NYC Dining: Chinatown Brasserie

Chinatown Brasserie
380 Lafayette Street
New York, New York
212-533-7000

Click for Related Post (newer): Dim Sum at Chinatown Brasserie  

Last night I was lucky enough to get into Chinatown Brasserie on its first night of service. It’s a beautiful, huge indoor space, seating about 400 people, serving what I would probably call “Tweaked” American Chinese food with interesting twists, along with very hardcore Hong Kong Dim Sum. The menu and restaurant concept was refined by the legendary Eddie Schoenfeld, a restaurant consultant well known for his involvement in four star Chinese restaurants during the 1970’s (click for podcast). There are two complete kitchens, one dedicated entirely to Dim Sum production under Chef Joe Ng and the other a full kitchen for main dishes and Chinese barbecue under Executive Chef Tyson Ophaso, a Thai-born ethnic Chinese chef who has trained under 3-Star Michelin Chef Claude Troisgros. During the day and on weekends, the restaurant is slated to produce over 40 different selections of Dim Sum, using Joe Ng’s reported repertoire of over 1000 varieties.

The restaurant on Lafayette Street.

Main Entrance

A view of the main dining room from the parlor area. The ambiance is very much 1930’s Hong Kong and Shanghai retro combined with modern fusion, particularly the very loud trance soundtrack playing in the background that evokes something of the discotheque scenes on TV’s “Alias”. I think they should ratchet the sound down a few decibels, because if this is supposed to be a “date” or a “destination” restaurant, you can’t hear yourself think.

Chicken Chow Mein. The American Chinese classic is updated with a giant fried noodle shell, much like a tostada, into which sauteed white meat chicken with vegetables and nicely caramelized onions is poured. A fun starter.

Beef Triangles

Snow Pea Leaf and Shrimp Dumplings

Barbecue Pork Loin

Beef and Broccoli. Another American classic, updated with high quality Flatiron steak, fresh shitakke mushrooms, fresh sweet water chestnuts, and some sliced hot chillies to add some zing. A Thai-style soy sauce is used to give this dish a slightly different and distinctive flavor from the classic.

Hong-Kong style Seafood Pan Fried noodles, in a reduced chicken stock, with shrimp, mussels, diver scallops, fresh tomato and Thai basil.

If you order too much food, you get to take your leftovers home in these cute microwave safe takeout containers.

Banana and Peanut Butter Parfait

Almond Cake with Raspberry

Chocolate Fortune Cookies

Executive Chef Tyson Ophaso

NYC Dining: Difara Pizza

Difara Pizzeria
1424 Avenue J, Brooklyn, NY
(718) 258-1367

Related Post: DiFara, It’s Hip to be Square 

I don’t really have words that can adequately describe just how amazing the pizza that Domenick DeMarco makes at DiFara. The man has a magical skill for transforming simple, high quality raw ingredients into some of the best pizza in the entire NY Metro area. He isn’t using an anthracite coal oven like Patsy’s, Arturo’s, Grimaldi’s, Lombardi’s, or Totonno, but what he is able to accomplish with an old, beat up steel deck pizza oven is nothing short of miraculous. The pictures, and this video I took (4 minutes, Google Video) really do speak for themselves.

7-12-06 NOTE to Visitors coming from the blogosphere: I’ve moved the Difara vid to Google Video. This version is improved because it has sound, the last one did not. You guys managed to suck down 90 gigs of video data last month, so now I have to move all my video stuff over there or my buddy Dave will go broke.

Click for link to Newer DiFara post on Square Pies

DiFara looks like an old beat up Pizza parlor in an old Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. The looks can be deceiving.

Mozzarella di Bufala, which is used in combination with low moisture Mozzarella and Parmigianno-Reggiano cheese.

A square pie being readied for the oven.

A plain pie, bubbling, just out of the oven.

Closeup, with fresh basil added.

A happy customer. Expect to wait 30 minutes or so for a pie during prime business hours.

Pizza Menu

Italian specialties menu

A row of fresh basil plants used to top the pizzas.

Oregano

Dom said these were Rosemary Plants

Dom saucing a pie.

A baby artichoke slice

Artichoke slice closeup. The oily residue is extra virgin olive oil used as seasoning drizzled over the top.

A plain pie being hit with basil

Plain slice closeup.

Sausage and Porcini Mushroom pie

Porcini mushroom slice closeup.

Memorial Day Thunder, Lightning, and Sausage

It was hot as hell today in Jersey. Rachel decided to stay at home while I went on a shopping trek to the Home Depot garden store to pick up some Zucchini and Cucumber plants (a failed mission on the Cukes, they didn't water them and they looked dried up and dead) eat lunch, get a haircut, and go food shopping. After an exhausting day zooming around in a car that clearly needed a freon recharge, I headed over to the supermarket to pick up some supplies. 'Lo and behold I find some nice freshly made Italian Sausage in the meat department. Grabbed some Cubanelle peppers and some other stuff, and raced home.

