Because of the asparagus allergy I developed a few years ago, all I can do is stare wistfully at asparagus when it appears every spring at the farmer’s market. This time of year is especially hard — you can find all different sizes of asparagus; pencil thin or thick and crunchy. This would be a good time of year for Donny’s proposed 11-course asparagus dinner.
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Think about a restaurant that can be described by the following: it services people from all different backgrounds, including cab drivers. It’s cheap enough that pretty much anyone can afford it. It’s completely free of any pretentions and food trends. And the food is delicious. Doesn’t all of that sound great? The other day while eating lunch at Punjabi Deli I had an epiphany — the tiny little vegetarian Indian “restaurant” is my favorite eating experience in NYC.
If you’ve never heard of it, Punjabi Deli is a small grocery store on Houston that serves great Indian food. You can eat in, standing hunched over the narrow counter, shoulder-to-shoulder with a random collection of New Yorkers. Sure, they use a microwave to heat up the food, but when you taste it you won’t mind. In the bowl in the foreground is a samosa — in this case, cut open and topped with yogurt, chickpeas, raw onions, and a variety of chutneys and sauces. It’s one of my very favorite things in the city — a mix of hot and cold, salty and sweet, crunchy and smooth.
As a food blogger I get asked a lot about my favorite restaurants in the city, and for some reason Punjabi Deli never occurs to me. That changed, as of that lunch a few weeks ago. It’s the new place I want to take out-of town guests to. Plus, il laboratorio del gelato is right across the street so you can get a little dessert to cool your mouth down from the spices.
Punjabi Deli — 114 E 1st St #3, Manhattan
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This piece was written on 4/25/2013. On 4/27 we visited Beer Table on their last night, where a patron made an impromptu toast to the owners and I drank a beer called Gypsy Tears.
On April 27th, 2013, Beer Table in Park Slope will serve its last beer after five years. The small bar and restaurant was well-known for its incredible beer selection; in addition to a few drafts and casks, the bottled beer menu contained hundreds of options from brewers all over the world, with bottles that cost anywhere from $8 to a select few over $100. This was not the kind of place to chug pitchers of beer; Beer Table was a place to actually drink beer, and to discover new ones. The sign on the door says they need a bigger space – and a bigger kitchen. Justin Philips, one of the owners, says that serving food was always his first priority.
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I’m a big fan of Xi’an Famous Foods, so I was excited when they opened a full, sit-down restaurant in Flushing: Biang! The name is supposedly derived from the sound that the noodle dough makes as it is slammed against the counter while being worked, and make no mistake: the noodles are good. But I like to think that the exclamation point at the end of the name refers to the bold, bright flavors that characterize the best dishes at Biang! In fact the few dishes we didn’t enjoy were the ones lacking that bright, exclamatory punch. For an example of what Biang! does right, take the bao’ji mung bean jelly pictured above. Served cold, the mung bean jelly is cut into noodley strips and sits soaking in a bath of soy and vinegar. It’s a wake-up call to the palate, impossible to ignore (and nearly as impossible to stop eating).
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Lily Ng, the manager of May Wah Vegetarian Market (and daughter of its owners), is not a vegetarian. Or, as she put it, “not yet.”
May Wah was created by Lily’s mother, who came to New York from Taiwan. Raised as a Taoist vegetarian, Lily’s mom was disappointed with the options for vegetarians in New York. In Taiwan she had hundreds of different vegetarian foods available to her, but the most she could find here was vegetables and a little tofu. Determined to bring some of vegetarian Taiwan to NYC, she created the shop in 1995 and began importing vegetarian products from Taiwan.
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After returning from Taiwan (see here and here) I was kind of craving some Taiwanese food here in NYC. My friend Sophia, who has family in Taiwan and was in the country the same time I was, recommended that we meet up at TKettle, a Taiwanese snack joint on St. Marks in the East Village. TKettle is her go-to place for Taiwanese snack food in the city (Gu Shine in Flushing is her recommendation for a full Taiwanese meal). Above you see the appetizer plate, a great introduction to some traditional Taiwanese dishes. Top left you see preserved eggs, with a concentrated eggy flavor. Top right is cold pressed tofu, with a slightly sweet flavor. And at the bottom is the cold cucumber salad, which is amazing — loaded with spicy garlic, these crunchy cucumber chunks are at once shocking and refreshing.
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Minutina may sound like the name of a long lost Pokemon (or is that just me?), but it’s a long-leafed green I spotted at Bodhi Tree Farm’s stand at yesterday’s Union Square Greenmarket. The sign said it was good for salads or light cooking, so first I tasted a strand of it raw. It tasted a lot like lettuce. I decided to blanch it in salted water — I brought the water to a boil, tore off the stem end of the minutina, dropped the leaves into the water, and when it came back up to a boil I turned off the heat and drained the leaves out of the water. Cooked the leaves took on the texture of scallion greens, without the onion-y bite of scallions. Good as a novelty, sure, but I don’t think I’ll be adding minutina to my regular rotation of veggies any time soon.
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