Crème de Cornell Spring 2016

Crème de Cornell a taste with a view

Spring 2016 1

CRèME

de

CORNELL

EDITOR IN CHIEF victoria sadosky MANAGING EDITORS sarah lee lining zheng EDITORIAL STAFF daniela depke, gabrielle leung, justin liu, shashank vura TREASURER theresa ra PUBLICITY CHAIR natasha wolman DIRECTOR OF julia wang PHOTOGRAPHY PHOTO STAFF camille chan, jieyu chen, kevin shih, christian walsh, amy zhong SOCIAL MEDIA CHAIR cathy zhang BLOG DIRECTOR kristen yi CULINARY DIRECTORS jamie french ethyn leong EVENT CHAIRS prajj dey nafisa hossain WEBMASTER chiaki soejima ADVISOR heather kolakowski

Crème de Cornell, an independent student publication at Cornell University, produced and is responsible for the content of this publication. This publication was not reviewed or approved by, nor does it necessarily express or reflect the policies or opinions of, Cornell University or its designated representatives. If you are interested in joining, please contact us at cremedecornell@gmail.com, or find us on facebook at www.facebook.com/CornellGourmetClub and at www.cornellgourmetclub.org.

Funded by Cornell SAFC and International Students Union

photo by kevin shih

letter from the editor Welcome to Crème de Cornell’s “A Taste with a View” issue! In this installment, we see how the view serves as a launching point to discuss food, but we also segue into other compelling aspects of the view. From the physical surroundings in which we dine and the food as a spectacle in of itself, to the visceral connection between food and sight and how physical spaces transform our perception of food, the view can encompass so many realms.

Experience the culinary landscapes of France, Italy, Thailand, and Cuba. Take in the magnificent scenery of the Finger Lakes with Finger Lakes Cider House and Suzanne Fine Regional Cuisine. See the thought which goes into creating the aesthetics of a restaurant. Traverse beyond the restaurant venue and contemplate what it’s like to run a Collegetown food truck at the height of the late night rush. Take a look at some of the most artistic desserts of 2016. Taste the garden wtih your next picnic basket.

This issue of Crème de Cornell is an homage to all the passionate student gourmets from such a wide variety of backgrounds and fields with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working at Cornell. For me, this issue is also a way to reflect on my time at Cornell and see how much Crème de Cornell has grown. With each semester, the bar is set higher (and the workload and time spent on this magazine has increased for everyone involved), but it has been worth it. Even though bringing Crème de Cornell to its current state was one of the most challenging tasks I’ve tackled at Cornell, I’m so proud of what Crème de Cornell has become and I can’t wait for the next phase of its life on campus.

Live on, Crème de Cornell! I will miss you dearly.

Best,

Victoria Sadosky

photo by victoria sadosky front cover by ethyn leong, julia wang & cathy zhang back cover by kevin shih

contents

5 // Color’s Influence on Flavor Perception

A glimpse into how sight influences taste

6 // The Charm of Blind Wine Tasting

A taste without a view?

7 // Kings of Cider

Cider tasting along Cayuga with Finger Lakes Cider House

11 // Dining with Seneca: Suzanne Fine Regional Cuisine

Exploring the #1 ranked restaurant of the Finger Lakes

12 // Inside The Piggery

From the farm to the butcher shop

13 // Dos Amigos Exposed

A look into Collegetown’s most popular late night spot

17 // A Garden with a View

Our top garden-inspired recipes for a decadent picnic basket

Reliving the Tastes of your Travels // 22

Who says the indulgence has to end when you return home?

“Cin Cin” to the Amalfi Coast // 24

World-class view + wine = unforgettable afternoon

A Tale of Two French Landscapes // 25 Cuisine in the city vs. the country

Bites in the Land of Smiles // 29 A culinary journey through Thailand

Two Views of Cuba // 31

An interview with Professor Maria Cristina Garcia

The Art of Pastry // 33 Five dessert trends for 2016

The Aesthetics of Authenticity // 35

Three NYC entrepreneurs showcase their restaurants

“Crème with a View” Contest Winners // 38 The winners from our Instagram contest!

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color’s on flavor text by ethyn leong

Think about this scenario: you are in a white cubicle and are given a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You are then asked to determine the flavor of each component without tasting the sandwich. Now, how could you generate such remarks? From an evenly brown cross section of the bread, along with grains along the crust, one could say that the bread was multigrain; the dark purple color of the jelly could cause someone to respond with grape jelly; the peanut butter obviously would taste like peanut butter. After providing these guesses, you are given the correct answers and are allowed to take a bite as reference. The bread was actually baked with molasses, hence the brown color, the jelly was strawberry dyed purple.

When presented with only visual details, people automatically generate contextual assumptions to reduce uncertainty. It’s similar to creating assumptions of spice level based on the intensity of a red or orange pigment and presence of small seeds, or reading a menu for food descriptions when deciding what to order. By creating assumptions, it is possible to avoid situations of dissatisfaction, and in the case of spice, physical pain. This can, of course, also be used to determine flavors of unidentified solutions (red for strawberry and yellow for lemon, for example) and create flavor and olfactory profiles before a direct analysis for either. Such statements seem like common sense to any food analyst, but what about connecting colors to the raw gastronomic perceptions of sweet, sour, bitter, and salty?

In general, there have been two main assay categories for investigating such connections: color vs. raw taste and color vs. flavor identification. Given sample size and inconsistencies between publications, however, no concrete statements can be made; general trends will instead be discussed. Regarding sweetness, various investigations reported that the colors yellow and green increased sensitivity the most, while red had little to no effect. Similar results were observed when

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influence perception photo by julia wang

analyzing sourness. For bitter sensitivity, red solutions appeared to decrease sensitivity, with no other color having any effect. Finally, none of the tested colors affected salt sensitivity.

One interesting note to keep in mind is that there were also reports of these colors decreasing sensitivity to sweetness when compared to an uncolored solution. It was inferred that this was due to the participants assuming that because dye had been mixed with the solution, it was not as pure, and the flavor was thus not as intense. No remarks were reported comparing color intensity to raw taste. Assays involving flavor identification provided assumptions similar to those involved in this article’s introduction: flavor identification has a much higher accuracy when it is associated with an appropriate color. Here, cherry, lemon, orange, and mint flavor sensitivity showed direct relations to color intensity, and when inappropriate colors were used, participants had a much lower accuracy when identifying the solution flavor.

There were also notes that included data which showed that color had a stronger olfactory influence than flavor sensitivity and identification. There were, however, also limitations to the magnitude which one’s sense of smell could be influenced by color.

Practical applications of this data are relatively obvious; increase pigment intensity to accentuate certain flavors, or play with colors to fool diner palates and play games with their sense of taste. Additionally, by altering context (lunch vs. dinner, for example), it is possible to create moderately differing responses to the same unadulterated mixture.

Through an understanding of certain expectations that people have based on color, manipulating the psychological impact of food could become both simple and enjoyable for both the cook and eater.

the charm of

blind wine tasting text by yu feng // photo by julia wang Pick up the glass, swirl it, lean the glass onto a piece of paper, stare at the rim, place the nose to the glass, sniff a little, swirl in the mouth, and spit. This long process might seem to be pretentious, but you cannot miss a single step when tasting a glass of wine, as you would miss important information. However, it sometimes can actually be beneficial not to know the wine because you would have biased opinions influenced by prices, origins and varietals.

When blind tasting a wine, I always try to narrow the range from the first swirl. If it is a red and seems to stick on the glass, it cannot be a Pinot Noir.

If it is deep gold with a slightly opaque rim, it might be a Chardonnay. But the appearance can also be deceiving. Once in class, we received a salmon pink wine and we all believed that it was a rosĂŠ. However, it was an Italian Pinot Grigio that was left sitting on the skin for a few hours. Most of the time, the appearance will tell the truth. White wine that has a pale, straw color normally means that the wine is young, and if the wine has high viscosity, it generally contains higher alcohol content due to its high sugar level.

