by Roy Choi
About 30 seconds before the noodles are done, turn off the heat and crack in the egg—but don’t mix it in. Just pull the hot noodles gently over the raw egg and let it sit for a minute to poach.
Now get a bowl and gently pour everything slowly into it, being careful to not disrupt the egg.
Add the butter, cheese, and sesame seeds to the bowl. Mix it all around. Garnish with the scallion if you have it.
EGGY, CHEESY GOODNESS.
GRILLED CHEESE WHAT?
GHETTO PILLSBURY FRIED DOUGHNUTS
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I love doughnuts, but I really love malasadas. And ever since I visited Hawaii, I got up on this game. One day, a friend of mine showed me how he did it growing up in Oahu: take a pack of the Pillsbury biscuits and fry them, then toss them in sugar. “DUDE!!!!!!” I said. Try it and you’ll see. You too will say, “DUDE!!!!!!!!!” and deplete your local grocery store of Pillsbury biscuit dough just to make these.
MAKES 8 DOUGHNUTS
½ cup sugar
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons roasted and crushed sesame seeds
1 tube Pillsbury original biscuit dough
4 cups Crisco shortening
Mix the sugar, cinnamon, and sesame seeds in a medium-size bowl.
Pop open the tube of dough and pull apart the biscuits—they come preportioned, so this will be easy. In a big, heavy pot, heat the shortening over high heat; you’ll know it’s ready when a tiny piece of biscuit dough sizzles when added to the oil. Fry the biscuit dough until each piece becomes puffy and brown on all sides, about 2 minutes. Flip the pieces over and fry them for 2 minutes more.
Pull out the doughnuts and rest them on paper towels for a minute or two, then toss them immediately in the sugar mixture.
REPEAT.
EAT.
GET BLOATED.
KETCHUP FRIED RICE
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Ain’t nothing more ghetto than ketchup fried rice. This is a fiend’s meal. It’s like crackers and aerosol cheese spread. It’s like sugar on some white bread or frozen burritos. Basically, some trashy-ass, fucked-up, dumb shit. But it’s damn tasty!
SERVES 4 TO 6
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon minced scallions
1 tablespoon minced carrot
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced kimchi (or store-bought)
2 cups day-old cooked rice
3 tablespoons ketchup
1 egg
¾ teaspoon roasted and crushed sesame seeds
Heat a large pan or a wok over high heat and add the oil. Throw in all the vegetables and the kimchi and sauté for a minute or so, until you start to see a little color on the veggies. Transfer the veggies to a bowl and return the pan to the stove.
Add a touch more oil to the pan and add the rice, stirring it around occasionally. Cook the rice until it gets a bit crispy, then add the vegetables to the rice and mix for a minute or two. Add the ketchup and mix everything around until the rice fully absorbs the ketchup. Remove from the heat and put a small pan over the flame. Fry your egg however you like.
Serve yourself a bowl of the rice and top with the fried egg and a sprinkle of sesame seeds.
WATCH SESAME STREET AS YOU EAT
KETCHUP FRIED RICE LIKE A G.
CHEESE PIZZA, DOUGH TO SAUCE
* * *
I might not convince you to make pizza at home, because most of the time it’s easier to just go grab a slice or phone in a delivery, but I’m going to try anyway. This sauce is really, really delicious, and you can work out some stress on the dough. So maybe instead of ordering in one night, you can be the pizza shop. Invite friends over and pile on as much cheese as you’d all like.
MAKES 4 TO 6 PIZZAS
DOUGH
1 cup warm water
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 teaspoons honey
Half of a ¼-ounce envelope active dry yeast
1 tablespoon plus ½ teaspoon kosher salt
4 cups all-purpose flour
SAUCE
¾ cup olive oil
¼ cup garlic cloves
¼ cup chopped shallots
One 28-ounce can plum tomatoes
1 cup mushroom or vegetable stock
Handful of fresh basil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
TOPPING
4 cups mozzarella and any other kind of cheese you want, shredded
MAKE THE DOUGH
Combine the water, oil, and honey in a small bowl and then add the yeast, giving it a gentle stir. Let the yeast mixture sit for 5 or 10 minutes; until it bubbles. Mix the salt and flour together in a large bowl. Slowly add the yeast mixture to the dry ingredients, then mix in a stand mixer on low to medium speed for 5 minutes.
