A Cambodian New Year at King's Land

It wasn't until I stepped foot into King's Land, a Chinese restaurant in Denver, that I realized ES and I might be attending something a bit more involved than a dragon boat team fundraiser. There was an open dance floor, a live band and a singer up on the stage, and many of the women in attendance were wearing slinky, jewel-colored evening gowns that swished around their sequined high heels. "It's Cambodian New Year!" explained the friend who had invited ES to drop by.

And so began a long evening of partying with the Cambodian community of Denver, and though I did feel terribly underdressed, I felt honored to be in attendance at such an event. The food was good—unlike banquets where dish after endless dish continue to appear long after you've filled up, the menu here consisted of a modest selection of top hits, including a light and soothing pork egg drop soup, pieces of roasted duck in a sweet glaze, black pepper pork chops, and a whole fish, deep fried until the bones were crisp enough to eat whole.

I also tried a piece of this pickled mango, which was topped with a wonderfully salty and spicy chili paste. The flavors were strong and sour and strangely refreshing, though I could only eat a few pieces before my mouth started to pucker. One of ES's friends was going around swearing that if we ate the mango we'd have, um, stomach troubles the next day, but everyone around us was breaking off pieces nonetheless. "It's just so good," they said.

As I watched people eating and chatting, raising their glasses to each other in toasts, and getting into rows to perform line dance routines, I recalled the numerous Chinese banquets I'd attended in the past with my parents and marveled at the similarities. If this had been one with my dance-loving parents in attendance, they would have been the ones leading the Electric Slide for sure!

Back at it

Soft serve sampler from Momofuku Milk Bar in the East Village: horchata, red velvet, old-fashioned donut, cereal milk flavors; caramelized corn flakes, toasted coconut, and cinnamon sugar toppings. Consumed, with friends, January 2011.

Readers, I've mentioned this before, but you really don't know how sad I was that I was unable to keep up Salty/Savory/Sweet for the last few years. Those of you who follow me (anyone still out there?) know that I rely on this blog to serve as a document of my adventures, both in eating and in life, as well as a record of my success or failure with the recipes I try. Unfortunately, the work involved in pursuing my fiction MFA degree while teaching simply made regular attention to this blog impossible. It's all appropriate, I suppose, but it didn't make my prolonged departure from this venue any easier.

Polish meal at Karczma in Greenpoint, Brooklyn: white borchst; pickle soup; stuffed cabbage; pierogis; kielbasa; sauteed cabbage; and roasted ham hock in beer. Consumed, with friends, January 2011. We followed this meal with donuts from Peter Pan.

But hey! I've submitted and defended my thesis, and am due to graduate at the end of the semester. My workload has lessened, which means I now—finally—have time again to restart this blog. So stay tuned, willya? Posts on recent Denver-area eating are forthcoming: a buffet at a casino nestled deep in the mountains; a burger so large and juicy that I needed a stack of napkins to consume it; a cream-cheese frosted cinnamon roll as large as my face; and a buffalo wing joint that also serves an extensive menu of Cambodian and Indonesian food. An upcoming weekend in Taos, New Mexico promises encounters with Pueblo green chili and the slopper, and I'll also be back in NYC for a visit in May, armed with a long list of places I want to try or revisit.

Hotpot at home: consumed, with family, Christmas 2010. Who needs ham or a roasted bird?

In the meanwhile, here are the rest of the Coloradoan restaurant profiles I've written since the last roundup:


"Big Al's Burgers and Dogs serves up satisfying fare"
"A Mediterranean feast awaits diners in Old Town"
"Ace Gillette's Lounge indulges sophisticated pleasures"
"BBQ Buffet: Nordy's a comfort food haven"


"Vincent Heavenly Pies and Pasta serve it up in an elegant atmosphere"
"Farmer's Table fills you up with no-fuss comfort food"
"Souza's Smokin' BBQ should be on your radar"
"Fresh choices make Little Bird Bakeshop irresistible"

So there it is—I'm excited, are you? See you soon!

Brooklyn wanderings: Grimaldi's, Almondine, and Brooklyn Flea

Look closely. See that woman down by the orange traffic cone, climbing down into a manhole in the middle of the intersection? A few minutes later, I was doing the same thing.

There's an explanation for why, but I'll get to that in a moment.

