by Sam Tackeff | Sep 20, 2011 | Asian, Restaurants
On the way back from our strenuous shopping trip to Ikea, Devon jokingly said he needed $50 dollars worth of Chinese food. Immediately. Preferably two orders of egg rolls. And by jokingly, well, he wasn’t. I’ve been feeding him too many cruciferous vegetables. After five healthy home cooked dinners this week, take-out Chinese food was the appropriate antidote.
The conundrum: where do we get Chinese food in our new city?
Finding good Chinese food is a crucial task for any relocation, and not one I take lightly. When we moved to San Francisco, well-researched Chinese take-out was the first meal we ate – on the floor of our apartment the day we moved in, New Years Eve. My thought process was that if we were going to kill each other building Ikea furniture and unpacking boxes, our last meal had damn well be a good one.
San Francisco has long been a good city for Chinese food, because it became a stopping point for many immigrants from diverse regions of China. In New England, the iterations of Chinese food are less regional, and skew towards a “Chinese-American” that has little to do with native cuisines. And they are often significantly altered for a more… Puritan palate. (For a fascinating book on the topic, I highly recommend Jenny 8. Lee’s book ‘The Fortune Cookie Chronicles’.)
This is not to say the Boston area takes this type of food lightly. I grew up with classic landmarks of Chinese-American food that rivaled anything in the country. The 1200 seat Kowloon Restaurant was opened in the 1950’s, and is still popular to this day. In the late 1980’s, Rick Chang built a 51,000 square foot copy of Beijing’s Imperial Palace, and opened a restaurant that served 5000 meals a day, and even had a separate Kosher catering kitchen for the 40% Jewish clientele. Alas, the restaurant closed a decade later due to bad management, a recession, and tax evasion, among other things. These are the nostalgic spots with the pu-pu platters, tropical drinks with umbrellas and deep fried egg rolls the size of a small burrito. I’ve never been above this type of dining, but they fulfill a different category of culinary desire.
You then have restaurants that serve food with a semblance of what you can actually find in China, which is typically what I’m looking for. Most restaurants have something in between these two. They can still have General Gao’s Chicken on the menu, but as long as they have some decent native-style dishes, I’m a happy camper. (You know, the ones that your Asian grandmother would semi-approve of, or at least recognize the components of the plate. We all know that she can make it better.)
From my preliminary findings, Chung Shin Yuan seemed like a good idea, but after further research, it was noted that the place is really only good for it’s Taiwanese Dim Sum on weekends. (I’ll jump on that soon). Next on my list? Golden Garden, in nearby Belmont.
We were too far for their 3 mile delivery radius, but after reading scores of reviews recommending their dumplings, we drove over to Belmont at 6:30. The restaurant is located on the corner of an unassuming neighborhood block. There were no cars around. Indeed, we were the only ones seated in the restaurant – although many people stopped by to pick up take-out as we ate. This was a relaxing experience after an afternoon with new-college-parents in Ikea. Devon actually got deliberately rammed by a mother with a cart.
We sat right next to the window. Our waiter was new, maybe a college student, but on top of things. Tea arrived immediately, and we were entertained by the “authentic Chinese-American restaurant zodiac placemats”. I had forgotten about these which seemingly were too kitschy for Chinese restaurants in San Francisco, and I feel nostalgic about every time I see them. Devon is a Pig (zodiacally speaking), and I am a Tiger. We don’t technically clash, according to the chart.
I wish we ordered more adventurously, but I tend to be cautious on my first experience. The menu had Szechuan cuisine, so I went that route. (Although, later I found out the chefs are from Dongbei, in Northern China, which would explain the lamb on the menu.)
After some deliberation, we ended up with a cup of egg drop soup for Devon, an order of pork and leek dumplings to share, ma po tofu, and rice noodles with pork.
Aside from the egg drop soup, which was slightly bland but serviceable, the food was a success. The dumplings – which you can purchase frozen in bags of 50 – were moist, succulent, and really flavorful. The dumpling wrappers were thin but didn’t break, and they were also boiled, rather than steamed or fried, which really makes a difference in texture.
Devon’s noodles, which I had successfully recommended he get rather than sweet and sour pork, came to the table looking unassuming, with small strips of pork and chopped scallions, and was surprisingly well seasoned. The next morning they also made a shockingly good stir fry with cubes of zucchini and bitter greens.
