Bun Rieu (crab cake poached in tangy pork tomato broth w/ rice noodles)
by Celia Cheng
April 29th, 2008
TET
83 Ave A
(5th & 6th St)
212-253-0800
$
Tet is the Vietnamese New Year, the celebration of a new beginning, and it’s a good name for Steven Duong’s new restaurant in Alphabet City. Mr. Duong also owns Nam in Tribeca and O Mai in Chelsea, both longtime local favorites. Nam is one of my top choices in Vietnamese restaurants, especially for the seafood dumplings in soup, so I was eager to try Tet and see what other treats were in store.
Modern, bold and dark, the décor of the restaurant makes me feel at ease while I enjoy the mouth-watering dishes coming out of the kitchen. At Tet, maroon and purple colored walls are accented by beautiful cream-colored, crocheted lampshades. All of which speak of good taste. Likewise, the menu is straightforward and the staff friendly.
I really enjoyed the food. The ingredients are fresh, and the flavors are balanced and subtle. My friend and I started with the chia gio, shrimp, pork, crab and vegetable spring rolls deep fried in rice paper and served with fresh herbs, lettuce wrap and lime dipping sauce. This is my favorite type of spring roll throughout Asian cuisine, and though they seem like a staple on most Vietnamese restaurant menus, good ones are not always easy to come by. Chinatown offers many that are greasy and laden with MSG. Other fusion Vietnamese restaurants often vary the stuffing and lose the balance of flavors. But Tet’s spring rolls are just right. The fried rice paper is thin and light but also chewy. There were only two pieces of lettuce for four spring rolls, and they were used as garnish sitting underneath everything else, which led me to believe that most people don’t use the lettuce as a wrap, but they should, as it tastes so good and fresh with some herbs tucked in.
On my second visit, looking for something a little lighter, I chose the banh xeo(coconut rice flour crepe filled with scallions, shrimp, chicken, bean sprouts, served with fresh herbs, lettuce wrap, and lime dipping sauce) as an appetizer. Though similar, this was even better than the spring rolls. The coconut rice flour crepe is so light and crisp, and the lettuce wrap and dipping sauce are the same, so depending on your mood, spring rolls or crepes are both good starters.
The goi sua, jellyfish, shrimp and cucumber salad topped with peanuts and tangy chili dressing was less spectacular. I like my jellyfish crunchy even though it’s slimy, but the jellyfish in this salad was a bit limp. Still the ingredients paired well, especially the crushed peanuts that added a nutty flavor and the crunch I was missing.
Dinner’s highlight was the bun rieu, poached crab cake, meatballs and rice noodles in a tangy pork tomato broth. In fact, I returned two nights later just to have this dish because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The juicy little meatballs are made with pork and a crab paste that’s ground and sautéed with lemon grass and hot peppers. Plump pieces of halved tomatoes complement the thin strings of rice noodles in a wonderfully tasty tomato pork broth. But the most fabulous part is the fresh crabmeat coated in egg, which, when poached, becomes incredibly tender and floats delicately to the surface. Bits of Thai basil add a burst of fresh flavor, and shreds of raw cabbage create a crunchy contrast. There are quite a few ingredients here, but the flavors, working in unison, are both luscious and subtle. It’s high-end comfort food at its best.
My companion ordered ga nuong, lemon grass chicken, for main, and, being a food snob, I wasn’t planning on touching it. In my mind, lemon grass chicken is as banal as Vietnamese food can get and the thought of a piece of boring roasted white meat arriving at the table was devastating. However, Tet’s lemon grass chicken is delicious. Both dark and white meat are served sliced, and while by nature white meat will never be as tender as dark, it was not dry and, in fact, very flavorful. Dipping the chicken in the garlic-heavy, tangy lime sauce made it even better. This is a real pleasure to have with white rice. What a pleasant surprise!
The only disappointment was dessert. We ordered a coconut tapioca soup with banana, palm seeds and jackfruit topped with toasted sesame seeds. It arrived lukewarm (it should either be hot or cold but not in between) and tasted rather bland with the tapioca too soft from overcooking. I’m a sesame seed fanatic and these should have been toasted so as to bring out the aroma and also create a crunchier texture. Instead, the seeds were stale.
I am happy to skip dessert, so if we don’t count that blunder, Tet is very good. I look forward to adding it to my list of Southeast Asian favorites, which also includes Fatty Crab and Café Asean.
Posted in Alphabet City , Noodles , Pork , Seafood , Vietnamese
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Shiromaru Ramen
by Celia Cheng
March 31st, 2008
IPPUDO
65 4th Ave
(9th & 10th St)
212-388-0088
For ramen-crazed New York City, we have another newcomer. Following in Setagaya’s and Santoka’s footsteps, another Japanese ramen chain has ventured into the U.S. market: Ippudo.
