizza would get around that problem, but I still don't think I would like it.

Tokyo Food

A snack package of what appears to be hazelnuts in a Tokyo mini-mart.

The Passengers ate all sorts of goodness in Tokyo.  The Japanese take their food seriously in the same manner as do the French with serious refinement of standardized age-old recipes.  We didn't suffer a bad meal once during our travels. Here are some highlights, though they exclude our early morning sushi adventure.  That will be a separate post.

Ramen noodles with all the fixings.

We had ramen one evening at a small restaurant not far from our ryokan.  Diners are supposed to choose their dishes from a vending machine outside the front door.  After the customer pays money in, the machine spits out a ticket for his order, and he brings it inside the restaurant.  We tried our very best to match the Japanese labels on the selection buttons with the pictures in the window.  Finally we gave up, and we were kindly greeted inside with an English menu.  This bowl of ramen was as big as my head.  I could barely get through half of it.  Passenger H unwisely had her own bowl, too, which by the time she quit looked like she only managed to pick out the seaweed, the half-boild egg, and two pieces of scrumptious fatty pork.  The yummy noodles are underneath a big pile of extras that also includes corn, bamboo shoots, and bean sprouts.  I think we paid JPY 950 per bowl (USD 11.25/GBP 7.10).  More dishes after the jump.  Click below left to keep reading.

Sushi-Dai, Tokyo

Early morning bustle around the Tsukiji Market in Tokyo.

Against our preferences for a leisurely holiday, the Passengers awoke early one morning in Tokyo to make the trip down the Hibiya line on almost the first train of the day to visit the huge Tsukiji Market, the wholesale outlet for fresh fish in Tokyo.  We wanted to see the market in action, but our prime motivation was to find ourselves the freshest sushi breakfast imaginable.

Patrons lining up for a seat at Sushi-Dai along a row of restaurants at Tsukiji Market.

Activity at the market begins in the wee hours of the morning so by the time we arrived in Ginza at 6:00 AM, a number of labors were already searching out lunch.  The rest of the city comes to Tsukiji for breakfast. Based on a friend's recommendation we headed straight for Sushi-Dai a fourteen-seat sushi counter with reportedly the best fish at the complex.  The place opens at 5:00 AM, and its reputation meant we found ourselves in a two-hour queue.

Come early; bring cash.

Once we got inside Passenger J opted for the full Omakase selection at JPY 3,900 (USD 46.25/GBP 29.25) for 11 pieces of sushi, miso soup, maki rolls, and a bit of omelet.  Passenger H decided that as the smaller member in the pair she needed the smaller option at JPY 2,500 (USD 29.65/GBP 18.75).  We did not go away hungry.

Marinated tuna with a dollop of wasabi.  Pickled ginger sits on the right.

We took our seats at the counter on a rainy August morning with the air-conditioner steaming up the view of the hopeful customers waiting outside.  After our early start to the day we were ready to eat.  All the sushi pieces were impeccably chosen and brilliantly crafted.  The three sushi chefs placed their offerings directly on the top-shelf counter.  Patrons ate using both their fingers and chopsticks.

Passenger H's set included mackerel braided over rice.  The omelet and the fish-based miso soup appear in the background. 

More pictures of sushi after the jump.  Click the link below left to keep reading.

Cafe Culture in Vietnam

The terrace and outdoor tables of L'Usine.

During our weekend in Ho Chi Minh City the Passengers discovered a great little upstairs cafe/shop.  L'Usine occupies an historic shophouse overlooking Dong Khoi street, but access is through a small lane lined with parked motorbikes.  Inside the cafe features a full espresso service and impeccably chosen teas from Mariage Freres of Paris.

The alleyway seen from the stairway leading up to l'Usine.

The interior has been fitted out with old hardwood sewing tables decorated with tall vases of cut flowers. The cafe does great salads and sandwiches, the latter using delicious French-style bread.  That baking tradition and the affection for bouquets counts as positive colonial legacies.  A stylish shop adjoins the eatery with a fabulously curated selections of boutique European and Asian designers, a real find.

The counter at l'Usine stands in front of a large window at the top of the shophouse staircase.