Well, I was planning to have a nice outdoor Memorial Day dinner, but mother nature interfered. Just as I step in the front door, we get hit with a major lightning storm. But did that deter me from firing up the Genesis C and performing my God-given right to grill up sausage on Memorial Day? Hell no. I was scared I was gonna get zapped, and I kept darting in and out of the house, thinking that would reduce the odds of getting hit with a bolt of lightning, but I think the results were worth it.

The weather may have failed us, but the trusty old Weber did not disappoint.

Podcast #16 and #17: Tony Bourdain

Click Here for the No Reservations Website

Click here for The Nasty Bits (Amazon.com)

Click Here to Listen to the Off the Broiler Podcast (Part 1)

Click Here to Listen to the Off the Broiler Podcast (Part 2)

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What they use to hunt wild boar in Ghana

Tony’s not giving up on smoking, even if he has to leave the country to do it.

Miami Ink tattoo #1

Miami Ink tattoo #2.

A dime bag of Hua Jiao, Sichuan Peppercorn.

NJ Dining: Front Street Smokehouse

Front Street Smokehouse & Saloon
(908) 354-1818
1 S Front St
Elizabeth, NJ 07202

Barbecue in Northern New Jersey has been something of an unstable animal — we've had some really good 'Q places in the last several years that have burned very brightly, but only for a short time, such as Fink's Funky Chicken and Ribs in River Edge and Stickey's BBQ in Teaneck. While there are no shortage of "Rib Joints" in the local area, none of them are doing actual BARBECUE, that being meats that are slow cooked using wood smoke. "Rib Joints" typically just boil or steam the ribs, then finish them off in the oven with some BBQ sauce. This is not to say that they don't taste good, its just that it's not the real deal. 

Front Street Smokehouse in Elizabeth has been doing actual 'Q for about three months now, although their bar has been open for a bit longer. Rachel and I decided to head down there on a Saturday evening and check out their food.

Bar crowd, 9:30PM on a Saturday night. A street festival that was blocking the street just completed, so I imagine that this place gets a lot more crowded on the weekends.

Iced Tea, in a Mason Jar. Kitschy but I like it.

Rachel's Smoked Chicken, with Mac and Cheese and Red Cabbage Coleslaw. Chicken overall did not have a heavy smoky profile until you got to the breast meat, but it was very moist and tasty and good quality chicken nevertheless. Its only smoked for about 3 to 4 hours. Front Street also offers a Chicken Breast over salad or sandwich that is much more smokier due to the fact is a thinner peice of meat and is able to absorb more smoke during the cooking time.

My "Pig Out" Platter, with Memphis-Style Babyback Ribs, Pork Shoulder, Sausage and Brisket.

I thought the Ribs were excellent, had some really nice chew in them, really good smoke to them. I'm not as much of a fan of babybacks as I am KC or St. Louis Cut ribs, but Memphis-style is the overall stylistic choice of the restaurant so I appreciate it. Good quality pork, nice six-hour smoke to them.

Brisket is good brisket although machine-sliced, which I think is a shame. Hand Sliced brisket in nice thick slices is a thing of beauty, although I imagine that in a restaurant situation machine slicing is a lot easier to deal with, particularly if the brisket is a popular item on sandwiches.

I liked the pulled pork, and its very smoky due to its 16-hour smoking process, which is definitely on the high end of what most BBQ places do.

The sausage is a mixed bag. Its excellent quality sausage, procured from a well-known local butcher, but its Italian sweet sausage with fennel that has then undergone smoking, not a Texas Hot Link. Something about eating this kind of sausage with the Italian spicing threw me off, especially with the sweet and vinegary warm Memphis-style BBQ sauce (which overall, I am not a fan of — I dont think their 'Cue really needs a sauce). Don't get me wrong, it's really good sausage, but I think that I'll have it in a Italian Sausage and Peppers sub the next time I come back (although, it doesn't appear on the menu).

Red Cabbage Slaw

Fred Flintsone Beef Rib. Beefy, fatty, juicy.

Front Street is using a combination of Cherry, Wood Charcoal and Gas for the cooking process, as opposed to using all wood fire. Its very expensive to get fruit wood down in Elizabeth and this makes the most economical sense. Plus, I think its working for them:

I also saw them grilling some nice 1/2lb burgers up in the kitchen. They looked and smelled great. If you're not in the mood for Q, I think it would be safe to say Front Street would be great for a burger and a beer.