A mere two blocks away from me on 4th Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets, I was excited to learn that I had another noodle option in the East Village.
Ippudo officially opens on March 31st, but since it’s soft opening on March 24th, it’s been packed. I popped in at lunchtime yesterday to see if I could grab a quick bite, but there was a ten-minute wait and I was in a rush. Determined to have my Hakata ramen, I went back today and found myself sitting at a round communal table, full of strangers all equally eager to try this new joint.
Seating at Ippudo includes three large booths, a long rectangular table, a round table made out of a tree trunk, a bar-like seating that wraps around a pillar, and a hidden back room with tables that seems more like a lounge area. The atmosphere is that of a lively izakaya with modern décor and loud J-pop (Japanese pop) playing in the background. Both the atmosphere and the prices show that they obviously spent a lot more money on the place than their competitor, Setagaya. Also in contrast to Setagaya, whose wait staff seem to be mostly clueless, the all-Japanese wait and kitchen staff at Ippudo are polite and enthusiastic.
The man to my left speaking Japanese on his cell phone was saying that the ramen was overpriced and that it was targeted toward non-Japanese. He didn’t think Ippudo was going to survive based on the prices. Indeed, $12-13 for a bowl of ramen is high, and if you add any sides, lunch is easily over $20, which is pricey for fast food. Yet the restaurant was packed and bustling with activity. To my right, another lone diner stayed on his cell phone until his food arrived. I was annoyed at all the cell phone activity, but I suppose this is not a place that encourages true comfort since the ramen business is based on quick turnover.
Ippudo specializes in Hakata (Kyushu-style) tonkotsu (pork bone soup) ramen. The original flavor of tonkotsu ramen or Ippudo’s original version, shiromaru (white) moto-aji (original flavor), is served in a rich white broth with scallions, roast pork, cabbage and seaweed. They have two other types of ramen: akamaru (red) shin-aji (new flavor) that is even richer with a heavier umami flavor, and karakamen, which is spicy. At lunch, you can add a rice dish, such as mentaiko (spicy cod roe) rice or roasted pork rice, for an additional $3. I chose the former. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the rice to be that spectacular. According to their website, the overall menu has been modified to accommodate the American palate, but shreds of cabbage in the rice instead of the traditional Japanese pickles and seaweed just taste wrong. Like the side rice dish included in the lunch set at Soba Totto, these seem like afterthoughts and don’t really match in flavor with either the ramen or soba that they are meant to accompany.
Since my visit, Ippudo NY seems to have made other non-traditional modifications to the menu by adding shoyu (soy sauce) and miso ramen (both $12) and tsukemen ($16). These are not part of the repertoire at Ippudo’s Japan stores as they are not Hakata style ramen. My ramen fanatic friend Sarah told me that New York’s Ippudo is also missing all the table condiments that they have in their Japan stores, including karashi-takana — pickled leaf mustard with chili commonly eaten with Hakata ramen. How can they shaft us on the good stuff?! They need to get those condiments into the New York store! She’s also a stickler for katamen (al dente) and recommends getting an order of the kaedama (extra) noodles if you like your noodles extra springy.
You can read thorough descriptions of Ippudo’s history and philosophy as well as the history of ramen itself on Ippudo NY’s website. I hope they add their menu to the site soon; that’s what always gets my mouth watering. For the time being, here’s a look at the goods on the Japanese site.
All in all, the ramen and soup are good, and I’m sure, despite my neighbor’s comments about price point, Ippudo will do just fine. I’m glad it’s here, but for all this hype around it’s opening, I feel it’s just an ordinary neighborhood noodle shop.
Posted in East Village , Japanese , Noodles
Shio Ramen
by Celia Cheng
July 27th, 2007
RAMEN SETAGAYA
141 1st Ave
(St. Marks Pl & 9th St)
212-529-2740
On a cold rainy day, though mid summer, I thought it would be perfect to have lunch at Setagaya — a nice hot bowl of ramen really warms me and fills me up. This was my third visit to this new ramen shop in the East Village since it opened last month.