Sticking my nose in the glass and taking a deep breath is always my favorite part of tasting. I can visualize images in my mind. Smelling a Riesling is like holding a green fruit salad at a flower garden where bees are around getting honey, whereas smelling a Merlot is like the sidewalk covered by cedar in the spring. If you are very familiar with a certain varietal, you would be able to easily tell the varietal when you stick your nose in the glass. For me, I can always tell when I taste a Riesling because I have been an avid fan for Riesling and can smell the melon, honey, and flowers.

Taking a sip of the wine and letting it touch your palate is the time to confirm the notes. Most of the time, the taste will match the smell. If you smell a red wine and you sense ripe dark fruit, you will probably get the ripe fruit or even fruit jam. Again, it will not always be the case. Last month we tasted a Banfi Riserva Borolo blend from 1964. I did not take a liking to it, as it smelled similar to my water sink on the first try. However, the fresh acidity, the gentle tannin, and the concise finish completely changed my thought towards the wine, and I fell in love with it.

Blind tasting is not for the pros only; it is for everyone to enjoy the glass of wine without bias. Individuals have different palates with varying understanding toward wine. You just need to drink a lot, and try as much as you can to figure out which wine is your true love.

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KINGS of CIDER

text by emily miller photos courtesy of finger lakes cider house & laura kozlowski

It was a rainy March day when a friend and I traveled up 89 to the Finger Lakes Cider House in Interlaken. I took a left onto a dirt road up to a barn-like structure on the horizon. We sprinted into the tasting room, forgetting how dreary it was outside. The room was warm, bright and rustic. Cozy. I learned later that the structure we were in was less than a year old and made by hand. I sat down at the bar with my companion and the owner, Melissa. We were poured some wonderful cider and began to talk about how the place came to be.

The Finger Lakes Cider House is a unique enterprise in the Finger Lakes region. The tasting room is a collaboration of five hyper-local cideries — most of which have some sort of connection to Cornell. The Cornell connections start with apples. Similar to Vitis vinifera with wine, there are certain apples that lend themselves to cider making – varietal apples.

These apples, unlike vineifera, are indigenous to the Finger Lakes region and there are tens of thousands of varieties to choose from. Cornell’s Dr. Jim Cummins was a pioneer in developing apple rootsocks, which are used in cider making today. Eric Shatt, owner of Redbyrd Orchard Cider, is another Cornellian – he is currently Cornell’s Orchard and Research Farms Manager. It really is a small world in Finger Lakes cider making!

Melissa was a member of the class of 2004. She moved back to the Finger Lakes in 2008 to start the Good Life Farm, one of three companies she and her husband own on the premises.

The other businesses are Good Life Cider and the tasting room in which I was currently seated. The huge glass windows and doors looked over the farm and beyond so that you could see Cayuga Lake gleaming. The tasting room itself has a fascinating story. The barn used to be where the tasting room currently stands, and stable horses used to reside in the front lobby and bathrooms’ current location. During construction some creative deconstruction was used. As Melissa, said, “You would fall in a hole anywhere you went.” Melissa’s husband and business partner, Garrett, built the barn and later, the tasting room. They undertake every project as a team.

The world of cider was new to me, but the cider-verse is not well-understood by the majority of the American public. When most of us college students think about cider, we probably think of it as a beer substitute — something you pick up in a six-pack. However, this image is a misconception. Cider is a fruit-based alcohol, like wine. Melissa and the other cidermakers’ goal is to “make fine ciders in a world that is confused about cider.” Another popular pre-conception is that cider is for the fall. However, releases of cider come out in the spring.

I was struck by the variation and unique characteristics of each cider I tried. Tasting was an adventure for a beginner cider connoisseur. Each sip was unexpected and delicious.

For five dollars, I received a sample of five delicious, notyour-typical-college beverages. I tried the Northern Spy, Still Barrel, Cazenovia, Cider Nouveau and Glacial Till, an ice cider (dessert in a glass). The ciders I tried ranged from dry to sweet, still to sparkling, and fruity to nutty. Some of the flavors from the tasting notes I had recognized from the wine world (apples, peaches, citrus, vanilla), but the ciders had more unusual and

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different profiles to offer (wood smoke, coconut, oregano, caraway).

Some of the ciders were barrel aged and others were not. Each cider was light and crisp, but complex in the nose and on the palate. My personal favorite was the Still Barrel. It was one of the most unique things I have ever tasted, with a crisp and acidic flavor, but soft undertones.

The taste constantly evolved with each sip. The names of the ciders had interesting stories. Some of the names were types of apples or the maker’s specific blends (most ciders are blends, not single varietal).

However, Melissa explained that many Good Life Ciders were named after the soil in which the apples were grown to remain “true to terroir.”

Having a cider tasting room is a big undertaking, but it has been a success. According to Melissa, 8,000 people have visited the premise in its inaugural year. Part of what makes cider business challenging is the economics behind it and the scale of the operation. “The Finger Lakes are full of opportunities, but they are crowded,” Melissa stated. Even the smallest winery can produce more than the biggest cider centers. Out of the various cideries, Good Life Cider House is one of the youngest. Because of the small production of various ciders, the tasting room menu is always changing and adding the latest creations. There are 15 ciders available, but each time you visit it is likely something new will be there, depending on the five makers’ schedules and stock.

The cooperative and collaborative model of the Finger Lakes Cider House is a unique approach and one that makes it possible for tasting at all. Other cider producers have wanted to get involved, but Melissa remains true to the original five producers.

To learn more about the cider making process, we ventured outside to the basement of the barn where a team was bottling — little did we know it was a recordbreaking day when 2,600 bottles

were assembled. There were pallets of bottles, barrels of cider and metal tubes adorning the room.The room smelled of yeast, apples and vodka.

Pneumonic hisses and spurts of gas punctuated our conversation with Garrett, the primary cider maker.

He showed us how the cider was made in the champagne methode traditionelle — fermentation within the bottle you purchase.

I asked him whether there was a science behind apple varieties and yeast selection or if it was more of a leap of faith. He laughed and said, “A little bit of both.”

Melissa and the other cider-makers’ goal is to “make fine ciders in a world that is confused about cider.”

Whenever I began to romanticize life on the Good Life Farm and Good Life Cider House, Melissa reminded me that the work was tough, but meaningful. There is a deep commitment to sustainability on the farm, even if it is expensive.

What now hosts greenhouses full of ginger, greens, orchards and grass fed beef, used to just be a cornfield back in 2008. Building the enterprise today required pennypinching and sacrifices like living just-above freezing, working long hours, and living in a yurt. But the effects are remarkable. From its humbling beginnings, the working farm now adds immeasurable character and gives guests a firsthand look at life in the fields. There are cheese pairings to go with the cider and Friday nights are a popular space to kick back, listen to some local bands and drink some of the best cider around. When asked about where she would like to be in five years, Melissa said she would like to expand the orchard and farm, acquire more cows, have a full staff of twenty with six staff in the tasting room and if possible, move out of the yurt.

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Dining on Seneca: suzanne fine regional cuisine Exploring the #1 ranked restaurant of the Finger Lakes (with a view!) text and photo by cathy zhang

On the outside, this 1903 historic landmark may look like a simply elegant house and farm located on the lakeside of Seneca Lake, but this is also where owners Suzanne Stack and her husband Robert began their beautifully touching restaurant dream. Opened in 2003, Suzanne Fine Regional Cuisine is situated on a 100-acre farm with the dining room as the restaurant itself. The farm-to-table restaurant sources almost all of its ingredients from the farm, which also explains its limited season from June to October each year. In the search for the best restaurant with a view in the Finger Lakes area this past summer, I was very fortunate to experience Suzanne Fine Regional Cuisine myself and hear about the story behind its founding.

