RSS
 

Archive for the ‘TravelSpite’ Category

BakeSpite: Back to Defiance

19 Oct

I had dinner the other night at Fort Defiance, the restaurant in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn where I discovered the Phony Negroni last year. It’s a cozy little place in a rapidly blossoming neighborhood full of genuine hipsters. Not the “video gamer on the Internet” definition of hipster, which basically means “anyone who puts more than two seconds of thought into what they wear and have buttons on their shirts rather than video game logos.” No, real hipsters. The wild, uninhibited kind. I mean, I saw people driving El Caminos ironically. That’s the real deal right there.

I learned two things at Fort Defiance this year. First, the iPhone’s camera may do HDR, but it still sucks for shooting food under low lighting conditions.

Secondly, provolone cheese and fried eggs don’t make for a great burger. Individually, either one would be awesome on a burger, but together they’re just not balanced right. A fried egg always has that little hint of sulfur lingering around the edges, a subtle flavor that needs to be counteracted with something sharper. Provolone hits your tastebuds at the same place as egg, amplifying the earth undertones of each and bringing that aspect of their flavors to the front. It wasn’t a bad burger, but I should have used a sharper cheese (swiss, maybe, or cheddar) to complement the egg. Well, live and learn.

Despite my own build-a-burger failure, I highly recommend Fort Defiance. If you ever happen to be in Red Hook (perhaps to take lessons on cultivating an ironic mustache) , you should stop by for their Monday night burger deal — ten bucks for a custom burger and roasted potatoes. That’s a decent price for a really good burger in New York, but it gets better when you add a two dollar Tom Collins (or beer, if you must). Thumbs up. Just don’t build a sulfur burger like I did. With unlimited freedom comes unlimited potential for failure. Remember that, my young apprentice.

 
5 Comments

Posted in BakeSpite, TravelSpite

 

BakeSpite: Eating well amidst the nerds

17 Oct

New York Comic-Con was a unique experience for me: It was the first convention of this sort where I actually managed to enjoy everything I ate. No miserable subsistence on dry shingles of pizza this year. New York is a city renowned for its great food options, but to see that reality manage to penetrate the impermeable walls of a convention was quite the pleasant surprise.

I actually found good food — and cheap! — at the back of the main exhibition hall in the form of a booth I read as “Koredog,” although my Google efforts reveal no such vendor by that name. So who knows? Anyway, Koredog-Or-Whatever was interesting enough that I overcame my aversion to tubes of mysterious pulped meat and ordered a hot dog for the first time in… maybe a decade? It was worth it.

Koredog-Or-Whatever is, basically, a chili dog. Instead of just slopping soupy ground beef over your weiner, though, they instead go all Korean on it and slather it with either spicy chicken or bulgogi (thin-sliced beef). In my opinion, the chicken was a lot better, as the beef was slightly dry and the sauce they used for it was a little too much like mesquite-smoked barbecue sauce to taste particularly, you know, Korean. Each dog also includes lettuce and pickles, though I dropped the latter because they were foul-looking America-style Western dill instead of kimchi or those little pickled sardines you get as appetizer dishes when you go out for Korean. Anyway, good stuff (it helped that the dog itself was way, way better than your standard Oscar-Meyer tube of tears), and surprisingly affordable at five bucks. If this place that may or may not be called Koredog really exists in the real world, I cheerfully encourage everyone to try it out.

I also took a couple of side excursion to Go Go Curry, which (being at 38th and 8th)  was a little less than a mile from the Javits Center and therefore an easy walk in pleasant weather. Also, in rainy weather. Some things are worth getting soaked for, you know?

This was definitely one of them. And yeah, I put cheese on my curry. Look, you’re already eating a plate of sugary starch slathered with fatty sauce topped by a fried piece of pig; you might as well go all-in and enjoy it.

Food!

Edit: Hey, I just realized: GameSpite has turned back into a real blog again, a place where I write about stuff I find interesting rather than just another spot where I write about video games. No wonder traffic has dropped by about a third!

 
9 Comments

Posted in BakeSpite, TravelSpite

 

BakeSpite: Hello from New York

13 Oct

So, hey. I’m covering New York Comic-Con this weekend, which means I can’t really blog much here. At least, not about video games. But I can sure write about food, because I can’t imagine that flying on 1UP. You know?

Cat insisted that for my first night here — actually our first night here, kind of; when she learned I was going to NYC, she booked her own simultaneous vacation out of sheer jealousy and will be here in the same city as me, though not actually doing anything with me so she can hang out with friends while I work for a solid weekend — for my first night here, I go to one of her old favorite haunts: La Bonne Soupe, a French (obviously) bistro in midtown. I guess it’s pretty reasonably priced for something that isn’t fast food in NYC, as a hamburger with fries — sorry, I mean, steak haché aux pomme frites —  is less than $15. (I love this city, but I’m not so crazy about the pricing.) And, fortunately, it is very tasty. I had the steak haché a poivre, despite not being much for red meat, and I did not regret a bite of it.

Someone also ordered escargot for the table, and that was super tasty as well. I’ve had some pretty bad escargot in my time, but this was excellent. Probably because each snail was cooked while completely immersed in garlic and butter. Yes, yes, French cuisine, I’ve figured out your “secret,” and that secret is beaucoup beurre.

Here is another secret: Brown sauces never, ever photograph well. Doesn’t this look nasty? But it was delicious! This place does hamburgers Hamburg steak style, just meat with sauce, and the sauce in question here is made with cream, cognac, and peppercorns. The fries were super-crispy, which means probably double-fried and double-fatty. And the wine was surprisingly decent for a wine at a New York restaurant; unlike pretty much any other wine I’ve ever had at a restaurant here without diving into the “second mortgage” section of the wine list, it tasted of fruit rather than vinegar.