My ma po tofu was soft and jiggly – Devon has “textural issues” with food, and hated it. I found it outstanding. The tofu was soft and fresh, the dish had a great ratio of tofu to meat sauce, and it was spicy enough that I had to order an extra bowl of rice. On my next visit, I plan on ordering more of the house specialties: the cucumber with garlic from the “cold delicacies”, the cumin-scented lamb, and a few of the offal dishes.
The bill came to $27 dollars and we had plenty of leftovers to take home.
Golden Garden
617-489-4428
63 Concord Ave. Belmont, MA 02478
by Sam Tackeff | Sep 15, 2011 | Uncategorized
A few weeks ago, we got it in our heads to look at apartments in Boston. The two months of living with my parents was surprisingly calm, but we both enjoy having our own space. I missed cooking for two, instead of cooking for four. I missed sweet, blissful silence. We looked at apartments online, and visited a few outrageously expensive small spaces. More expensive than our apartment in San Francisco? The size of a padded cell with sloping ceilings that even I was sure to hit my head on? “But it’s right in Harvard Square…” I tried to rationalize, ignoring the fact the oven was half size. It’s a good thing Devon has more sense than I do about these things.
And then….
We found “the one”. The knee-buckling, makes you feel wobbly, teen movie first love, “one”.
The top floor of an 1890 Victorian home in Newton, a suburb of Boston. There were no photos on Craigslist, and the description seemed too good to be true. The house had all the charm we both wanted:three bedrooms, a living room with a turret, a large eat in kitchen, two bathrooms, and a clawfoot tub. A small balcony off my office. Three parking spaces. Heat and hot water included. Exactly what we were paying in San Francisco, but double the size. Better yet, the house needed a little bit of love – not the big stuff, but painting, little projects, upkeep, and the landlord would be willing to fund our “This Old House” fantasies.
The landlord emailed us the next morning to let us know that he was planning on showing the place again, but if we wanted it, it was ours.
What did we do? Turn it down.
I wasn’t sure I was ready to move yet. I loved spending so much time with my mom. Devon and I were both working freelance. And I was scared of ghosts in an old house. Yes, ghosts. Living in Newton was too “adult”. Turning down that house seemed stupid and I regretted it. And then three weeks later the landlord sent us another email. The people he had shown it to had jumped at the apartment (we knew they would), but failed the credit check. The place was still ours if we wanted it.
By that time, Devon had a new job at creative agency doing what he is really good at. I was ready. We brought my mom along. We tactfully asked if anyone had complained about hauntings. The landlord looked at us and laughed out loud. I took that as a good sign.
And now, we are here.
We sold almost everything we owned in San Francisco larger than my cookbooks and his guitars, so we are starting from scratch in a house that has more space than either of us could have hoped for. We’ve been working on the necessities. We have our internet set up. I have a new library card. We have a bed, our TV, and one single chair. I’ll be back in the kitchen, writing long to-do lists, choosing color swatches, patching up walls, having people over, and keeping you all updated. It feels exquisite.
And, I’ll finally have a place to put these:
by Sam Tackeff | Aug 30, 2011 | Local stores, Restaurants, Sandwich, Turkish
Have you been in a convenience store lately? It used to be that you could only find sad packages of stale sunflower seeds, Slim Jims, or half smushed Hostess snack packs, but not much else. You may have been able to buy your late night desperation pint of ice cream, but usually it wasn’t the good flavor. For decades, convenience stores weren’t filled with what one wanted, but rather what one, in a moment of irrationality, believed they needed.
Now I have certainly been grateful at times for the salvation of convenience stores: that Snickers bar in Fort Bragg after driving unintentionally three hours up the Pacific Coast Highway without having eaten all day, and the air conditioning in a Buttonwillow gas station when it was 120°F come to mind. But these experiences have been few and far between. It used to be that I wouldn’t stop in one unless I was truly desperate.
I am here to share that times are ‘a changing. In New England, a curious thing seems to be happening. This region has hopes and dreams for convenience stores, and is pushing for a small revolution. Taking it a new level. The ultra-convenience. Superlative convenience. Or more to the point, actually convenient. In New England, our convenience stores are marvelous and full of happy surprises. We have affectionate names for them too. Cumby’s anyone? Ours come with or without gas. And, some of them house restaurants.
