Michael's Noodles

Lately I've been working on a theory that DC's Chinatown is no match for the Chinese restaurants in Rockville. Your average DC resident is more familiar with the downtown hub than the Rockville places, so I thought that my theory was pretty counterintuitive. But last night my Chinese friend Dan treated this like a no-brainer. "Yeah, Rockville is much better," he agreed, matter-of-factly.

Dan thought that the three crown jewels of the Rockville scene - Joe's, Bob's, and Michael's noodle restaurants - had different owners even despite all the similarities in name, menu, location, and pretty much every other restaurant attribute. Next time we head up to Rockville, he agreed to translate my questions to the Taiwanese waitresses, who crack up hysterically and walk away, still laughing, when I try the questions in English.

When Lolly and I recently lunched at Michael's Noodles, I did manage to find out from a manager named Lang that Michael's Noodles was the last of the three restaurants to open. She also seemed to be saying that the three had independent ownership, but her randomly mixed-in Chinese words left me uncertain. And she seemed a little uncomfortable with the topic; our conversation was left hanging abruptly when Lang darted back into the kitchen.

The food was more satisfying. Michael's cuisine is in full bloom, even if it's the latecomer of the Rockville noodle houses.

The thousand year old egg pictured above was a first for Lolly and me. A traditional Chinese delicacy, these eggs are preserved, sometimes underground, in a clay-like plaster of red earth, garden lime, and tea for about 100 days.

Not quite a thousand years, but long enough for the mixture to leach through the shell and turn the egg into a freak show. The egg white becomes a dark shade of brown and the yolk is cast black. I'm not crazy about eating any food that looks like it drowned in the Valdez oil spill let alone an ancient midnight egg. But the taste was smoky, sweet and salty, and from now on both Lolly and I will celebrate embryonic racial equality.

Taiwanese dumplings.

Noodles with seafood. That all these Taiwanese restaurants call themselves noodle houses is perplexing to me. The noodle dishes make up a minority of the dishes, and they're often outshined by other menu items. Goupy and salty, this reminded me of the dumbed-down Chinese food for American palates that I had come to Rockville to flee. A five year-old girl at the next table was laughing at us as we struggled to scoop up these slippery things.

Fried rice with Chinese Sausage and Ham. This comfort food had a nice smoky flavor, an attribute that was working well in a number of Michael's dishes.

Sweet and Sour Cabbage.

NY Times Dining & Wine

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/nyregion/22soup.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1258758962-aVf20elMFZ/ThsfwfdA65Q

I think this is an example of what's often frustrating about food writing. The writer takes an interesting observation - many ethnic cuisines feature chicken soup - and fails to even try to explain why this is the case. Why is chicken soup common to such different cultures? Do they all use it for curative purposes? Any other purposes beyond sustenance? Instead of describing the culture behind the food, she fixates on the food itself. The problem is that there's only so much you can say about food without resorting to trite, exaggerative descriptions: the Korean version came with a "stunning" side of mushrooms; when she had the Sichuan soup, her "whole body hummed"; the Greek one tasted "elegant". In what other section of the Times would this ever pass as good writing? Yet, for the food section, it's the norm.

The most overused food writing cliche has to be "delicious." Saying that something is delicious is appropriate for someone who doesn't know anything about food and just want to express dining rapture. For example, I'd expect a college kid drunkenly gobbling down fried chicken at 2 a.m. after a frat party to yell, "Delicious!" It's not appropriate for someone entrusted by the top-ranked newspaper in the country to provide well-researched, engaging analysis of food. So why do I get more than 100,000 results when I enter delicious into the New York Times search engine?

http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch?query=delicious

Is this just the frustration and jealousy of one who will in all likelihood never see a letter of his food writing grace the old grey lady?

Rockville Chinatown

Over the past couple months, I've been to three Taiwanese restaurants in Rockville: Michael's Noodles, Joe's Noodle House, and Bob's Noodle 66.

The similarities of these places go way beyond the titular. Each has taken an encyclopedic approach to menu-writing, with an average of over 200 items available. They serve up many of the same authentic Taiwanese dishes, all of which are boldly indifferent to the preferences of white people. And they aren't exactly taking different spins on these dishes - some of them, like Michael's and Joe's Taiwanese hamburger, are impossible to tell apart.

