Best Food Writing 2013

by Holly Hughes

  One day I visit with Bowien shortly before the lunch-hour rush. His staff buzzes around us, pulling down chairs from the dining room rafters, where they’re stored for the night—one of many workarounds required to make this tiny space viable. “I went to Noma recently,” Bowien tells me. “There was this sense that everyone there was just pushing toward this common goal. The servers—everyone. Everyone was going to bat and trying to make something honest and good. That’s what resonates.” Mission could hardly be more different than René Redzepi’s spare, pricey Copenhagen mecca. But both embody their founders’ singular ideas of what a restaurant should be. Mission’s food reflects Bowien’s adventurous, irreverent tastes, and consequently some of it is going to toast your taste buds. The wait staff look like they were rounded up at a Hayes Valley bus stop and are prone to bringing you a bowl of rice porridge you didn’t order and forgetting the sizzling cumin lamb that you did. But they’re always in motion and unfailingly friendly—“Be nice” is another core tenet of Bowien’s belief system (and another rationale for importing people from California). Mission’s ambience, too, is pure Bowien, from the soundtrack (golden era hip-hop, metal) to the keg (“If people are going to stand here and wait, let them drink free beer”) to that vintage Jordan poster (“I wanted that poster when I was a kid and never got it”). The place isn’t for everyone, but it’s authentically its own, and that speaks to a clientele that’s learned to sniff out (thrift-) store-bought, hand-churned idiosyncrasy.

  There’s a risk that as Bowien branches out, it will be harder to imbue each new place with his philosophy. (Also, you can’t fly back from Paris to man a wok every time a cook calls in sick.) This is a risk that any entrepreneurial chef would face, but it’s an especially acute one when your formula is a lack thereof, that exciting sense that you and your crew are making it all up as you go along. Bowien, though, seems constitutionally ill-suited for stasis. I arrived for an early dinner one night to find him sitting at one of the tables in the dining room, ear buds on his ears, working on changes to a menu that a long line of people were waiting outside to sample. Bowien explained that the tinkering is as much about keeping his staff happy as anything else. “I have to keep all these cooks motivated back there,” he said. “Cooks get very weary after a while. They want to make this food and next thing you know they want to make regional Italian food, so they go to another restaurant.” At Mission, the cook in charge is more restless than most.

  THE KING OF THE FOOD TRUCKS HITS HAWAII

  By Jonathan Gold

  From Food & Wine

  Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold was an aficionado of food trucks long before the rest of America caught on, singing their praises in his Counter Intelligence column for LA Weekly magazine, and along the way earning a Pulitzer Prize–the first ever for a food writer.

  Honolulu is littered with fancy restaurants, where dishes like sea urchin-garnished jumbo shrimp are a fixture on 12-course tasting menus. It also has its share of breathtakingly expensive sushi spots. Those are not the kind of places that appeal to chef Roy Choi.

  As I sit with Choi over dinner in a Waikiki tonkatsu parlor, contemplating a $30 sliver of Japanese fried pork, we are talking about Spam musubi: rectangular bricks of vinegared rice stuffed with pink, glistening slabs of the lunch meat, then wrapped in seaweed. Spam musubi is a crucial totem of what Hawaiians call “local food,” the shotgun marriage of Polynesian ingredients, Asian flavors and American specialties that you find at drive-ins, bowling-alley coffee shops, lunch trucks, mall food courts—pretty much anywhere the regulars tend to outnumber the tourists. Spam musubi is quintessential gas-station food—you see it in a cooler in the back, near the Red Bull and the Coors Lite.

  I think we should try the musubi at He’eia Pier General Store & Deli, which was just reopened and has been getting good notices for its reinvented lunch specials made with organic, island-grown ingredients, or at least at Iyasume, where musubi is the specialty of the house. Choi thinks we need to go down the street to a 7-Eleven. I’m not sure I agree with him, but I admire his style.

