It's our last days in the US, so we had to go through our list of
"last wishes before leaving the USA" tour. It started yesterday at
Katz's Deli... and since Katz's is almost next to my buddy
Frank London's pad, we teamed up for a stab at their pastrami.
I am Jew as He is Jew as We is Jew and We all eat Pastrami... Katz's has been extensively
documented here, so we will move on... Today, Fumie had to do a few photo shoots, one of which was the banh-mi Vietnamese sandwich place at 150 2nd street in the east Village. Again - Frank lives nearby, so we needed to have a photo model to stuff food into mouth. Frank deftly locks up his bike. He may be World Music's #1 Jewish music producer, but the man gets around NYC on a bike. And a cell phone. .
Bánh mì . Vietnam used to be a French colony, and so they learned how to deal with things like crusty french baguettes and pates. But they were still Vietnamese, and damn good cooks. The genesis of the
bánh mì sandwich stems from the French countryside "salad sandwich" which consists of lettuces, tomatos and sometimes vegetables as well as dressing served on a baguette. The sandwich is a product of French colonialism in
Indochina, combining the French ingredients of baguettes, pate and mayonnaise with native Vietnamese ingredients like coriander, hot peppers, fish sauce and pickled carrots. Ho Chi Minh used to be a pastry chef at Escoffier's in Paris.
Uncle Ho worked as a chef in England and the US as well during his student days, and his politics may have been influenced by Marcus Garvey while living in Brooklyn... but this only tells us about why the Vietnamese were so successful at national liberation movements. What is important here is the fusion of the French breakfast tradition with
Vietnamese cuisine. The French may have been imperialists, but they left behind pate and crusty baguettes.
This is good.
You take a crusty, fresh french-style baguette, spread fine french-style pate - nobody really knows where these
banh-mi pates really come from, and nobody really cares - and then you add some roast pork, ham, or maybe chicken or sardines... and carrots, cilantro,
sriracha sauce... the Vietnamese not only defeated the United States in open warfare, they also re-invented the concept of the "sandwich" Bravo, Vietnamese! Bravo!
Frank, to his credit as a Klezmer musician, doesn't go "whole hog" about eating pork. He chose a chicken
banh-mi. I went for the classic pate and ham version. Frank has an amazing ability to maintain
non-porkedness in the face of immense
treyf-ness.
This ability to maintain a four thousand year tradition of kosher eating is important in a city like New York, which attracts immigrants who have come from places that have perfected non-kosher eating into a seductive art. Walking downtown from the East Village towards our next Vietnamese rendezvous, we pass markets offering loads of non-kosher goodies.
Mmmm... frogs. Well, damn... frogs are tasty! And who eats frogs? Why, the Cantonese and
Vietnamese! Browsing among the Chinatown offerings we ended up at the
New Bo Ky. (80 Bayard St.) I was there on my
last days in NY last year. I always seem to leave NY by eating here. Why? Because it is so gutsy, no bullshit, authentic and cheap. That's why.
This is an extremely good, extremely cheap, very North Vietnamese place. There are a lot of things on the menu that originate in the southern provinces of China where there is a significant Vietnamese minority, and if the menu is any indication, they don't like to pay a lot for their food. The New Bo Ky is famous as one of the cheapest restaurants in the entire City of New York, definately in Chinatown. Twenty bucks will stuff you with some excellent, absolutly authentic Viet cuisine.
Do not miss the special
pho. It is a beef soup with rice noodles, but at New Bo Ky there are some kind of inexplciable innards added. I have no idea what these things may be. They are white, transluscent, and a bit crunchy, and they definately come from inside a cow.
Who the fuck cares what part of the cow it came from... They are good to eat, though. Probably not kosher. I don't care.
Oh well. Hell, here I come!
Now, if you are in Hungary, you should understand that we could not finish this meal, and it cost us Ft 3,400 for the two of us. This was a
fásza nagy lakomás for the price of two Big Mac Happy meals in Budapest. We win. You lose.
And in three days, we will lose too!
Fumie in front of $20 worth of food. The best spring rolls we have had in the US. The best greens to have come out of any Asian kitchen. And then, the $3.50 plate of "Mixed Country Meat." When I ordered this, the waiter patiently explained, without much command of English, that this consisted of ears, toungue, and other stuff - he did this by pointing at ears, tongue, and other stuff on himself. It isn't like we asked him "
please show us where the bad man touched you... using this anatomically correct doll...
