FOOD FOR THOUGHT
For around four years I had a column in the Asian Wall Street Journal writing about food. It was a great job, allowing me to explore food not just in Asia but elsewhere in the world. I reviewed restaurants, took cooking classes and spoke to hundreds of fascinating people — chefs, home cooks, historians and writers.
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Flexible and Relaxed, Some Hotel Restaurants Break From Tradition
I've always found hotel restaurants to be stiff and boring with unimaginative food too reminiscent of catering schools and service that makes lone diners feel awkward. They invariably send me fleeing back to the comforts of room service. But there comes a time when you can't face eating another club sandwich with Larry King droning sycophantically in the background.
American Behemoth Doesn't Always Bigfoot Native Cultures, Cuisines
In August alone, French farmers attacked branches in protest against American food tariffs, dumping manure and vegetables to block entrances. In Belgium, a McDonald's was burned to the ground, possibly by animal-rights activists. In the Australian town of Torquay, a group of surfers formed Scram -- Surf Coast Residents Against McDonald's -- saying, apparently without irony, that a planned McDonald's would "sully the town's surfing culture."
Bombay authorities are taking McDonald's to court for putting tables in a public space outside a restaurant. The list goes on. Dozens of articles on globalization, obesity or environmental degradation have named the fast-food chain as a culprit.
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It has all the makings of a good thriller -- satellite tracking, surveillance teams, stakeouts and undercover operatives. Throw in webs of international intrigue that stretch around the world from California to Japan, from South Africa to Mexico. Even the vocabulary -- laundering, street value, interdiction -- would be familiar to anyone who has seen a movie about drug busts. Like drugs, the commodity doubles, even triples, in value as it passes along a chain ofmiddlemen before reaching its destinations: Tokyo sushi bars and expensive Hong Kong restaurants.
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Craving Italian food, I checked a city restaurant guide and found a place nearby. I should have known it was a bad choice when the staff was wide-eyed with surprise at my arrival in the empty restaurant. Did they know something I didn't? Yes, they knew I'd made a horrible mistake that I didn't fully comprehend until the antipasto arrived.
Asian Cuisine Retains Few French Influences, Save Vietnam's Banh Mi
These almond-shaped loaves, about a third the length of an average baguette, are the most enduring legacy of the French rule of Vietnam. But even these loaves are now far more distinctly Vietnamese than French. Cooked without salt, normally used to slow the yeast's leavening of the dough, they're generally more airy and oily, and less sweet than anything found in France. Variations in flour and yeast mean that French bread always tastes different around the world, but these loaves have taken on an identity apart from their origins. Indeed, overseas Vietnamese communities set up bakeries to reproduce this bread rather than buying local variants of French loaves.
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Such is the world of food publishing. There is hardly a faded star, semi-retired movie director or washed-up model who hasn't written a cookbook these days and without exception they are worthless. It may be impossible to hold back this tsunami of celebrity inanity and hype but there are still people writing books on food that really enrich our understanding of this important area of our lives. Recent years have seen some excellent writing by the likes of Ruth Reichl ("Tender at the Bone") and Jeffrey Steingarten ("The Man Who Ate Everything"), but sadly there have been few books that have explored Asian cuisine in the same depth.
One Fragrant Package Holds Culinary Legacy Of Sri Lanka's Burghers
When you peel open the banana-leaf wrapping of a lamprais, the steam that wafts up in your face carries with it the scents of the ebb and flow of cultures that have passed through Sri Lanka. These packages of rice, curry and relishes called sambols are the high point of a cuisine that is fading as the community of Burghers, Sri Lankans of Dutch and Portuguese descent, drifts away from the country.
One Top Critic Takes a Dim View Of New Dim Sum
Our spell-check software was a bit overeager last week, which may have left some readers confused. The July 23 Food for Thought column, "Cantonese Classics Get a Makeover," portrayed Cantonese spare ribs as "doused in Counter and orange slices, or drenched with espresso and Kohl." That should have been "doused in Cointreau and orange slices, or drenched with espresso and Kaluha." (AWSJ July 30, 1999)
China, Farms Step in to Fill Caviar Gap
Increases of between 40% and 100%, depending on the type of caviar, were driven by the downward spiral of production from the former Soviet states around the Caspian sea, home to the three species of sturgeon from which the best eggs come. Rampant overfishing in the past decade and pollution from the oil industry have reduced sturgeon stocks to about a third of what they were 20 years ago.
