eating nyc

It’s been a few months since our last serious food tour, and we can’t just sit around and get skinny.  It’s just not an option.  So, off we went again.. this time back to my old stomping grounds of NYC where we’ve done several food tours already, but happily the culinary face of Manhattan is constantly changing so there are always new discoveries to be had.  I got myself a shiny new point-and-shoot camera (the S95) for giggles, and couldn’t wait to try it out on what else.. food!  Hmmm in clearing out my older point and shoot, I found about a year’s worth of pictures I forgot about.  At least four or five trips from last year that never got blogged about…. will get around to that at some point.  Maybe.

Anyway, back to the food.

a snap taken by Kiran, my foodie partner in crime and forever-food-tour-buddy

I have unofficially dubbed this particular trip as our Momofuku Discovery journey, since we made it a point to visit three of the five Momofuku establishments in the course of our two days in town.  We previously had visited his Milk Bar and accidentally ruined an entire day’s worth of planned food tour eating by consuming far too many Milk Bar treats – ya, it’s that good.  This time around, we didn’t visit Ko or Ssam Bar, chef David Chang’s most famous ones (gotta leave something to look forward to?), but we did have a delicious meal at his newest midtown establishment Ma Peche, and oh boy was it good.  I accidentally translated this to “my fish” when in actuality it means “mother peach”.  Translation fail.  Previously only a David Chang groupie in name, I’m now officially a consummate (not consummated) de facto groupie, and the giddy owner of an autographed copy of his cookbook.  Which is very interesting reading, by the way.

Another new development for me during this trip was… ramen.  Real ramen has always had a magic associated with it, which is difficult to understand when your only experience with it is the kind where you pour hot water in a styrofoam cup (or bowl, if you’re really making the big bucks), and sit around for a few minutes before you’re done “cooking”.  But if you look at the number of Japanese anime series and movies and children’s stories (albeit all Japanese ones) built around the magic properties of ramen to cure what ails the soul, there might be something to it, right?  When we were in Japan last year, we were too intimidated to approach a true ramen bar where businessmen were sitting with their faces literally IN the bowl, sucking down soup like someone was going to take it from them.  I was very curious, but too frightened of doing it wrong somehow and having the ramen chef snatch my bowl away from me and starting shouting — it’s like the whole Soup Nazi thing, but Japanese.  No WWII reference intended.  I’ve always liked soupy noodle dishes — Chinese beef noodle soup is a favorite from my mother’s kitchen.  But ramen… man, I totally get it now.  And I’m kicking my own ass all over town for not braving the ramen bars in Japan while I was there, and instead wasting my teeth and digestion on chicken-organs-on-a-stick and Japanese Subway and whatever other nonsense we ate… we should have been eating RAMEN 6 meals a day!!!

I digress.  Back to NYC … we visited Ippudo, which was absolutely the highlight of the weekend for me.  Ippudo is a ramen establishment that is very well-known in Japan, headed by a guy that is known as the Ramen King, and the NYC location that we visited is his international debut.  We sucked down bowl after bowl of creamy broth, filled with so much flavor and wonderfulness that I literally stumbled around in a daze upon leaving the restaurant.  If ever there was a thing that I could truly call soul food, this is it.

Related sidenote — if you have no idea what I’m talking about with the whole “magical ramen” thing and are curious about it, I really recommend that you watch the movie Ramen Girl.  Despite Brittany Murphy’s terrible acting in it (may she rest in peace), the movie is cute and funny and explains everything I’m babbling about now…  My new mission is to try to recreate Ippudo’s amazing broth at home.  A bit of research on the interwebs tells me that this involves a pressure cooker and a bunch of pig’s feet.  Bring it on!  Ramen party!

Other pics from the weekend (more found here):

And one of us with our awesome hosts for the weekend, John and Christina *love* :

Instead of going straight home, we drove a few hours due west to pay a visit to our friend Alex who was skiing in the Poconos with his family to celebrate a very big birthday.  This picture of me with Alex’s youngest son Gabe totally kills me:

I have about twenty more pictures exactly like it — I kept hoping he’d lose interest in my face and look up at the camera, but nope.  My face is pretty darn interesting, duh.  And while I was doing this….

The guys were still eating.  (how?????)