The restaurant is almost completely operated by family members and close friends of the owners. According to one of the three staff members working that night, Suzanne Stack was a professor at the Culinary Institute of America before opening the restaurant, and her husband Robert worked in the marketing sector of an air conditioning company, completely different from Suzanne’s expertise. It had always been Suzanne’s dream to open up her own restaurant. The couple gave up their promising careers to purchase the farmland and historic landmark in Lodi, NY, which turned into the restaurant we know today. Walking into the vintage-decorated wooden dining room, I immediately felt a sense of home and comfort – maybe that is what the loving couple would like to convey to their guests.

The concept of farm-to-table restaurants has been rising in popularity the past few years as a great way for restaurants and farmers to collaborate in finding affordable, local and fresh sources for their ingredients, benefiting both sides of the business. The guests, in return, receive freshly prepared dishes while supporting local farmers. Due to the farm-to-table concept, Suzanne Fine Regional Cuisine strives to provide the best inseason ingredients. Therefore, its menu changes every two weeks. The 5-course Summer Tasting Menu includes an amuse bouche to begin, followed by an appetizer, veggies, two main dishes (both containing meat, vegetarian options available) and chocolate for $65.

The Spring Pea salad and baby greens were both very refreshing and delicately made with a variety of colors. The lobster was grilled to the perfect amount of tenderness and bite, with the carrot, ginger, and pea shoots balancing out the umami flavors, as well as adding some nutritional value. Though the dessert was a bit too sweet, the entire tasting menu was very filling.

One suggestion I would give to anyone interested is to come with a very empty stomach. After dinner, guests are welcome to visit Suzanne’s beautiful gardens behind the back deck, where the herbs and vegetables are grown.

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Now you may wonder, how can I visit? It is best to make reservations in advance, as the restaurant is often fully booked and can only seat 24 guests per night. Just a 45 minute drive from Ithaca and you’ll get a peaceful view of Seneca Lake, a beautiful garden farm and, most wonderful of all, a historic restaurant with a romantic story. Why wait?

Inside the

PIGGERY text by prajj dey // photos by christian walsh The Piggery, located near the Farmer’s Market, is a butcher shop owned by two Cornell alumni, Heather Sandford and her husband, Brad Marshall. Although widely successful now, the story of how it developed is far from cliché.

Both Heather and Brad graduated from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in 1997; Heather was an Agriculture and Bioengineering major and her husband a Genetics major. However a lot of her free time was actually devoted to the music scene in Ithaca. While pursuing her degree she held a part-time job at the local records store, worked as a DJ at The Haunt, and even played the bass guitar and drums in a variety of bands. In fact, between the two of them, they’ve gained experience in an assortment of different fields.

Following graduation, she took this passion for music to the New York City music industry where she worked in music production and marketing for about two years and later the music Dot-com sector in California for a couple years.

When the Dot-com market crashed, Heather moved to the real estate industry and dedicated herself to low-income housing for a couple more years. Brad, in contrast, did Bioinformatics research at UC Berkeley.

However, both Heather and Brad are from the area – Rochester and Syracuse respectively – and after spending so many years away from home, they eventually moved back in order to be closer to their families. At around that time, they found themselves interested in sustainable building, small-scale farming, and homesteading, the concept of feeding yourself with food that you grow. So she took an off-farm job and her husband built a house on their property, in addition to starting some farming activities.

Every weekend they would visit the Ithaca Farmer’s Market and explore what had to be offered. However, the more they went, the more they noticed that there was a significant de-emphasis on meat. As Heather said, “It was mostly diverse farms that would raise vegetables, which would be front and center. And maybe off to the side there was a sign in a Styrofoam cooler, like we have meat. Also, the way it was packaged and presented, often in cuts that were unfamiliar to people, we felt was a challenge to the customer.”

And since they were already raising small animals on a farm, just for their sake, they came up with the idea: what if they cut fresh meat and made sausages or charcuterie or tried different things, and brought it to the Farmer’s Market every week? Wouldn’t that be both a fun, part-time endeavor that would also be useful for the community? And there was the spark that led to The Piggery as it exists today.

Their first steps were a haze of research – making sure they had the necessary licenses, that they were certified, that, essentially, it was doable. They certified their basement as the cutting facility, making sure that the walls and floors and sinks were washable. And while under state inspection, they threw themselves into the business and taught themselves everything they needed to know about cutting meat.

Every weekend they brought their products to the Farmer’s Market and “by the sixth week there was a line, no exaggeration, fifty people deep.” Their business was growing far more rapidly than they had previously expected, and ever since, it has simply grown as a communitydriven project, based on the needs and requests of their customers.

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EXPOSED

an interview with co-owner davidinterview farahi fffanan

textext by steph paiva // photos by kevin shih & christian walsh Q: How did you get Dos Amigos started?

A: So it started as a class. We started basically through our fraternity and we went on vacation together and talked about how we both loved tacos. My partner Jorge is from Mexico, so he grew up with family recipes and eating Mexican food.

I established a passion for it growing up in Reno around taco trucks. So I was really in love with food trucks, specifically taco trucks, and Jorge had the love for Mexican food. We realized that when he would go out to Mexico, he would end up at taco restaurants and I’d end up at taco trucks in Reno or LA. There was no authentic Mexican food necessarily on the East Coast; it was more of a thing on the West Coast. So, we kind of mulled over the idea and realized that a lot of other people thought the same thing [that there was no Mexican food in town]. So we took a business plan class in Fall 2014 and wrote a business plan through the entire semester. We didn’t really do it for the intention of starting a business, but we just wanted to explore the idea of it and thought it might happen one day. It really came to fruition once we set out a table in Statler Hall and handed out surveys as part of the class, asking people what their thoughts were, and people loved it. People were bothering us next semester and kept asking us whether it was going to happen. Some people in my fraternity thought it was a joke, but Jorge contacted me about a month before school ended, and asked what my plans were for the summer and said that he was looking over the business plan. Neither of us wanted to do the internships that we were planning to do, so I came back to school from my time abroad in Thailand for Senior Week and we basically hit the ground running trying to get permits and secure a truck. We had our business plan, which provided good groundwork for how to think about it, but we didn’t really know anything about what we were doing.

Q: Did you have any special interest in tacos growing up?

A: It pretty much started once I got my license and I was able to drive around. I think it was my uncle really, because he would go to trucks in LA, it’s a really big thing in that area. You see a lot of Hispanic people, but there are also people in suits coming out of clubs at 2AM who go to these trucks. So I figured I would try one with my friends, since my hometown can get pretty boring, and then I fell in love with it. I was known as the kid who was always going out to the taco trucks in town late at

night after going out. I spent a lot of time in LA, and I would take my cousins and my brother who also fell in love with it, so we go all the time together. It was really more that I loved it and I saw the opportunity, and thought that people on the East Coast should be exposed to it. Jorge just has an overall love for food and beverage. That’s what he wants to do in his life, he wants to be in that industry.

Q: How do you make sure that your tacos stay authentic and true to the Cali-Mex style?

A: The recipes came from family recipes. Jorge went for a week to Mexico City with his godfather. They just went around deciphering where the recipes were at their favorite taco shops.

It’s the same when you grow up eating your ethnicity’s food.

You just know what it is. He went to his grandma and his mom for recipes and culminated that with those from taco shops in San Diego. We sourced a lot of our spices and seasonings from San Diego for a while. The day usually ended with us tasting tacos and getting our friends excited to try them. We taste tested different tacos, different sauces, different combinations every night. At the end of the summer, we had a few dinners with people who went to Cornell to get them to taste test the product.

And then two weeks before school started, we paired up with a chef, Sam Epps, who helped us design the menu. Before that point, it was just Jorge and I. It wasn’t easy but I knew from the consumer side and Jorge knew just from the food and family side.