Mouth Watering Prose

The dining room at A Voce Columbus. Image from Joonbug. More pictures from Sam Sifton's review here.

I recommend reading Sam Sifton's review of the Manhattan restaurant A Voce in the New York Times. The piece demonstrates how great and descriptive food writing can be. The author's standards for every category of the dining experience are clear, and he can be surprisingly generous, as exemplified by his straightforward acceptance of the restaurant's corporate remit to produce top fare with calibrated regularity. Combining flavors creatively and choosing ingredients impeccably earn the reviewer's praise, but he dismisses as callow efforts to meet various NYC menu obligations, like strip steaks even for Italian eateries, without any attempt at culinary invention.

And the sentences Sifton uses for describing the food make for enjoyable reading. He liked the grilled calamari so much that it "could come with yard grass and used tennis balls and still be decent." Wonderful, evocative images are laid out alongside the gastronomic options, and the author does not refrain from punctuating each description with a verdict. The recommendation to enjoy a glass wine and cold cuts while reading the rest of the menu prompts Sifton to write us our own gastronomic tour.

Any two of these [appetizers] will do; there are many courses to go before you sleep. The appetizer list yields a remarkable house-made salt cod, with taggiasca olives, raisins and pine nuts, that is somehow both delicate and brawny — a football player in ballet's fourth position. There are also roasted mushrooms with mâche, hazelnuts and a creamed fontina, rich and earthy, quietly elegant, sensual: it's bedroom fare.

I additionally recommend you have a glass of red wineas a pleasurable accompaniment to such a tour de force review, maybe something Italian and reliable like a Valpolicellia, .

Sin Huat Seafood: More Crabs

Geylang hosts Singapore's wild side, unless the APEC Summit is in town, like last weekend.

Though we are in Bangkok this week, we thought we should share our extreme gastronomic experience from Saturday. A birthday dinner was organized for a new friend at Sin Huat Eating House, one of Singapore's most revered food institutions (follow this link for a great 2003 article highlighting almost all of Singapore's food traditions). Revered should not be taken to mean refined. Sin Huat is really a streetside cafe with plastic chairs and poor service perched hard against the traffic of Geylang, the artery of Singapore's red-light district. But chef Danny Lee keeps up the coffeeshop's reputation with outstanding seafood of all sorts.

No white tablecloths or starched napkins here. Bring your own package of tissues.

The meal involved a progression of platters served up according to the whim of the chef and/or the stall aunty, staring with a perfunctory vegetable platter of kailan. After eating some greens, it was a serious seafood derby.

We had fresh scallops, pulled out of the bubbling fish tanks by Chef Danny himself and heartily slathered in a dark garlicky black-bean sauce, but bigger adventures awaited with the gung gung lala.

Gung Gung lala with spicy dipping sauce. The garlic scallops appear in the foreground.

Gung gung come steamed in the shell with a fistful of wooden skewers by which diners can spear and drag out the meat. The dipping sauce provided was a sinus busting combination of chilies, spring onion, coriander, and salty soy sauce, plus a number of other additions. Gung gung are only a little bit chewy and taste slightly of the sea, as might be expected when uncoiling the body of an animal from tidal waters.

Prawns. Prawns. Prawns.

The prawns in garlic presented one of the real standouts from the night. Again the seafood was fresh and the garlic was generous, and everyone was ecstatic to find the motherlode of flavorful buttery drippings pooled underneath the rows of shrimp tails. Just about any edible item on the table got dredged through that nectar, including the al dente squid rings that followed.

Three-crab pile-up on the east end of Geylang.

However, the crab bee hoon was the real piece-de-resistance of the evening, and THE reason visitors flock to Sin Huat. Big Sri-Lankan crabs are served with vermicelli that soaks up all sorts of essence from the shellfish. The combination is wet and salty and flavorful. Seasoned diners, like the generous chap directing the evening, ask specifically for female crabs because they include potent dry roe that mixes in with the ginger, chili, and stock sauce and hides itself amongst the noodles. Divine. Of course, female crabs do have one drawback: no claws. Not that I let this detail stop me. I think I was full for the rest of the weekend.

