House of Chow: Domicile of Delish

I have long considered myself to be a Connoisseur of chinese takeout. It is one of the many small gifts one acquires after living in NYC, the way that people from LA claim to have a sixth sense about mexican food, or perhaps the way Cincinnatians might be able to nose out a good three-way from a strip mall away. Some of the skills involved are simple. Recon: Is there anyone in the restaurant? Has there ever been? If not, perhaps you should move on. What's around the restaurant? Do you like those places? Details: When you enter, is it the sort of place you would like to stay for those long, hungry minutes before your food is ready? Have they put any effort into making your time in the restaurant, however brief, enjoyable? Intangibles: There's something about the names of restaurants. My least favorite chinese restaurants have been: Jade Garden, Ming Garden, Main Garden and Dragon Garden. I would love to say that there is some reason for a correlation between bad food and the naming of restaurants, but I'm content to say, if the name sounds a little off-putting, perhaps you should avoid.

And then there's the House of Chao on Whalley Ave. I felt ambivalent about the place from the get-go. Was this a good name or an awful one? It is next the best brunch place in New Haven, but you can't really see inside....I entered in the middle of the day and there was just one other person there perusing a menu. The place looked more like a bistro than a take-out Chinese place, which again gave me pause. This really was like no other Chinese place I had ever been. What got me to enter the place was a recommendation made in passing. What intrigued me was the person waiting for the waiter, who was perusing a novel that seemed large and out of place in a restaurant. Apparently, the customer's intense time with the menu was mostly a show; she only wanted one thing: dumplings. "Has the chef prepared the dumplings for the day?"

"No, he's still working on them." "Fine, I'll come back in an hour or so."

Chef...prepared?

I would come to appreciate all of this in time. As I do whenever I am testing out a restaurant, I got something I truly love: General Tso's chicken. For the record, I have tasted the highs and the lows of this dish. It is surprisingly easy to make at home, and to pack it with enough tang to wrench your jaw out of place. It is also possible to but General Tso's chicken and find it packed with greyish meat, which you can't stomach. It is also possible to return to said purveyor, when a little inebriated and purchase that same dish and get half-way to sobriety before feeling the shame of what you have done, but I digress.

This was the best General Tso's Chicken I have ever had. The same with every dish I had there. Not a trace of grease, made with fresh ingredients, balanced so that the spices did not overpower the dish, and the side items were not simple present to be brushed off. Just the memory of the food makes concentrating on writing a little difficult.

The downsides: it is a little difficult to get to without a car. I bike like I have a death wish, but I'm not foolish enough to tango with the traffic patterns on Whalley. It's as though a group of people have developed the technique of driving by faith, so they don't bother to use turn signals, or look when they want to make a U-turn across three lanes of traffic. Also, the service is slow, man reading Dickens novels instead of taking your order-slow. But the food is so worth it that, that last criticism barely deserves notice. Go in, chow down!

Next time: Recollections of Rudy's.

Montreal, I'm yours

I know it has been a long time, and I know that this going to be a post about something that has nothing do do with New Haven, but I have decided that since the city of Montreal, today's topic, is a meager hour plane ride or 5 hour car ride away, this counts as a New Haven activity. I have recently returned from a trip to Montreal, which according to Wikipedia, which quotes the Lonely Planet guide for the city was nicknamed "Sin City". (A brief digression, apparently Montreal has shaken itself of the name, but not of the vice. There were more establishments dedicated to the pleasures of the flesh than coffee shops, bookstores and churches combined. It's a serious issue there, although it seems to be taken with due deliberation. Check out the sex worker resource center and advocacy group, Stella, for more information.)

I like cities with attitude and this one had it in spades. From the slightly scary punks on lower Rue St. Denis (more on this street in a moment) to the general air of hip exuded by the young and oldsters. The streets were dirty and the people were rude. The subway was fast and real people (not the super rich) lived in the city proper. This is all to say that city was cosmopolitan; it had all the things one would want from a proper city. In the spirit of this universal cosmopolitanism, I sought out Montreal's versions of some of my favorite things. Here is a quick list of what I found:

Fries-

Poutine! I arrived hungry and irritable. All the places I was told to go to were packed with cool teens and early 20-somethings. After stomping around St. Laurent for two hours, I decided my life would be infinitely better if I was somewhere warm, eating greasy food and drinking beer. As I began to wend my way to downtown Montreal, I saw a small place called Patati Patata. When I say small, I mean miniscule, Rudy's stage small. There were 2 tables, a central bar and a window bar, meaning that any number of people constituted a crowd. Through the window I glimpsed, my future perfect evening: two cooks hard at work churning out plates of poutine anda double barreled tap of Montreal.

Poutine has an odd texture. Nothing in the mixture seems to be truly solid or liquid. The cheese melts into the gravy, the gravy absorbed into the fries and the fries decompose rapidly. Balanced with a pilsner, this was manna from heaven. The atmosphere of standing cheek to jowl with other people from Montreal also helped make this a singular eating experience.

Bagels-

As a man from New York, I am of course a bagel snob. I strongly believe that the further you get from New York City, the worse the bagels are. (The only place this does not hold for is Long Island, which seems to exist in the New York Bagel slip stream.) I was told that Montreal could field a good bagel, so I tried the Fairmount Bagel, known for its hand rolled, wood fired bagels. To be fair, I ordered half a dozen, each a different type including the New York salted bagel. Now, the simplest description I can give of a New York Bagel is crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. The Montreal bagel did not have the bite nor the crumb, yet they were bagels...good bagels...warm, soft, sweet, almost honey-sweet, bagels. They had a more uniform consistency than those in New York and I cream cheese didn't spring to mind while biting into one, but they were serious baked goods.

Beer-

Beer is important to me. The way that politics can be important to people. I feel like I failed myself on the beer front. The convenience stores all proudly sold Unibroue beer. And I had generic Montreal beer with my poutine. But I really wanted something distinct, and perhaps unavailable in the United States. Despite some digging I was unable to discover a truly beer centered bar in Montreal, the sort of place that makes drawing together an assortment of beer its priority. I did go to a microbrewery called L'Amere A Boire, which had 20 beers on tap, of which I had Fin de Siecle which, I believe was a red ale. It was pleasant, rich and not overpowering. While it did not have an expansive beer list, it had a brochure style of presenting them which made choosing difficult (did I mention that it was also in French?). Nonetheless, it was good place. There was no poutine, but they had great locally-grown Bison burgers and juicy rabbit burgers.

I suppose the mark of a good trip is a bit of regret.

P.S. This is hardly worth it's own entry, but Montreal has these Farmer's Market-esque markets. I believe there are 4 of them. I went to Marche Maisonneuve. The bakers there changed my notion of what a croissant could be. More precisely, they changed my notion of how much butter could be pressed into a pastry. I try to be resistant to saying "they make x better there" (except in the case of NY), so let's just say, it's not better, it's butter.