First, there was beef cheung fun from a cart at Hester and Elizabeth, which TL and I had that morning for breakfast in Chinatown. The woman topped the steamed rice noodles with soy sauce, sesame seeds, and a thin peanut sauce, which added necessary flavor since the meat portion was decidedly skimpy. This version was a quarter cheaper and pretty good, but in the end I'd rather have the prepared-to-order cheung fun from Corner 28.

After breakfast we went to Pell Street so that TL could get a haircut. And then we made our way from Chinatown to Atlantic Avenue and Court Street in Brooklyn, where we stood in the pouring rain for about half an hour…

…waiting to climb down into a manhole…

…and into a centuries-old abandoned tunnel running under the streets of Brooklyn. Built in 1844 and sealed less than a decade later, the whereabouts of the Atlantic Avenue tunnel remained a mystery until nineteen-year-old Bob Diamond finally located it in 1981 and worked to open it up again to visitors. Go here to reserve a spot on the tour and you can hear Diamond tell his tale yourself.

I was reluctant to leave the cool, dark tunnel for the humid sidewalks aboveground, but luckily by the time we finally surfaced, the rain had ended and the sun had come out. TL and I decided to walk along the promenade to catch the end of Brooklyn Flea. By the time we arrived, though, there were only a few vendors left in the market and only one was still selling any food. I picked up an almond croissant and a brioche to eat later.

But there was still the matter of lunch—after having only eaten cheung fun seven hours earlier, TL and I were famished. What to do?

I was thrilled when I saw that there was no line outside of Grimaldi's. We sat down and quickly asked for a pizza topped with sausage, ricotta, and extra basil. Our hunger is my only explanation for what compelled us to order a large for the two of us instead of a small…both of us tried to finish the entire pie, but midway through our third slices we knew it'd be impossible to go on. It had been a long time since I'd last had really good pizza, and I dearly wanted to. I'm not sure how Grimaldi's compares to all the other coal/wood oven pizzas being served around town—I haven't tried enough of them to know—but whatever the case, I found this pie totally satisfying.

Stuffed to the gills with pizza, TL and I headed back to Astoria. It wasn't until about 10pm that either of us felt hungry again. Luckily we had the leftover pizza and Brooklyn Flea pastries to sate our bellies. The croissant was quite good—just sweet enough, and the paste had a wonderful nutty flavor—but the brioche seemed a bit dry.

I had also picked up three macarons from Almondine, which had gotten a bit smashed on the journey home. At a dollar each, they were cheaper than most macarons but also quite a bit smaller. Happily, what they lacked in size was more than accounted for in flavor; both the lemon and passionfruit curds sandwiched between the almond paste cookies were bright and tart, tasting intensely of their respective fruit. The pistachio was less impressive but still tasty.

Between the pizza, the croissant, the brioche, the cheung fun, and the macarons, it was a totally satisfying eating day, but being able to go down a manhole into an abandoned tunnel was totally the icing on the cake. I should hang out like this more often.

Changing up chefs in the family kitchen

The night before I flew back to Colorado, my family and I gathered around the dining table for a vast home-cooked meal. Unlike other feasts that were primarily created by my mom, this time my brother did most of the cooking, coming up with seven or eight dishes by himself over the course of an afternoon. On the table were fried pork chops; a stir-fry of shrimp, carrots, and celery; marinated burdock root; stewed lotus root; sauteed snow peas; braised tofu; and sauteed Taiwanese cabbage. We ate everything atop bowls of my dad's multigrain "rice," and it was a meal that tasted all the better from my older sibling's touch.

The next morning, I pulled out several batches of homemade bagels from the oven—I had kneaded and shaped the dough the night before, and gotten up early in order to boil, top, and bake them in time for breakfast with the fam. I'd also picked up some smoked fish at a tiny Russian grocery next to my bus stop the day before, and that on the bagels along with some veggie cream cheese and lettuce picked from the garden meant we were truly dining in style. There was only so much time to linger over the meal though—I had a plane to catch, my dad had an exercise class to lead in the park, and my brother had to go back to his apartment. In other words, it was time for my brother and I to remove our chef hats and return the kitchen to our folks.

A square meal in Chinatown: Big Wong and Chinatown Ice Cream Factory

Did I say I was sick of Asian food? Obviously a temporary respite was all I needed, because I found myself in Chinatown's Big Wong with MH a few days later, about to dive into a giant plate of beef chow fun. You could fry a whole second meal in the oil that puddles under these noodles, but I love chow fun all the same. It's definitely one of my favorite junky indulgences; I just have to keep those indulgences at "occasional" and not "frequent."