Sides we thought were all uniformly very good. Good Mac and Cheese, The Red Cabbage Cole slaw was a nice change from the typical slaw, and the BBQ Black Beans was again, a nice change up as well from the typical white beans immersed in BBQ sauce style. Red Potato Salad was excellent. The only thing I found scratching my head about was there was no greens on the menu. NO GREENS? At a BBQ joint?

Overall I would say Front Street is doing really good 'cue. You can talk stylistic choices until you are blue in the face (type of sauce, type of ribs used, duration of smoking process on Chicken vs. the Pork, etc) but at the end of the day, these guys really care about what they are doing and the end product is good. I hope Front Street's success will finally encourage the startup of more BBQ restaurants in Jersey again.

NJ Dining: Bergen County Dim Sum Parlors

Bergen County has some of the best Chinese eateries anywhere in the state. We’re lucky to have two really phenomenal Dim Sum restaurants, Silver Pond and Dim Sum Dynasty, who make some of the best dumplings in the entire Tri-State region.

NOTE: Please also see my earlier entry for Noodle Chu, in Parsippany. Not Bergen County, but definitely worth the trip if you are in the Morris County area.

Silver Pond Seafood Restaurant
230 Main St, Fort Lee, NJ
(201) 592-8338

01/01/09 Silver Pond recently re-opened after a 4 month closure. Thanks to Bill Pitcher for the update.

Silver Pond is a Fort Lee institution that has been in business for over 20 years. It really looks like something that belongs in Hong Kong, not in Northern New Jersey. Like all Dim Sum parlors you need to get there fairly early on a weekend (11:30-12 Noon is about as late as you really want to get there) and bring either cash or your American Express Card, ’cause they don’t take Visa or MasterCard. In fact, I maintain a personal AMEX Optima just for the sole purpose of eating at this place and going to Costco. That alone should tell you something. The photos here just barely scratch the surface of their dim sum offerings.

Main Dining Room

Live seafood tanks amuse small children

Scallion Pancake

Gai Lan with Oyster Sauce

Pan Fried Noodle with Superior Soy Sauce

Salt and Pepper Fried Shrimp

Pork Shu Mai

Pork Wrapped with Yuba Skin.

Fried Shrimp Paste wrapped with Bacon

Pan Fried Pork Dumplings

Sticky Rice wrapped in Lotus Leaf

Sticky Rice Wrapped in Lotus Leaf (opened)

A type of fried shrimp dumpling with cilantro.

Fried Shrimp Balls

Roast Duck

Mushroom Roll

Steamed Fluffy BBQ Pork Bun

Dim Sum Dynasty
75 Franklin Ave, Ridgewood, NJ
(201) 652-0615

If Silver Pond is the classic, dependable, experienced Dim Sum Parlor then Dim Sum Dynasty is the young whippersnapper, with new tricks up its sleeve and wearing a much snazzier outfit. It is by far the more elegant restaurant and has some very interesting offerings that you don’t necessarily get at old warhorses like Silver Pond. This is not to say all the food items are superior, some are better and some are average. I like to alternate between the two restaurants myself.

Main Dining Room of Dim Sum Dynasty

Dim Sum Dynasty’s Pork Siu Mai

Fried Squid with Cashew Nuts

Crab/Shrimp Beggar’s Purses

Shrimp Har Gow

Clams in Black Bean Sauce

Flaky Pork Pastry Triangles

Mango Pudding

Steamed Pea Shoot Dumplings

Dim Sum Dynasty’s Pork Wrapped in Yuba Skin

Green Pepper stuffed with Shrimp Paste

Fluffy BBQ Pork Buns

Another type of clam dish, this one is dry sauteed.

E-Fu Mein Noodles

Baked Pork Buns. Dim Sum Dynasty’s are not to be missed, especially if they are just out of the oven.

NYC Dining: Market Cafe

Market Cafe
496 9th Ave, New York, NY
(212) 967-3892

Rachel and I were in Midtown on the West Side tonight visiting a friend, so we decided to go local on his very strong reccomendation and eat at Market Cafe, an eclectic sort of regulars neighborhood bistro joint serving really top notch food at very reasonable prices.

Main Dining Room

Scallops over Brown Butter and Mashed Potatoes Appetizer. I could have eaten four or five of these scallops as a main dish and I would have been totally satisfied. By far my favorite dish of the evening but everything we had was really good.

Gnocchi Appetizer. Also a really good dish, if there was anything that we could complain about was that the sauce to gnocchi ratio was a bit out of whack. More gnocchi!

Arugula with Wild Mushrooms and Walnuts salad

Three Cheese Penne. An upscale Mac and Cheese, came out nice and bubbly. Not too overwhelming on the cheese flavor, it was nice to share.

