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!
Well, I am now back in Budapest, but in order to transport my cargo of chipotle peppers, salted codfish, wakame seaweed, and industrial amounts of El Yucateco Kutbil-Ik Mayan Hot Sauce back to my flat in Zuglo, I needed an extra duffle bag. No problem, when you need something cheap in Jersey, you head to Lodi. On Route 17 is the International Liquidators and Food Warehouse, a megashop like no other. Basically, when some retail giant someplace on the planet goes belly up, the orphaned merchandise winds up here. It's worth a visit if you are ever cruising Route 17 - just across the road is the charmingly sleazy Satin Dolls topless bar, which was rented out to the producers of the Sopranos TV series for several years as the site of the Bada Bing Club.
The International food section is constantly changing - you will always find something odd or special here, like an entire aisle of Macedonian pepper sauces and pickles. As far as Hungarian products were concerned, there were only these few, sad jars of garlic paste. Due to the unstable nature of the middle east, there always seems to be knock-down sales on halal products. How about a can of cow?
But the real reson to go bargain hunting in Lodi is the Indian Chef buffet located inside the market itself. Since the Warehouse seems to be owned and operated by folks from India and their relatives, the lunch options are limited to some of the finest, cheap Indian food available in the New York Area. The dining area may be a bit improvised, but the food is not.
The curry station offers versions of chicken, lamb, and vegetable curries alongside old standards such as cauliflower and potato aloo gobi. The chicken and rice biryani here was one of the most pricey items, at $7.95, but the server kept packing our take out order into a container as if trying to see just how much biryani he could fit into one aluminium take-out plate. It actually served three of us, for dinner.
But the best surprise is the dosa man. Somehow they have scoured the subcontinent to find the most serious and dedicated maker of fermented rice and lentil pancakes and bring him to an industrial sector of Lodi, New Jersey. some of North America's crispiest and most authentic south indian meals are served about 100 meters away from the Bada Bing Club.
I ordered the classic masala dosa, filled with curried potato. These dosas are slow food. An order takes about twenty minutes to fix up, and the wait is worth it. They also serve other rice based specialties from Karnataka cuisne of southern India, such as idlis, smaller thick rice panckes.
Finished dosa, hot and crispy, served with two types of mild chutney sauce and a spicy bowl of sambar for dipping. I have never been able to finish off one of these, and at $5.95, it's a bargain indeed. Tamil cuisine has traditionally been overwhelmingly vegetarian, but honestly, it may be the only vegetarian cuisine that I can imagine eating for any length of time. 
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.
It's the beginning of a new year, and time to celebrate the simple fact that we have gotten this far without screwing up. Celebrating a year in which I was awarded the Hungarian Herzl Prize for being a Laudable and Admired New York Jew in Hungary... although I had to send Golan Tibi in my stead to the ceremony to pick up the prize, and there wasn't any money attached to it, and... I got to visit the Ukraine. I got to tour with the Eldridge street band. I got to play gigs with Muzsikas. And also, a year to celebrate 70 years of 
Bob G. slamming through some creole tunes on one row button cajun accordion. Bob is the guy who first turned me onto the joys of primitive, wheezy, narrow-scale diatonic button accordions, which are the most musically limiting instruments I play alongside the Romanian bagpipes and the Black Sea kemence fiddle. But when you need authentic chanky-chank, nothing will do the job like a real louisiana squeezebox.
This is the shape of the future, with cheese. Slow food franchises... probably inspired by the In-and-Out Burger chain out on the West Coast, which we New Yorkers have heard about but have yet to sample. Five Guys recently expanded into 
I miss places like this in Europe. Some day, I hope, burger chains such as Five Guys or In-and-Out will expand to Europe and then Europeans can learn that the usual franchise outlets like Micky D's and Burger Krap are not hamburgers but actually just beef garbage recycling centers. At Five Guys the staff were actual cooks... not just burger flipping automatons. And they got a big kick when Fumie started snapping their pictures. "Hey, we're gonna be famous!" 