In short, a success. And a nice change of pace after a day of airport food.

Tomorrow: sad lamentations about the fact that there is no decent food within a half-mile of the Javits Center.

 
4 Comments

Posted in BakeSpite, RestaurantSpite, TravelSpite

 

BakeSpite: Now that is bánh mì

27 Apr

Well, that’s about enough of PlayStation for a little while. I need a mental break. Let’s write about food instead.

Remember a few weeks ago when I posted about an overpriced, mediocre Vietnamese sandwich I had the misfortune of purchasing for lunch? I wasn’t too broken up, because I knew I was en route to Orange County in a few days. And the best thing about Orange County — possibly the one good thing, really — is the suburb of Westchester, which has a huge Vietnamese immigrant community. And that means plentiful, cheap, delicious, Vietnamese food. Such as this:

This is not the best bánh mì I’ve ever eaten, but that’s just because I’ve had better bread before. Everything else about it was perfect. (The bread was merely really good.) The vegetables were plentiful, the pickles perfectly flavored, the meat wonderfully smoky, the mayonnaise buttery rich and spread thin enough that it was an accent rather than an overpowering goop. The bread could have been a little softer inside and a little crustier outside, but what the hey.

And, of course, since it was in Westminster, that means the price wasn’t $8.50 like it is near my office, but rather:

Yes, it was $2.50. Two and a half bucks for 12″ of deliciousness. That makes it half the price of those Subway $5 footlongs. And about ten times as tasty.

You know the sad little bins of withered sandwich fixings you see at Subway? The ingredients were super-fresh and piled high, with an emphasis on quality rather than variety. This is, as it should be.

I couldn’t even begin to spell the name of this place, but if you ever find yourself in Westminster, CA with the desire to buy more super-delicious food than you can eat in a single sitting, look for a place at the corner of Euclid and W Edinger. Your tastebuds will thank you.

No, just kidding; they’ll be too busy exploding with pleasure to thank you, but the sentiment will still be there.

 
9 Comments

Posted in BakeSpite, RestaurantSpite, TravelSpite

 

Pepper Lunch, Shibuya

14 Sep

Yesterday at lunch I let our esteemed leader Sam determine our choice of food. His selection was a place called Pepper Lunch. I’ve walked past the Pepper Lunch in Akihabara lord knows how many times over the past few years, but it looked kind of… not iconically Japanese. So I’ve always passed it by in favor of curry, ramen, sushi, that sort of thing.

Silly me! Turns out Pepper Lunch is extremely Japanese. We stopped at the one in Shibuya beneath the Yamanote rail bridge, and it’s absolutely the sort of place you only see here in Japan. Despite being a steak restaurant, even. You make your meal selection via vending machine ticket, customizing your order by purchasing specific tickets, and hand your tickets off to the wait staff. A few minutes later, they bring you your customized order. I guess it’s kind of like vender cafes in New York, but somehow more idiomatic to Japan.

In the case of Pepper Lunch, that idiom spans a very specific choice of skillet-fried steaks. They also really like corn here, offering not only a portion of corn with each steak selection but also selling it as a side and in the form of a corn soup. I’m not really sure where the “pepper” part of Pepper Lunch comes into play, but maybe “pepper” is code for “corn” here.

Your meat is delivered to the table uncooked, but that’s OK because it’s served on an insanely hot skillet with a pair of tongs to allow you to flip the meat chunks for even cooking. Each meal option is a different cut and comes with different sides — mine included corn (of course), a couple of carrot pieces, some thin slices of garlic, and a very lonely green bean. The meat is served with a generous dab of seasoned butter sitting on top, which melts as you flip the meat and makes the food dangerously delicious. Well, I say “dangerously,” but I eat beef and eggs and other similar foods so rarely that my cholesterol is epically low; you could double it and I’d still be in the healthy cholesterol range. So I dug into my rare indulgence of butter-soaked beef with gusto.

Like most Japanese fast food I’ve experienced, Pepper Lunch’s servings are pretty horrifyingly unhealthy, but the high fat and cholesterol content are mitigated by the small portions. Of course, like curry restaurants, you can choose to overeat to your poor straining heart’s content, but I find the smallest portions (“diet” portions, intended to be eaten by office ladies watching their weight) are almost always enough to satisfy.

I don’t imagine Pepper Lunch is the sort of place I’ll eat often, but it was surprisingly delicious. I’d even regret having passed it up all these years if not for the fact that in doing so I usually end up at someplace like the crazy chirashi restaurant on Chuo-dori I discovered last year. Basically I guess what I’m saying is that when I’m in Japan, and I eat food, I go away happy.

 
Comments Off

Posted in RestaurantSpite, TravelSpite

 

The stars of Muteki Mario

12 Sep

My first stop in Tokyo this year — right after a much-needed bite to eat at CoCo Ichiban Curry — was the famous Muteki Mario, the latest hot retrogaming-themed bar in Shinjuku. I managed to catch the star lineup: three videogame-themed drinks that more or less justify to place’s gaming gimmick.

From left: the Enemy Koopa (mint and tequila, basically mouthwash); the Mario (grapefruit juice and either rum or gin — hard to tell as the tartness fruit dominated everything); and the Cute Peach (some kind of milky drink with peach liqueur). I wasn’t that impressed with any of them, honestly, and ultimately settled on a gin and tonic.

But hey, nerdy drinks!

 
Comments Off

Posted in TravelSpite