This is the ultimate in
"You No Like That" Asian dishes. But guess what? It was fantastic! But soon it will come down to that last Nathan's Hot dog at Newark Airport, and then...
burek on Tereza Korut!
Nowadays it looks like this.
The largest single residential housing unit in the world, built by the East Germans in the early 1970s when the city of budapest decided that the Schvab garden resturants with their fish soups and shramli bands had to go to be replaced with cheap worker's housing.
Of course, this being Budapest even the drabbest parts of town have their eye-popping surprise features. How about some Roman ruins, such as these at Florian ter, just across the way from the East German Mega-Residence.
Winter shopping in Hungary means... cabbages and meat. I had to make some dinner this week and went into Moldavian Jew default mode: mamaliga with mushrooms. Mamaliga is the cornmeal porridge eaten by most of rural Romania at any given meal, usually served in a big iron cauldron accompanied by a bottle of tsuica, like this one in Maramures...
There is no better winter food. Perhaps no better food in general, unless you are Asian (... japanese?...) and like rice. As for me, mamaliga is cheaper than mashed potatoes, faster to prepare, and goes better with cheese or mushrooms. My father was raised eating mamaliga mit kas un piter, (Yiddish: with cheese and butter) cooked by my Grandmother who was from Teleneshti in Bessarabia. When I am home I like to cook it up for him...
As for myself, I peeked into the pantry and found the needed ingredieants. Cornmeal, fresh mushrooms, and some dried wild mushrooms I brought from the Hackensack Costco in the US. Usually I get my wild mushrooms from my Moldavian folk music buddies here in Budapest, who are all fanatic - and well trained - mushroom hunters. If they can eat them and live, then so can I. Otheriwse, Costoco sells these huge towering plastic conatiners of dried morels, pocinis, and chanterelles for peanuts comapered to their fair marlet price so I brought home a jar.
Mamaliga is a lot coarser than Italian polenta. Polenta actually makes me gag. It's way too fine and baby-foodish. Go for the coarse ground corn meal, boil it up in some salted water with a bit of butter, and then after fifteen minutes pour it out into a concave soup plate greased with some butter and perhaps cheese - in this case Slovak sheep bryndza. After twenty minutes of cooling you can invert it onto a flat serving plate.
We made ours with sauted mushrooms - sliced fresh champignon mushrooms, a bit of soaked wild mushrooms and their soaking juice. Made a flour and oil roux to what the Cajuns would call a "dark peanut butter roux" and added the shrooms, seasoned with black pepper and a slight hint of nutmeg. Heaven on a plate. 
In early February Fumie and I are taking advantage of a special sale she found on the Whizz Air website to fly to Milan to visit our friend Igor... for free. All we pay is airport taxes and we're in the fashion capital of Italy - during February sale month - where the local food tradition is the happy hour. Milanese bars and restaurants set out huge buffet tables at around five in the afternoon where for the mere price of a drink - usually a glass of wine or a beer - you can pig out. Apparently this used to mean a small snack, perhaps some pizza or cold cuts, but soon grew with typically Milanese extravagance to a situation where some places put out ten different pasta dishes and a salad and antipasto spread that would put Babbo's out of business. So, yes, polenta... pehaps. We will be documenting the places we hit, and we have been known to hit three or four in an evening. But until then, winter means mamaliga.
We are back in Budapest during one of the greyest, most unphotogenic winters in memory. The nation is undergoing National Hangover Month. January in Hungary seems to be when everybody who has survived the holiday season is on a temporary teetotaling regime, at least until February arrives with the promise of farsang, or Carnival, which means a long weekend of midwinter revels. As for me, I am enduring a difficult period of withdrawal from good cheap chinese food. After a couple of months in New York gorging on low cost dim sum and korean treats, I am now going cold-turkey on my favorite cuisine. Now that I have established, beyond doubt, that I like cheap chinese food my options are basically to either make it myself or to hoof it over to the Four Tigers Chinese Market in Pest.
The Four Tigers Market, alias the 
There are lunch stands located all through the market, but the best are the ones in the back of the market, directly behind the middle entrance off of Kobanyai ut. Just enter the gate and march beyond the "used" cell phone vendors and the chinese lunch stands near the entrance to the row of shipping containers in the back of the market. Yes, it looks dangerously unhygenic, and yes, you have to eat outside from grungy picnic tables, but it is good, cheap, and authentic. So what if they chop meat on carboard laid out on the ground? They do that in Sinkiang as well.
Pepper, vineagr, and garlic sauce to keep things happy. This is best in soup, but there is usually some straight hot pepper paste around as well, and always a squeeze bottle of Sriracha sauce.
