NYC Dining: Momofuku Ssäm Bar

Momofuku Ssäm Bar
207 2nd Ave (At 13th Street)
(212) 254-3500

Late last summer, we brought you inside the kitchen of Ssäm Bar to see its inner workings just before its grand opening, and we spoke to David Chang to hear what his new restaurant concept was all about.

In the 9 months since opening the restaurant, many things have changed. Gone is the original simple menu , replaced with a much more expanded list of offerings, focusing on small plates/appetizers and special/seasonal items. The notable exception to the small plates is the $180 Bo Ssäm, which needs to be asked for in advance, and is the Koreanized equivalent to a Roman pig orgy.

Last night, I was invited to join a group of very nice publishing folks at Ssäm Bar to indulge in a group session of Bo Ssäm, something that should only be undertaken alone or by a couple if you are (A) Insanely hungry or (B) Plan to eat lots of pork for the next several meals.

I’m posting what I remember from memory, I’ll be correcting the descriptions later. Time to sleep off all this …. MEAT.

Click Here for Hi-Res Photos.

Momofuku Ssäm Bar is a love letter to the wonders of Pork. Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

Fun with Salad

Photos by the Olympus Stylus 770 SW

(Click here for hi-res versions)

It was a brutally hot Memorial Day weekend, and after all that meat on Saturday, I knew we had to increase our veggie quotient and eat something a bit more healthy and refreshing.

Here we’ve got some grilled skirt steak that I marinated in a Vietnamese-style marinade overnight, plus some King Oyster mushrooms that have been sliced lengthwise and grilled with a soy/butter glaze.

This salad has romaine lettuce, hearts of napa cabbage, garlic scapes, cherry tomatoes, english cucumbers, red onion, red bell pepper and rice noodles. The dressing is based on “Thai Beef Salad” from Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet

Salad presented with sliced skirt steak, king oyster mushrooms, blanched Gai Lan tips, peanut garnish.

Closeup

If you grow chives in your herb garden and you let them grow too high, they will start to flower. But this is not a problem, because the flowers are actually edible, and they have a very strong oniony flavor. So you’ll want a sweeter-style salad dressing if you use them.

Chive flower closeup

Here we’ve got a mesclun and spinach salad with supremed graprefruit slices, in a garlic/mustard/honey vinaigrette, with pignoli nuts.

Closeup of salad using chopped chive flowers as garnish.

Takoyaki: It’s Octopussylicious

Mitsuwa Marketplace
595 River Rd, Edgewater, NJ
(201) 941-9113

web site: http://www.mitsuwanj.com

For Memorial Day weekend, the Mitsuwa Marketplace Japanese shopping center in Edgewater, NJ brought in a team of Takoyaki meisters from Osaka, Japan to make their griddled battered octopus tentacle treats for the amassing crowds. We went on location to cover this hypnotizing combination of street food and performance art.

Hi-Resolution Photos Click Here

If you are unable to see the embedded video below, click here.

Are you ready for the craze that is Takoyaki? Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

NJ Dining: Belly Full Caribbean Take-Out (CLOSED)

Editor’s note: Belly Full appears to have closed.

Belly Full Caribbean Take Out
1040-C River Road
Edgewater, NJ
(201) 224-6700

Caribbean food is one of my favorite cuisines, but good examples of it are hard to find in North Jersey. I was pleasantly surprised when I encountered a new Island-style take out joint in Edgewater, Belly Full. It’s a family-run place with nice people, with great food.

Storefront on River Road in Edgewater.

Belly Full’s menu is an amalgam of favorite dishes from all the major Caribbean islands, including Jamaica, the USVI and Trinidad, as well as some Soul Food items like Southern Fried Chicken, fried fish and collard greens. The owners hail originally from St. Vincent. It’s got a few small tables where you can eat their fresh made dishes in the store, and watch Bob Marley videos on their HDTV. Be advised the 3 month old store is already very popular (in particular with a number of notable pro basketball and football athletes who live in the Ft. Lee and Edgewater area) so they run out of certain dishes at times.

A peice of Jerk Chicken thigh. Appropriately and authentically spicy.

A pair of Jamaican patties, a spicy beef and a spicy curry chicken. The crust is of the softer, more pie-like crust type, rather than the flaky, crumbly kind you see in commercial varieties like Tower Isles. While the store purchases these from a bakery in the city rather than made in-store, these were nice and fresh, are of an excellent variety and reminded me of the ones Rachel and I had in Ocho Rios back during a trip to Jamaica in 2000. Flavorful, with good meat fillings that were not at all greasy.

Beef Patty cross section.

Chicken Patty cross-section.

Home Made Sorrel drink, which we thought was nice and refreshing and less cloyingly sweet than the bottled kind sold in Jamaican groceries.

A sampler plate with rice and peas, BBQ chicken, Stew, and Oxtails, and Mac and Cheese.

Jerk Chicken sandwich, which had a great spicy dressing on it and came with a sweet carrot salad that was a real knockout. The sandwich itself was excellent and a nice size too, with a big juicy chicken breast on it.

