Pure Thai Shophouse, NYC

On our last shopping and eating day, petiteseour and I had a day that was light on the shopping, but excellent on the eating!

We had lunch at Torrisi Italian Specialties where we very happily shared the house-roasted turkey sandwich (to die for - so moist and flavorful, piled high with a wonderful dressing, shredded lettuce, thinly sliced red onion and tomatoes), delicious chicken parm hero, and a variety of sides - broccoli rabe, brussels sprouts, and sweet and sour eggplant relish, which was delicious on bread. Unfortunately we had just missed the eggplant parm - which sold out just a few people ahead of us in line. Also, unfortunately, no pictures - super crowded squeeze and we were just too hungry! We will be back though to try the lasagna, house-made mozzarella and ricotta, and that wonderful-looking eggplant parm!

Next was a stop at old standby Il Laboratorio del Gelato where petiteseour and Anthony went with daring flavors like tarragon pink peppercorn, and basil, while I stuck with delicious fruit flavors of lychee and concord grape. Then off to buy beautiful macaroons at bisous ciao to give as gifts, with a pit stop for coffee and a couple of Robicelli cupcakes at Cake Shop. After visiting our friend and dropping off said gift of macaroons, another tea break at the Limelight Marketplace where I discovered the wonder that is Bacon Marmalade. So good I'm headed back this weekend to pick up more jars as holiday gifts!

But on to the final round - dinner at Pure Thai Shophouse. Being a regular at Recipe and a fan of Land Thai Kitchen, Petiteseour really wanted to try David and Vanita Bank's newest venture - a noodle house in Hell's Kitchen.

We started with the Crispy Shrimp Sesame Crepe - which was not what I was expecting at all, but was really delicious. My only complaint may be that I didn't get much shrimp flavor, though the kaffir lime curd on top was tasty. The actual slices of lime though were a little jarring at times, when you got one on its own. All together though, it was a really interesting dish and one I would definitely order again.

But the main star of this place is the homemade noodles. We got the house specialty Ratchaburi Crab and Pork Dry Noodles along with add-ons of pork cracklings and a sunny side up egg. The egg was a great addition - just gave a little bit of extra moisture to the tie everything together. The noodles were satisfingly firm. The roast pork was the color of Chinese char-siu, but much milder - a nice surprise for my Chinese palate - and the yu choy added a nice bit of crunch and bitterness. We finished the meal with some fruity drinks - chrysanthemum for me and roselle (a bit like cranberry) for petiteseour.

Pure Thai Shophouse
766 Ninth Avenue (bet. 51st and 52nd)
New York, NY
(212) 581-0999

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A Southern Thai Dinner at Little Spice, Hanover, MD

My friend Nick recently organized a dinner at Little Spice in Hanover, MD that focused on Southern Style Thai cuisine. The chef-owner's mother came from that region of the country, and she was excited to make a few specialties from South Thailand.
We started with a set of appetizers. First, we had crispy rice cakes served with a warm shrimp dipping sauce. I've had a version of this dish with pork before. This shrimp version was also very tasty.
Our second appetizer was fish cakes, or Tod Mon, served with crispy Thai basil. We used a sweet chili sauce on top of the bite size cakes.

We followed a generous set of entrees. We had Gang Garee, a Thai yellow coconut curry, with chicken and potatoes. It was like Thai "comfort food" in that it was rich, warm and just pleasant to eat.
My favorite dish was crispy stir fried catfish with curry paste and fried basil leaves.

We also got Naam Prik Gapi, a dish that I have only tried for the first time this year, that being at Bangkok Garden a few months ago. It is a fermented spicy shrimp paste served as a dip or topping for fresh raw veggies like cucumber, eggplant, or squash. While I think most of the table was thrown by the "funky" flavor of the paste, I liked Little Spice's version. While not as spicy, I think I appreciated more subtle flavors in their take of the dish.

We had Southern Thai style fried chicken. It was seasoned with garlic, turmeric, and onion marinade and topped with bits of crispy garlic. Alas, the chicken was a little dry and overdone.

