Cheese, Book, Restaurant, Thing #38
Good dirt, good seafood, good kimchi, good cooking competition
Hello friends,
Missed you in Jan (bit of a reading slump). Nice to see you now!
Cheese: Pyrenees Brebis smells fresh yet barnyardy. The taste is not mucky at all though: it’s milky, pleasant, and carefree. This is a fun cheese that’s begging for caramelized onions or fancy pizza. If you’ve had Ossau-Iraty before, this is very similar and is made from sheep’s milk from France’s Basque country. There’s nothing to dislike about this cheese! If it was your neighbor, it would be the kind of neighbor who would drop off cookies around the holidays and always say hello when it saw you on the street, because it’s a nice person (er, cheese).
Book: Thank you, Charmaine Wilkinson, for getting me out of my aforementioned rut. I raced through Good Dirt, a fast-paced, multi-generational novel about a family heirloom — a jar made by an enslaved ancestor — and the many lives it has impacted… and cut short. There’s everything you want in a novel if, say, you’d like to escape the incessant doomscroll urge: romance, suspense, mystery, history. Oh, and short chapters, which also feel necessary in my life right now. If you’ve read Black Cake (and if you haven’t, you should), you’ll be happy the writer is back with her strong ability to move plot forward. While the story can feel occasionally jumpy and there are a lot of secondary characters to keep track of, ultimately, this is a satisfying book for immersing yourself in someone else’s (fictional) life.
Restaurant: I returned to New York City last month and crammed in several fantastic meals. Two places I wish I could be a regular at:
Chalong for excellent Southern Thai and seafood, especially if you’re trying to find somewhere to eat before a Broadway show and don’t want to succumb to all the terrible 8th avenue options. Hoof it to Chalong on 9th ave for Crab Curry and the Mee Pum Riang, a Southern-style pad thai with a silky yet understated coconut curry sauce. I have yet to have Thai food this good in DC. Great heat levels (present, but not tear-inducing) and couldn’t-be-kinder service.
Ariari for Korean seafood (notice a theme to the weekend?) inspired by the port city of Busan. I could have kept eating several more servings of the rather mild kimchi banchan, but the spicy fish stew with charred scallion oil, plus the dolsot al bap — a hot stone bibimbap with rice, roe, shellfish paste and sea urchin cream (!) — also required my undivided attention. Ariari is exactly what you want in an East Village restaurant: cozy, bustling, quick-paced, yet never rushed. It made me nostalgic for my 20s; it would be the type of place I would go to repeatedly with friends for post-work dinners.
P.S. For DC recs: It was such a pleasure to work on Washingtonian’s 100 Very Best Restaurants again this year. Is this exactly how I would have ranked them if it was Carey Polis’s 100 Very Best Restaurants? Well, no, because I definitely haven’t been to all 100 on the list (but I promise at least one of the five of us that worked on this project did!), and because taste is subjective for a multitude of reasons that we all know. But I’m proud of the list we came up with, and think that there’s no other source in D.C. for such a comprehensive look at the restaurant scene. Here for all the quibbles, though!
Thing: Part of the reason I didn’t read much in January was because I became invested in watching Culinary Class Wars, a Korean cooking competition show on Netflix. Minus the Great British Bake-Off, I watch relatively little food TV, but I got hooked on this for several reasons:
The pool starts with 100 chefs of a wide range of backgrounds. It’s fascinating to watch their different approaches to the challenges.
The quality of cooking is extremely high.
The editing is absolutely ridiculous and full of cliffhangers but… it worked.
The challenges were pretty bonkers as the competitors got whittled down.
As a Korean food fan but not a Korean food expert, I also enjoyed the chance for more exposure to not only Korean cooking styles, but also many Chinese- and Japanese-inspired dishes as well. File this one under: Another good distraction for the ~times in which we live.~
See you soon.
-c