  Even if you think you know everything about chef culture, Choi is that other guy—his gaze intense, his Lakers cap skewed, his sartorial style somewhere between skate-punk, Koreatown dandy and East L.A. veterano. Born in Korea, he grew up shuttling among Los Angeles neighborhoods with his scholarly dad and restaurateur mom, who always managed to prepare multicourse Korean breakfasts no matter how many hours she worked. He was the speaker of his class at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and spent a decade as an executive chef at grand hotels.

  Choi first came to prominence when he left the mainstream food world to start Kogi, the Korean taco truck that not only jump-started the national food-truck craze but also the rush to elevated street food. He logged time at Le Bernardin, but he cooks like a dude as obsessed with carne asada picnics as he is with his mother’s kimchi. Instead of expanding his Kogi franchise, he’s opened a series of inspired places: the rice-bowl spot Chego, the Hawaii-inspired A-Frame and the small-plates-style restaurant Sunny Spot, loosely based on Jamaican roadside dives. He has an intimate knowledge of Koreatown in Los Angeles, and he was an F&W Best New Chef in 2010, but his favorite destination is neither Paris nor Korea but Hawaii, which he first got to know as an adolescent dumped off for a summer at an aunt’s house in Honolulu. He has visited almost every year of his adult life. It’s where Choi feels at home, and where he finds inspiration for everything from his restaurants to his upcoming book, Spaghetti Junction: Riding Shotgun with an L.A. Chef. “I translate Hawaii as a place where people make sure I’m having a great time, eating terrific food, without any expectation of anything in return,” Choi told me. “It’s a place for people to be happy. It sounds corny, but in Hawaii, it’s not; it’s uncorny.”

  Honolulu is a multiethnic city where currently fashionable things, like Asian-inflected European cooking, are as likely to show up in a construction worker’s lunch box as in a tourist’s four-star dinner. Supermarket staples like chuck steak, flown in from the mainland, cost almost as much as great local tuna. And the line dividing canned lunch meat from spectacular local shellfish is occasionally finer than one might wish.

  In the Honolulu calculus that splits food into what is eaten with a plastic fork and everything else, it is clear which side of the plate-lunch divide Choi stands on. Deprive him of malasadas, shave ice or laulau (taro-wrapped pork), and he is an unhappy chef indeed.

  So the next morning finds us in a rented car, creeping through morning traffic, on our way to the first of three breakfasts: the beginning of a hundred-thousand-calorie journey around Oahu that will fuel Choi for the rest of the year.

  We pull into the parking lot of Leonard’s, a cramped bakery that’s the home of Hawaii’s best-known malasadas: slightly sweetened beignets, best eaten scorchingly hot, dusted with granulated sugar. The line inside is endless, snaking back on itself, slowed by customers who take forever to decide among the hundreds of pastries in the long glass bakery cases, even though they inevitably end up with malasadas.

  “The karma’s coming back to me,” says Choi, whose trucks generally inspire even longer waits.

  We eat leaning against the wall outside. A bus full of Japanese tourists pulls into the lot. Each of them takes pictures of the vintage neon. Tour guides distribute malasadas, one each, daintily folded in napkins. The Japanese do not look thrilled.

  We double back to the Rainbow Drive-In, draped with banners proclaiming its 50th anniversary. It’s a fast-food place with outdoor tables and a cantilevered shade—a famous center of “local food.” We order far too much: a teriyaki plate, chili rice and something called long rice, which is thin, slippery glass noodles cooked in chicken broth. We also try the local-food specialty loco moco: an enormous plateau of rice topped with a well-done hamburger patty, drenched in a viscous, dark-brown goo and topped with a fried egg.

  “This isn’t delicious,” says Choi. “Or, rather, this is
a different kind of delicious. When you come out of the ocean after surfing all day, loco moco is the best thing you ever tasted.”

  We stand in another line at Helena’s Hawaiian Food, often said to serve the best plate lunches in Honolulu, where Choi is treated like a movie star by a California newscaster who frequents Kogi and I am drawn into an argument about the best hand-pulled noodles in the San Gabriel Valley. In the world of plate lunches, Helena’s is stunning: a profoundly smoky version of the traditional luau dish pipikaula, made from short ribs that have been dried on racks in the kitchen; fried butterfish collar; tripe stew with homemade chile pepper water; squid cooked down with taro leaves; and lomi salmon, which is like a mild salsa with cubed fish tossed in with the tomatoes. For dessert, there are jiggly cubes of haupia pudding, made with coconut cream. We are happy, and we are full.

