One Fork, One Spoon has moved

When I started this blog in 2007, I saw it as a semi-public place for me to practice writing. I never expected any of my friends to read it regularly, and I certainly didn’t expect any strangers to find it. I’m really grateful and amazed that I had any readers. Ah, the wonders of the Internet!

So I hope you’ll continue to read me at the blog’s new location at www.oneforkonespoon.wordpress.com. I’ll be blogging about a new project, a Korean cookbook that I’m working on with my friend Diane Choo. The book will be published by East Rock Publishing, a new publisher focusing on East Asian culture, sometime in 2010. I’m really excited about it, and especially about our upcoming research trip to Korea. Regional specialties, learning from master housewives, it's my dream come true!

Porteño food at Cafe San Juan

This is my last post about Argentina. It’s been over a month since I got back, but I still think about it all the time—the things I saw, the people I met, and of course the food I ate. So after the mildly snide comments I’ve made about Argentine food, it seems fair and right to write my last post about a delicious Argentine meal we ate that was not steak.

Café San Juan in San Telmo wants you to feel comfortable and cozy. There are no menus, just substantial blackboards that the servers will prop up on your table. One is devoted to tapas, the other to main dishes like rabbit and lamb chops. (I love lamb chops but I love them even more when they’re called “chuletitas de cordero.”) The kitchen is open, but not in the flamboyant way you see in the U.S., since it’s small and just pushed off to the side. It almost feels more like the restaurant just didn’t want to separate the chefs from the dining room and vice versa. The décor in general is quiet and unassuming, clean but a little bare. The warmth of the room comes completely from the food and the happy people eating it.

We ordered two tapas and two entrees. The waiter seemed a little surprised, and when the food arrived, we realized why. The portions were huge, so that even before we started eating, we could see we were clearly in the New World. We Americans, North and South, love our food big!

But I can’t complain that the roast pork tapas were too big. I loved every bite I had, both my piece and the half I got from my friend. Thick slices of roast pork were layered on a piece of good, crusty bread, with more than just a drizzle of a green cilantro sauce. The gazpacho was served in its own shot glass, but there was nothing precious about the presentation. I made a mess on the tablecloth pouring the gazpacho over my share. I didn’t care.



Likewise, the olives were speared onto equally thick and generous slices of cheese. Simple, delicious, and totally satisfying. The rabbit was also very generous—it looked like the entire rabbit was on our plate. Though there was nothing wrong with it, we agreed there was something about the uniformly rich and braised flavor that didn’t really suit our palates.



But what impressed me the most was the beautiful canelones de mollejas, or cannelloni stuffed with sweetbreads. They were monstrous tubes of pasta, reminding me again of how the New World super-sizes everything from the Old World, but I wanted as much of it as I could get. The sweetbreads had been mixed with a wonderful ricotta, and the pasta itself defied all my expectations with its firm al dente resistance. The tomato sauce was incredibly rich, obviously full of some kind of fat, but it still added the tartness and brightness necessary to make the dish unstoppable. I don’t know if sweetbread cannelloni is particularly Italian, but it felt very beefy and Argentine.



My friend, who had found other Argentine desserts impossibly sweet, loved our dessert. It was just a sweet little rice pudding with an icy mango sorbet and some very jaunty tuiles.

The Guía Oleo, an Argentine online food guide, describes the food at Café San Juan as “porteño,” the Argentine word to describe the people who live in Buenos Aires, even though I’d heard it described on Chowhound as Spanish. Now that I’ve been there, I think the Guía is right. This is true porteño food.

Voulez Bar

“Voulez” in French means, “You want.” When you arrive at Voulez Bar, a French bistro and cafe in Buenos Aires, it's pretty clear, yes, you do want.



It's not just that you might be tired of steak and excited to eat a little quiche/tarta with some fresh greens dressed in a very French way. Of course, the space is beautiful, with large windows that let in the kind of light that makes the most lowly glass of white wine gleam and glimmer. It is obviously popular, despite being a little expensive by porteño standards, filled with ladies lunching, businessmen dining, and a trio of Americans who seemed more like expats than tourists judging by their self-satisfied conversation. (I would be self-satisfied, too, if I managed to figure out a way to live there.)

