i******n
发帖数: 538 | 1 今天看到纽约时报上有篇长文推荐的中餐馆的。叫什么Xiao Ye restaurant on
Orchard Street on the Lower East Side。这是哪家啊？
October 12, 2010
Xiao Ye
By SAM SIFTON, New York Times
EIGHT in the evening at Xiao Ye, Eddie Huang’s new restaurant on Orchard
Street on the Lower East Side, and hip-hop was bouncing off the black-
painted walls of the long, narrow dining room. Young men and women ate
dumplings and slurped noodles, drank Taiwanese beer. They talked smack about
football and architecture, smartphones and music.
Mr. Huang was one of them. He had strutted into the restaurant with a crew
of friends and taken a table in the middle of the room, then pulled out his
mobile device and started to text. There were employees cooking, and someone
signaled to them. Soon they brought food. Mr. Huang alternated between
eating it and stabbing at his phone.
“I’m interested in the culture of eating,” he would write later on his
blog. “I am not a chef.”
Which sounds about right and is really too bad. Because if Mr. Huang spent
even a third of the time cooking that he does writing funny blog posts and
wry Twitter updates, posting hip-hop videos and responding to Internet
friends, rivals, critics and customers, Xiao Ye might be one of the more
interesting restaurants to open in New York City in the last few months.
As it stands, though, Xiao Ye is an artful misfire: the sort of place that,
as Mr. Huang sadly appears to desire it to be, is really only best when the
customers are a little drunk, a little high, maybe both and in any event
extremely hungry.
His intentions are good. Xiao Ye translates from the Taiwanese as “midnight
snack.” And the restaurant almost excels at serving those, fresh and well
made, free of the taint of fast-food culture. Xiao Ye could almost be the
right place to eat right now.
You can get a bowl of Taiwanese pork on rice, the meat — luscious Duroc-
breed pork — ground into an intensely flavored, almost mouth-numbing stew
with soy sauce and five-spice powder, and realize that the notion of making
classic late-night Asian snack food with good ingredients, without MSG, is a
terrific one. Add a soundtrack of Danger Mouse and Jemini, a glass of
bubble tea with Johnnie Black and it becomes a dish for repeating a few
times a month, the sort of food that leads to later nights than you intended
, long walks home.
Xiao Ye serves top-drawer dumplings, open-ended and sweetly moist within,
more of that ground Duroc pork combining with Napa cabbage to elevate the
flavor exactly to its $8 cost. There are sometimes very good noodles —
northern-Chinese-style zha jiang mien with yet more ground pork in a perfect
bean-paste sauce — though it is a dice-throw each time whether these will
be mostly hot or kind of cold. There is an outstanding dish of General Tso-
style prawns, with a sweet-fiery sauce that melds with rice into something
approaching a new paradigm: a Chinese dish reinvented, then reinvented again
.
And the Hainan chicken with rice is beautifully flavored, tender and sweet.
In Singapore, where “HCR” is close to a national dish, the debate over its
makers often concerns the quality of the chili sauce that accompanies the
dish and acts as paint for the chicken’s canvas. At Xiao Ye, the poles are
reversed, and the chicken is the dominant taste. It’s remarkable.
Xiao Ye should be the sort of restaurant to flock to after rock shows or on
the way to them, a room sitting near the epicenter of Lower East Side
culture. It should, as Mr. Huang has written, invoke St. Marks Place without
the tourists. It should have that energy, that youth, that drive.
And yet. Despite a capable and attractive floor staff of neighborhood
waiters and fast-hands bartenders, and a clientele that seems willing and
able to return to its doors, Xiao Ye does not always rise to meet our needs.
It’s not just that the restaurant’s chef and owner is sitting in the
middle of the room eating dinner alongside his customers.
Cabbage said to have been steamed with garlic and chilies, then drizzled
with lardo, tastes of cardboard and water, a school-lunch nightmare that is
hard to shake. There are punishingly salty, barely pickled cucumbers. A beef
rib braised into pale, flabby submission in a mixture of ginger beer,
chilies and tomatoes might have been made by your college roommate in a
borrowed Crock-Pot one night over winter break, then discarded in favor of
Greek pizza from that place out by the discount liquor store.