Transfer the dough to a large, lightly oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let it rest in a warm place for 10 minutes.
Transfer the dough to a floured surface and form balls; you should end up with 4 to 6 medium-size balls of dough. Let the dough proof again in a covered bowl for an hour. Each ball of dough will make 1 pizza. Take what you’ll use immediately and wrap the others in plastic and freeze.
MAKE THE PIZZA SAUCE
Pour the olive oil into a small pan, add the garlic and shallots, and cook them slowly over medium heat until they turn medium brown, stirring periodically, about 40 minutes.
In a medium-size pot, combine the tomatoes and the stock, bring to a slight boil, then reduce the heat to simmer. Add the garlic/shallot mixture, oil and all. Cook for another hour, then stir in the basil. Transfer the sauce to a blender and puree. Add salt and pepper to taste and let the sauce come to room temperature.
MAKE THE PIZZA
Preheat the oven to 450°F. If you have a pizza stone, put it in the oven while it’s preheating.
Roll out the dough as rustic or as pretty as you like and lightly brush with olive oil.
Ladle and spread as much sauce as you want all over, from the center of the dough to the edge, being careful to leave a rim around the pizza.
Sprinkle on the cheese. Bake that thing in the oven on the pizza stone or directly on a greased sheet pan for 7 minutes.
I like to top mine with dried oregano, red chile flakes, and hot sauce.
BUTTERMILK PANCAKES
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Sometimes, when your whole life, your whole fucking life, is threatening, you need something that comforts you. Pancakes were that thing for me, and I know it’s not just for me. Because nothing says comforting in the morning or in a foggy, drug-induced state more than a plate of pancakes: It’s just batter, butter, and syrup. Easy as 1-2-3, and maybe enough to help you count back to what got you here in the first place.
SERVES 4 TO 6
2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted
1 tablespoon plus ½ teaspoon sugar
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
¾ teaspoon baking soda
1½ eggs, beaten, or ¼ cup liquid eggs (to get ½ egg, beat 1 whole egg and use half of that beaten egg)
2 cups buttermilk
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons melted butter
1 teaspoon olive oil
Mix together the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, and baking soda in a medium bowl. Mix together the eggs, buttermilk, and butter in a larger bowl.
Slowly mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and beat for 2 minutes.
When all the ingredients are just incorporated, let the batter rest for a little bit while you heat up a griddle or pan. Once it’s hot, add a generous drizzle of olive oil to the grill or pan.
Ladle in the pancake batter to make pancakes as big or small as you wish. Cook over low to medium heat until you see a million bubbles on the surface of the pancakes and their undersides become brown and crispy. Once you see that, flip the pancake over. You should get that signature rise.
Cook for about a minute more, and there they are, wonde
rful pancakes. I like to eat my stack with pure maple syrup and some good, softened butter, and that’s about it.
VARIATIONS
For blueberry pancakes, add rinsed dry blueberries to the pancakes in the million-bubble stage, right before you flip them.
For johnnycakes, substitute cornmeal for half the flour.
CHAPTER 7
YOU VERY LUCKY, MAN
“You very lucky, man!”
I didn’t mean to get deep into gambling, I swear.
“I told you, he’s the best!”
By the time I got back from New York, it was the end of January 1991. I had nowhere to go other than back to school. So there I was, a twenty-one-year-old junior majoring in philosophy and studying logic. I figured I’d try to stay clean now, hit the books, get it right. But try as I might, school was as boring as shit and my mind started to wander. I looked up some guys I knew from high school who were studying at UCLA and ended up moving in with the Korean kid I had met back in honors English, Paul “Yogi” Juhn. Week after week, we wasted time playing video games, trying to get laid, partying hard, drinking harder. Then he and his crew started to hit the casinos. At first, I was just going along for the ride.
