Tag Archives: Food

Day 2: Foodie

Posted on by Ryan K.

It’s been all about the food since yesterday. Last night, we ate at the Stash Cafe (Rue St. Paule Ouest) in Vieux-Montreal. It’s not often that I would volunteer myself for Polish food but this was a delight complete with a talented pianist. Traditional borscht and a roast duck really made this quite the meal complete with Polish favorites like perogie, krokiety, and bigos.

This morning we trekked it via Metro to Fairmount Bagel for a different type of bagel. These bagels are smaller with big holes. They are traditionally boiled like the New York ones. I was particularly impressed with the whole wheat sesame bagel.

Lunch brought lighter fare at the Cafe Holt. I had an open faced sandwich with chicken and cheese with a salad on top.

Dinner was supposed to be the big Thanksgiving meal at Toque!, a french restaurant. We surprisingly chose a sampling menu: eight courses, a total surprise menu at the whim of the chef. Here’s what we got:

  1. Smoked salmon between two slices of potato chips (sandwich) with chive and creme fraiche
  2. Noca Scotia princess scallops marinated with cranberry juce, apple julienne, and topped with apple foam, served on half shells
  3. Grilled mackeral on a bed of toasted crumbs and mustard seed sauce topped with baby salad mix
  4. Five shrimps served between two thin slices of bread cooked in olive oil, drizzled with mayo, served on top of red bell pepper sauce, garnished with baby parsley
  5. Postage-stamp sized ravioli stuffed with squab with confit of baby bok choy, garlic, mushrooms, and pearl onion
  6. Veal medallion with puree of artichoke, butternut squash, honey mushroom, and black fennel
  7. Melted cheese on scallopped potatoes with beet reduction and olive oil
  8. a) Pineapple sherbet with coconut cream b) Breton berry sherbert with cream

I thought Toque! was nice but not stunningly good. It is supposedly one of the best in Montreal but there are a few things missing: lighting, hot plates, good tea, hotter food, better atmosphere, better menu setup.

Yelp.com

Posted on by Ryan K.

I needed a restaurant bad. My job: book a reservation for a few friends so we can see each other before going back to school. I know plenty of places in San Francisco but alas, I wanted someplace new. Enter: Yelp.com.

Yelp is a place to review restaurants, doctors, bars, salons, dentists, or any place of business anywhere in the United States. But what makes it different from other sites like Citysearch or Zagat restaurant reviews? Yelp has real reviews from real people. Yes, people can have many different experiences and reactions to the same place. But people’s reviews usually balance out to the appropriate quality level of a business.

The site is clean and simple to use. You can search by neighborhood location, type of business, type of restaurant, rating, and more. You can read all the reviews, good and bad. For fast searches, just go by the easy ranking out of five stars. Yelp also differentiates itself from others on the web by adding social networking features. Add your friends. Let reviewers know if their reviews are useful, funny, or cool too. Mobile Yelp allows for people to check Yelp for reviews on the go.

I’ve added around 45 reviews mostly in San Francisco but also at Middlebury (which has only one other reviewer!). Check it out and start yelping:

http://rkellett.yelp.com

Pay Up

Posted on by Ryan K.

Several years ago at the West Coast Chinese Family Camp (WCCFC), I performed in a skit (I know, I know…) about modern Chinese customs. One of the funniest bits was our version of fighting for the bill at the restaurant. Chinese are known to go to great lengths to pay. There is a whole playbook of how to get away with paying for a meal. My favorite: the “I’m going to the bathroom” trick where one pretends to excuse themselves to the restroom when really they are paying for the meal behind everyone’s back.

But what drives this notion to want to pay for the meal? The Chinese, known for being particularly stingy, suddenly open up their wallets willingly to treat others? Is it that the non-payers now owe something to the payer? Is it a matter of respect? The Chinese use a term for this that doesn’t really translate well: “hac-hay,” meaning a combination of being overly kind and giving toward the other parties in a good way, sorta (so, I suck at translating…).

Just as there are rules about who pays in the modern world: the inviter pays unless the inviter is female, then the male at least attempts to pay. The college rule is that the bill is almost always split. The Chinese rule? Well, the elder almost always ends up paying even if you fight for the bill as noted above. Age has everything to do with it. As a young person, I can’t pay for anything even if I tried. Is that wrong? No, cosmically it works out that I will be paying for the next generation when I get old. In return, the expectation is that the young will look after the old (my mother firmly believes in this one: she once said that she’s not worried about government social security running out because that is my job…).

See you when I get back to San Francisco!

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Free Stuff Dance

Posted on by Ryan K.

As tropical storm Prapiroon lashes the Hong Kong buildings with rain and wind, Krispy Kreme (KK) was out with their latest promotion trying to stir up some business for its first store in Hong Kong (in Causeway Bay). They were giving out free boxes (6-packs) of their original doughnuts just outside the Two IFC Mall. The weather was no deterrent as hundreds of people flocked to the outdoor stand. KK must have handed out several thousand doughnuts to tourists, office-workers, and passers-by. Of course, just as I located the source of it all, the last box had just been given away.

To get to the point, Hong Kong people Chinese people love free stuff. Okay, (most) everybody likes free stuff. But Chinese people in particular will do anything for free stuff. They open bank accounts to get the free rice cookers, suitcases, alarm clocks. They loyally fly particular airlines in hopes they can cash in their mileage for free plane tickets. They only shop for stuff on sale. It’s pretty clear that the Chinese know how to do the frugal dance.

So, if you want to do business in Hong Kong, the only way to play the PR game is to do the free giveaway. And by all accounts, it’s worth it. There is no stigma against brands here. Old grandmas will faithfully use the same branded Pepsi bag that they got ten years ago and bring it everywhere they go. Free advertising. And there is nothing wrong with getting in line with hundreds of other people to get free stuff. When I put on Pippin at Shantou University, the way we made the production a hot event was to give away free tickets. People lined up to get the tickets. We could have just as easily said that anyone who wanted to could come to the show, for free. But the key was the perceived value of the ticket in hand.

Krispy Kreme has got the idea but it’s still a hard sell because KK is not located in the IFC Mall. What are the chances that an office-worker will take the subway two stops during lunch to pick up some doughnuts for the office? Plus, most real Hong Kong people avoid the shopping capital, Causeway Bay, like the plague. Maybe, KK has the IFC Mall scoped out for one of their many location additions within the next year.

White Bread

Posted on by Ryan K.

You can’t escape it. It’s everywhere. It never rubs anyone the wrong way because it’s just so….soft. White bread is the staple (well, if we exclude the all-time favorite: rice) here in Hong Kong and the mainland. Loaves of it eaten each morning for breakfast as toast, many more sandwiches made at lunch (no crust, of course), and have a roll at dinner on the town and you can be sure it’s all white. Oh, and all those little “baos,” Chinese pasteries, with scrumptiously sweet insides? White bread too. But what happened to the distant wheat cousin or any darker relatives? If anyone can come with a definitive answer to that question, please write me, I’m dying to know. But let me at least make a conjecture: China has always been a white bread society because white bread is the most manufactured type of bread and hence lasts the longest before going stale. The taste is sweet (think the opposite of the organic sprouts bread you buy at Whole Foods) which brings us back to the days of Wonderbread commercials. Kids in HK and China grow up eating it and stick with eating it. There is no health movement here that focuses on eating right (instead numerous commercials touting microelectrocution methods of losing weight…). So, there is no need to have wheat bread when there is no demand and it costs more to produce it. And this makes me sad that I can’t find a good five grain or pumpernickel.

I’ll save my discussion of the use of mayonnaise (on anything including bread) for another day…

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