...more recent posts
and here
$25 AND UNDER; East Village Noodles, All the Way From Japan
By ERIC ASIMOV
Published: July 14, 2004, Wednesday
ARTICLE TOOLS
Printer Friendly Format Printer-Friendly Format
Most E-mailed Articles Most E-Mailed Articles
FOR many Japanese, ramen is not so much a noodle dish as an obsession. Americans know ramen as the savior of college students, who, equipped with only hot plate, dried noodles and powdered broth, whip up late-night snacks. This packaged meal has little to do with the Japanese conception of ramen, which is more akin to Mom's chicken soup, painstakingly and lovingly prepared and consumed with a sense of comfort and well-being.
Not that Japanese mothers are all slaving over the pot. In Japan, most ramen is consumed at shops and stands that dot the cities. And, just as my parents, when traveling overseas, told me they craved the sort of Jewish foods that they rarely ate at home in New York, many Japanese travelers and expatriates who experience ramen lust may simply be longing for the comforts of home.
One such expat is Shigeto Kamada, a musician, who says he despaired of finding good ramen in New York. So he taught himself to make it by reading books and watching videos. Now he is satisfying similar appetites at Minca, a little ramen shop he opened about a month ago in the East Village.
Mr. Kamada calls Minca a ramen factory, but there is little about the place that suggests an assembly line. It is just a storefront with four or five tables and eight or so seats at a counter. Tiny halogen spotlights hang from the ceiling, and unusual selections from Mr. Kamada's art collection adorn the brick walls.
Many people assume that ramen means noodles, but noodles are only one component of the complete ramen dish. The noodles themselves are of the type called chukasoba, or Chinese-style soba noodles. Unlike soba noodles, which are made of buckwheat, curly chukasoba noodles are wheat and have a springy elasticity that lets them remain squiggly even when cooked.
Mr. Kamada uses dried, portioned noodles delivered from Japan. Though crucial to ramen, the noodles are the easy part. Far more difficult is the soup. Mr. Kamada uses 80 percent pork bones and 20 percent chicken bones to prepare his broth, which he boils for hours until it achieves a light, velvety texture, a milky color and an intense porkiness.
If you take a seat at the bar and order the basic ramen ($8.50), you can watch Mr. Kamada assemble it before you. First, he puts a portion of the noodles in a pot of boiling water. Then, he opens a white vessel on his work counter, revealing dozens of hard-cooked eggs steeping in a soy sauce. With chopsticks he plucks one out and slices it lengthwise.
From another pot he pours the fragrant broth into a blue earthenware bowl. He adds the egg, a selection of ''mountain vegetables,'' which look like curly mushrooms, and salt and pepper. He tosses in the noodles and uncovers a long pan filled with cooked pork, sliced ultrathin. Eying the pork carefully, he selects a few slices and floats them on top of the broth. Finally, he adds a small sheet of nori seaweed.
On a summer day, the ramen experience can be a bit like taking a steam bath. With soup spoon in one hand and chopsticks in the other, you alternate bites of savory pork; slurps of noodles; sips of the rich, peppery broth; and occasional tastes of egg, scallion and mountain vegetable. I like to add a jolt of spicy red hot sauce. Before long you can feel your face begin to flush, and beads of sweat break out on your forehead. Each bite feels like feeding the furnace, yet the ramen is so good that you do not want to stop.
Variations on the ramen theme include soy ramen ($8.50), with an extra dose of soy sauce in the broth, and chicken ramen ($8.50), which uses a lighter chicken-and-fish broth. You can have it tsukemen-style ($8.50), in which the noodles are served in a separate bowl. You dip the noodles in the soup before eating them. For a little more, you can have charshu ramen ($11.50), which is topped with six or seven slices of pork. Or you can try my favorite, toriniku ramen ($11.50), which is topped with meltingly soft chunks of pork belly and buttery tender leaves of green cabbage.
Preliminaries might include exceptionally delicate gyoza dumplings ($4.50), stuffed with pork and pungent cabbage, or a refreshing salad of julienned daikon ($4), dressed with a spicy sesame sauce. That's it. No dessert, no beer or wine (you can bring your own), just ramen.
For that, the predominantly Japanese clientele seems especially grateful.
Minca
536 East Fifth Street (Avenue B), East Village; (212) 505-8001.
((skinny))
need to eat here
Using His Noodle
Before he opened Momofuku Noodle Bar, David Chang spent months cooking and eating in Japan, where he learned that ramen is as diverse as American barbecue, and that variations are just as passionately debated among connoisseurs. So rather than attempt the impossible—making “real ramen” far from its authentic Japanese context—he’s come up with his own style, using ingredients like miso compound butter, eggs slowly poached in their shells, Greenmarket corn, and Berkshire pork. The result is a gently priced menu rooted in tradition but not enslaved by it, with a Pan-Asian twist in the form of additions like cold Korean buckwheat noodles and Chinese pork buns.
163 First Avenue
212-475-7899
((skinny))
Using His Noodle
Before he opened Momofuku Noodle Bar, David Chang spent months cooking and eating in Japan, where he learned that ramen is as diverse as American barbecue, and that variations are just as passionately debated among connoisseurs. So rather than attempt the impossible—making “real ramen” far from its authentic Japanese context—he’s come up with his own style, using ingredients like miso compound butter, eggs slowly poached in their shells, Greenmarket corn, and Berkshire pork. The result is a gently priced menu rooted in tradition but not enslaved by it, with a Pan-Asian twist in the form of additions like cold Korean buckwheat noodles and Chinese pork buns.