Steak Frites, their signature hangar steak with French Fries and Pesto. An excellent dish and a great value.

We didn't get dessert, but from the desserts we saw coming out, in particular a really nice big slice of moist multi-layer chocolate cake, I'd say it would be defnitely worth it.

DIY Taco Stand

I guess I’m a bit fixated on Mexican food this week as I decided to make some tacos today for lunch, inspired by Tony Bourdain’s recent Texas/Mexico border episode that aired on the Travel Channel a few days ago. Not the kind of bastardized Tex-Mex with grated cheddar cheese and sour cream and all kinds of garbage on it on a fried Ortega shell, but the real kind of tacos that you find as Mexican street food in Mexico City, Puebla, and elsewhere in that country.

Here’s where you want to start, with your taco mise-en-place:

We’ve got leftover rough chopped grilled onions, chopped up cilantro, chopped up chile pepper, de-seeded (I used serrano because I like the serious burn, but jalapeno or your favorite chile will do fine) a nice fresh cut up lime, and a package of corn or flour tortillas. I’ve also got a plate of leftover steak (originally marinated in Goya Adobo con Cumino for that autentico Mexican flavor) cut up into small pieces. You should probably do a better job than I did of cutting them, because these pieces were really too big.

Next, heat up a cast iron skillet REALLY FREAKING HOT and then toss your leftover steak up with the onions:

Once you got the steak and onions heated through, remove from pan and set aside on a plate. With the pan still nice and hot, throw two tortillas onto the pan, and toast them up for about a minute on each side, just so they heat up nice and get a few brown spots on them. Remove each tortilla and stack them up one on top of the other. Repeat the process until you’ve got a couple of two-stack tortilla bases on a plate.

Next, put some of the grilled steak and onion mixture on each tortilla stack, and garnish with the chopped cilantro. Give each taco a squeeze of lime, and eat with your favorite hot sauce.

I’m partial to Valentina but there are a number of other authentic Mexican hot sauces out there, like El Yucateco and Tapatio.

This works with just about any kind of meat. My favorites are leftover chicken and Mexican chorizo sausage, and grilled shrimp.

Thinly sliced up pink radish (rabano) as a garnish is also a super-authentic way to go.

Picasa for Linux

Hooray Hooray, Calloo Callay, Picasa for Linux is here.

Picasa for Linux, running on my SUSE Linux 10.1 desktop.

Picasa is what I use to do pretty much all my photo edits for Off The Broiler and the pictures I post on eGullet. Until today, however, its been a Windows-exclusive program. Sure, there were hacks to be able to run it semi-decently using the GPL WINE software and Crossover Office on Linux before, but what Google and Codeweavers has done with the new Linux release is really tweak the heck out of the WINE runtime (with over 200 fixes contributed to the WINE project itself that should improve many other Windows programs running on Linux) to really be able to run it cleanly and transparently on Linux without any serious compatability bugs.

If you're looking for an excellent photo editing package that's really easy to use on Linux, you definitely need to give this free software a whirl. Sure, there's other more powerful stuff out there like GIMP, but this should pretty much satisfy the needs of 90 percent of the ameteur digital photographers out there using Linux as their desktop computing platform.

NJ Dining: La Batalla

La Batalla (formerly Cinco De Mayo)
83 N Washington Ave, Bergenfield, NJ
(201) 385-0303

In an earlier post about a local taqueria, Mi Pueblo I touched a bit about how Bergenfield is quickly becoming like a Little Puebla or Little Mexico City, with its influx of Mexican immigrants. La Batalla is a restaurant I’ve been going to for a couple of years now that I’ve become quite endeared of, because its this real dump of a place (although the owner is in the middle of doing some renovations that might make it more approachable by gringos) that makes amazing Mexican food. Quite frankly I think it gives places I’ve been to in Mexico City and Austin a run for its money. Don’t be scared off by its appearance, GO.

Storefront

Interior is now fully renovated

Look, new tables!

A grocery section has recently been added

Get your chiles by the pound

Owner Santiago Huerta with Chicharrones

Y los chips

Mexican Coke, the Real Thing.

Squirt, a grapefruit flavored soda.

Sopa Poblano

Taquitos de Pollo y Bistec

Chicken Taquito closeup

Steak Taquito Closeup

Quesadilla de Chorizo

Chilequiles con Huevos

Bistec Envuelto

“Sopes” cooking on the grill

Chile Rellenos

Chuletas de Puerco

Enchiladas

Steak and Chicken Sopes

Steak La Batalla

Torta Milanesa

Taco de Carne Enchilada

Chalupas on the grill

Festival de Camarones

Bunuelo