What I Ate Before/Between/After Seeing All Those NYFF Movies
Festy scran.
Now that the New York Film Festival is over, I’ve been adjusting to a life where I’m not watching two to four movies every day. That said, I am happy to get back into my routine of cooking at home and being able to eat for pleasure instead of strictly sustenance. Sometimes, during the festival, I had a luxurious hour for dinner. Other times I had fifteen minutes.
Funny enough, I didn’t eat at any of the restaurants that are in the Lincoln Center campus: Lincoln Ristorante seems too pricey, Café Paradiso didn’t appeal to me, and even if I had the time, there was no way I was getting into Tatiana. But someday!
Here’s everything I ate during this year’s NYFF, plus a sorta-recipe for a chickpea-pesto pasta salad as well as a brief review of the entrancing Việt and Nam.
Brought My Lunch!
The little lawn across from the Lincoln Center Theater is a great place to eat a packed lunch, which I did on a handful of occasions in an effort to save money (at the expense of time). On my first day of press screenings, I brought a leftover tomato/chickpea salad that I had made when having friends for dinner a few days before. It held up kind of okay, but it was so much that I kinda struggled to scarf down in the thirty minutes I had to eat.
The hard part with trying to bring my own lunch is that without a microwave, I had to eat things that were edible at room temperature and could sit in my backpack for a few hours. Another leftover that worked well: a Lyonnais lentil salad, topped with some tinned mackerel.
And, of course, a bit of fruit is a good, healthy pick me up in the afternoon. I’m not usually an apple fan, but these puny heirloom apples at the farmer’s market were… really good? A game changer, tbh.
Kind of a recipe: Orecchiette with chickpeas and pesto
My go-to packed lunch was something I’d eat even if I weren’t optimizing for scarfability and can-eat-at-room-temp-ability: orecchiette with chickpeas and pesto. I’m far from the first person to combine pesto with pasta e ceci, but it’s a terrific pantry/freezer clearout. (I had a few jars of pesto in my freezer, owing to the voluminous basil bunches I was buying over the summer.)
Here’s the process, after you’ve cooked some chickpeas and made a pesto sauce (or have taken them out of the freezer and defrosted).
For roughly 5 or 6 servings, cook a pound of pasta (I really like orecchiette here, since it cradles the garbanzos so well.)
Drain and toss with as many cooked chickpeas as you want; anywhere between two and four cups will do. (And as always, I suggest Rancho Gordo if you want a specific brand of bean. Cooking them is easy!)
While everything is nice and warm, add as much pesto as you want, as well as some freshly grated parm or pecorino.
To serve, drizzle some robust olive oil on top, and now you’ve got a really flavorful, simple pasta salad.
I’ve tried a few various pesto recipes, some with nuts and some without, sometimes mixing basil with other leafy herbs like mint or cilantro that are about to spoil in my fridge. The Serious Eats recipe is a terrific template, but I use a food processor instead of manually grinding everything in a mortar. I did it the old fashioned way exactly once, and I am not sure if it was any better than using a machine, because I was too tired and frustrated to care about the flavor.
Reliable Takeout Within One Block of the Lincoln Center
It was usually not feasible to bring lunch or dinner, so I did eat out a lot.
I usually do not eat breakfast, but there’s a Breads Bakery in between my subway stop and the cinema. More than once I grabbed a pain au chocolat and an egg sandwich. The $15 breakfast would add up if I did it every day, but it was nice to luxuriate a bit.
The Casbah food truck, in the plaza across the street from Alice Tully Hall, does a great lamb over rice. Can’t go wrong here. $8 cash, a few cents more with card.
A mole chicken burrito from The Migrant Kitchen was solid, but really really needed some hot sauce. $14.
While I didn’t personally go, the new-ish H-Mart on 70th Street and Columbus kept more than a few critic colleagues fed.
Reliable Fast Casual Within A Few Blocks of the Lincoln Center
When there was time to sit down for a little bit longer: I got beef noodle soup and soup dumplings from EA Dumpling, a Taiwanese chain that recently set up shop on Columbus Ave. Not mind blowing or anything, but it was good enough and very fast. $20 for a bowl of soup and half of the dumplings.
Charles Pan Fried Chicken remains undefeated: for $10 you can get two pieces of chicken, a side (always mac and cheese), and cornbread. It’s a perfect portion for a light meal. The cornbread is pretty bad these days, but I won’t argue with the price. A three-piece and two sides combo (which can be A LOT to eat, depending on the sides you get) is $19, so if you’re really really hungry, just get two two-piece combos.
A couple friends had recommended La Dinastia, a no-frills restaurant that offers both American Chinese and Latin dishes. (If you define them by the ethnicities of the line cooks, nearly every restaurant in New York is Chinese and/or Latin.) I popped in with a friend one evening, and it was tasty and comforting. We split an oxtail stew, fried pork with maduros, and a plate of mofongo. I took home enough leftovers to make up an entire lunch; the whole thing cost $74 after tip and tax.
Việt and Nam and Bánh
First a film review, then a dinner recap.
Situating his country’s post-war legacy within contemporary concerns, Trương Minh Quý crafts a film that can be beguiling, but at its best is spellbinding. The titular characters of Việt and Nam are coal miners who happen to be lovers. They are the first thing we really see in this movie: two bodies lying in a black bed of glimmering coal, tenderly holding each other by the cheek, discreetly licking the other’s thumb. Footsteps approach. Other workers are coming, and they slowly get up to join them. This may be a workplace relationship on the down low, but it’s not clandestine. One of two (it’s never clear who is Việt and who is Nam) is planning to sneak across the border, to join the wave of migrants looking for opportunities elsewhere. Meanwhile, one of their mothers is on a quest much closer to home: her husband was a Viet Cong soldier who died in the war, and she’s still searching for his body, decades later.
Trương is part of a burgeoning wave of slow cinema practitioners from Vietnam and Thailand, following in the footsteps of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and also inspired by the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky. Việt and Nam operates on a dream logic that, like its precedents, focus on sensation over plot; the pace can be charitably described as “measured.” Adding to that effect of unreality, the actors don’t speak with colloquial Vietnamese, instead using what the director called a “lyrical” form of the language. The idea was for the viewer to “feel the literal emotion [of the characters], but at the same time feel distant.” For those willing to breach that distance, this can be a rewarding movie to experience.
It was only fitting to pregame a Vietnamese film by eating Vietnamese food. There aren’t any options near the Lincoln Center, but forty blocks north is Bánh, my favorite Viet restaurant in the city. Subway dysfunctions that evening didn’t stop my friends and I from having a very good dinner. I’m rarely so far uptown, so I was glad that my friends were down to hustle up there before settling into a long, slow movie. Bánh’s menu especially appeals to second-gen Vietnamese like myself, who grew up eating many dishes that I can rarely get in New York. This was the first restaurant I went to in the city that offered xôi xeo, a sticky rice with mung beans that I often had as a quick meal growing up.
(Bánh does not, however, make the prominent foods featured in the movie: fried frogs and fish egg fruit.)
Everything that we got was really good, even according to my friends who are actually from Vietnam. Follow your heart in terms of what to order, though my personal faves were the crispy silken tofu and bun ga, a not at all traditional fried chicken noodle salad that nonetheless was terrifically balanced. We didn’t get any drinks, so four mains and three appetizers netted out to $35 per person after tip and tax. The kitchen is pretty quick so you’ll be done in just over an hour, very helpful when we had to hustle back down a few stops on the 1 train. This was easily the best meal I had during NYFF.