163 First Avenue
212-475-7899
hebrew, the chosen beer
skinny loves wd~50:
last nite the food was fab, i am not sure i will eat a better meal this year, this years bay scallops might even be better than last year (which were the #1 in nyc), the new monkfish dish is fantastic, and the desserts were stunning as usual (french toast is not just for breakfast anymore)......
skinny sez yum yum
NYTimes $25 and Under reviews Uminoie (86 East Third Street; 646-654-1122):
Mutsumi Tanaka and Mika Okui opened this unassuming spot in January without a day of professional kitchen experience between them. The women, both in their 20's, cook, act as hostesses and wash dishes behind a five-seat bar — not unlike an island counter flanked by stools in a home kitchen — that is the focal point of the narrow, sparsely appointed space.
Uminoie serves an idiosyncratic blend of food cooked in the style of Goto Island, west of Nagasaki, where Ms. Tanaka grew up, and in the style of Ms. Okui's mother, who is from Tokyo. Goto's cuisine is distinguished by the use of ago-dashi, a broth made by briefly simmering dried flying fish, in lieu of ichiban-dashi, the dried bonito and kelp stock commonly used in Japanese cooking.
Portions are generally small, and the menu is not divided into courses. You are encouraged to linger, to drink and to order at a leisurely pace, as is the custom at an uminoie, a casual beachside restaurant and bar.
Dishes from Goto and nightly specials are the best bets. Goto udon ($8) showcases the sweet, delicate flavor of ago-dashi in a simple soup of hand-cut udon noodles made by Ms. Tanaka's father on Goto. The creamy curd of a rolled omelet infused with ago-dashi ($8) called to mind another fish and egg combo, slow-cooked eggs with caviar. Nikujyaga ($5), beef stewed in ago-dashi with onions, potatoes and carrots, has an elusive and alluring sweetness that hints at mirin or miso.
Prodded for its secrets, the kitchen coyly offered that the stew contained "other Japanese flavors" in the manner in which home cooks "accidentally" omit an ingredient when passing on recipes.
BEST DISHES Goto udon; dashimaki-tamago (rolled omelet); nikujyaga (beef stew); kakuni (pork belly); stuffed peppers; gyoza.
SOME stories are simply too improbable to be made up. Here's one: In 1770, the French secretly sent a one-armed amateur botanist named Pierre Poivre -- yes, Peter Pepper -- to the Moluccas, hoping to alter the balance of power by breaking the Dutch stranglehold on a strategic commodity, nutmeg. (Well, two commodities, technically, since mace is made from the membrane that surrounds the flesh inside the fruit of the nutmeg tree.) The plan was almost foiled when some rebellious islanders thought the French might be a Dutch raiding party, but in the end Poivre managed to bring 20,000 nutmeg plants, along with a few hundred clove seedlings, back to Paris to be planted in the Jardin du Roi.
lugers is bunk (skinny)
RIP ancel keys - dead at 100 "eat well and stay well"
"The K Ration, named for him, was originally made up of items from a Minneapolis grocery store -- hard biscuits, dry sausage, hard candy and chocolate."
"That "Seven Countries Study" provided evidence that a diet rich in vegetables, fruit, pasta, bread and olive oil and sparing of meat, eggs, butter and dairy products reduces the occurrence of heart disease."
From Gawker, a report that makes me want to check out Freemans:
Freemans tuesday night the 16th of nov. the bush twins along with 2 massive secret service men tried to have dinner they were told by the maitre 'd that they were full and would be for the next 4 years upon hearing the entire restaurant cheered and did a round of shots it was amazing!!!
skinnys skin last nite loved the hen of the woods mushrooms (sauted in butter oil onion chicken stock and beef/veal demi-glaze), the response was "yum" in his native garbled tongue as he went back and forth from mommy to daddy for bites.........he loves middle eastern food (lots of "yum yum's" , and a sirlion burger / 99 conterno barolo combo got the highly coverted "yum yum yum" response (for the wine), hearby know as the 3 yum award..........lets hope he stays on this path, (skinny)
serious about snacks
6 lb 1040 page cookbook
I bought about 50 beautiful tomatoes in ‘the country’ last weekend ($8 total, including the basket! The farm stand is unattended and one pays by leaving money in a milk pail. But as I was counting my crumpled dollar bills I could feel the farmer’s eyes on me from a distance. I decided to leave 10 – after all the basket was included - and sure enough as we were driving away I saw the farmer walking toward the stand, probably about to go count the money. Or am I just a paranoid New Yorker?). I spent part of Monday chopping sautéing and canning. I was thinking, as I stirred, about my grandmother. Would she be disappointed to know that ‘canning’ these days’ means carefully pouring into “ziploc” bags (which probably cost me more than the tomatoes)?
For me, Summer comes to a close at the end of tomato season. (And I see bill is ready for the Fall pig roast).
Fine whine
In retrospect, it seems that Parker was doing to wine what Bill James was doing to baseball in the same years, and in the same way. Both Parker and James began, in the late seventies, as unknown amateurs with privately printed newsletters, rapidly found a hungry and enthusiastic audience, and by the mid-eighties had become the reigning authorities among people impatient with the old wisdoms.
71 Clinton keeps it's 2 stars:
It has evolved since then, when William Grimes gave it two stars in The New York Times, and so has its setting. In that prettified picture, 71 Clinton now stands as a testament to how much a trailblazing restaurant can do for a neighborhood — and to a restaurant's ability to please and prosper on the far side of the initial hype.
seems appropriate that lizzie grubman would be representing fatburger on the east coast. first stop, jersey city.