The Tortured Eaters Department: The Anthology
Some more April eating.
A supplementary round-up of some more things I ate in April. (This was supposed to go out much earlier but then I went on vacation and finally back in the swing of things.)
Oaxaca, Tokyo, Brooklyn
I hesitate to write about this one-night-only collaboration, between Oaxacan restaurant Claro and Japanese-ish cocktail bar Bar Goto Niban, since it’s not like anyone reading this can experience this delightful fusion. (Unless they run it back at some point, which I hope they do.) So take this as a recommendation to eat at Claro; I’ve been for brunch and loved it, so dinner must be even better. I swung by around 9 PM with my friends David and Sam. Fortunately, they hadn’t sold out of anything, even though there was a huge line at 6 PM when they opened. Credit to the kitchen team for properly provisioning for this event!
The brief Oaxacan-Japanese menu featured three small plates, a dessert, and a larger pork milanesa. The latter dish had a menu price of $165, owing to a 2 oz dollop of Osetra caviar and two mini cocktails. So we did not order that… but we got everything else, and they were all delightful. They certainly did not hold back on the spice, so those with feeble tongues may not have the best time.
Here’s what we ate:
Spicy Tuna Tostada, with chintextle mayo, salsa macha, sesame, and nori
Beef Tataki Aguachile, with tamarind, wasabi, and charred habanero. An amazing dish, with super-raw beef slices swimming in a pool of spicy, oily sauce.
Mole wings, with mole rojo crema, toasted sesame, furikake, and pickled ginger. Of the three savory plates, this was the weakest; Bar Goto Niban’s wings are terrific, but this sauce didn’t quite fit.
Matcha Nicuatole, with Kettle Samidori Matcha, Harry’s Berries strawberries, toasted rice, and whipped cream. This was actually my favorite dish, with the toasted rice giving a nice crunch to the creamy maize and sugar custard.
Food total after tip and tax was $100, which was split three ways for a light dinner. We also got a cocktail or two which bumped up the bill quite a bit.
K as in Korean-ish
It’s perfectly alright, and a perfectly fun time. The fusion of Korean and Southern cuisines has become a fruitful niche, as this NoHo hotspot has been consistently packed since it first opened a year and a half ago. The flavor profiles come off more as Southern, with swirls of chili oil or bits of gochujang folded in. Despite this skew, the heritage of this restaurant’s owners seems to give permission to a certain kind of Asian American — the kind who almost exclusively eat at Asian restaurants and complain about Mission yet go clubbing there every other weekend — to eat baby back ribs. One thing that is indubitably Korean is the atmosphere: the dim, red-tinted lights, neon signs, and bottles of soju give the feeling of an upscale pocha.
Four Notable Dishes
The shrimp toast roll is a shrimp toast, but rolled up and deep fried and extremely yummy.
The mushroom bibambap had a mildly smoky flavor that gave the rice bowl an extra boost of comfort.
While the baby back ribs (not pictured) aren’t particularly innovative, they’re perfectly fatty and tender, and the pickled celery that came with it provided a cleansing punch.
My favorite of the night was the crab drop, which subs out the soft egg with silken tofu. Strands of crabmeat are threaded throughout, and the beads of chili oil provide a nice bite without overwhelming the other flavors.
All-in price: $65, for eight savory dishes and two creatively presented desserts, split three ways, plus $25 to split a bottle of Ninome Tangerine Soju two ways. A complimentary shot of saké is served upon arrival.
A Night Out Is What We Make of It
Of all the at-home supper clubs/dinner parties that have cropped up around the city, Make Bistro may be the most well-realized. One day, Derek Lucci fell down a YouTube rabbit hole of Thai cooking videos, kicking off an obsession for perfecting dishes rarely seen in America, using ingredients authentic to tradition. I have a friend who is practically obsessed with Make Bistro, and a recent Saturday evening marked Vickie’s fifth time eating in Lucci’s home (and my first). Making this dinner a bit more special than others was that it was a collaboration between Brooklyn-based Lucci and Bangkok-based Dylan Eitharong, who runs a similar supper club there called Haawm.
Usually, I’m wary of a white chef who specializes in Asian cuisine, but here there is no need for skepticism. I’m no expert on Thai food, but Lucci clearly has become one. He goes all around the city in search of fresh herbs that don’t appear in Chinatown’s grocery stores, painstakingly recreating the dishes of those YouTube videos. (Eitharong also packed various pastes and other rare ingredients in his luggage.) Most dishes are genuinely “Thai spicy,” but it doesn’t overwhelm the palate. (Ugly Baby is guilty of this… their food is inedible IMO.) For this collab dinner, I don’t know where Lucci’s influence started and Eitharong’s began, but the food was unimpeachable, and the well-appointed Clinton Hill apartment is a dream dinner setting.
Among the four appetizers, six larger plates, and two desserts, there was genuinely no weak point. But here are four personal favorites:
Heavenly beef with crushed coriander and nam jim jaew dipping sauce
Spicy khua curry with beef rib, gooseberries, and wild betel leaf
Dry tom kha, where boiled galangal was juiced, then chicken was simmered in the broth. It’s a simpler preparation of tom kha than we normally encounter. It was garnished with some “wild coriander,” which is the Thai phrase for good ol’ parsley.
Crispy trout cloud and grilled pork salad featuring star fruit and chili jam. The star fruit’s inclusion was revelatory for me; it brought the whole dish together.
The food from Make Bistro is terrific. The apartment is immaculate. It is very expensive. A dinner ticket for Make Bistro is typically $175-200; because this was a collaboration, I paid $250. (Drinks are BYO, though they may supply some Chiang beers.) $250 was a bit extreme, in my honest opinion, but the usual price range is likely worth the splurge.