“Home run all the way!”
But the instant I sat down at the table and felt the felt, I was jolted out of my routine. Everything suddenly became new, alive, fresh. I could smoke, drink, watch sports, gamble, talk shit, make friends, flirt, and eat. Time didn’t exist; neither did judgments. Only possibilities and action. The amenities just made it sweeter: pats on the back, massages, cheers, ladies. And the food. Oh, man, the fucking food.
THE 710 FREEWAY RUNS north to south along the eastern outskirts of Los Angeles, connecting the San Gabriel Valley to the ports of Long Beach. The Bicycle Club—or, as we liked to call it, the Bike—is located just off the 710, in the industrial section south of Los Angeles. On the way there from almost anywhere in L.A., Orange County, or the Inland Empire, you drive past South Gate, Huntington Park, Vernon, Cudahy, Paramount, Gardena, Commerce, Bell Gardens—places that were cattle ranches and farmland before they morphed into lower-middle-class towns submerged in smog and dust, dominated by raw industry. Meatpacking. Smelt. Metal. Rubber. Food processing.
The Florence Avenue exit takes you off the 710 almost directly to the Bike. The lights flash on the sign like any one of the oozing neons lining the Las Vegas strip.
There are three entrances to the Bike: two in the front, one in the back. It should be easy, just to walk into a goddamn building, but when you’ve gambled so much that it infects your mind, body, and soul, everything feels like Monty Hall asking you for a door number. I’d choose a door based on what the spirits or glow of luck dictated: some days, I knew the Big Deal was hidden behind door number 3. Other days, door number 1 pulled me in like a vacuum.
No matter the door, you instantly feel the sense of the place the minute you enter.
The beetle-black heads of Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Mexicans, and Armenians crowd the tables, populations that have both ready access to the 710 and a penchant for the casino’s Asian Pan 9 and Pai Gow games.
There are some old-timers; a handful of fresh new faces, college kids; and blue-collar workers. There are hangers-on—trolls with sunken eyes and furrowed brows—who stand behind rails, overlooking the tables. They throw out sycophantic words of encouragement in hopes of catching crummy tips. Railbirds, squawking at the action.
There’s the pulsating white noise of murmuring chatter, chips clicking and clacking, the squeaking wheels of the Candy Girls’ carts rolling from one player to another.
The place is huge and separated into three major rooms. The poker room and Asian games room flank the Dragon Room; this room is the home of the big-city gangsters, the Hong Kong and Vegas big shots, or the lucky bastards who won temporary riches elsewhere in the casino and decided to swim here with the sharks. When I first started, you could have found me, day after day, night after night, in the Asian games room, at ease among residents whom many might refer to as social deviants. Prostitutes, drug addicts, delinquents, criminals, gypsies, carnies, bums, drunks sat in those chairs, congregated around those tables, touched those cards.
Say what you will and make your judgments, but understand that there, even in that underbelly of the city, the ethics of the game—the challenge—reigned supreme. You could leave $150,000 in chips on a card table, walk away, take a piss, and come back to find your money untouched, as if it had been insured by the FDIC. Try doing that at a company party.
ON MY FIRST DAY at the Bike, I started with $150.
The game was Pan 9. Ten players are at the table, each with the goal to beat the dealer at his own game. Each player gets three cards, with one more optional; the object is to add up the value of the cards and get to the sum of 9. Face cards are worth zero. If you’re Vietnamese and you see a face card, all you say is, “Ddoh mah,” which loosely translates as “Fuck me.” I won. I won again. And again. I was on a streak fresh out of the gate. I turned that $150 to $500 in 10 minutes. I went from small $100 hands to huge $10,000 hands and never looked back. I should have looked back. I should have reaped my rewards and left behind that room, filled with the hollow eyes and big nostrils of Southeast Asia. But I didn’t. Fuck the odds, I thought. Fuck fate.
I was doomed from the start. Ddoh mah.