  But five minutes later, we are at the Shimazu Store, a battered storefront a mile or so down the street, for the first of many cracks at Hawaii’s famous shave ice, a kind of giant, fluffy snow cone flavored with homemade syrup that seems to be an obsession of Choi’s: guava, lilikoi (passion fruit), lychee, milky green tea, durian. Shave ice is always found in a storefront a little out of the way, and it’s always served in portions far too big for one person to get through before the ice collapses over your hand with a splash. The pavement for blocks around each store is stained with dead shave ice and weeping children. I finally talk Choi into going back to the hotel for a nap.

  Dinner that night is at Side Street Inn, a 20-year-old bar in an alley. Side Street is kind of a prototype of the modern izakaya that has been popping up in large American cities for the last couple of years, an aggressively multicultural house of big eats that just happen to be served on shared platters, lubricated by oceans of beer. Choi has been coming here for years. We are greeted effusively by owner-chef Colin Nishida.

  “People keep asking me for my pork chop recipe,” he says. “It is very short—garlic salt, flour and cornstarch, that’s it.”

  “I thought I tasted Lawry’s salt,” says Choi.

  “Nah, although I love the stuff.”

  “No egg wash?”

  “Why the hell would I do that?”

  Ninety minutes later, we’ve gone through enormous platters of Japanese fried chicken, kimchi fried rice and sweet-sticky baby back ribs with a thick hoisin glaze that Choi adores. He has also come to agree with Nishida about the crunchy fried pork chops: Why the hell would he use egg wash?

  Outside of Honolulu, which resembles a typical midsize American city in a lot of ways, Oahu is a not-immense place where the great American road trip quickly runs out of road. Among other things, I wanted to taste the definitive version of a local specialty, huli huli chicken. I found it within an hour of leaving the hotel, in the parking lot of a Malama Market, where Ray’s Kiawe Broiled Chicken truck sets up on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. I had imagined a guy cooking out of a van, but the grill was as long as a semitrailer, shaded by a dented tin roof, heaped with fuming kiawe charcoal over which spun 30 to 40 chickens threaded onto special rotating spits. Choi finds Dino, the owner’s son; he tells us the chickens go from raw to cooked in just 25 minutes. But he has to keep a lot going at once in case a tour bus drops by, an event that’s both lucrative and unpredictable.

  Down the street, Matsumoto Shave Ice—home of the most famous version in the world—is totally set up for the tourist trade, an old grocery channeled for the sale of dripping ice cones and T-shirts. Choi is recognized by a Kogi fan from Oakland, a young Filipina in the area for a friend’s wedding, who pumps us for information on restaurants both in Honolulu and back in California. The rainbow shave ice, we all agree, is grainy and second-rate.

  We continue driving around the island, stopping to admire the beach at Banzai Pipeline, familiar from a thousand televised surf competitions but as flat as a pond at this time of year. We fly past a gaudily painted truck promising Korean tacos and end up at Giovanni’s, beyond the local shrimp farms, a heavily graffitied truck that doesn’t look as if it has ever moved from this spot. It’s outfitted with a huge dining area shaded by a metal roof. Giovanni’s is famous for its garlic shrimp, and the scent of chopped garlic surrounds the truck like a cloud. The menu, such as it is, is painted on a surfboard, but there’s no reason to get anything but as many garlic shrimp as you can hold; firm, sweet and swimming in scented oil.

  I make Choi drive back to Shogunai Tacos, the Asian truck we’d seen earlier. The Japanese taco, wrapped in a flour tortilla, isn’t completely horrible—the fistful of braised pork and crumbles of nori make it taste a bit like yakisoba, rendered in taco form—but the Korean taco is dreadful, seasoned with rank kimchi and clumps of orange cheese. Choi’s face contorts.

  “You’re kind of responsible for this, dude,” I say.

  “I probably am,” he says. “And I’m not sure what to think.”