There was only one thing that left a sour taste in my mouth, and I’m not talking about the makrut leaves. It’s not really Lucci’s fault — he does not control who buys a ticket — but in all of the communal pop-ups and dinner parties I’ve been to, this was the only time that the vibes were off among the strangers gathered together that night. Besides me and Vickie, every one of the eight other guests were white, and most were making a date night out of it. At these types of things, the usual hope is that a group of strangers can build bonds over comforting food, and there is a temporary community, even if you never see anyone again. But on this night, no one seemed to get along with each other much, so everything just felt kinda weird. Part of this is bad luck, but maybe I just don’t like the type of people who will casually drop a few hundred dollars to eat dinner in someone’s apartment. But I’m one of those people, so maybe I’m the real clown 🤡
Vickie assured me that this was an anomaly; she had a lot more fun at her previous appearances. But I suspect the best way to have a dinner party at Make Bistro is to make it your dinner party by setting up a private dinner. I think that would be the move, as long as you know nine people comfortable with spending a couple hundred bucks on the best Thai food they will have outside of Thailand. And if you happen to be in Thailand, perhaps book a seat at Haawm, and let me know how it is.
Liver Me Like You Do
Amidst all this eating out, I did find some time to cook. I made a cassoulet, which gave me lunch for a whole week. My evenings after that were mostly booked with plans, so my lunches were all things I’ve made before: chive-sesame waffles, rice and beans with roasted sweet potatoes and a serrano-cilantro sauce. On weekends I would get skate wings from that fishmonger at my local farmer’s market and steamed them on a bed of stinging nettles, tossing some ginger fish sauce on top just as the fish was about ready. (I’m riffing on a steamed skate wing dish I had at Ha’s Dac Biet back in January.)
One new cooking challenge was monkfish liver, which was offered by that fishmonger for a few weeks. I’ve had the delicacy before in restaurants, but never knew what to do with it at home; there are no recipes for it on Serious Eats or even NYTimes Cooking. There’s generally two ways to prepare it. In the Japanese style, it’s marinated in saké, rolled into a log, then steamed (called ankimo). In the European style, you treat it like you would foie gras: marinated in milk and herbs, cooked sous vide for a few hours, then served au torchon (cold slices) or briefly seared in a hot pan, and placed on a piece of buttered toast.
I’ll spare folks the wormy details about cleaning the monkfish livers; I’ve now learned that people don’t actually want to know how the proverbial sausage is made. That said don’t look at the photos below if looking at organs gross you out.
My first attempt wasn’t that great; I marinated the livers in sake, and tried to roll it into a neat log. But I’m terrible at rolling things into logs, and some of the livers had broken down to a gooey mess. After about three hours sous vide, I chilled the log in the fridge overnight. The next day I spread some onto a toasted baguette. It tasted… livery. Not my best work!
A week later, I was back at the farmer’s market and they still had monkfish livers ($16 a pound). The vender asked me how it went and I told her I had sort of failed. She suggested marinating in vinegar and then searing it, as that was how they did it in her country (I’m not sure which country that is; I didn’t ask, and Googling “monkfish liver marinate vinegar” did not yield anything useful.) This second time around, the livers were a lot more intact after I cleaned them since now I know what I’m doing. The livers broke down a bit too much in the vinegar, after soaking for a night — if there’s a next time, I’m gonna do the milk marinade and make a pâté.
I sliced off a piece and seared it and it was pretty good, but I had a lot of liver on hand and wanted it to keep until a dinner party I was throwing that Saturday, so I did a sous vide again (I’m still awful at rolling gooey things into logs) and then froze the cooked monkfish livers. At the dinner, I pretty much served the monkfish liver as-is, for people to spread onto toast. It was quite a hit; the vinegar denatured that metallic liver flavor, and the toast denatured that acidic sting from the vinegar.
That dinner party was a fun one. I called it an “improvised dinner” because the menu wasn’t set until I went to the farmer’s market that morning… I ended up making a bunch of random stuff, all of it fairly quick to cook, but it became a bit of a marathon meal for my guests. To tide everyone over, we served a dozen different bottles of wine. (If you’re curious, this is the Google Doc I made for the dinner party planning.)
I didn’t really get photos of everything, but I did snap a picture of the whiteboard I used to keep track throughout the night:
April Grog Log
Eating out more often also means drinking more often, but there weren’t many days where I had more than a couple drinks.
A can of Kidd Squid Sag Harbor Lager, at home
Nothing
Maker’s Mark on the rocks, at the MoMA
“CoCo Demode” at Maloya
A pint of Kirin Ichiban, at Katsu-Hama
A smuggled cup of Brooklyn Kura Occidental Saké, at the BAM
“Saturn,” at Hei Tiki
A can of beer, at home
Green grape soju, at MUI
A glass of Sangiovese, at Sardi’s
Nothing
“Bahar Bitter,” at Sofreh
A bottle of Singha, at Make Bistro
A flight of beers, at Gun Hill Industry City
“Giovanni Giorgio,” at Grand Army
“Pandan Apologist,” at Sweet Polly
A pint of Half Acre “Daisy Cutter” Pale Ale, at Botanica
A can of Killsboro “Killsner” Pilsner, at home
Nothing
A can of Sixpoint “Resin” Double IPA, at home
A leftover half-bottle of Barbera, Fratelli Arditi - 2021, at home
A bottle of Miller High Life, at home
A Moscow Mule at Lincoln Center
A can of Sixpoint “The Piff” Hazy DIPA, at home
“Hermit Purple” cocktail, at David's
A very meh rosé, at the Amsterdam Airport Lounge
A can of To Øl “City Session” IPA, at Flere Fugle
A can of Kølster “Diamond” Pilsner, at a park
A glass of Naveran Brut Nature Cava, at Oysters & Grill
A pint of 1664 Blanc, at Hian