Anniversary, Rottingdean

The town of Rottingdean lies in a valley where the South Downs meet the English Channel.

The Passengers have been married a whole year now, plus a few weeks spent getting around to finishing this post and loading the photos. For our paper anniversary we made a pilgrimage back to the south coast of England where we were married at St. Margaret's church in Rottingdean. We spent two nights in this postcard village where Rudyard Kipling (and H's grandmother) used to live. The day included a walk across the south downs overlooking the sea and a very relaxed dinner of fresh scallops and langoustines at Riddle & Finns in nearby Brighton. Here are some images to show what makes the village such a pleasant retreat.

St. Margaret's church in the center of the village. Parts of the building pre-date William the Conqueror. The house immediately in front of the church was Kipling's home, The Elms.

Overlooking the downs.

A Tudor-era (16th Century) cottage near the village green.

The Kipling Gardens were created in 1983 as a means to preserve part of the village's historic core.

Saturday in East Singapore

This 328 location, in a traditional Peranakan shophouse building, attracts diners hungry for Laksa.

Saturday featured a very successful outing. The Passengers ventured out with a few Americans to Katong, a neighborhood in East Singapore traditionally home to Peranakans (Chinese families who have long dwelled in the Straits region). These streets gave birth to a spicy noodle and coconut soup called Laksa. We perched atop small plastic stools facing onto East Coast Road and ate at one of the areas's best known stalls (above). We also strolled by the Sri Senpaga Vinayagar temple (below). Chinese have lived around here for centuries, but this Hindu monument on Ceylon Road was built in 1875.

Three military helicopters cross the sky on exercises for the National Day parade 9 August.

Next, we hopped in a cab and made for the East Coast Lagoon Food Village where we sat at seaside picnic tables with pitchers of Tiger beer and a great view of the current maritime parking lot (below). The Food Village is another of the open-air clusters of food stalls, or hawker centres, found throughout Singapore. We heaped up plates of satay, stingray, and carrot cake. I took pictures of a couple interesting signs. Good food. Good chat. Good views.

Chili Crabs, Pepper Crabs

Eng Seng coffeeshop only has a limited number of crabs each night. Anxious diners routinely queue on weekends.

It has been another stirring weekend for the Passengers in Singapore. I want to put up a post before the week takes off again at full tilt. We recently took an outing to a small, open-air diner known as a coffeeshop, or kopitiam. No one went for coffee. Instead, Eng Seng on Joo Chiat Place specializes in chili crab and pepper crab, two of Singapore’s signature dishes. Pieces of Sri Lankan crab are fried up in thick, savory blends of spices and served up with pieces of bread for mopping up the sauce. The sweet meat of the crab flesh nicely balances the piquancy of the spices. This dining establishment attracts a very local crowd; our party was the only collection of Angmos (white folks) all night. The bill for eight crabs, drinks, plates of noodles and vegetables, and bowls of fried rice totted up to less than S$200 (about 138 USD today). Hard to argue.

Pepper crab was my personal favorite. Eng Seng will also serve steamed crabs for those who demand purity or lack a sense of adventure.

Chili crabs come with lots of tasty sauce. The Tiger bottle (back left) is the flavorful local lager.

The Joo Chiat area features preserved shop houses built with store fronts below and living space above. This stall sold overwhelmingly fragrant durians, definitely a subject for a future post.

Denny's Disasters

The Onion (America's Finest News Source) has provided another pitch-perfect indictment of American life decrying casual dining and cable news; see Obama Drastically Scales Back Goals for America After Visiting Denny's. Courtesy warning: This video includes a few words not suitable for broadcasting over your cubicle wall.

American food has on occasion been praised for its mass appeal, but our odd predilection to combine comestibles with propellants deservedly invites derision from the French and, yes, even the English. Perhaps casual dining restaurants, those indistinguishable iterations of Applebee's, Olive Garden, and TGI Friday's, best capture the American urge to standardize, homogenize, and mediocritize the culinary experience. Among these Denny's stands proud as the forerunners who blanketed America with their version of the neighborhood/all-night roadhouse diner. They might be described as a sanitized edition of an American institution, but they scrubbed out all the charm and let their cleaning skills lapse. However, they are cheap and always open, plus senior citizens get their own discounted menu.