BACK IN THE EARLY NINETIES, you could smoke everywhere, including inside casinos and restaurants. Naturally, then, the Bike was perpetually overcast. But despite the tar, the place smelled like a sweet kitchen, with a menu as diverse as the casino’s winners and losers. And more than just feeding your body, the dishes fired up your spirit.
Take ph. The casino cranked out bowl after bowl of the Vietnamese beef soup, full of rare beef slivers, star anise, blackened ginger, cloves, herb stems, beef bones, garlic, pepper, coriander, shaved white onions looking like the lace on white panties ready to hit the floor. The noodles, fresh rice pounded and cut, still warm as they were ladled with the broth. Cilantro and Thai basil danced on top, and a lime wedge grinned like a Cheshire cat. Then the sidecar to the Harley-Davidson: a side plate of green herbs and bean sprouts.
The Vietnamese gamblers usually ordered the ph. They were fucking fierce, aggressive, amazingly deft at switching gears in a hand, and they never hesitated to go all in. And they had no qualms about going all in just before stopping the action to eat. You never saw anything like it: a table full of squatting Viets, talking, mouths full, squeezing limes with the voracity of a vice clip, sweat beading down their temples, making sounds that only a trapped gargoyle would make in a dungeon, their chopsticks clanking viciously at a rapid pace. Nonchalantly slurping up those bowls of noodles even though their lives were on the line: fuck the world for a minute while I finish my bowl.
If you were willing to front, you’d order the ph too, like you knew what the fuck was up. You were Popeye, the ph your spinach—the iron to pump up those muscles and go from weak sauce to hot sauce. It gave you the strength and confidence to take on the Vietnamese players, and, while you were at it, that seasoned poker pro, too, white guy, fifty years old or so, full-on sweatsuit, noshing on a plate of turkey and gravy with cranberry sauce. Your ph would take one look at his bland bird and say, Your cranberry is no match for my Sriracha. You can’t take me. You can’t handle my spices.
And, as your cards continued to hit and your chips began to stack, you would wash it all down with a classic American milk shake. Thick like lava, sweet like a Milky Way. Cheddar, baby.
AFTER ABOUT A YEAR, my lucky streak with Pan 9 ended. And yet, even as my friends deliberately edged me out of the Pan 9 tables, I refused to believe that my run with luck was over. It wasn’t, really. We rekindled our relationship in the poker room.
Poker is a game where everything is pistol to pistol. You wait to see who will actually pull that trigger. Sometimes, when you got nothing to lose, and you’re twenty-two years old, shoveling away $10,000 nightly in shoeboxes, you get pretty good
at making others blink.
While they’re blinking, you’re building your empire with chips. Colors, like the number of blocks you control on the streets, dictate power. In order, from Youngling to Jedi Grand Master of the cantina: orange chips, blue, green, amber, yellow, black, and multi. That’s two quarters, a buck, $2, $3, $5, $100, and $1,000.
It was poker that took me from mild-mannered gambler to rabid addict. I started with $1–$2 stud games, winning with a pair of kings. Then I matured quickly, passing the forty-eight-inch mark on the roller coaster ride, and moved from merry-go-rounds to the big boy rides at the hold ’em tables.
I was called the garbage man. I cleaned up. Even more so than at the Pan 9 tables, luck became a physical and spiritual presence, a dragon whose tail I somehow hitched a ride on. I had a keen Spidey sense with those cards. I could see you. I could feel you. I knew whether I could beat you, and I knew when to fold because I also knew a better hand was just a round away.
Because of that tingling feeling at the base of my skull, I was extremely confident. I’d play hands no one else would play. Nothing could faze me. I could talk to four different people, eat my chow fun, watch the highlights of the Dodgers game, and flirt with the petite Vietnamese dealer with the big breasts, jade bracelet, gold ring, perfect nails, and big full red lips. Like I wasn’t paying attention. But I was. I tagged folks the second they cashed in their chips. Now at my table, I saw the sweat drip from a temple or caught a nervous twitch. I knew who counted his chips twice. Who was scared.
Me, I had balls. Two fucking beanbags rested between my legs, and I could not be fazed ’cause I was balls deep.