Setagaya specializes in and exclusively serves shio ramen. (The four most common flavors of ramen are shoyu (soy sauce), shio (salt), tonkotsu (pork bone soup) and miso.) Shio is a clear broth, and while it does have salt in its base, an outstanding shio broth must rely more on the complexity of its other flavors than the more distinctive flavors of miso, shoyu or tonkotsu. To do its shio justice, I think it best to quote from the back of Setagaya’s menu, which explains how the ramen broth is made: “Pork bone, chicken and chicken bone, Raus seaweed and Rishiri seaweed from Japan, dried mushroom, dried scallop, dried anchovy, garlic, ginger, cabbage, and red pepper are prepared separately and then combined together for our ramen soup.” The broth comes topped with dried scallop, which has been fried and ground into flakes, fresh julienned scallion, hotate oil also made from scallops and Aosha seaweed.
To simplify things, you only have the choice of shio ramen or tsukemen. Both are served with shio broth, but the shio ramen is traditional ramen in which all ingredients are served in one bowl, while tsukemen involves dipping the noodles into the broth as the two are served in separate bowls. Other side dishes are available, which are simply repeats of ingredients included in the shio ramen: cha-shu (roast pork), menma (bamboo shoots), and salt egg. Some rice dishes are offered as well, like oyakodon (egg and chicken over rice), and toridon (chicken over rice); also on the menu are appetizers like edamame, oshinko (Japanese pickles), and seaweed salad. All in all, the menu is really limited, as the true focus of the kitchen is on its signature ramen. Many items on the menu were whited out during the first week of business, which is a sign that they would be implemented over time. Some of these items are now served, but the menus have been reprinted, and, to my disappointment, they’ve removed gyoza altogether. How can a ramen shop not serve gyoza?! Let’s hope that’s just temporary.
The shio ramen is good: the flavors are rich even though the broth is clear. The salt egg is half of a pickled, hard-boiled egg with the yolk only slightly runny — the perfect consistency! The cha-shu is fatty, tender, juicy and stands up well on its own as a meat dish. The noodles are thin and have that perfect springy consistency. The menma, a staple in ramen, is nothing special to speak of. In addition, there are chopped onions floating in the broth. Watching the Japanese food show “Seventy-seven Best Ramen Restaurants in Tokyo” (which plays repeatedly on the large LCD screen in the restaurant) I learned that at the Setagaya ramen shops in Japan, you get an entire bowl of chopped onions to use as a condiment, so that you may add as much as you like. We don’t get that option here.
The tsukemen is also served with a shio broth, but the noodles are wider, like a much springier tagliatelle, and the cha-shu in the broth is sliced up, which dilutes the full-flavored, fat laced pieces of meat. There are chunks of dried scallop in the broth, which are missing from the ramen, giving it much stronger hints of seafood aroma. Unfortunately, the dish comes with no egg or menma, though you can order them as side dishes. Another problem with the tsukemen is that the noodles get cold quickly, as does the broth, so only a few minutes into my meal, I was sadly dipping cold noodles into lukewarm broth. Overall, I preferred the thickness of the noodles used in the tsukemen but the ramen was a better meal.
Service, on the other hand, was atrocious! On all three visits to Setagaya, I found the staff to be utterly clueless, unprofessional and downright dumb. The restaurant suffers from a total lack of management: it’s like the blind leading the blind. Besides the ramen chefs, who are busy cooking behind the counter, most of the servers are not Japanese, or knowledgeable about their product (or anything else, I imagine). There’s generally no line at lunch, but the restaurant doesn’t seat more than thirty, and a queue forms outside the store during dinner. When a line is this long, turnover is key, but the servers here are clearly incapable of managing the flow of customers. The staff is so inattentive, that on my second visit, we spent ten minutes trying to get the check from our waitress, even though we had been done with our meal longer than that and there was a long queue.
During my most recent visit, the waitress, while trying to pour broth for my tsukemen from a thermos, spattered broth into my eyes. In accordance with Murphy’s Law, I wasn’t wearing my glasses that day. The broth wasn’t piping hot, but this is not something I am typically thankful for. With the level of incompetence here, I couldn’t see the point in getting upset, but I do think that if the staff’s training does not improve, the restaurant is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Since Chikubu closed I hadn’t had a favorite ramen in town, until now. Even though the management needs improvement, I like Setagaya for its overall authenticity. Just in case you are wondering how I feel about some other ramen joints in town, here’s the skinny:
Rairaiken — it takes talent to make food that has “No MSG” in it taste like it’s laden with MSG
Minca — good (but too rich for me!)
Sapporo — mediocre
Menkuitei — below mediocre
Menchankotei — I prefer the menchanko to the ramen but overall the tonkotsu ramen is not bad
Speaking of ramen comparisons, I was reminded that I might need to venture outside of Manhattan if I really want to find the best. I’m finally going to try Ramen Santoka in Mitsuwa (Edgewater, NJ) next month, something I’ve been meaning to do for a couple of years now! Ramen Santoka is another famous Tokyo-based ramen shop, and my friends Sarah and Henry who also lived in Japan are fanatic about it, so I know it has to be delicious. I’ll keep you posted!