It's just the magic that’s always in the best cafes. It's that perfect low-level buzz of noise that comes from the echo of voices and clinking silverware, and the feeling that you can sit as long as you want looking out the window. You can be alone but have conversations surround you.

And the quiche there really is very good.

Chinese food, and the possibilities of life in Buenos Aires

For me, love comes with familiarity. So it was only in my second week in Buenos Aires, and my third week in Argentina, that I really began to love the city. I knew at least a few of the major bus routes leaving off of Avenida Santa Fe. I could carry a vague map of the city in my head. I had my favorite café, where I could drink a café cortado and eat medialunas all day and even plug my laptop into an outlet. (New Yorkers love Buenos Aires because it shows them life in a big city doesn’t have to be quite so hard.)

But what really moved me to love Buenos Aires, and to be able to imagine living there for more than a week or two, was the discovery of great Chinese food. Yes, Buenos Aires has great Chinese food. Great Chinese food is a good thing, wherever you are, but it’s particularly noteworthy when you’re in a country where the culinary standard seems to be a serious aversion to garlic, spices, and heat. (I try really hard to accept a country’s food on its own terms, but a Korean girl has her limits.)

Chinatown in the leafy, outer neighborhood of Belgrano turned out to be just a few blocks, but like all Chinatowns around the world, there were gold and red tchotchkes for sale and tourists and Argentines looking for exotic thrills.

The kind of thrills Zizou* and I were looking for, we happily found at a place called Lai Lai, from a Chowhound tip. It was very “Chinese,” to be sure—red lanterns, red walls, red light. There were postcards of Taiwan lined up in right above the tables all around the room, that made me wonder what the owners longed for, especially when Zizou, whose family is from Taiwan, told me the staff were speaking Mandarin with a Beijing accent. Unlike many of the restaurants we normally go to in San Francisco and New York, this restaurant could not be bare-boned. It had to prove its Chinese-ness to its non-Chinese clientele.

At the same time, the menu was oddly reassuring in its Spanish translations. There was very little in the way of bird’s nest soup or abalone, and the chicken, beef, and pork that was there was translated in a way that claimed, “This is very much like this that you already know.” Tofu was “queso de soya” or “soy cheese”; wontons were “raviolines.” It made me realize how flexible American culture is, that we happily learn new words for the new foods we eat, even if we might mangle their pronunciation. We say “panna cotta,” not “Italian custard,” and “taco” instead of “Mexican pancake stuffed with meat.”

In the end, what we loved about the food wasn’t that it was just like the mapo tofu I’ve had at Grand Sichuan in Chelsea, or the dumplings we’ve had at Koi Palace in Daly City. Everything we ate was a little unexpected, a little surprising, and all good.



Our appetizer of spicy dumplings was served in a hot, oily broth, rather than the pool of chile oil we expected, but the broth was so tangy and restorative, we spooned it up.



The lamb with scallions was a little tough with gristle, but the taste of the scallions was a joy, like chewing on springtime after all the vegetable-less dishes I’d eaten. The beef with Chinese broccoli had an intense flavor of star anise, but it was curious and interesting because it had a flavor that wasn't one of the three dominant flavors in Argentine food.



The best part, though, was the mapo tofu. Not only was the tofu slightly firmer and more resilient than usual, it tasted of beef! Not pork! I’ve seen recipes for mapo tofu that call for beef, not pork, but it just seemed so appropriately Argentine to replace the most common meat in Chinese food with their beloved beef. We first were concerned it wasn’t red enough, but then we realized the red light of the restaurant was hiding the amount of chiles in the sauce. It was absolutely delicious.

At one point, Zizou asked me, “Do you think this would taste as good if we were in New York or in San Francisco?” Probably not, given that the food tasted the way I imagine manna tasted to the starving Israelites, but in a way, it didn't really matter.

It was Chinese food, the Argentine way. And that is how I fell in love with Buenos Aires.

*Zizou, the alias of my privacy-seeking friend and traveling buddy.