For those Britons who have never been into this restaurant, please conjure up some crude American stereotypes: fluorescent lighting, plastic booths, badly positioned smoking section, food retaining the shape of its container, apathetic waitstaff. Now subtract flavor and fun. The dishes don't require many ingredients, but they still taste like cardboard. Denny's is a place visited out of necessity -- when everything else is closed, because it's affordable, because I had a coupon. It's stationed at the bottom rung of American society, which means either customers are too ignorant to want something better or just unable to start climbing higher.

Summer in the City

The Guardian just published a new travel feature on New York City with ten destinations to help visitors enjoy the summer weather and escape the oppression of warm asphalt and sun-baked dumpsters. The suggestions should encourage both NYC residents and those who need another reason/excuse to visit. I now want to visit Wave Hill Gardens, especially now that I finally have friends living in the Bronx. I would like to add a few endorsements and addenda to fill out the Guardian's well-conceived recommendations. The numbering below corresponds to the newspaper's list.

1. Water Taxi Beach: I am glad this summer institution is expanding, but the original Queen's location with its view of the Midtown skyline will be hard to beat. Speaking of beats, to make the most of a foray into this outer borough, go dancing in the afternoon sunshine at PS 1's Warm Up. The avant garde outpost of MoMA deploys its Young Architects Program to transform its courtyard into a recreational space where families and hipsters and locals enjoy world-class DJ's every Saturday throughout the summer. If dancing doesn't suit you, try the nearby Noguchi Museum and its gardens (above).


5. Rooftop Bars: I commend the Guardian for promoting a low-key, inexpensive alternative over the more outrageous rooftop bars of the city. I will add a this recent guide courtesy of New York magazine. I support all trips to Koreatown for a laid-back venue, and Bookmarks, atop the Library Hotel, offers an urbane spot to watch the flicker of city lights. I will take that crowd above the painfully hip choking the Meatpacking District any day. The Metropolitan Museum also has a roof (above) overlooking Central Park with drinks available.


7. The Cloisters: I am very proud that the Metropolitan Museum's medieval annex in Fort Tryon Park garnered a mention, not least because they have kept me in beer for now three years running. Garden Days at the Cloisters happen this weekend (6, 7 June) for all who appreciate the museum's stunning displays of plants and historical botany. I recommend the Cloisters to all who will listen, but I further advise everyone to expand your visit into a mini-break from Manhattan with lunch or brunch on the patio of New Leaf Café, also in Fort Tryon Park.

8. Brooklyn Botanic Garden: The New York Botanical Garden gets my pick over the smaller, more crowded BBG. Still, this garden makes for a nice day out, especially when combined with the fascinating and charming Brooklyn Museum (see McKim, Mead, and White façade atop the post, from Josh and Josh) and the idles of Prospect Park. King's County (i. e. Brooklyn) has built for itself a number of cultural institutions that would be nationally renown if it wasn't for those pesky, august bulwarks elsewhere in the city. For a look into Brooklyn's effortless appeal to families who somewho maintain adult lifestyles, visit the museum on a Target First Saturday.

And those are a few of my suggestions for how to take the New York Summer to 11. Don't worry, my nostalgia should pass quickly. The Passengers are spending this weekend stretched out on the Indonesian beaches of Bintan.

Life in the North Yorkshire Dales

I had to cross several time zones, but I have finally made it back to the Midwest. Actually, these days I am even further from the Midwest than usual. I am in Ripon in North Yorkshire to do research on the big stone church here. The city is an historic market town on the River Skell; the monastery that later became Ripon Cathedral goes back to the seventh century. However, most of the urban fabric, including the market place, dates only back to the eighteenth century.

It's a remote place by English standards. There is no train station; I arrived by bus from Harrogate. The nearest university is probably aways south in Leeds or York. Both of those are considered relatively new institutions. The University of Leeds is barely one hundred years old. Again, English standards. Historically, Ripon arose from agriculture and livestock around the Yorkshire Dales. Now much of its economy relies on tourism. In addition to historic charm Ripon has a well known racecourse. The city lies between the Yorkshire Dales and the North Yorkshire Moors National Parks, which makes it a good stop for literary folks chasing Brontes or Shelley or even James Herriot.