Q: What do you think are the favorite menu items among customers?

A: The nighttime crowd really loves the quesadillas, like after bars people come and love quesadillas. Everybody has their own favorites. It is always like an exploration, or for us it’s more of a change, because we eat so much of it that we are always looking for something new. Recently, we tried the chicken and carnitas quesadilla combined and we loved it. For a while, somebody recommended putting mushrooms on the quesadilla, and that was really good and we tried it with the chicken and it was really good with the carnitas. So, it’s really just whatever you’re in the mood for. My favorite taco, by far, is the carnitas taco and the green salsa. A lot of people have been asking us to get spicy salsa, so we actually just developed a hot sauce this week.

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Q: So is a lot of the menu influenced by suggestions and customers?

A: We obviously try to take feedback.

We’re not going to serve whatever people want. We still don’t really put cheese on our tacos because that’s not how they do it. People come up to us and ask if they can get lettuce and tomatoes on their tacos, but that’s just not how it is done in Mexico or Southern California. It’s mostly onion and cilantro, and we do accommodate and do it for kids if asked. We’re not going to stock a lot of items that conflict with our mission of tacos from Cali-Mex, but at the same time, we have to look at what our customers want. We just launched taquitos, which people love. We’re only doing it as a weekend special right now just because it’s tough to get it at the quality that we want consistently.

So we really love it, but we’re trying to figure out how to fully integrate it into the menu, but that was a cool collaboration with Cornell’s fashion show and was something that we wanted to do for a while. They came to us and said they wanted a special for their fashion week, so we did the taquitos and it worked out perfectly.

Q: what are the benefits or challenges that come with operating your business from a food truck?

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A: From the consumer perspective, I think it started out for me at Mexican food trucks. Every time I saw a food truck, I would just stop where I was and I am still so intrigued by them. I guess it’s that the food truck presents more of an entrepreneurial spirit, because most of the food trucks have people in situations similar to Jorge and me, where we were tired of doing corporate jobs or working for someone else. The food truck provides a much easier entry-level for a business. Once you do a brick and mortar, you are signing away a lease for ten years and putting in a quarter of a million dollars into it, whereas with a food truck, you can start out even by just leasing a truck. You have to have a commissary kitchen, but that lease is much cheaper. The food truck provides entrepreneurs and people who have been stuck in a position that they don’t want to be in with a much easier entry

to starting their own food business. So I think that’s something that is really cool. A lot of it is that we have the ability to change our menu items; it is much easier to adapt to customers and you are closer to the customer in my opinion. There is a vibe within the truck, and from the business side, the employees are in really close quarters.

We are lucky enough to have a big truck, but we’ve been able to create a fun work environment and everyone who works for us is really young. I think we just happen to attract young people, especially given our fun environment.

Q: Would you consider transitioning your business into a more traditional restaurant?

A: No, I think Jorge has aspirations of having a restaurant or two in the future. I think it’s not something that I would rule out, but in terms of Dos Amigos, what makes the brand is the fact that it is a truck. We wouldn’t want to do it another way. We were looking into it for a second over the summer, just because we thought it would be hard to operate a business from 10PM-2AM, and that was really the only available slot. So we looked into it, but we just realized that it wasn’t what we wanted our business to stand for. There is nothing exciting about it.

It’s really hard to describe, but there is just a different vibe working on a truck. Of course, you are expected to adhere to all the safety and cleanliness standards of a restaurant, so to us, our truck is a restaurant with so much more of a personality.

Q: Can you tell us more about the artwork on the truck?

A: There is a kid named Pablo who is a student at Cornell, and he is the one who painted the truck for us. We just wanted to have all students as much as we could involved, so he came out to Ithaca a few weeks early to paint the truck for us. In terms of the layout of the truck, I got in touch with a company that fabricated the truck for us down in Fort Lauderdale. We just got lucky in terms of how we designed the truck. We got in touch with people from the food and beverage industry, and we really thought it through in

terms of how we wanted our line to look.

We knew what appliances we needed in there, and we basically went through a couple of distributors and asked around to try and gain as much knowledge about it from people that knew. Then we made a decision after we purchased the truck and had the designs, so we drove it up and had our painter paint it for us a few weeks early.

The painting of the truck was kind of a give-and-take. He had his visions for the truck and we had ours, so it was a collaboration of the two. We knew that there were certain things that we wanted to include on it, but the design of the surfer on the back was all his. So it was just a collaboration of all three of us.

Q: What is your typical night?

A: The nights are always changing, given Ithaca’s seasonality. The weather plays a big role and the students’ schedules play a big role, so we operate our business in the nighttime mostly. We are starting lunch permanently next week. We’ve been in and out of the Commons, but we are going to be right off the Commons Tuesdays through Friday. We started that over winter break when the students left, but we were closed for spring break during nighttime, which is why we went to the Commons for lunch.

We really react to the students. It fluctuates.

If it is not a big prelim week, a lot more people go out Tuesdays and Thursdays.

If it’s a really cold night or rainy, not as many people go out. Still surprisingly, a lot more people come out even if it’s bad weather because our brand has grown. But it definitely fluctuates, and every night is not a normal night. Obviously, there is the post-bar rush that happens on the weekend, but that is really the only thing that stays consistent. And you see the same people. There are some people who come almost every single day we’re open. Most of our customers come two to three times a week and our employees who know them say “hi” if they’ve crossed paths.

So it’s pretty cool that our customers and the people in the truck seem to have a relationship.

“The food truck presents more of an entrepreneurial spirit.”

Q: Is there anything weird or interesting that you see or have seen in the past while working?

A: After 12 o’clock, 95% of these people are intoxicated and 50% of these people are extremely intoxicated, so there have been funny times where you just cannot understand what peoples’ orders are. You have to have a lot of patience dealing with

certain people like that. It’s kind of fun, but it’s not for everyone. There are times when people just say, “Give me food.” They just give their card and are not talking, so you know they want food, but don’t know what specifically. Or there are certain times where we end up having to take care of people because they are not safe by themselves. So there is that sort of thing, but there are also some interesting things. I was a little bit uncomfortable at first seeing my friends like that and serving everyone and having a different relationship with people. It took some getting used to.

Q: Where do you expect to see yourself or this business in the next couple of years?

A: The future plan is just for Dos Amigos to stay in Collegetown serving the food that we serve. Our dream is to come back in ten, twenty, or thirty years for alumni reunions and to still see Dos Amigos there, or some form of what Dos Amigos stands for, which is authentic Cali-Mex food. That is what we strove for in the beginning and I think that that is what we want to see. I don’t think we’d be necessarily disappointed if it wasn’t named Dos Amigos, but we just really want people in the Cornell community to be exposed to this type of cuisine and we hope that it stays there. That is really our goal.

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A Garden

garden-inspired

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with a View

dessert recipes

recipes by jamie french // photos by amy zhong 19

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Carrot Cake Whoopie Pies These are adapted from Claire Twesten of Talula’s Gardens’ recipe. I always like to plump my raisins in alcohol rather than water, and I like goat cheese frosting over cream cheese frosting for a little extra flavor.

Cookies

2 sticks butter, unsalted, softened 2 c dark brown sugar 2 eggs 1 ½ tsp vanilla extract 2 c all purpose flour 1 tsp baking soda 1 tsp baking powder ¼ tsp salt 1 tsp ground cinnamon ½ tsp ground nutmeg ½ tsp ground ginger ¼ tsp ground cloves 2 c oats 1 ½ c carrots, peeled carrots 1 c golden raisons, plumped To plump the raisins, combine raisins and ¼ c alcohol or water (I like bourbon), heat to a simmer, cover and steep for about 10 minutes, strain. To make the cookies, combine the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and all the spices together in a medium bowl. In a standing or hand held mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Scrape the sides of the bowl. Add the eggs one at a time, along with the vanilla, mixing until the first egg is fully incorporated before adding the second, making sure to scrape the sides of the bowl. Slowly add the dry ingredients, then the oats, carrots and raisins. Cover the dough, and refrigerate for at least 6 hours or overnight. Preheat the oven to 325F. Place tablespoon scoops of the dough evenly spaced on a cookie sheet. Bake 10-14 minutes until browned around the edges. Allow to cool.