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It might help to begin with a brief primer on chilis, which get their heat from chemicals called capsaicins -- complex fat-soluble alkalines. Even the hottest chilis contain only about 1% of the chemical, which is confined to the placenta -- the inner ribs of the fruit to which the seeds are attached. Capsaicins are multitasking chemicals: Aside from stimulating nerves that produce a burning sensation, they make you salivate and sweat, and leave your nose runny.
Asia's Brief History As a Coffee Grower Is Probably a Blessing
Late in the last century, a disease of coffee bushes known as leaf rust struck in Sri Lanka. Within a few years, it had spread to two-thirds of the island's plantations. By 1880 it had moved on to Indonesia, spreading slowly down the chain of highland coffee farms along Java. By 1900, Sri Lanka and Java, once the two largest producers of coffee in the world, were exporting just a few thousand sacks a year. In the wake of leaf rust, Asia abandoned its role
providing what one Arab poet called "the drink of the friends of God."
How Curry Rice Conquered a Cuisine Otherwise Refined
I'm speaking of Japanese curry, or kare raisu as it is known in Japan. It's the favorite school lunch of Japanese children. Pretty much every train station in Japan has a stall that sells it. Each year pre-packaged curry rice is a $1.2 billion business.
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As you head home you get tantalizing wafts of the food that everyone else is eating. All around you, people are tucking into dishes from a cuisine of extraordinary variety and refinement, but these are being cooked and eaten at home, not in restaurants. India may now have an economically buoyant middle class and tandoori chicken may have spread around the globe, but a culture of good restaurant food has never taken root at home. Most capital cities, bringing in people from around the country, are filled with a wide range of restaurants. But not Delhi. All across the city are those ominous establishments that offer. "Continental-Chinese-Mughlai Cuisine." This is not some new fusion, but generally three types of food done badly.
Nuoc Mam or Prahok? By Any Other Name, This Sauce Would Smell
This recipe for the ancient Roman condiment garum would evoke little of Fisher's squeamish nose-wrinkling in Asia, where fermented fish sauces are ubiquitous. Be it nam pla in Thailand, prahok in Cambodia or nuoc mam in Vietnam, these sauces arouse passions as pungent as their mule-kick bouquets. On the island of Phu Quoc off Vietnam's southwestern coast, fish-sauce manufacturers are angry at Thais for allegedly overfishing and for
producing counterfeit bottles of the island's prized product. In Cambodia, meanwhile, there was much finger-pointing earlier this year as the catch of sprats from the Tonle Sap river, a tributary of the Mekong, fell below expected levels. Ethnic Vietnamese, scapegoats for many problems in Cambodia, were blamed.
From Migraines to Morning Sickness, Ginger Is Reputed to Help
The emphasis in Asia has often been on the more expensive ingredients and the benefits they are said to offer. Shark's fin and bird's nest are tonics to perk up the tired and sick; bamboo webs, the fine filigree of membrane found inside bamboo stems, are said to lower blood pressure. But these perilously expensive and increasingly rare products are out of reach of most people. So the emphasis increasingly has been placed on the benefits of more prosaic ingredients such as ginger, the most widely used herbal remedy on earth.
Ossified Ideas, No Variety? No Thanks
The Cantonese and the French have a lot in common. Both cultures put a lot of emphasis on food and fashion. Neither puts much stock in politeness or is known for its shy, retiring public demeanor. Both regard themselves as guardians of a great culinary tradition. And both have turned a complacent eye to the slow ossification of their traditions.
A Pre-eminent Cuisine Loses Its Edge Amid Food Scares, Recession
Diners in Hong Kong have been buffeted by ill winds now for several years. From chicken virus to pesticide-soaked vegetables to seafood left toxic by algae blooms, food scares crop up regularly. On top of that, the economic downturn has bitten deeply, leaving many restaurants struggling to stay open. It is all disheartening news in a city that is slowly losing its reputation as one of the best places to eat in the world.
Some Disparage It, But Isaan Cuisine Is Hot in Bangkok
People from Isaan have rougher tongues than other Thais, or so say those soft Bangkok city folk who can't cope with a cuisine that takes spiciness to a new level. Dressed up in contemporary menuspeak, a representative Isaan dish would be a medley of chilis on a bed of chilis in a chili marinade with a liaison of chilis topped with a chili julienne. In short, it's hot.