Red Velvet cake, baked by a friend of the owners. It was probably one of the best I’ve ever tried. Apparently, they sell Carrot Cakes that are even better, but they disappear early in the day due to huge demand.

Nice Weather = WEBER (XI): Ribs

A recent topic on Ed Levine’s quite excellent SeriousEats.com site gave me a serious craving for BBQ ribs over the Memorial Day weekend. So I decided to head over to one of my favorite butchers, Kocher’s Meats in Ridgefield, and picked up a couple of racks of baby backs and some spare ribs for some good eatin’.

Wanna learn how to make ribs that come out like this? Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

It’s a Food Seasoning, Light Fixture and Air Purifier!

Recently, on a trip to H-Mart (Han Ah Reum) in Little Ferry, NJ, we saw these weird things in the adjoining market:

These are lighting fixtures made out of mined salt deposits, and they come in all different sizes.

I happen to think they are weird looking, although I wouldn’t mind one in the living room. Its kind of creepy in a Aliens/Pod People kind of way. Supposedly, they also purify your air, but I’m not sure how that works. I’m guessing its pseudoscience.

Calling All Koreans

As many of you know, we at Off The Broiler are huge fans of Korean food. But we realize that we’ve only scratched the surface of one of the most under-appreciated Asian cuisines represented in the United States.

This summer, we’d like to find the very best in Korean Food in the New York Metro Area (Manhattan, NJ, Queens) . However, we have a little bit of a problem — we don’t speak Korean, and many of the best Korean places in the area aren’t English-friendly. We could eat at restaurants at random, but there are so many (especially in Bergen County and Queens) that we wouldn’t know where to start.

Our objective is to find the Korean BBQ places that still use charcoals, the very best mandoos, and other specialty Korean restaurants that we might not be aware of but would benefit Off The Broiler readers. To do that, we need guides that speak Korean and know the best restaurants in the area. If you can spend a weekend afternoon/evening with us eating at your favorite places, please send an email to jperlow@gmail.com. Or tell us where to go and what to order!

Jason

NYC Dining Event Summary: Share Our Strength (UPDATED)

The Share Our Strength: Taste of the Nation event for New York City was held at the Roseland Ballroom last night, right in the heart of the theater district. It was a massive event, hosting some 2000 (or more) people. NYC’s top restaurants and chefs, along with a number of premium liquor and beverage vendors fed a hungry and thirsty crowd and advancing the worthy cause of fighting child hunger.

The room was very dark, and I had to use flash and post processing for a lot of these pictures, so please excuse the quality.

The Roseland Ballroom on 52nd Street.

The NYC Share Our Strength 2007 event was the biggest food event I’ve ever been to in my life, with excellent dishes abound. Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

NJ Dining: Guernsey Crest Ice Cream

Guernsey Crest Ice Cream Co
134 19th Ave, Paterson, NJ
(973) 742-4620

There are certain places that you shouldn’t judge on external appearances alone — and one of these is Guernsey Crest Ice Cream in Paterson.

Opened by the Cornwell family in 1927, Guernsey Crest has been producing ice cream commercially and serving its fans for 80 years now. The family owned business, now in its fourth generation, resides in a part of Paterson that has seen better days. The building looks like the last major renovation was in the 60’s or 70’s and is covered in graffiti. The signs look weathered and overall it has a scary, ghetto-like appearance. Frankly, it looks more like an ice cream place you’d find on the last scene of the Sopranos than Holsten’s does.

I think this paint needs a touch-up.

The first time I attempted to go to Guernsey Crest, when surfing ice cream parlor listings on my GPS navigation device, I drove by this building thinking something highly illegal was going on. In fact, when I came to the realization that this in fact WAS an ice cream business, I chickened out and didn’t come back until I got reliable confirmation that the ice cream was good.

Here’s the list of ice cream flavors, which is displayed outside.

The counter area, which resembles an urban check cashing business. I wonder if those windows are bulletproof.

The full menu of ice cream treats. Notice you can get gallon and 3 gallon pails if you want — they produce this stuff for commercial distribution.

Rachel’s amaratto chip ice cream cone — a whole $1.25! I had a banana shake, which was excellent. Total bill, $4.50.

NYC Dining: Liebman’s Delicatessen

Liebman’s Kosher Delicatessen
552 W 235th St, Bronx, NY
718.548.4534

web site: http://www.liebmansdeli.com/

I love Jewish delis. The sad reality remains that they are quickly fading from the American landscape as generations of people who loved and prepared this type of food are dying off. Additionally, the climbing prices of urban real estate make it all to tempting to sell off and bulldoze these cultural landmarks in favor of condos or shopping centers. This realization that the days are numbered for the Jewish delicatessen makes me crave a good pastrami on rye with a kasha knish and a Cel-Ray even more.

One such deli that appears to be defying this unfortunate trend of decline is Liebman’s, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, which remains a very strong bastion of older Jewish American residents.

Liebman’s, clogging Jewish arteries with love since 1953.

A trip to Liebman’s is like going back in time to the good old days when Jewish delis were in every major NYC neighborhood. Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link for more.