Goat Cheese Icing

2 sticks butter, unsalted, softened 1 ¼ c powdered sugar 2 tb honey 4 oz cream cheese, softened 8 oz goat cheese, softened To make the frosting: beat the butter and sugar with a stand or hand mixer until light and fluffy. Slowly add the honey and cheeses, beat until incorporated.

Match similarly sized cookies to make sandwiches. Place the frosting in a piping bag to pipe frosting on the flat side of one cookie, then top with another to make a cookie sandwich or ‘whoopie pie’.

Lemon Bars Joanne Chang is a master when it comes to finding a truly great baking recipe. I’ve added thyme to the shortbread crust, and decided to top them with a sugared almond as well for some extra texture. These are the best lemon bars I’ve ever had, and are always a hit at summer outings.

Shortbread

1 stick butter, unsalted, softened 2 tb granulated sugar 1 tb confectioners’ sugar 1 tb thyme 1 tsp vanilla extract ½ c all-purpose flour 2/3 c cake flour ¼ tsp baking powder ¼ tsp salt Sift together the flours, baking powder, and salt in a small bowl. In a standing or hand held mixer with the paddle attachment, cream together the butter, sugars, and thyme until light and fluffy. Scrape the sides of the bowl. Add the vanilla extract and dry ingredients, scraping down the sides, and mix until completely combined. Scrap the dough onto plastic wrap, cover and press into a square. Refrigerate for about 20 minutes. Preheat the oven to 350F. Grease a 8x8 inch metal or glass

baking pan with butter or baking spray. Place the dough between two pieces of parchment paper, and roll to about 8x8 square, or slightly larger, and cut down to size. Remove the top layer of paper, and place the bottom layer of parchment and dough into the baking pan. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, turning half way through until golden brown. While the crust is baking, make the curd.

Lemon Curd

zest all but 1 of the juiced lemons (reserve for almonds) 1 c fresh lemon juice (from 4 to 6 lemons) 4 tbs butter, unsalted, cubed 2 tbs heavy cream 1 cup granulated sugar 4 large eggs 2 large egg yolks ¼ tsp vanilla extract Whisk together the sugar, eggs, and yolks in a medium bowl. Combine the lemon zest, juice, butter and cream in a medium saucepan and heat until just under boiling. Remove from the heat.

The butter should be melted. Temper the lemon mixture into the sugar-egg mixture. This is done by whisking some of the hot lemon mixture into the sugar-egg mixture, then gradually adding more until it is all added. This slow heating of the eggs prevents curdling. Pour the mixture back into the saucepan and heat on medium stirring constantly. Cook the curd until it is thick enough to leave a line when you draw your finger through.

Strain through a fine sieve and stir in the salt and vanilla. Pour the curd over the baked crust, and spread evenly.

Bake at 350F until set, and jiggles like firm jello, about 15-20 minutes. Cool to room temperature, remove from the pan. Refrigerate until set, at least 4 hours. Cut. Top with the cooled candied thyme almonds.

Candied Thyme Almonds 6 oz sliced almonds 1 egg white ¾ tsp thyme ¼ tsp salt ¾ c sugar zest of 1 lemon

Preheat oven to 425F. Combine all of the ingredients in a bowl, mix well.

Spread onto a lined sheet pan. Bake 5 minutes then toss almonds on the pan, repeat about 3 times for a total of about 15 minutes or until golden 21 brown and fragrant.

Rosemary Toffee 2 sticks butter ½ c granulated sugar ¾ c brown sugar 2 tb corn syrup ¼ c water 1 ½ tsp salt 1 tsp vanilla extract 1 ¼ tsp rosemary, finely chopped 5 oz chocolate chips, bittersweet Grease a half sheet pan with half sheet pan with butter or cooking spray, or line with a sill pat. Melt the butter in heavy bottomed pot on medium then add the sugars, water, salt, vanilla. Whisk frequently. Heat to 295F, add the rosemary, and pour out onto the prepared pan. Spread into a thin layer with a rubber spatula or by moving the pan from side to side. Top with the chocolate chips, using the residual heat to melt the chocolate. When the chocolate has melted, spread evenly over the toffee.

Cool and chop to “chip” sized pieces to be used in cookies, or into larger pieces for snacking.

Rosemary Toffee Chip Cookies 2 sticks butter, unsalted, softened 1 ½ c brown sugar, packed 2 eggs, large 1 tb vanilla extract 2 ¼ c all purpose flour 1 tsp baking soda ½ tsp salt 2 c chocolate covered rosemary toffee (chopped to “chip” size pieces) sea salt flakes, optional Mix together the flour, baking soda and salt. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the vanilla and eggs one at a time, scraping between each addition. Add the dry ingredients, mix until just combined then add the toffee. For the best results, cover and refrigerate at least 4 hours, but best if over night.

Preheat the oven to 375F. Scoop tablespoon amounts of the dough onto a prepared cookie sheet.

Sprinkle with a small amount of sea salt flakes. Bake for about 8 to 12 minutes or until golden brown.

reliving the tastes of your travels

text by rachel allison // photos by rachel allison & camille chan Exploring new foods and flavors is one of the best parts of traveling, but do you sometimes wonder how to best relive some of those experiences when you’re back to the daily grind?

It’s easy enough to order foods and ingredients from around the world at the click of a button, but why not pick up a few edible souvenirs on your travels? When I’m in a new city, there’s one place I always make a point of visiting – and it’s not a gallery or the observation deck of the tallest building. My go-to place for local flavor is actually the grocery store. I love baking, and when I’m traveling I find local ingredients and mixes to bring back and use in my own kitchen. For me, local supermarkets have always highlighted the way locals experience food, and help me recall the sights and tastes of my travels.

In Helsinki, I walked along the scenic waterfront towards the Market Square. The colorful buildings fronting the docks seemed to crowd right up against the Baltic, while moored boats bobbed calmly in the north harbor. As I made my way past grand cathedrals and into the downtown shopping district, I ducked into a café for a hot drink. The pastry case caught my eye – many of the baked goods were garnished with a generous scattering of large sugar crystals. I saw the same pastry adornments at the farmer’s market in Hakaniemi, and it looked just like the pearl sugar used in Liège waffles (a family favorite), an ingredient I’d been struggling to find in Toronto! After a quick trip to the S-Market (a local supermarket

chain), and a halting conversation with my limited flashcard Finnish, I emerged triumphant with 2 lbs. of Rapea Raesockeri (translation: crispy sanding sugar). Back home, four thousand miles away, the Finnish sugar went into the Liège waffles, incorporating the Scandinavian staple into one of my favorite recipes. My home may not have sweeping Nordic vistas, but my sugar souvenir recalled calm coastal views and hot coffee in Helsinki.

After Helsinki, I spent a few days in Bordeaux, where the vineyards were as breathtaking as reputed. From the Médoc to St. Émillion, a UNESCO World Heritage site that boasts a medieval village with ancient vineyards, the rolling hills of vineyards are a sea of lush green.

After wine tasting in the dim, oak-musty caves, standing amidst hundreds of barrels and soaking up the sights, I stocked up on a few bottles to take back with me. I was also tempted 23

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to choose souvenirs among the arrays of brightly colored macarons I encountered in storefronts all over Paris, but found that the delicate almond meringue cookie isn’t the most practical souvenir. My first trip to Paris had resulted in a new obsession with the confection and the purchase of many macaron boxed mixes from the supermarket. This time, I sought out French chocolate to create my own take.