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New York's Le Cirque 2000 is, along with The Four Seasons, the company cafeteria of the bold-faced set, where on any given day you might encounter Henry Kissinger, a bevy of supermodels, half the CEOs in Manhattan and the lacquered and surgically enhanced elite of the city. This is the place from where Pope John Paul II ordered takeout for 46 people last time he was in the city. As home away from home for people with thousand-megaton egos it would be fitting for Le Cirque to have a chef to match.
Strange But True: Good Asian Food Abounds in Londo
Michelin-starred chefs are in the same fame league and tax bracket as soccer stars and Spice Girls, newspapers devote about half their pages to restaurant reviews and suburban supermarkets have entire aisles devoted to Thai ingredients. England is no longer, as Napoleon said, a nation of shopkeepers. It is now a place where everyone aspires to own a Pan-Asian or New British seafood bistro serving the best organic produce in a minimalist setting.
As It Exits Colony, Portugal Will Leave A Legacy to Savor
Asia's first Western colony is now its last. On Dec. 31, Macau returns to Chinese sovereignty after being ruled by Portugal since 1557. The run-up to the handover has been smooth, and the Portuguese are evidently thinking about what they'll leave behind. Unlike the British in nearby Hong Kong, they never had much of a reputation for the rule of law. Street signs may all be in Portuguese but only a handful of Macau residents speak the language. So what will
Lisbon's legacy be? Most probably vinho verde and caldo verde, chourico and bacalhau, cha gordo and pasteis de nata -- all components of a cuisine that found its way to the south China coast over the past 450 years.
The City's Restaurants Have Calmed Down and Grown Up
Flinders Lane, in the city center, has become a gourmet gully with new places opening up amidst the galleries and boutique hotels that are taking over what was once the seamier side of the business district. Decoy is a bright, small, informal space dominated by a huge old clock that hangs in the center of the room. The restaurant does a busier trade for lunch than dinner, offering a mix of European dishes that make excellent use of the amazing produce
available in Australia. A huge plate of antipasto came with grilled vegetables and salad that were a revelation afterthe tasteless pap too often flown into Asian cities.
Too Busy To Shop? Forget a Recipe? No Problem at All
In the basement of MIT's Media Lab, a research center that bills itself as the place where the future is invented, is a kitchen. It looks little different from any other kitchen. Indeed, at the moment it is little different from any other kitchen. But in time it will become the first cooking space to incorporate a whole range of new ideas about kitchen life being developed by the Lab's Counter Intelligence project.
Revisionist Dining: Colonial Menu Isn't What It Used to Be
There are places in Asia where time travel is still possible, at least in culinary terms. In Maymyo, in the cool highlands of Burma, they still serve traditional British Sunday roasts. At the Candacraig Inn, a large mock Tudor mansion that was once a chummery, or guest house for Englishmen employed by Bombay Burma Trading Company, you can eat roast beef with Yorkshire pudding or lamb with mint sauce.
Nobu's Sublime Cuisine Evokes Tokyo, Lima; Next in Southeast Asia?
The key to some of the best, most innovative Japanese food in the world is an auto-dialer on your telephone. Or prepare yourself to grind your dialing finger to a bloody stump calling the reservations line at Nobu in Tokyo or New York or any of the other cities where Nobuyuki Matsuhisa has opened his eponymous restaurants. After two hours of dialing the New York number, I finally got through to a sneering Harpy who offered a range of inconvenient dining times in a voice that suggested I was wasting her time. After a further interrogation I was told in menacing tones to call back the day before my booking or they'd cancel the table.
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French foie gras and Italian black truffles; bottles of orange, mango and lemongrass sauce; tiny vials of 25-year-old balsamic vinegar; shiny tins of the best spices and cases of the rarest wines. This cornucopia is all available with just a few clicks of your mouse from the on-line branches of such stores as the Oakville Grocery or Dean and DeLuca. As long as you live in the United States, that is.
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TO WITNESS the preparation of chicken braised with tamarind and Indonesian black nuts is to understand why
Peranakan cuisine, Singapore's comfort food, is on the wane in kitchens here. Only after several days of soaking,
cleaning, extracting and mixing is the dish, the favorite holiday recipe of the Straits Chinese, ready to serve up.