  FISH AND GAME

  By Peter Barrett

  From Edible Manhattan

  Having himself ditched Brooklyn for a rural life in the Hudson Valley, painter and food writer Peter Barrett (acookblog.com) had special insight into why Manhattan chef Zak Pelaccio of Fatty Crab fame might choose to reinvent himself in a locavore’s haven upstate.

  Zak Pelaccio looks like someone you might see at a Phish concert: stocky, convivial, with a scruffy red beard and unruly curls spilling out from under a multicolored knit beanie. But that appearance belies extraordinary creative talent, the ability to speak in long, eloquent sentences, and a 10-year history of being well ahead of the culinary curve. He was cooking farm-to-table food before that was a thing, doing pan-Asian mashups with pork belly before David Chang popularized it and going deep with the complex, soulful funk of fermentation before any of those flavors made it into the mainstream.

  Pelaccio, 39, gained real renown for cooking unpretentious Malaysian-influenced food back in 2005 when he opened Fatty Crab in the West Village. Not long after, he added Fatty ‘Cue in Brooklyn, plus a Fatty Crab on the Upper West Side and another in the Virgin Islands. But as time passed, Pelaccio recognized that he required a greater level of independence: “There wasn’t enough of me in there, ultimately,” he says, noting that it took some soul-searching to resist the allure of becoming a celebrity chef. “Now I’m just a partner and occasional collaborator.”

  At the end of 2011, Pelaccio and his partner of seven years, Jori Jayne Emde, moved upstate to a post-and-beam barn they renovated on property in Chatham that his parents bought in 2005. The move brought him closer to the farms he’d long worked with, and inspired his new restaurant venture, Fish & Game, slated to open in the town of Hudson just about the moment you read this.

  Pelaccio’s exotic preparations have always featured locally grown ingredients, but Fish & Game is more place-based than ever. A laminated map of the region, about five feet square, hangs on a wall outside the kitchen. A star in the middle marks Hudson, and there’s a circle drawn around it: the 40-mile radius from within which almost all the food will be sourced.

  “We’re retraining ourselves to do very simple and exclusively product-driven, nose-to-tail food and create a regional cuisine,” he says. “We’re still going to buy citrus, and other things, but whatever we can get from this area we’re going to use,” he continues, eagerly poring over the map. “Without being preachy or full of ourselves about how it should be done, we’re just doing it.”

  Off the Menu

  Pelaccio’s been sourcing from local farmers for a decade and now that he’s their neighbor, he’s been busy lining up agreements with Hudson Valley growers to grow ingredients for what he calls “very good home cooking,” depending on what comes in the kitchen door each day. “It’s a kind of improvising, free-associating based on the available ingredients and our experiences.”

  Diners have the choice of a short meal or a long one but there is no printed menu. Some dishes are large enough to share, and others are the size of little treats. And different tables will get different cuts of the
same animal; since each pig has only one heart, only a few people a week might see strips of such a delicacy, quickly grilled and served with a sweet and sour sauce reminiscent of a dish that Pelaccio remembers fondly from Bangkok.

  “Anybody who says they’re cooking this way but they’re doing 150 covers and everyone gets [pork] belly, they’re full of shit,” says Pelaccio. “It cannot happen. You might get some neck, and the next table might get shoulder. They may be prepared similarly, with the same accoutrements, or sauce, but the cut will be different.” To diners who only like lamb rack or center-cut salmon fillet, he suggests, “Get over it.”

  As the crew breaks down a lamb from Wil-Hi Farms in nearby Tivoli, they treat each piece differently to see which preparations stand out. Each cut gets a distinct seasoning and then is vacuum-bagged and cooked sous vide. A rack of lamb ribs gets slathered in cooked rice spiked with coriander and chili and then is left to sit out at room temperature for a week to ferment before its final preparation.

  Emde, 33, is slim, blonde and energetic, with a quick and contagious smile. “We met at Five Ninth,” Emde remembers, referring to the Meatpacking District restaurant that preceded Fatty Crab, where Pelaccio was the chef. “He hit on me,” she laughs. “It was awful.”