Back in my kitchen, I got an order for custom macarons to complement a dinner party featuring French wine. It’s been a long time since I made macarons from a boxed mix, and now that I work from scratch, I can create my own flavor combinations.

Macarons with a wine-infused dark ganache Shells

90 g egg whites 25 g granulated sugar 200 g powdered sugar 110 g finely ground blanched almonds 1 tsp gel food coloring, magenta In a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, whip the egg whites with sugar until you obtain a glossy, thick meringue. Beat in gel coloring. Do not overbeat your meringue or it will be too dry. Whisk together the powdered sugar and almonds until well combined. Add them to the meringue, give it a quick fold to break some of the air and then fold the mass carefully until you obtain a batter that falls back on itself after counting to 10. Give quick strokes at first to break the mass and slow down. The whole process should not take more than 50 strokes.

Test a small amount on a plate: if the tops flattens on its own you are good to go.

If there is a small beak, give the batter a couple of turns.

Fill a pastry bag fitted with a plain tip (Ateco #807 or #809) with the batter and pipe small rounds (1.5 inches in diameter) onto parchment paper or silicone mats lined baking sheets. Let the macarons sit out for 30 minutes to an hour to harden their shells a bit. In the meantime, preheat the oven to 300F (you may need to

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This was a perfect opportunity to revive the tastes of Bordeaux and Paris. A deep pink macaron filled with a Bordeaux-infused dark chocolate ganache seemed the perfect blend of patisserie and wine. The Cabernet Sauvignon dominant wine was rich and round, with blackcurrant, plum, and black cherry aromas, the perfect complement to dark chocolate and an easy way to have a little of France home. I’m now looking forward to creating a whole series of macaron inspired by different wines – a crisp Loire Chablis in a lemon zest buttercream or a white chocolate Champagne mousse would make lovely macarons, don’t you think?

experiment with your oven temperature).

When ready, bake for 15 to 20 minutes, using a wooden spoon to keep the oven door propped open. Baking time depends on macaron size. Let cool then remove from baking sheet.

Ganache filling

1/4 cup heavy cream 1/4 rich red wine (I used a Cabernet/Merlot blend, but use whatever inspires you!)

3 1/2 ounces dark chocolate, finely chopped (preferably 70 percent cacao) 1 teaspoon unsalted butter, softened Bring cream and wine to a boil in a saucepan over medium-high heat, until reduced slightly. Pour cream over chocolate in a heatproof bowl. Let stand for 2 minutes, or until chocolate has melted. Add butter, then whisk mixture until smooth. Let cool, stirring often.

Macaron recipe adapted from the Tartelette blog. Ganache adapted from Martha Stewart.

Assembling the macarons Transfer prepared ganache into a piping bag fitted with a round tip (1/4” to 1/2”).

Pipe about 2 teaspoons of filling onto one shell and press down evenly with the matching shell to distribute the filling.

Allow macarons to set overnight, if possible. They are best enjoyed the next day!

Liège Sugar Waffles 1 (1/4 ounce) package yeast 1/3 cup lukewarm water 1 1/2 tablespoons granulated white sugar 1/8 teaspoon salt 2 cups flour 3 eggs 3/4 cup melted butter 2 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup pearl sugar Mix the yeast, water, sugar and salt in a bowl and let it develop or sit for 15 minutes.

Pour the flour over the yeast mixture mix until blended on medium speed, using the paddle attachment of your stand mixer.

Add the eggs one at a time until batter is smooth. Add melted butter a bit at a time, and the vanilla, mixing well after each addition. Let the dough rest, lightly covered, until doubled in volume (about 1 hour).

Gently fold in the pearl sugar and let the dough rest for 15 more minutes. While the dough is resting, heat the waffle iron. Spoon about a 1″ ball of dough into the center of the waffle section. Cook until deep golden brown in color. Cooking time depends on your waffle iron.

Recipe adapted from Whipped.

“Cin Cin” to the Amalfi Coast text and photo by jieyu chen

If you’re a fan of wines or have taken Intro to Wines, you must have learned that the term “cin cin” means Cheers! in Italian. During my trip to Italy over spring break, what impressed me the most was not the historic relics in Rome or the aesthetic masterpieces in Firenze, but rather the breathtaking scenery and taste of the Amalfi Coast. Located in Compania, Southern Italy, Positano is one of the most famous and scenic towns along the Amalfi Coast. With limited time to explore this quaint town, I chose to enjoy Positano by relaxing on the patio of the most classic local hotel—Le Sirenuse.

The term “cin cin” means Cheers! in Italian.

We started the afternoon with a glass of Rosé from a local winery in the Compania province and toasted to the colorful blocks of houses on the opposing hills.

Even though the most famous Italian wine comes from northern Tuscany, it’s always a wise choice to go local, and the

Rosé did not disappoint. Half sweet, half tannin, the wine found a perfect balance between bitterness and sweetness, which corresponded to the fresh, Mediterranean sea breeze and the dreamlike tints of Positano.

Accompanying the wine is the authentic Prosciutto di Parma with Melon. The plating itself is an art: the intriguing composition of prosciutto and melon constitutes an artsy figure of Damascus Rose. The savory taste of prosciutto interacts with the smoothness and fragrance of the melon, enabling me to envision the figure of an Italian gentlemen whispering with a charming signorina.

Immersing myself in the Amalfi sunshine and the intermittent sound of the gentle waves, I decided to finish the afternoon tea with a traditional Italian dessert—tiramisu.

Originally developed in Veneto, Italy, the tiramisu demonstrates the essence of Italian cuisine art. It is composed of lady’s fingers, layered with a whipped mixture of eggs, mascarpone cheese, and flavored

with cocoa. Although I’ve tasted tiramisu in many Italian restaurants around the world, I found the most authentic flavor within Italy. Compared to the extremely rich and sweet taste of the more generic version of tiramisu, the authentic Italian one is lighter, fresher and incorporated more layers of flavors. Besides the regular ingredients, there’s one more component added - the Marsala wine. It intertwines the richness of eggs and the bitterness of the cocoa, while bringing a lingering mellow aftertaste. Together with the colors and sunshine of Positano, they created a splendid, yet romantic concerto.

When I was back in Ithaca and telling my friends about my trip, I told them there was one thing I appreciate and one thing I regret: I appreciate that I had the chance to visit the Amalfi Coast, however, I regret only staying for one day. If you are looking for a fairyland where you can relax, go to Positano, enjoy the magnificent coastline and brilliant sunshine, and don’t forget to “cin cin” to whoever you’re enjoying your time with!

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A Tale of Two French Landscap

Stepping into the streets of Paris is lovely in its own way. In the summer the city practically radiates heat—stuffed full with loud tourists and annoyed Parisians. Every street corner has a different bakery that oozes the smell of fresh croissants and baguettes, and the tables are filled with stylish Paris natives sipping lattes and conversing. Paris seems to never stop—the days seem busy and the nights even more crazy. As soon as we landed in Paris and dropped off our bags at the hotel, my family and I immediately set out to our favorite bakery in Paris: Fauchon. Located in a busy part of Paris, Fauchon boasts tasty macarons, truffles, and various sweets along with cured meats and cheeses. After feasting our eyes (and mouths) on delicious treats, we proceeded to try and walk off all the calories we had just eaten. However, my favorite part of Paris is never the day—I

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usually feel like too much of a lobster to enjoy myself. I also just feel as if I never want to stop for a bite to eat during the day.

I’m much too invested in the scenery around me: the scooters zooming by, the glorious and almost majestic architecture, and the warm rush of air that embraces you as you walk into the metro station. Not to mention I’m saving my appetite for dinner!

Nighttime in Paris is somewhat magical. If you’ve ever seen Midnight in Paris, you know exactly what I am talking about.