It's Not Just Broth And Noodles; Pho Is Passion in a Bowl
Everything changes, even in Hanoi. For years this city evaded the forces of culinary globalization as people were
more concerned about getting enough to eat than what they ate. A place where the proudest boast of food stalls was
that they pre-dated the 1945 revolution and where new restaurants appeared at the rate of one a decade is now
caught in the spinning wheels of fashion. It's not just the fleeting appearance of California cuisine, restaurants du
jour, wasabi-flavored mashed potatoes or other dishes of the moment. Change has been sweeping through the
basic staple dish, the one thing all Hanoians eat -- pho.
Perfect Pilaf? Everyone Has an Opinion on The Central Asian Dish
Almost all the myriad ethnic and religious groups -- from Kyrgyz to Georgians, to Iranians to Turkmen to Sephardic Jews -- hold their own views on the origins of this dish and on which is the superior, more authentic version. The first documented mention of plov comes from books published in Baghdad and Damascus in the 13th century. Uzbeks claim it was invented by the Mongol warrior Tamarlane (or Timur) in the 14th century as a handy, one-pot dish to feed his armies as they invaded India and Iran. (Tamarlane has something of a reputation as a picky gourmet -- he is said to have executed bakers who were unable to replicate the exact taste of the bread he ate at home. He only relented when he decided that the missing ingredient was the air.)
Refined or Repulsive? Any Way You Slice It, It's Still Raw Meat
Chefs are cooking less and less these days. There's hardly a menu around that doesn't feature a list of raw foods -- carpaccios, tartares, ceviches and variants of sashimi are everywhere. Rawness offers a slippery sensuality, a return to our primal nature in an ever-more processed and packaged world. Carpaccios and tartares are no longer restricted to beef. Now everything from lamb to kangaroo to mahi-mahi comes sliced thin or chopped but not
cooked.
Scholars Discover Meaty Historical Fare At Radcliffe Library
He was also carrying scraps of paper on which were written recipes collected from fellow inmates of the Japanese prison camp at Bilibid. Those recipes were the makings of one of the strangest cookery books, "Recipes Out of Bilibid." This slim book, published in 1946, is a favorite of Barbara Haber, curator at Harvard University's Schlesinger Library (www.radcliffe.edu/schles), which houses one of the world's most important collections of books on food.
Russian Restaurants Yearn for Moscow -- And Lighter Food
Singapore's sole Russian restaurant, Shashlik, is 14 years old but it feels as though it might have been around for decades more. With its elderly, amnesiac waiters, its interior so dim and dated it looks like a KGB holding cell, and its plates of beef stroganoff served with crinkle-cut fries and diced mixed vegetables, Shashlik is as gloomy as an evening alone with a volume of Solzhenitsyn.
Flexible and Relaxed, Some Hotel Restaurants Break From Tradition
There are places in Asia where time travel is still possible, at least in culinary terms. In Maymyo, in the cool
highlands of Burma, they still serve traditional British Sunday roasts. At the Candacraig Inn, a large mock Tudor
mansion that was once a chummery, or guest house for Englishmen employed by Bombay Burma Trading
Company, you can eat roast beef with Yorkshire pudding or lamb with mint sauce.
Flexible and Relaxed, Some Hotel Restaurants Break From Tradition
The box accompanying the story about Les Amis au Jardin on page 10 of the April 16-17 edition listed certain information incorrectly. Here is a reprint as it should have appeared: Les Amis au Jardin is tucked in the middle ofthe Singapore Botanic Gardens. Drive to the visitors center on Cluny Road and walk up the path into the gardens until you come across the large black and white house. It has only 11 tables and guests often have to book two
weeks in advance. But it's always worth calling on the off-chance of a cancellation. Lunch is less busy. Menus change weekly. Lunch costs S$55 ($32) and dinner S$135. Wine starts at around S$65 and reaches nearly S$9,000. If you can't go for dinner, it's possible to have a drink in the small downstairs bar. The telephone number is 466-8812. Les Amis is located at 1 Scotts Road, No. 02-16 Shaw Centre. The telephone number is 733-2225.
(AWSJ April 23, 1999)
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Singapore -- It was as a child in Singapore that I learned to love food. I developed a preference for bold tastes, for spices, for ingredients with nose-crinkling aromas. I discovered that one of the great pleasures is the variety and inventiveness you find in a city that really cares about eating.
