#65: First We Eat!

The best things I ate in January, from pizza and dumplings in New York, to chicken with a side of chaos in New Territories.

Dear subscribers, open this in your browser to see this email in full—you might be looking at a truncated version, and no one wants that.

---

I spent a good amount of January feeling bad that I wasn’t getting much done. I’m annoyed at myself having written that, but it’s true.

With the trips to New York and Hong Kong (and preparing for said trips to New York and Hong Kong), emails and the scheduling of things was about as much as I managed for weeks. The actual doing of things fell to the wayside and I’ve been picking them up for the last week, making the most of a weird strain of tri-zone jet lag that lights a fire under me in the mornings, no alarm necessary.

What I did do in January was eat. Which is something, especially as I get to relay all the juicy details now, pun intended.

M.F.K. Fisher said, “first we eat, then we do everything else,” which feels appropriate and comforting, as now that we’ve celebrated Chinese New Year I can no longer deny that the year has begun in earnest. But start as you mean to go on, as they say, and as relates to stomach capacity I certainly tried my best.

Wayne Thiebaud, Pie Slice, 1978, via Sotheby’s. The one thing this list doesn’t include is dessert—I just liked the painting.

My favourite meals and dishes of the month were as follows:

Sukiyaki; Cello’s.

Sukiyaki at home, the result of a niggling hyper-fixation after seeing a cabbages.world video (my brain is fertile ground for cravings; Ivan and I joke that the mere words “fried chicken” will plant seeds neither of us can un-sow). I followed their sauce recipe and he thinned out the meat by hand, as the Asian supermarket near us selling frozen hot-pot beef was closed. The soy mixture was velvety salty-sweet, and we dipped the cooked slices in beaten raw egg. Leftover egg, veg, and sauce was mixed in with udon, which I really didn’t need after several rice refills. But you never need sukiyaki, you want it—and I see myself wanting, and making it, much more often.

Bleary eyed, ecstatically eaten Pizza at L’Industrie the night we landed at JFK, which righted a delay-laden travel day and started our trip off with the kind of all-American bloat only several New York slices, beers, and a six-hour flight can give you. Our gracious hosts Kes and Grace (who are likely reading this, hello) clued us in on the fact that one can buy pizzas at the new-to-us West Village branch and pair them with an Italian-style pilsner next door at Talea Beer Co., a women-owned taproom that exclusively plays pop girlie hits, for no extra cost save the beer. I’m still shocked that we managed to put away two whole pizzas as a quartet; it’s as if we awoke from a fugue state backgrounded by Chappell Roan.

A special mention to Cello’s on St. Marks, where we rushed a might-get-hungry-during-A-Complete-Unknown slice each. Slices so rightfully hot they should come with a burn warning.

I think about the dumplings at New York’s Shu Jiao Fu Zhou at least weekly, and demanded it for lunch on our first full day. In London most boiled dumplings are of the Northern Chinese, doughy-skinned variety, which, though tasty, curtail the number of dumplings you can eat and are honestly, just lesser? Says a Southern wonton-fed girl, unsurprisingly. Kissed with vinegar and chilli oil, the ones at Shu Jiao were as good as I remembered—wrinkly and translucent skins with a slight bite, housing a chive-forward filling. Plus, the cheapest meal we had in New York by a country mile.

I am not a steak girl, and tend to get bored a few bites in. But the bone-in rib eye at Gage and Tollner, a mirror-lined Brooklyn institution born in the era of top hats and tail coats, was as good as steak can get—even though the clientele are now in AllBirds and Aritzia. Their cuts are butter-basted and come topped with garlic confit, herbed butter, and seared lemon (a revelation when your buttery steak comes with more butter). They also do faultless renditions of caesar salad, parker house rolls, and creamed spinach—usually my favourite part of a steak dinner, but at this meal the crown was ceded to the steak itself.

Duck udon at Raku, the star of a previous email.

#63: The Big Orange

Venture below the paywall (I dare you) for: Japanese breakfast; an outrageous wedding feast spanning oysters, suckling piglet and coconut cake; perplexingly good razor clams; crispy-skinned roast chicken with a side of chaos.