The tourism means the town has plenty of places to eat, but Ripon does not really bustle. I had to visit three pubs before I found one serving food after 7:30 tonight. Hotels are plentiful, but none of the major chains operate here. They are down in Harrogate with the International Centre. The agricultural history and its separation from the British mainstream give it a familiar feel to someone who grew up in the rural Midwest. The shops here are provincial. Even if daily newspapers and television link everyone into the latest fashion and music, those cultural touchstones don't travel very well. Urban fabrics and urban sounds are not quite suited to the lifestyle here. Likewise, the food has been good so far, but it is based around an agrarian diet where meat is plentiful and local, not a convergence of multiple cultures. I had my second pie (fish) for dinner in as many days. I am also on a first-name basis with several of the hotel staff already, and the library has kept a pile of books waiting for my return tomorrow. They are not carefully catalogued on a reserve shelf. The librarian simply stacked them atop the Help Desk with a note announcing my return tomorrow. Occasionally, locals ask why I left New York to spend a week here. I came here for work, but all those hometown qualities mean I don't go stir crazy here. I try to concentrate on the niceties that are cultivated by a more static environment. A preacher once described his hometown to me. "It's a great place to be from," he intoned. It's not glamorous, but being from somewhere teaches a lot about how to live somewhere.

Lunch Break/City Break

The Passengers just completed a lunch date near H's office. We finally motivated ourselves to stand in line, native New Yorkers stand "on line," for our chance to experience Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. In moments of intermittent sunshine, today felt like a warm spring day, but the weather did not prevent us from sharing a concrete, a cup full of frozen custard mixed with chocolate pieces, along with our hot dog, burger, and fries. There is now a restaurant version of Shake Shack on the Upper West Side where customers can sit inside, but the Madison Square Park location represents the initial vision of a "roadside" burger joint, essential a haute cuisine Dairy Queen. The fries use Yukon Gold potatoes. Danny Meyer's Shack makes a unique vegetarian patty based on fried mushrooms, and today's custard flavor was milk and honey. It makes for a yummy twist on childhood favorites, and puts another feather in the Union Square Hospitality Group's cap despite the cutthroat and trendy competition of this city's restaurant business.

In fact, New York City dining features numerous other dining establishments that rely nostalgic palates. We live near the uptown location of Kitchenette, a homespun diner that boasts pot pies, grits, and hole-in-the-bread breakfasts. Though founded by a pair of female entrepreneurs from New York City (via the French Culinary Institute) and Boston, the place feels like a tastefully appointed lunch-counter cafe from a place like Iowa. Sarita & Caesar Ekya developed perhaps the most single-minded enterprises of the genre in S'MAC and the Peanut Butter Co, specialty joints for Macaroni & Cheese and peanut butter, respectively.

A number of factors might be contributors to the fascination with Americana comfort food in Noughties ('01 - '09) New York. A simple explanation sees the taste for simple childhood fare as a logical counter-narrative to the so-called fusion innovations behind global cuisine and molecular gastronomy. But most of these places on the New York scene cannot resist coopting the fusion impulse, thus Mediterranean mac' and cheese with kalamata olives and sauteed spinach. Another factor might be a longing for comfort food in a city redefining itself after a terrorist attack. This could explain the popularity of red velvet cake and pigs-in-a-blanket, but these trends are more national. The culture of juvenalia popularized these foods and encouraged dodge ball leagues for adults and Rock Bank nights for bars.

These cultural currents probably play a part in sustaining these throwback businesses, but as explanations they overlook dining as an experience. These establishments permit young professionals in New York to participate in a vibrant restaurant culture on familiar terms. There will come a day for expense-account dinners in dramatic locations with diva chefs, but these homespun locales provide everyday food at everyday price points, at least "everyday" according to New-York-City standards. I long for a return to college-town drinking prices. Nostalgia from twentysomethings might seem ridiculous, but life in the city can be tough for young careerists. A farm-style brunch with good friends sometimes represents our best substitute for a get-away to a Connecticut farmhouse.