Take, for instance, my latest experience: Turkish Kebab’s, located in Jay’s Newmarket Convenience.
Jay’s Convenience Store is actually a converted house. You can get your gas and your cigarettes and your six-packs, but what you really want to come for is the food. Real Turkish food. I’m not really sure which I would have found more unlikely a decade ago – having great food in a convenience store, or finding Turkish food in Newmarket, New Hampshire.
Turkish food is my comfort food, the food I crave. I grew up spending summers in Istanbul. We would visit the city where my grandmother lived, and then spend weeks on Büyükada, the biggest of the Princes’ Islands. The setting was idyllic: a beautiful island in the Bosphorus, with centuries old houses, no cars, and horse drawn carriages. You’d take your tea in the afternoon on the waterfront, watching the ferry boats come in from the city, their passengers visibly relaxing as they got off the boats. We’d swim, and bike, and walk through the neighborhoods. But mostly, we’d eat.
The street food culture in Turkey is diverse and enticing at every corner. There are Dönerci’s selling döner kebap – meat cooked on a rotating spit, and shaved thinly (similar to schwarma). You can get kebabs in sandwiches, or midye tava (fried mussels) with a nut sauce called tarator, or stuffed mussels taken straight from the Bosphorus and cooked on the sidewalk. Or you can get lahmacun, (lah-ma-joon) a thin Turkish flatbread with lamb, filled with lettuce and lemon, and wrapped up to eat on the go. There is Tost – which is the best grilled cheese you will ever eat, stuffed optionally with sucuk, a spicy sausage. Or if you need something sweet, there are pudding shops nearly everywhere, and more ice cream and waffle sellers than there are Starbucks in Manhattan.
I tend to feel sorry for myself that I live so far away from Turkey, especially in the summertime, so I was ecstatic to find Jay’s so close to home to fill myself up on the foods I was missing. I try to do a lot of Turkish cooking but you just can’t recreate döner without a large spit and a qualified chef. (It takes years of training to become a proper Dönerci).
Jay’s is filled with all sorts of treats that I crave. Kebabs – which loosely refers to almost any meat cooked on a stick – are their specialty. I’ve heard good things about their falafel, although I haven’t tried it. You can also get almost anything in sub form. They do Italian style subs as well, and some Italian home-style dishes.
They also have a large variety of Turkish salads, including Kısır, a bulgur wheat salad similar to Tabouli (they actually label it as Tabouli, but technically it is different), and hummus, and a very good eggplant salad. They have “popular” New England favorites including seafood salad, but why you would purchase that when you had Jay’s other options, I have no idea.
Turkish people also consume a lot of pastry and fried foods, and Jay’s carries many of these as well, including flaky Börek (turnovers) filled with white cheese and parsley, savory meat pies, zucchini fritters, and even some Italian arancini (rice balls) as big as your fist.
I was excited to hear the grocery section had a small collection of imported Turkish foods, because I always find myself missing things like Turkish honey, jams, and olive spreads. We typically travel over an hour to stock up on these things at Sevan in Watertown, Massachusetts, and I was looking forward to the.. erm.. close to home convenience.
Unfortunately, when we went, the entire Turkish grocery section in the back had been decimated. It turns out they had received a visit that week from a group of Turkish high-schoolers spending the month at Phillips Exeter Academy’s summer school. At least I can completely understand their impulse!
And apparently, students can also get a 15% discount on food if they show their ID. It’s probably better that they weren’t open when I was in highschool, otherwise I would have been in twice a week abusing their generosity.
This trip we all decided to order the same thing – thinly sliced döner in a Turkish lavash bread, rolled with lettuce, tomato, pickled onion, and yogurt sauce. While very tasty, I found myself finding the ratio a little off – there was actually too much meat for my preference, and I would have liked a little bit more sauce. Next time, I think I might actually get the tomato sauce their Italian cook makes rather than the more traditional yogurt. Nothing wrong with a little fusion!
We also took home some smoky Turkish eggplant salad, and some kisir, as well as some kadayif – a crispy pastry similar to baklava, except with vermicelli-like dough filled with pistachio nuts. (At some point, I’ll write a 5000 word essay on my love of Turkish pastry… the stuff is glorious.)