The Dumpling Lady. The northern Chinese like dumplings - shiu-jao - and this woman has had the dumpling market cornered for several years. At Ft 500 a plate of ten, they keep the market warm and fed in the cold season. Best eaten with a dipping sauce of black vinegar and hot sauce. There are also spicy noodles and cold noodles in the summer.
Right next to the noodle lady is a stand selling Asian vegetables and basic Chinese groceries, but I couldn't take a photo because the nice noodle stand people warned me off of trying. Big nasty looking Hungarian paramilitary security guards are happy to confiscate your camera. There is a strict policy of no photography allowed in the Four Tigers Market, which possibly dates back to its rough reputation in the Wild East Years of the 1990s, when the operation of the market was wrested from a shady mafiod Hungarian security guard company by a former Hungarian Minister of the Interior using Hungarian Army commandos. Subsequently, said Minister retired to operate the market himself as a sort of profitable private fiefdom, free of annoyances such as federal tax and customs investigators and - happily for us - local restaurant inspectors. Today the operation of the market is somewhat more legit, but the rules remain, as seen in the picture below showing the entrance gate to the market. No dogs, no cameras, no guns, and no video. And they mean it.
The photos I have here were all taken surreptitiously... I don't suggest that anybody visiting the market try to take photos in a manner that will get your camera confiscated. And, in any case, we usually get our chinese vegetables across the street at any of the grocery vans parked along Kőbányai ut or at the Rong rong market, directly across the street from the market's main entrance.
After coffee at the Parisienne Japanese bakery and cafe in Ft. Lee, we headed down to Palisades Park. Fumie loved being in New York's Chinatown because the vibe made her feel she was traveling in Asia again. Here we felt we were visiting Korea. 
That neither-here-nor-there globalistic feeling definately strikes you when you enter the Han Ah Reum shopping mall. This is one of my favorite places in New Jersey, because Jersey has always attracted immigrant cultures, and there have always been some Jersey ethnic version of the giant market like we have at home, whether it was Polish, German, Chinese or - as now - Korean. 
Fumie picking up a few last minute items before heading home - a lot of Japanese food is identical to Korean food, so for konyaku and seaweed, we were set... The Japanese actually have a secret craving for Korean food, since so many Koreans were brought to Japan as labor when Japan occupied Korea. They love the bold flavors, they secretly yearn for the hot pepper and garlic in rude doses, and kimchee has taken hold in Japan in the way that Indian curries have supplanted most of traditional English food in Great Britain. 
Some things you can't fake at home. Walking around a Korean megamarket makes me think back to the days of my childhood when I would never dream that people would eat fermented squid or fish guts with a straight face. Now I find myself wondering how I will be able to go without the stuff.
I had never really given congee much attention until this year. Fumie started going on a congee crusade when she arrived, mainly because so much of the American diet was so different that she usually needed something bland - and Asian - to settle her stomach. And since we seemed to spend a lot of time in the Lower East side and east Chinatown, congee seemed the answer.
They also make excellent noodle dishes, like this classic cantonese beef chow fun. Sticking with the rice theme, these are thick rice noodles. My discovery of chow fun dates from 1982, and it became the lunch of my years in Boston. I used to bicycle down to Chinatown from my job at BU at least twice weekely during lunch hour for take out chow fun.
Also in the rice noodle family, Singapore style mei fun, thin rice noodles fried with shrimp in a light curry sauce. I am very sure I will not have anything this good in Budapest for a long, long time, unless that thing is made from pork and paprika... We are leaving for Hungary later this week... no more dim sum...
Another memorable congee was found at the Hsin Wong Restaurant on Baxter st. in central ("tourist") Chinatown.
The presence of roast ducks in a Chinese Restaurant window is a pretty good indicator that I want to eat whatever they have inside. I mean, you can at least see the food. It may look like pig intestines, but then, I want to eat pig intestines.
At Hsin wong I took the easy road and went for an order of pork spare ribs. these were not the dry, stringy spare ribs that come with the usual take-out bag of chinese food. These were amazing, meaty, moist, and would have to rate a 9.8 on a scale of 10 in the Best Chinese Spare Ribs in the World list.
The congee.
One feature of chopped roast duck places is that they usually are cheap and they serve noodle soup. Hsin Wong was one of the better noodle soups I have had in New York. Beef with shrmp wonton and vegetables...
The proper side dish to a chinese soup meal is a plate of green vegetables with oyster sauce.