Posted in East Village , Japanese , Noodles
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Daikon Salad
by Celia Cheng
May 18th, 2006
SOBAKOH
309 E 5th St
(1st & 2nd Ave)
212-254-2244
It’s been over a year since I last talked about Sobakoh. When I wrote the last review, the restaurant had just opened and was still trying to find its rhythm. A year and many visits later, I am glad to announce that Sobakoh is one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants. I love the atmosphere, the friendly and professional service and, most of all, the amount of attention this place gives to its food. Though I tend to end up spending $60-$70 per meal, which is more than I might expect to pay at a neighborhood soba joint, I am actually not complaining. It’s worth it. I would be paying about the same price at Honmura An, which is also lovely, but Sobakoh is a lot less pretentious. Of course that’s part of the difference between the East Village and SoHo.
Right now is soft shell crab season and so you’ll see it on every menu. At Sobakoh, the soft shell crab tempura is a year-round staple but, because the crabs are in season right now, it’s extra delicious! I still find the flavor to be rather subtle, but when it comes out of the kitchen freshly deep-fried, every bite is a treat. The trick of course is to try to finish before it gets cold because it loses both flavor and texture. While hot, the crabmeat is still juicy and the kani miso (crab roe) is runny — yuuuuuuuummmmmmmmy! Not to mention that Sobakoh makes tempura well, not overly doughy with the batter just thick enough to produce the right amount of crisp.
I’ve also tried the eggplant and ground duck meat soba (kind of like a ragu but in broth), the kamo tsuke soba (your basic kamo seiro in which you dip the cold soba into hot broth with slices of duck) and the uni and ikura soba (cold soba with sea urchin and salmon roe, which comes with a cold tsuyu — soba dipping sauce — to pour over it). All three have their own merits and can satisfy different cravings. I was specifically craving sea urchin but didn’t feel like having sushi, and so the uni and ikura soba was perfect, since a good amount of fresh uni was paired with the cold soba.
But what I really want to talk about is the daikon salad, which is what I really crave at Sobakoh, despite being a soba fanatic. When I say that Sobakoh pays attention to its food, I mean that it not only uses fresh ingredients but cares about the details too. Even the careful slicing of scallions and shallots shows that Sobakoh really wants you to experience a beautiful and zen meal, down to the smallest details. The daikon radish is thinly sliced, served with yuzu wasabi dressing and topped with bonito flakes and some greens for garnish. It’s a light starter but very addictive. I just kept picking at it until I finally noticed that there were no more slices of daikon left. :(
With a good sake selection, high quality food and soba, friendly service, relaxing jazz and an easy-going clientele (predominantly Japanese), Sobakoh has become my ideal little neighborhood joint, inconspicuously located on 5th Street.
Posted in East Village , Japanese , Noodles
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Soft Shell Crab Tempura Cold Soba
by Celia Cheng
April 9th, 2005
SOBAKOH
309 E 5th St
(1st & 2nd Ave)
212-254-2244
Sobakoh is the most recent addition to the soba restaurant scene in New York City. The others, namely Honmura An, Sobaya and Soba Nippon, all have their own niches and loyal followings.
Sobakoh is currently open only for dinner from 5pm to 11pm. I showed up with two friends at around 9:30pm to be greeted by the host outside the door, apologetically informing us that they were sold out of all soba dishes. I had heard about the soft shell crab tempura so even without the soba I was willing to try the restaurant.
When we started placing our order, the waiter informed us that there were still three last portions of soba left if we wanted them. Of course, we wanted them! When I lived in Japan I went on soba pilgrimages to find good soba! I ordered the soft shell crab tempura cold soba.
Soba lovers always eat cold soba as opposed to hot because the cold soba retains the texture of the noodles and the right amount of firmness to chew on, whereas soba that sits in hot broth becomes soft over the course of the meal.
To make a long story short, the soba wasn’t much to write home about, nor the dipping sauce. Not even the soft shell crabs did much for me. Overall I found the meal to be on the tasteless side. Homura An is still far superior in its food, service and atmosphere. Sobakoh has better atmosphere than Sobaya, but the food is not much superior. I understand that it’s a new restaurant and there are still many details to iron out but running out of 80% of the menu by 9:30pm night after night calls for some action to be taken. The staff is exceedingly courteous and service conscious which makes me want to come back and try Sobakoh again. Maybe a couple months down the road they will have adjusted and improved.
Posted in East Village , Japanese , Noodles
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