The one flaw of Jay’s is the lack of seating: when you are hungry, you want to eat food right away! Some quick thinking led us to the benches at Stratham Hill Park. And here, I leave you with a shot of my mother, a real live Turkish person, enjoying her sandwich. Authenticity folks, I like it.
Turkish Kebab’s Subs & Grill (in Jay’s Newmarket Convenient Store and Gas)
35 North Main Street, Newmarket, New Hampshire
603 – 659- 1500
by Sam Tackeff | Aug 22, 2011 | Books, Writing
“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.”
— M.F.K. Fisher (The Art of Eating)
I have a few rituals for when I get into a rut with food. When I can’t think of what to cook any more, I sit down surrounded by my favorite cookbooks, and make lists. When I can’t think of what to write anymore, I read M.F.K. Fisher. For me, her writing is comforting. Like a stand-by recipe you know will turn out perfectly every time, but each time you cook it, it surprises you with new complexity. A new taste or thought. A new memory. Or a new connection.
Mary Frances Kennedy (M.F.K) Fisher, is generally considered one of the founders of modern food writing. For me, she is the ultimate authority.
Now, lest we ignore our predecessors, there has been food writing for millenia. The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, they certainly knew how to throw a party, and enjoy their food and drink. But somehow, in the past several hundred years, there has been a drought of evocative food writing. The genre suffered a long spell of being largely prescriptive and dry. Either you were writing about how to give dubious elixirs to invalids, or you were giving technical details about mother sauces. Stray from these directions and you would be swiftly smote by the culinary deities. There wasn’t much more than that.
M.F.K Fisher was radically different. She wrote about food from the perspective of someone who passionately loved eating food. She wrote about indulging, traveling for food, taste, dreaming about food. She was blunt, exceedingly witty, and intelligent. How many food writers are expansive enough that their quotes fit seamlessly into Roger Ebert’s film reviews? Reading her writing, I’m always reminded of F.Scott Fitzgerald in tone and style – except instead of writing about disaffected wealthy people, she writes about quelling her own hunger, which is a much more interesting topic. She wasn’t a professional chef (and some of the recipes in her early books were slightly off), but boy could she conjure up a taste memory.
And that’s what modern food writing is about. Good food writing, that is. Fisher’s writing is about thinking about food, not from a technical standpoint, but a heartfelt one. If you are interested in improving your writing, M.F.K. Fisher is a good place to start.
Almost all the food writing I love and devour – the books, blogs, gushing articles in Saveur, even Ruth Reichl’s dream-like food tweets “Silver sky. Breezy. Cooler. Tiny red new potatoes gently roasted. Shower of salt, sweet green garlic. Soft, savory. Irresistible.” which spawned ½ of @RuthBourdain’s satirical tweets: “El Bulli just served its last dinner. Sources tell me Ferran shut off the lights in the middle of dessert and played “Don’t Stop Believin’.” – is indebted to M.F.K. Fisher.
I could spend my time writing about M.F.K. Fisher ad nauseum, but this post is actually about Anne Zimmerman, whose biography of Fisher’s early life came out this year.
I met Anne a few years ago soon after I moved to San Francisco. She was finishing a book about the aforementioned food writer, Fisher, and I was managing a bookstore that specialized in books on food. I’m truly in awe of anyone writing a book, but Anne seemed particularly sweet and humble about it. I knew within about five minutes of meeting her that I would enjoy her writing.
Anne Zimmerman’s “An Extravagant Hunger” relates the story of M.F.K. Fisher’s fascinating rise to fame and prominence. Beyond her writing, Fisher was a riveting persona. By gathering details from her personal correspondence and papers, Anne brings to us the woman behind the writing, and it is easy to see Anne’s admiration of her subject in the text. A dramatic life, rife with tumultuous romance, passion and creativity, the food writing iconoclast is truly a phenomenal character.
There is no doubt that Fisher was a brilliant and talented young woman, however she didn’t hit her stride until her early thirties when her first book was published. From then on, she was incredibly prolific. She penned more than 30 books about food, and countless articles, as well as the best translation of Brillat Savarin’s ‘The Physiology of Taste’.
For all of us writers who have yet to publish our first book, it is encouraging to read about the meandering path it takes to be a true renaissance woman.
An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher by Anne Zimmerman
Published by Counterpoint, 2011
352 Pages
And if you need to get started on Fisher – I’d go ahead and recommend ‘The Art of Eating‘ which is a compilation of some of her best work.