Another favorite of the evening for me was the Khua Kling, a classic Southern Thai dish that took minced pork cooked with dry spicy curry. I loved the hot kick it gave you as you ate more and more of it.
Our last main was a whole fish cooked in a banana leaf. Unfortunately, it was overcooked and too dry. I imagine it's hard when you are making items not usually on the menu.

We finished with a great trio of dessert. I particularly liked the warm tapioca with coconut milk and canteloupe.
We also had fried banana and fried pineapple with palm sugar syrup.






1350 Dorsey Road
Hanover, MD
(410) 859-0100

Fu 1039, Shanghai

For one lunch in Shanghai, I was lucky to eat at Fu 1039, a restaurant specializing in Shanghai style cuisine nestled in a beautiful old mansion from the 1930s in the Hongqiao neighborhood.

The food at Fu 1039 was not only delicious but also plated beautifully.

We started with several plates of appetizers.
First was lotus root stuffed with sticky rice. I should note that Shanghai cuisine leans toward the sweet even in savory dishes. The lotus was wonderful.
We had the marinated drunken (Chinese wine) chicken topped with shaved ice and some goji berries.

Also, there was a dish of marinated wheat gluten with mushrooms and wood ear mushrooms.
A classic Shanghai appetizer was the smoked fish which had a great flavor.

Our following courses were just amazing, each better than the next.
We had sauteed fresh water shrimp, a simple dish, but good.

Next was braised pork in sweet and sour sauce. The preparation was much more subtle and delicate than the sweet and sour pork here in the US.

We then had a dish that consisted of fresh water crab meat that you poured into very fine sesame coated bread.
While the crab was yummy, we were actually more impressed by the bread (bing) in that it was so thin.

Another classic Shanghai dish was the vegetable rice. Another simple dish, but so well prepared- the vegetable being diced so fine and every grain of rice coated in flavors.

Dong Po Pork, taking its name from a Chinese poet, is another classic Shanghai dish. It is made by slow braising pork belly in soy sauce. The result is wonderful, fatty pork with a wonderful sweet and salty soy sauce that has penetrated into the meat and fat.

It was accommpanied by mini mantou (rice bread) to sop up the residual sauce.
My aunt said Fu 1039's Dong Po pork reminded her of eating it at home when she was young. It was one of the best single dishes I had on my trip to China.

Another unique course was the braised fish in Chinese vegetables. Again the vegetables were diced very fine, almost like a pesto sauce, but with very Chinese flavoring.
The sauteed sweet peas were yet another example of a great simple dish. I think they may have used pork fat in them because they were really good.

Our soup was a chicken soup with pork and sheets of bamboo.
For dessert, we had a jelly that was made with a Chinese herb I don't know the English name of.
Fu 1039 was such an amazing experience. I will make sure then next time I am in Shanghai, I will be back.








1039 Yuyuan Lu
Shanghai
(86-21)5237 1878

Ice Cream Moon Cakes at Häagen-Dazs in China

In China, Häagen-Dazs is considered a high end ice cream brand. Their branch on Nanjing Lu, Shanghai's main drag has a doorman.
Since we were in China during the Autumn moon festival, on special at Häagen-Dazs, was an ice cream moon cake that came in chocolate or strawberry flavors. At $12US, they were expensive, even more so for the Chinese, but since we were on holiday, we got both kinds to try out. They were beautiful to look at, and the ice cream was indeed delicious. To our surprise, for the "yolk" of the moon cake, they had a yellow mango sorbet in the middle.

Breakfast at KFC in Shanghai

KFC is really popular in China, even more so than McDonald's. It's probably because they've adapted their menu to include Chinese favorites as well as the Colonel's finest.
We got some breakfast from a nearby branch on our first day in Shanghai.
They had mini You Tiao, a deep fried stick of dough, and I enjoyed my bowl of Congee that had pork and some thousand year egg in it.

While these were fast food versions of traditional Chinese breakfast items, KFC also had a breakfast ham sandwich made with Shao Bing (sesame seed covered flat bread). This was actually pretty good as well.

