the morning after sandy

barismo san jose v60, frangipane; 67F and cloudy.

mission chinese

i was looking for a shirt and found, as well, the new york location of mission chinese food (on orchard street, a few blocks south of houston; conveniently close to doughnut plant, where the filled square doughnuts are the only things worth getting and they are very much worth getting). at 2pm on a thursday afternoon, there was no line. if you are planning to visit, bring a crew of at least four people. the food is good and everything inside is tinged with red from the aggressive lighting programme.

mysteriously, the manhattan mission chinese is better than what i remember of the original in san francisco. and even though it is its own entity on the east coast, the chinese name printed out front is that of the dingy lung shan chinese food shop that it shares space with on mission street. these refinements combined with traces of history, i suppose, are how legends grow.

nearly there

[from the archive]

R&D in food is frustrating in ways that are not obvious (or, perhaps, even frustrating) to anyone outside that quite small domain. above, a new dish when it was "90% there."

one of the chefs had made particularly rapid progress: just a few days of work and a couple of flashes of intuition had brought his side project from an offhand remark by the head chef to a refined set of preparations with unusual but complementary flavours. everyone thought it was on the verge of being polished enough to make it onto the regular menu: an astonishingly quick development process. being so close, why not try it out for a visiting Important Chef of great renown dining in the restaurant tonight?

there is great excitement, and much needs to be done to prepare enough of the ingredients to serve everyone in the Important Chef's party. our protagonist, the R&D chef, comes in early on his day off to prep and will stay through dinner service to personally cook the dish. there is stress, there is pressure: the Important Chef is Very Famous in some circles. our protagonist feels the mixture of privilege and dread from having an opportunity to show his quality to "someone whose food i've idolized for years." mid-day, the head chef joins our protagonist and the rest of the R&D team to work out the presentation and plating of the dish. after an hour, they have gotten nowhere. no presentation seems to work, and they are running out of the laboriously prepared ingredients. there is no time today to make more.

several other special courses have been prepared in Important Chef's honour and, with less than an hour to go before he sits down to dinner, the team decides to pull this new dish from his already overstuffed menu. so that the ingredients are not wasted, some friends of the house who are also dining tonight will get it at their table instead. the word "crestfallen" is not inappropriate in this situation. our protagonist is packing the prepared ingredients from his R&D lab bench to bring them over to the service kitchen. as he walks out the door, he calls over to me: "in your notes, you could write down that 'he was a little upset at burning his day off to not cook this new thing for the Man Himself."

nearly there, but no cigar.

not a happy camper

this is the aspect of a doomed crustacean.

königsberger

and now we want to go to berlin even more than before. did you know that german marzipan is broadly divided into two schools, the lübecker ornamentals and the königsberger austeres? of course, i paint with a broad brush out of ignorance. more fieldwork is clearly necessary.

(thx ursula)

please hold,

our representatives will be with you shortly.