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Sometimes it takes a rare confluence of disasters and mishaps to create something truly special. It certainly seems that way for Charles Phan. The Berkeley-educated architect went back to his native Vietnam in 1992 to design a garment factory. After a long wait, Ho Chi Minh City bureaucrats denied permission for the project. He moved back to San Francisco to get in on the city's high-tech boom. The software company went bust. Thinking about a move into restaurants, he planned to open a crepe shop in the city's Tenderloin district. The owner of the building he was looking at refused to rent to a Vietnamese.
Sri Lanka's Cuisine, An Island Unto Itself, Is Mainly Undiscovered
Outside of Sri Lanka, there seem to be few places where you can eat hoppers, pittu and the array of curries and sambols that rival Thai food for their invigorating, bright tastes and colors. The Muslim traders who visited this island for centuries named it Serendib, from which we get the word serendipity, a wonderful but chance discovery.
It's the Attack of the Mutant Sushi - Japan's Famed Food Falls Foul of Culinary Criminals
Good things rarely happen to good foods when they go global. Burgers, pizza or pasta, for example, have paid the price of universal popularity. Now it is happening to sushi -- and with a vengeance. (I'm using "sushi" to cover sashimi, nigiri-sushi and the various nori-wrapped rolls.) Any doubt I might have had that sushi has not reached even the most arid corners of the earth was dispelled when I stopped at a roadside diner in the one-horse, 20-casino
town of Winnemucca in the northern Nevada desert ...and was offered the sashimi special.
More Than a Drink, Tea Is Used as Tonic, Main Course, Dessert
Tea has become much more than a mere beverage, though. It's an ingredient in its own right. Thanaruk Chuto, better known as Chef Pom, has an entire tea-based menu at the Bai Yun restaurant atop the Westin Banyan Tree Hotel in Bangkok. Chef Pom, who has been cooking in Thailand and Hong Kong for 25 years, uses tea to smoke not only duck -- a tradition in some parts of Asia -- but chicken and pigeon as well, and has also concocted a variety of
tea marinades.
In an Effort to Keep Grilled Frogs Alive, One Woman Rewrote the Recipe Book From Scratch
"I was amazed that ingredients that were so familiar could at the same time be so exotic," she recalls. With that dish, she says, "a spell was cast." A decade later, Ms. Thaitawat spent a year meticulously researching all facets of Cambodian food, from the dishes served in Phnom Penh's royal palace to the paddy fields and lakes where most Cambodians spend their lives. The resulting book, "The Cuisine of Cambodia," is a rare achievement. The beautifully produced and lavishly photographed cookbook serves as a history of Cambodian food and customs as well as a vital document that will preserve many recipes that have been at risk of disappearing.
Tasmanian Farmers Hope the Scent of Truffles Will Make Them Stinking Rich
Many Ancient Roman recipes for truffles begin with instructions to thread them on to a skewer and grill them lightly. Nowadays you are lucky if you get a few dark flecks shaved on top of a dish. At the beginning of the 20th century, France's annual black truffle harvest exceeded 1,000 tons; recipes often called for half a kilo. After a century of deforestation, the abandoning of orchards and acid rain, the yield has plummeted to a paltry 30 tons. That, combined with an ever-wider appreciation of truffles, has thrust prices into the stratosphere -- with desperate gourmets shelling out as much as $1,000 a kilo for the stuff.
But Hold the Ghee: Tabla's Tastes Are Light and Direct
One of the factors in the extraordinary resurgence in the past decade has been the admission of Asian or Asiantrained cooks into elite circles, bringing revitalizing energy to French and American cuisine. Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, who retooled Japanese food at Nobu, the Cambodian-born Sottha Khunn at the sumptuous Le Cirque 2000 and Vong's Jean-Georges Vongerichten, a Frenchman whose formative experiences were at Mandarin Oriental hotels, are now joined by another remarkable talent, Floyd Cardoz, at the Indian-influenced restaurant Tabla.
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Aaaaaagghhh. There is nothing quite like the sinus-scouring blast of allyl isothiocyanate and secbutyl
isothiocyanate. These intimidating scientific names are the active ingredients in wasabi, the ugly and vividly green
stem of a plant from the cabbage family that, ground into a paste, is the essential accompaniment to sashimi, sushi
and soba noodles. You probably know it but you may never have tried it because, unless you are in Japan and
eating in a top-notch restaurant, that dollop of green stuff on your plate is almost certainly not the real thing.