We also got a side of veggies, the "steamed seasonal vegetables w. oyster sauce" for $3.75. The funny part was, after we ordered we tried not once but twice to change our request—we wanted a different type of veg, which at $7.50 actually cost more—but both times we were told in no uncertain terms that we'd be better off getting the dish we'd originally asked for. "Too big, too much vegetable," was the general message from both our waitress and a manager. They were each so insistent that MH and I just laughed and went with it. Oh, the joys of Chinatown!

We followed our meal with another joy of Chinatown: the Ice Cream Factory. I'd never been impressed with their popular green tea, red bean, almond cookie, or black sesame flavors—I always found that they all tasted too much like basic vanilla—but this time I got a combination of lychee sorbet and mango-papaya sorbet, and I thought they were awesome. Like the cilantro-lime sorbetti I'd had in Philadelphia, both were wonderfully fruity and refreshing. I know now that while I quickly get sick of ice cream or creamy gelatos, sorbets are a sure way to rock my world.

Philadelphia, Day 2: Ocean Harbor, Thai Chef & Noodle Fusion

Catch up! Day 1

The next day, I totally wanted to eat at this place for breakfast, but unfortunately it was too early and they were still closed. Magic kingdom of dough! Where else could I possibly want to be?

Nonetheless, I was happy to go to Ocean Harbor for dim sum instead. TL and I stepped into the large Hong Kong style restaurant just before they began serving, and waited along with everyone else for the carts to begin wheeling out of the kitchen. We had cups of hot tea to warm our hands and keep us company.

After only ten minutes or so, the dim sum started appearing. We quickly pointed to a bunch of items, knowing we were getting the freshest ones possible. Our table quickly filled up with the standards: crystal shrimp dumplings, shaomai, braised beef balls, fried rice-flour dumplings filled with ground pork, and fried taro dumplings filled with ground pork. I thought they were all pretty good, though the fried items were definitely a bit on the greasy side.

We couldn't pass up on the rice noodle rolls (can you tell I can't get enough of those things?), so we ordered a beef roll and a shrimp roll. I also asked for what the woman told me was soup dumplings, but I should have known better. They were terrible specimens, with thick skins, no soup inside, and a bland, heavy filling of pork. Of all the dim sum we ordered, that was the only real clunker.

After breakfast we decided to make the uber-touristy move of taking a Ride the Ducks tour, which turned out to be, well, not super fun, but not bad either. The best part was being in the water. If our guide hadn't hated the world so much, it probably would have been a better tour.

Once the tour ended we made our way to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia's Mütter Museum, which was full of really creepy medical specimens like preserved human brains and a collection of foreign objects that had been removed from people's bodies. Fascinating stuff, though I actually felt kind of sick to my stomach after seeing some of the items in that museum. But this is a food blog, not a gross-out blog, so I won't get into it.

We had just enough time before our bus departure to have a quick meal before leaving. After trying to find something in the food no-man's-land immediately around the museum, we walked all the way to Continental Midtown only to be informed that they were between lunch and dinner service, and so wouldn't be able to feed us. We ended up backtracking to a whimsically decorated restaurant called Thai Chef & Noodle Fusion. (Their business card invites you to "Please Visit our Under Sea Dining" with the suggestion that "Maybe you Want to Jump into the Sea." Maybe, indeed.)

My pad see ew came with a significant amount of vegetable, far more than I'm used to with this dish. The sliced carrots, red and green peppers, and shredded cabbage certainly made the noodles healthier and more colorful, but I think I prefer my beef, rice noodles, broccoli, and egg unadorned. It was pretty good otherwise though, and the dish came in a hefty portion for its price.

Noodles noshed, there was little else to do but walk to the Bolt Bus departure area. TL and I were both really beat, and though I managed to take advantage of the free WiFi for a little while, it was only a matter of time before I passed out. When I woke again we were in Manhattan, with Philadelphia far behind us.

Philadelphia:
Day 1: Reading Terminal Market, DiNic's, Miller's Twist, Capogiero, Vietnam Palace
Day 2: Ocean Harbor, Thai Chef & Noodle Fusion

Before the bus, breakfast at Fuji Bakery

When TL and I realized that we had a weekend free, we decided to take off for Philadelphia for a few days. Maybe it's silly to return to NYC for three weeks only to leave it for somewhere else, but impromptu trips are pretty hard for me to resist.