I have two theories to explain the similarities among these restaurants:

1. The best chef in Taiwan is being cloned by the government and shipped to the States in a conspiracy to get Americans to put down the chicken pasta and start eating interesting food. Ruby Tuesday is taking the hit well.

2. Michael, Joe, and Bob are estranged business partners.

There's some evidence for theory # 2. In 2006, the Post reported that a group of entrepreneurs had banded together to set up a Chinese-oriented shopping strip on North Washington Street. The goal was to build a new Rockville Chinatown that would overtake the moribund downtown version. Currently, though, Bob's Noodle 66 is the only Taiwanese restaurant rollng pasta dough on the strip.

Did the group of entrepreneurs have a falling out? Maybe North Washington Street isn't big enough for three fantastic noodle houses?

I'm making it my goal is to solve this mystery. To do so, I will need to confront horrendous Rockville traffic and numerous miscommunications with three different Taiwanese restaurant staffs, who know the answers to all my questions but in a different language.

Cochon in New Orleans

When I started a conversation with a couple seated next to me at Cochon in New Orleans last week, I probably shouldn't have been surprised to learn that they were from D.C., too.

In D.C., you can have the best of whatever international adventure you feel like. Up for authentic masterpieces of vegetarian Indian food? Go to Rasika. Want to try kifta with berbere sauce prepared just like you'd get it at the National Palace in Addis Ababa? Head over to U Street. What you can't find in DC, and what draws people like me to places like New Orleans, is a distinctive local cuisine.

Cochon is probably the best place to dive deep into unique Louisian flavors. Chef Donald Link grew up in Lake Charles, which is Cajun country, but his food is a mix of Acadiana, Cajun and good ole Southern. When I saw Link on Anthony Bourdain, his thick accent reminded me of the loveably incomprehensible Farmer Fran. In other words, his swamp creds seemed pretty legit. So when I had a chance to go to New Orleans for work, the first thing I did was reserve my table at Cochon.

When they brought over my first dish, fried alligator with chili garlic aioli, I could sense fumes of jealousy coming from my table neighbors. The DC couple was already done with their meal, but they were seriously coveting the tender gator nuggets, so I gave them some. We expressed mutual admiration for the piquant aioli and commiserated over the toils of federal employment.

Bonding over alligator meat just doesn't happen in DC, nor should it (as much fun as it is to imagine Georgetown trophy wives feasting on the swamp thing). But what is the DC staple that seams together Washingtonians in culinary camaraderie? Our two best-known chefs are a Spanish egomaniac who does tapas and a French guy who expanded his LA-based restaurant empire to DC as an afterthought. Probably the only prominent DC chef who tries at all to cobble together a recognizeable DC cuisine is Bob Kinkead. But his efforts to mix Maryland seafood with Virginia ham seem half-hearted, perhaps because he's from Cape Cod.

After trying some of my fried rabbit liver with pepper jelly toast, the DC-ers paid their bill and were replaced by Big Easy natives: a loud-shirted and -talking building contractor named Greg on a second or third date with a blond half his age. Greg told me that the rabbit was his favorite dish at Cochon, and he advised that, if I wanted to blend in with the local crowd, I should express dining rapture by crying out, "Aiii-yee!" To his date's embarrassment, he and I practiced.

My voluble new friend then flagged the waiter and ordered me a boucherie plate. The boucherie is a traditional Cajun pig-slaughtering party, where rural Louisianians take down every last scrap of meat, including organs like the liver, not to mention pig's blood. The plate was an exotic eater's fantasy of boudin, andouille, rillettes, smoked pork jowl, and cracklins. As I began to work my way through the unctuous pieces of pork, Greg, who was still waiting for his food, let loose with a vicarious "Aiii-yee!"

I finished with paneed pork cheeks with goat cheese arugula and beet rosti. As I took my last taste, I felt like I had gained some insight into the wetlands of the Gulf region. If only Kinkead's black flounder with tasso ham and crab did the same thing for my stomping grounds.

New Camera

This pic was taken with my new Kodak EasyShare.



The dish itself is nothing new - just a few simply prepared, reliable ingredients. I grilled some bay scallops in olive oil, seasoning one side of them with cayenne and the other side with oregano. They're served over a stir fry of snap peas, garlic and shallots.

In case anyone ever planned to argue that a Samsung camera phone is a fine alternative for food photography, here's the same dish snapped with my cell. This is the phone that I used for all the photos on my previous site, spelling certain food blog death and, for a good majority of my viewers, early-onset cataracts.