Speaking of: Xiao Ye’s melted mozzarella sandwich on grilled Pullman bread
with ham, caramelized scallions and a thick swipe of gochujang, a fiery soy-
based hot paste, might have been your college roommate’s idea as well, made
in the toaster oven, then abandoned in favor of chicken wings from that
other place out by the discount liquor store.
A moist, fairly bland Cheeto-fried chicken (you read that correctly) arrives
as sliced breast meat, white beneath its orange coat, with a marmalade
dipping sauce that’s been hit with chilies, but not very hard: tiger-hued
stunt food for the Princeton homecoming, perhaps. It’s amusing, but perhaps
best ordered only by the visibly intoxicated.
Mr. Huang has called some of these dishes “American-born Chinese diner food
.” Perhaps. They are certainly not the Taiwanese snack food that he learned
from his mother as a kid in Orlando, Fla., and then in part perfected at
Baohaus, the excellent little sandwich shop he opened on Rivington Street in
December 2009, where his gua bao, or steamed-bun sandwiches, crush comers
from all directions in matters of flavor and value.
These dishes come from an entirely different place from those sandwiches,
and from a different place from a great deal of the Xiao Ye menu as well.
They are more calculated, more desperate and far less interesting.
More than this: they are a little dishonest. They aren’t diner food so much
as what a talented Asian guy rooting around in the refrigerator for
something funny to eat (or serve in his restaurant) might call diner food.
There’s gochujang on the grilled cheese. Instead of ketchup! Get it? These
dishes have to go.
The entire business plan for Xiao Ye boils down to a painted sign above the
open door to the kitchen. It declares Mr. Huang’s intentions in the lingua
franca of his age and upbringing. The sign makes fun of his background and
forebears even as its creator celebrates both. “Dericious,” reads the
script, a pidgin nod to what Mr. Huang wants his Xiao Ye to be.
Those soft and ethereal dumplings qualify; so, too, the pork on rice and the
Hainan chicken. There is some good fried tofu as well, and a marvelous
shaved-ice dessert roughly the size of a breadbox. But if Mr. Huang really
wants to stand for delicious, he is going to need to work harder.
Because in the meantime? Xiao Ye is a bummer.
Xiao Ye
Fair
198B Orchard Street (Houston Street), Lower East Side; (212) 777-7733;
xiaoyenyc.com.
ATMOSPHERE Your boy Eddie’s basement, with Hova on the stereo: Where the
food at?
SOUND LEVEL It can get loud, though not unpleasantly so, provided you like
hip-hop.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Dumplings, pork on rice, zha jiang mien, Hainan chicken,
General Tso’s prawns.
WINE LIST Some wines, some sakes, some cocktails (Hennessy and Four Loko!),
but the smartest tack is beer: Taiwan Original.
PRICE RANGE Appetizers, $6 to $10; larger plates, $9 to $18.
HOURS Tuesday, Wednesday and Sunday, 6 to 11 p.m.; Thursday to Saturday, to
2 a.m.
RESERVATIONS Yes.
CREDIT CARDS All major cards.
WHEELCHAIR ACCESS A crowded, narrow dining room, but navigable.
WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the
reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into
consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change. | s***e
发帖数: 2795 | 2 太长了。。。好吃吗？
about
【在 i******n 的大作中提到】
: 今天看到纽约时报上有篇长文推荐的中餐馆的。叫什么Xiao Ye restaurant on
: Orchard Street on the Lower East Side。这是哪家啊？
: October 12, 2010
: Xiao Ye
: By SAM SIFTON, New York Times
: EIGHT in the evening at Xiao Ye, Eddie Huang’s new restaurant on Orchard
: Street on the Lower East Side, and hip-hop was bouncing off the black-
: painted walls of the long, narrow dining room. Young men and women ate
: dumplings and slurped noodles, drank Taiwanese beer. They talked smack about
: football and architecture, smartphones and music.
| i******n
发帖数: 538 | 3 没吃过，这不是才问.我想纽约时报写这么长的文章，可能这个餐馆还有不错的地方吧。
【在 s***e 的大作中提到】
: 太长了。。。好吃吗？
:
: about
| m*******y
发帖数: 14292 | |
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