Before boarding the Bolt Bus (which is now my bus of choice, by the way), we stopped to have breakfast at Fuji Bakery, one of the few places selling Asian baked goods in Midtown. Guess we were hungry—we ordered a hot dog bun, a pineapple bun, two roast pork buns, and two egg custard tarts, all of which were fresh and warm.

I also couldn't resist ordering a "shrimp rice roll" from the breakfast special menu…I think I was still remembering the pork version I'd eaten in Flushing. This one wasn't nearly as good: the rice noodle was thicker, the shrimp were small, and the rolls had clearly been waiting around in the steamer for a while. Still, even when these items aren't freshly made, they're pretty good. I thought it was a pretty satisfying breakfast.

Flushing never fails

Flushing is full of so many delicious things that I can't stand it sometimes.

Take the ground-level booth of Corner 28 restaurant, for instance. They gained a lot of popularity for their dollar Peking Duck sandwiches, but now they're also selling what they advertise as "rice wrap" and "made to order steam rice roll."

Whatever it is, when you tell the woman your choice of beef, pork, roast pork, or baby shrimp, she spreads some out onto a metal tray, pours a thin slurry of rice flour and water over it, and pops the whole thing into a steamer. A minute later, she pulls out the tray to reveal a sheet of soft, bouncy rice noodle embedded with whatever protein you chose (pork, above). Using a spatula, she scrapes this sheet off of the tray and into a small styrofoam container, where it's ready to be better than the best dim sum treat you've ever had. The noodle is perfectly textured and the pork lends awesome flavor. It might not have even needed the container of soy sauce it came with, but I poured it on anyway and regretted my decision not one bit. For one full container, I paid a mere $1.50.

And then there's the cumin-spiked lamb sandwich from the basement of Golden Shopping Mall, which I picked up at X'ian Famous Foods and ate on the train. Sure, the filling was way too salty, and the lamb bits too heavy on the gristle, but where else, for $2.50, can you get such a hefty, unique, flavor-packed sandwich?

Even cold, the giant, floppy egg pancake from one of the stands next to Mayflower Cafe and Bakery was tasty, and it was no more than a dollar or so. I wish I had better directions for where to get this one, but that's how Flushing is to me: a place where you wander around, coming across unexpected pockets of deliciousness, and eating your finds in full enjoyment of the moment. I wouldn't have it any other way.

San Francisco, Day 1: Civic Center Farmer's Market, Bund Shanghai, Paulette, Miette, Mandalay

The last time I was in San Francisco was under simultaneously awesome and unfortunate circumstances. Awesome because it was the finale of a wonderful two-week cross country road trip with two of my good friends; unfortunate because just days earlier, during said trip, I had badly twisted and sprained my knee while white-water rafting on the Colorado River (during a set of rapids JK fell out, the boat tipped up on its side, my foot stayed wedged under the seat before me, my body flew out of the boat, my knee wrenched and my foot popped free). So by the time I got to San Francisco, I had a giant blue knee immobilizer wrapped around my right leg, and I was hobbling around with a wooden cane. (Yup, not crutches—no insurance back than, and a cane was cheaper.) Let's just say that trying to navigate those crazy hills with a busted knee was more than a little inconvenient, so I was pretty happy to explore the city healthy and whole this time around.

GQ had graciously offered me her home and her company, and because I arrived pretty late at night, it wasn't until the next morning that I started getting a sense of where I was. The apartment she shares with her boyfriend BH is in SoMa, which also happens to be quite close to the Civic Center Farmer's Market. As soon as we were able to get ourselves showered and outside, we hit up the market to see what we could eat.

The first thing we encountered was this Belgian Sugar Waffle truck, which neither of us could resist. These yeasty specimens were light, chewy, crisp on the outside, and glazed with the perfect amount of sweetness. They beat the long-ago waffle I had from Wafels & Dinges by a mile.

One waffle was surprisingly filling, so we opted to get tamales from this stand (sorry, didn't get the name, only a photo) and called it the end of breakfast. The one I picked out was the spinach and cheese, which was served hot so that that cheese inside turned gooey. The entire thing was very satisfying.