You can practically walk into any neighborhood restaurant and have an amazing meal. Some offer a set meal, and many offer à la carte. The menu is typically structured in a way that offers a starter, main, cheese, and finally a dessert course. Most of these restaurants offer many Parisian favorites including escargot,

pes

text by alex fowler // photos by jieyu chen salad, duck, chicken, and seafood. The cheese course is my personal favorite, as (at many restaurants) you are usually told to choose three cheeses paired with bread and pears - absolutely heavenly and incomparable to anything in the US. The dessert menu is usually just as complexly layered as the main menu, filled with chocolate delights and crowd favorites. Bread is served with the meal and wine is an absolute must. At higher end restaurants, there are many more courses with the addition of an amuse-bouche (a complimentary appetizer) and sometimes a pre-meal drink called an aperitif. Bistros and brasseries are much more casual and inexpensive and usually serve light and in some cases large meals along with drinks. They are typically more popular during mid-day, early evening. Eating out in Paris at night is an experience and the Parisians leisurely sip wine and

coffee late into the evening. The unique part of Paris and its food is how popular dishes have emerged to dominate many of the menus in bistros and brasseries.

Our first night after arriving, we made our way to a restaurant our hotel concierge recommended called L’Absinthe, a small brasserie owned by the famous chef, Michel Rostang. Although it is linked to him, the restaurant is highly underrated and hidden on the backstreets of a neighborhood which was close to our hotel. I ordered the duck which came with a house made sauce and plated in an aesthetically pleasing manner. It took me all of my willpower not to devour the entire dish in five minutes. My brother (the only steak enthusiast in my family) ordered a medium rare steak that came with roasted potatoes.

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It was quite possibly the best steak I have ever tasted. My dad ordered pork and my mom ordered duck just as I had ordered. It was around five when we sat down to eat, already jet-lagged from our long trip. The restaurant was deserted at five, yet when we left at seven more and more people had arrived - ready to spend the night relaxing

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under the city street lamps and moon.

Paris boasts an incredible amount of fine dining restaurants with Michelin stars along with their casual brasseries and bistros. Parisians take their food very seriously and fine dining is no joke. While in Paris, I had the wonderful delight of

trying some of these world-renowned restaurants. One of my favorites was the Le Meurice by Alain Ducasse. When stepping into Le Meurice, you enter a different world - one with chandeliers, extravagant place settings, and uniformly dressed waiters.

We were given an amuse-bouche after we sat down, followed by an overview of the

menu. We then proceeded to order and watched our meal unfold. Everything was delicately staged and made to absolute perfection. My dad ordered what he thought was a simple roasted chicken, yet when the dish came it wasn’t like any typical roasted chicken: it was incredibly crispy and juicy!

My favorite part of Paris is always their pastries, specifically their croissants. As an extreme connoisseur of croissants, my mom had already gone through countless reviews to find the apparent location of the “best” croissants in Paris.

People claimed Sucre Bleu had the best, so we quickly mapped out our route on the metro and made our trek. It was located in a small neighborhood with a few trendy bars and clothing shops and the famed bakery. “Good” doesn’t even come close to depicting how delicious our croissants were. They were buttery and flaky - a melt-in-you-mouth experience that you can only relive when your teeth sink into its slightly charred crust. It is a must to go here if you are ever in Paris.

The last stop of our trip was at a restaurant called Tour d’Argent. It is the restaurant the movie Ratatouille was based upon and boasts their duck as their claim to fame. The view is magnificent, a sweeping view of Paris including the Eiffel Tower, the Seine, and all the dainty Parisian side streets.

We stayed in Paris for a few days before we rented a car and drove down to the Loire Valley, a place far from the hustle and bustle of Paris and filled with small picturesque farmhouses and châteaux.

Once we had reached our hotel, the Château de Marcay, we set out to explore the small surrounding city of Chinon. We soon found that there were only a few tiny restaurants and most people cooked at home instead of eating out. In the Loire Valley there were different specialties such as pigeon. The cuisine was more farm-to-table than the city. That night we explored the area and went to a small restaurant owned by a couple called La Part des Anges. There were only about eight tables in the restaurant and the couple served, cooked and bused. My brother ordered the beef stew, while my parents enjoyed pork chops and a seafood dish. I had the duck, which was roasted to perfection. In addition, we also tried the restaurant located within our

hotel called La Table de Macay. It was considered the best restaurant in the area and the menu boasted the same French favorites along with sautéed scallops and risotto. The restaurant had outside seating that looked over the small valley and the grounds of our hotel. For a second I imagined we were the owners of the small Château, leisurely sipping our drinks as we looked at the luscious valley that lay beyond. I ordered the risotto and lamb shanks and my family ordered an array of dishes including scallops, steak, and chicken. Each meat dish was tender and we were soon told that the meat we were eating was from a small farm located about two miles down the main road.

Over the next couple days, as we explored the surrounding châteaux, we stopped by small restaurants that were family owned. One night we even went to one of the renowned restaurants in the Loire Valley called the La Roche Le Roy in Tours. While this restaurant was considered fine dining, it was much more laid back than the fine dining we experienced in Paris. There was a small garden behind the restaurant that we were told our salads came from. Our server was able to tell us exactly where our meat came from, and each dish had a rich unique, more farm-to-table flavor.

The street food in the country is not taken as seriously as in Paris. Most times we would pick up meats and a baguette at a local corner store and snack as we walked the hilly, small cities. The best parts of the Loire Valley were the farmers markets we stumbled upon. French farmers markets boast freshly made bread, local cheese, rotisserie chicken, and almost picturesque vegetables and fruits. The French take their farmers markets very seriously, and in the country where people cook at home for the most part - the farmers market become a hub of activity.

Overall, my trip throughout Paris exposed me to two very unique food settings and environments, which are worlds apart. I would recommend traveling the country, as you are given an intimate view into French culture and cuisine. Not to mention you will eat the best food of your life (and perhaps gain a few more pounds than you intend!).

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Bites i Land of

text by ben c photos by camille chan, je

banana groves, wet marke

It’s easy waking up before the sun rises, when your alarm sound is the rooster’s crow. As I stepped off my bed, the concrete floor felt cold to my feet. Across from me was another IKEA bunk bed uncle Khanet put together just months ago, right after construction of this homestead finished.

Outside two dirt bikes, a four-wheel drive Mazda truck, and a multifunction tractor were packed, which when lined up together looked more like a man’s dream than farming vehicles. As a city boy,

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coming back from a boarding school that was an ocean’s width away from home, I fell in love with the bucolic setting, albeit with modern amenities.

Petchburi Here, in Petchburi province two hours outside away from any metropolis, farm life never ceased to charm me. My uncle came here twice a week to tend to the banana trees, visit the mutt puppies, and

savor the land.

To stay on a farm was to work. So, after I threw on my clothes, we headed to the fields to trim the Bodhi saplings and weed out the creeping vines. As I toiled away with the rusty machete, hacking at root after root, the sun climbed out of its puffy bed. Burning rays begin to parboil any exposed skin. Unable to withstand the heat any longer, we decided it was time for breakfast and drove to the local market.

in the f Smiles

chiaravanont ennifer chun & amy zhong

ets, and coconut ice cream Rows of canvas tents lined every corner of the square. The stalls walled both sides of the dirt footpaths. I had to make way for the workers hustling around buckets of fresh produce. Like ants, they marched back and forth, nonstop. Exploring the new setting, I spotted the butcher. He was deconstructing a whole hog at the open-air stand. Each time he brought down the heavy cleaver, he was boasting his mastery. Flesh and bones sliced through like butter. And I savored every bit of it. The merchants offered an array of miscellaneous products, from herbal medicines to stereo sets. And, of course, there was a plethora of food. The local market was a landmark, where the villagers came to relish in whatever bustle they can catch.

a tomyum broth. At first sight, I paused and thought, “Boiled whole fish?” Too swiftly, uncle Khanet fished out one and laid it right on my plate. With a little hesitation, I took a bite. The mackerel smelled nothing of fish and had a hint of the river.

