The Food Maven Diary
[Archives]

[Previous Entry] [Diary Home] [Next Entry]

10/08/1999 Archived Entry: "The Week That Was (Boy, Am I Bloated)"

It has been such a busy week! What feels like marathon eating began last Saturday evening at my neighbor’s table.

Every year when the first cold snap comes, Marie Kalman makes tripe à la mode de Caen -- in short, stewed tripe. She knows I love it, so even if I don’t make it to her annual tripe dinner, she packs some up for me and freezes it so I can enjoy it at my leisure. Fortunately, I made it to the event this year. So that was debauched night number one. (Incidentally, as not everyone will eat tripe, Marie also made braised veal shanks.)

Then, the very next night, Sunday, I went to Zarela Martinez’s for dinner – not her wonderful Mexican restaurant on Second Ave. in Manhattan, but her home. Zarela is still working on her book (her third cookbook) about the food of Veracruz, so we ate Veracruzano style. That’s what happens when you go to a food writer’s home. You eat kitchen testing. But, believe me, I am not complaining. Zarela’s parties are the best I am ever invited to, whether it’s one of her big bashes or a small dinner party, as it was last Sunday. Forget the great food, she invites the most interesting people.(You can read more about Zarela and her work in my diary item of June 17th.)

Monday I gave a party – for my friends the DiPalo family who own DiPalo Latticini, the dairy-grocery where I buy many Italian ingredients. DiPalo has the best of everything. It’s a very tiny store where they actually make mozzarella in the far corner so customers can watch the process. There is no room for anything but the best. I planned a Neapolitan feast at Gemelli, Tony May’s restaurant in the World Trade Center, but I did not count on chef Stefano Riccioletti making so much food and everything being so irresistibly delicious that I couldn’t control myself. But he did and I couldn’t. Without going into all the details, we started with an amazing array of antipasti – fried yeast dough (pasta cresciuta) with anchovy, and another with seaweed (yes, Neapolitans love seaweed), marinated fresh anchovies (alici), stewed octopus, eggplant parmigiana (sensational!!), the famous Neapolitan salad of cauliflower and pickled vegetables (insalata di rinforzo), although Stefano used roasted peppers instead of pickled and I liked it even better than usual; gattò, the mashed potato cake/casserole studded with soppressata … I said without going into all the details. The biggest hits of the dinner, however, were the pasta and beans with mussels and clams, which is a very fashionable combination in Campania these days, and spaghetti finished in the light cherry tomato sauce that lobsters were first cooked in. We were served a half lobster each, too.

On Tuesday, I made some new soy products to taste and had to eat them for dinner. Maybe that’s what really ruined my stomach.

Wednesday, I went to Elmhurst, Queens, with Jim Leff, who is better known as the Chowhound. His website, www.chowhound.com , is great. My favorite part is the interactive section – the message boards. You can find access to them by scrolling down Jim’s home page. On our eating adventure, we first went to Kway Tiow, Jim’s favorite Thai restaurant, on Dongan Ave. and Broadway. We had Manila clams in a dark sauce with lots of fresh green chilies, rice noodles with beef, Chinese broccoli with salty crackling pork as a flavoring; larb, which is ground pork seasoned with chilies, scallions, red onion, fresh coriander and lots of lime juice, and mint. We had to hold off ever so slightly so we’d have room for Captain King, the Taiwanese Chinese restaurant a few blocks down Broadway where Jim’s favorite Chinese restaurateur, Kim, is managing. We ordered the best vegetable dumplings I ever had – the skins were so thin you could see the green of the chopped vegetables through them – fried dumplings with thicker skins but with a very well seasoned pork filling – some cold jellyfish seasoned lightly with sesame oil, and a braised ham hock, a miracle of gelatinous fat and succulent meat in a sauce heavily seasoned with star anise. We ordered the hock mainly to have sauce to dunk our sesame-scallion bread, but by the time the two came, I couldn’t even look at another dish. I took both home and reheated them for dinner on Thursday, which was also the day I broadcast live from the Hudson River Club and did a little demo at the Mediterranean Culinary Festival in the Winter Garden, the atrium at the World Financial Center.

I should have been on bread and water Friday, but in fact I ate spaghetti for dinner. After all that rich food, the only thing I could think of was spaghetti with tomato sauce. I think it has tonic qualities. Maybe some day a scientist will prove that … as Neapolitans always say: Spaghetti with tomato sauce is the only food you can eat everyday.

Zarela: 953 Second Ave., between 50th and 51st Sts.; (212) 644-6740.
DiPalo Latticini: 206 Grand St.; (212) 226 1033
Gemelli: 4 World Trade Center, between Church and Dey Sts.; (212) 488-2100
Kway Tiaow: 83-47 Dongan Ave., Elmhurst, Queens; (718) 476-6743
Captain King: 82-39 Broadway, Elmhurst, Queens; (718) 429-2828
Hudson River Club: , 4 World Financial Center, 250 Vesey Street, 2nd Floor;
(212) 786-1500