From the market, we started walking north toward Chinatown. Along the way, we ran into a library book sale and I managed to snap up six books I'd been wanting to read, each for a mere dollar (score!). We also picked up some macarons: the pink and green ones on the left (sweet wedding almond and pistachio) were from the hip macaron shop Paulette, and the more natural-colored ones on the right (pistachio and strawberry buttercream flavors) were from the French bakery Miette. When I tried them later, I found the ones from Paulette superior to the ones from Miette; the latter were too chewy, and the flavored buttercream lacked flavor aside from sweetness. From Paulette, the almond macaron was outstanding, but the pistachio bore zero hint of nut in its taste. Overall not one of the macarons made as much of an impression on me as the ones I had from Madeleine Patisserie in NYC. But maybe that was just the magic of the first time…

I replenished my store of semi-precious stones for jewelry in Chinatown, and then decided to have lunch. We found ourselves in the middle of an odd service hour—it was about 3 or 4 pm and the restaurant GQ had wanted to go to was closed in preparation for dinner. When the second restaurant we tried told us the same, we walked into Bund Shanghai across the street and crossed our fingers that we'd end up with a good meal despite having chosen at random.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how successful we were. The pan-fried noodles with seafood, above, were pretty good…

and so was the chicken-corn soup…

but the "boiled pork sweet rice ball"—flavorless pork filling wrapped inside bland gobs of rice dough, suspended in hot water—was terrible,

and the soup dumplings were the smallest I'd ever seen, with no soup at all inside of them. The meal was okay, but it definitely wasn't the best Chinese food we could have eaten. Lesson learned: still better to do some research first.


After lunch, back at the apartment while waiting for MH to arrive, GQ and I set out to make our own macarons, despite just having purchased so many. But good thing we did—our attempt was, in short, a massive failure. Not only were the cookies completely flat, they stuck in gooey clumps to the Silpat or crumpled up with the merest nudge from finger or spatula. Plus, they were way too sweet. GQ had made several successful batches of macarons prior to baking them with me, so I can only conclude that I was the macaron killer. Sorry, GQ!


Between the farmer's market, Chinatown, and sampling too many failed macarons, it was difficult for me to work up an appetite for the dinner we had planned at Mandalay, a Burmese restaurant. But I'd heard about the Burmese food in San Francisco even before I'd arrived; I'd never tried the cuisine before, and was eager to sample it. So, off we went with BH and MH.

The one dish I always heard about was the fermented tea leaf salad, so that's what we started with, along with a salad that subbed in shreds of fresh young ginger for the smoky, fermented tea leaf paste. The components were very similar otherwise: peanuts, sesame seeds, toasted lentils, ground shrimp, fried garlic, green pepper, and a dressing. Each came beautifully arranged and was mixed tableside by our server. I found the ginger salad too strong, but I loved the toasty, nutty flavors of the tea leaf salad.

We shared an order of balada, which was something between Malaysian roti and Chinese scallion pancake: the crisp round of dough was thick and chewy, but came with a coconut-laced curry dipping sauce. I found it very oily but still delicious.

We also got a tureen of murky-looking samusa (aka samosa) soup, with actual chunks of cut-up samusa bobbing around in the strong, salty broth. There were other things floating in there as well: chick peas, lentils, assorted vegetables, and pieces of something that tasted exactly like falafel. I would never have thought to make broken-up samusa into soup, but the chunks somehow retained their crunch and lent their flavor to the soup in a good way.

By then we were all full, but we had overestimated our appetites and there was still more on the way. Out came "Rangoon Three Ingredients," which combined tender pieces of squid, shrimp, and scallops in a stir-fry with tomatoes and onions. This was a very well balanced dish, and if I had been hungrier I would have definitely eaten more of it.

To go with the seafood we asked for coconut rice and turmeric rice, the latter which arrived looking like a dish of fried rice. Both were wonderfully flavored, with the coconut just edging out the turmeric rice with its hint of milky sweetness. Either would have been good enough to eat plain.

And then there was a noodle dish, which I don't remember very well. I think it had sounded interesting on the menu, but in execution, it was nothing special.

Finally, the four of us split one dessert, just to get a taste. Nearly every Asian culture seems to have an iced dessert like this: shaved or ground ice, ice cream or sweetened condensed milk, various sweet jellies, sweetened beans or bean paste. This one was no different but also no less refreshing at the end of our heavy meal.

Now that I've written up the whole day, I'm just a little appalled at how much we actually ate that day. And this is just the beginning! Whew…

San Francisco:
Day 1: Civic Center Farmer's Market, Bund Shanghai, Paulette, Miette, Mandalay
Day 2: Slanted Door, Ciao Bella, Acme Bread Company, Ghirardelli, Mangarosa
Day 3: Saigon Sandwich, Flying Fish Grill
Day 4: El Tonyayense, Pica Pica Maize Kitchen, Bi-Rite Creamery, Pagolac
Day 5: Lee's Sandwiches