Cajun Kate's, Boothwyn, PA

On the way to Delaware this weekend, we made a 3-mile detour off I-95 to find Cajun Kate's - which 1000yregg had read good things about. It's a teeny lunch counter inside the Booth's Corner Farmer's Market. The market itself is huge, and had a lot of promising looking Pennsylvania Dutch butchers, bakers, etc. -- worth checking out next time.


But this visit, we were on a mission for Cajun Kate's. The story behind Kate's is that culinary couple Don and Kate Applebaum grew up in the Philly area, met at The Restaurant School, and found their careers taking them to New Orleans, where they fell in love with the cuisine. After they decided to start a family, they wanted to move back to the PA area, and so brought the taste of NOLA with them.

We scored a couple of stools and dug into red beans and rice, fried mac and cheese (with a deliciously sweet Creole tomato glaze), and gator sausage on a stick with Creole honey mustard. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that there was a "special" mac and cheese that had 4 kinds of cheese and applewood smoked bacon...

We also brought a few quarts of the red beans and rice, along with yummy gumbo, down to the Don Rockwell picnic in DC, which we were headed to the next day. I think they were a big hit!

Cajun Kate's
Booth's Corner Farmer's Market
1362 Naaman's Creek Road
Boothwyn, PA 19061
(484) 947-8914

Shun Feng Restaurant, Shanghai

I'm going to admit an immediate bias in this post as I am going to talk about a restaurant run by distant members of my family in Shanghai called Shun Feng. They have 6 branches with one opening up this month, but the one we had several meals in was located on the 7th floor of the Shanghai No. 1 Department Store on East Nanjing Lu, the main strip in the city.



Shun Feng serves primarily Hangzhou style cuisine, and they try to source their ingredients locally. The restaurant also does not have an executive chef, rather they have many chefs, each who specialize in one dish or item.
They have several hundred items on their menu, and I can say that every item I ate when I visited the restaurant was delicious.
For starters, the tea served with meals is Longjing tea, a form of green tea especially from Hangzhou. It's served in a glass and the leaves can be resteeped in hot water throughout the meal, and for me, the flavor and smoothness got better as the meal progressed.

One of the most unique dishes I had in China was Shun Feng's sea cucumber served in a soup that had caterpillar fungus. For one thing, the sea cucumber was spiny, considered to be superior to non spiny versions. The caterpillar fungus was even more special: it's considered medicinal, but in the soup it conveyed a unique herbal flavor that complemented the sea cucumber's texture.





Another signature dish was fried stinky tofu from the city of Fuyang. When uncooked, stinky tofu is rotten tofu, and it smells terrible. When cooked though, the bad smell should go away, and can easily be served in a restaurant without scaring nearby diners. The flavor had a pungent quality reminiscent of stinky cheese. It goes really well lightly dipped in chili sauce.

Some other highlights from my dinners at Shun Feng include:
- wood ear mushrooms - each one was uniform in size as the others
- pumpkin with a honey sauce
- freshwater shrimp
- pork and vegetables wrapped in tofu skin
- 1000 year egg (with the largest yolks I've ever seen) with pork sung






Desserts in Chinese cuisine are a bit odd, even for me, as there is really no use of dairy items.
I tried what seemed like "cake" made with rice and surprisingly the texture was like actual cake- fluffy and light. I had two versions- one a white just simply sweet cake, and the other was flavored with a Chinese fruit I can not recall, but it had a notes of dark chocolate in the flavors.

While not quite like Western desserts, it was an interesting item to try. Regardless, we would still end our meals with fruit which is much more consistent with Chinese cuisine.










A few more items of note from Shun Feng included:
-chicken feet- these were cooked slow in a light chicken gravy- different that the Cantonese style
-taro with vegetables - this might have been the best taro dish I've ever had- the taro was smooth and creamy to bite into

- fried turnip/daikon dumplings- this was another "best i've ever had" dish, the daikon inside was beautifully cooked and the outer layers of crust were delicious
-soup with egg dumplings, quail egg, clear rice noodles, stuffed tofu and vegetables



It makes me happy that whenever I go to Shanghai, I will be able to eat at my family's place, Shun Feng. They've taken flavors of home for me and pushed them into fine dining.