I savored the punch of a taste it gave, though I didn’t quite like the slimy texture of the skin. I drank some broth, and the aroma of the fresh herbs and the slight tang of the lime filled my mouth. Before long, it was time to hit the road. We headed back to Krungthep, the city of angels, or, as most people know it, Bangkok.

By the time I returned to the farm, I had drunk two cups of hot soymilk with a few too many patongko, deep fried dough sticks, doused in definitely too much condensed milk. I was ready for my kaoneaw gaitod, fried chicken with sticky rice, my personal favorite comfort food. It came wrapped the classic way, in a sheet of parchment paper with plastic lining inside.

Once I pulled off the rubber band, the bundle blossomed. I drooled over the savory aroma. My first bite was heavenly.

There was just enough of the crispy flour to give a crunch, and juice gushed out from the tender meat—tastes like childhood.

After swallowing, the slightly garlicky fragrance and the intense savory taste lingered. Of course, I follow up with a ball of sticky rice, to mop up the remaining flavors on my tongue.

The first thing we did when we reached Bangkok was head to Chatuchak market, so we would not come home empty handed.

Name what you desire—$50 Yeezy Boosts, lime trees, and baby anacondas. This colossal labyrinth of a market will sell it to you. Aside from offering supplies and an overabundance of food, it was a tourist attraction. European backpackers dotted the crowded streets. Chinese tour groups formed bottle necks at every other turn. Uncle Khanet walked from fruit stands to dessert kiosks, searching for the best dragon fruits and Thai sweets. In the blazing, midday heat, I rushed to the ice cream vendor. His setup was a steel cart attached to his Honda scooter—the ice cream vessel. Next to the gallon tin of ice cream, bowls of toppings flooded the cart surface. Sweet sticky rice, peanuts, and coconut jelly were my choices.

My fried chicken and sticky rice could be your hotdog and bun. It offers the comfort of home that only a few other dishes can. It brings back special memories, perhaps your first time at the ballpark or my first hike into the rainforest.

Maeglong After a few more chores and some tidying up, uncle Khanet and I left, just in time, so we would not be too late for lunch.

We drove till we were about an hour outside of Bangkok. I was expecting another average roadside meal. “These guys do amazing plathu,” my uncle assures me as we pulled into the parking lot. We were in Maeglong, a province nationally famed for its plathu, short mackerel. I’ve eaten plathu all my life - lightly salted and fried whole or with hot shrimp paste and cucumber. However, until I ate at that restaurant, I did not know what I was missing. The fish were served boiled in

Chatuchak, Bangkok

While I quickly finished my treat, slurping up the remaining melted, coconut cream from the bowl that was made of half a coconut, I observed the market. The steel trolleys passed by, carrying sacks of merchandise. The old man worked the bamboo wood with his machete. A mother and her daughter held hands, browsing the stalls. This landmark, even with its stardom, was no different from the market I visited in Petchburi. They served identical purposes, only on a vastly different scale. It may not be possible for the rooster’s crow to wake me up everyday, but everywhere I travel to, the food market will always bring me home.

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Two Views of Cuba

an interview with Professor Maria Cristina Garcia

text by victoria sadosky // photos by emily miller & julia wang photograph courtesy of professor garcia Professor Maria Cristina Garcia is a wellknown professor on Cornell University’s campus. Serving as the Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies, she is a prominent scholar of immigration history. She emigrated with her family from Cuba when she was quite young.

I sat down with Professor Garcia in her office in McGraw Hall to discuss how her family maintains contact with the homeland through family recipes.

What was it like growing up as a Cuban American in Florida? Any food memories?

We were immersed in a world that was quite different from the one we left behind. It was 1960s America. The language, the political scene, the music and popular culture…everything was just very different. Life was especially challenging for my parents because they lost their home and homeland. They had to rebuild their lives and careers in a new country, in a new language. For the children the move was a litter easier— we adapted more quickly because of our youth. We were sponges, absorbing all.

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Food was one arena that required us to be adventurous and open-minded.

American kids brought peanut butter and jelly, tuna fish, or egg salad sandwiches in their lunchboxes. Or they might buy the lunches offered in the school cafeteria— hot dogs and sauerkraut or pork and beans; or meatloaf and fish sticks. We wanted to eat what the American kids ate. They ate hot dogs and hamburgers, so we wanted hotdogs and hamburgers.

Occasionally, we might see a Cuban kid carrying a lunch box with Cuban food—a medianoche, plantains, last night’s leftovers—but that was rare. The longer we lived in the US, the more our tastes changed. At home we ate Cuban with the family; at school we ate American with our classmates.

How did your family approach American cuisine?

We always ate Cuban food at home, but on Sundays, as a special treat, my parents would take us to eat what we called “American food”: meatloaf and mashed potatoes and gravy; fried chicken; lasagna or pizza. We might go to Royal Castle or

Burger King. Some of our non-Cuban classmates went to Cuban restaurants because it was “exotic”. We thought that was funny. What was normal for us was out of the norm for them. Over time, my family cooked more and more American dishes at home because they were less time-consuming to prepare. Life in the US got too fast-paced, too busy. My mother asked her American friends and neighbors for recipes for casseroles, meat loaf, tuna loaf…anything that was easy.

My father was not happy about it.

Who was the main cook in your family?

My grandmother was the principle cook in the family. My grandmother was a Catalan who settled in Cuba so the food she prepared was Spanish or Cuban.

Her favorite dishes were paella, arroz con pollo, carne asada, ajiaco. If she was in a hurry, she might make picadillo, our favorite comfort food, which was easy to prepare. Rice and black beans or red beans were usually a side dish.

And, of course, plantains: tostones or plátanos maduros. She made this great fish dish—a white fish cooked in a thick

recipes by jamie french // photos by jieyu chen and kevin shih

tomato sauce, a guisado. The fish would absorb the tomato sauce that had lots of green bell peppers, onions, garlic.

She never consulted any cookbooks or written recipes. Many years later, when I was going off to graduate school, I asked her if she had copies of her recipes that I

“Food was one arena that required us to be adventurous and openminded.” might Xerox, and she replied “No, why would I need a recipe?” So I had to watch her cook, and take notes as she chopped, stirred, and simmered. Occasionally, she would come visit me and try to teach me how to cook, but it was a challenge.

In South Florida, it was easy to find the ingredients we needed for Cuban food.

Not so in Austin, Texas.

How has Cuban cuisine evolved in the US? In the early 1960s, Cubans generally shopped at Cuban mercados, where they were sure to find the ingredients they needed. We went to supermarket chains like Publix only when we wanted to buy processed American food like Kraft American cheese or hamburger buns.

However, Publix and other American

supermarket chains eventually adapted their products and services to appeal to the immigrant consumers in South Florida. Management realized that this immigrant population was a very lucrative market. It was good business to tap into it. Today, when I walk into a Publix in South Florida and find Cuban pastries and products for sale, and signs in Spanish, I can’t resist smiling.

Over the past fifty years, the Latin American population of South Florida has changed. Cubans are no longer the dominant Latino group. The variety of cuisines is astounding—Nicaraguan, Puerto Rican, Argentinian, Peruvian, etc. Supermarkets and other commercial establishments are appealing to these populations, too. On recent trips to Miami I have noticed that my favorite Cuban restaurants have added dishes to their menus that are Central American or South American, to appeal to their panLatino clientele. They have expanded their repertoire of ingredients and dishes to appeal to all these different Latino populations.

Is there a difference between Cuban food in the US and on the island?

seafood, and even of rice and beans, made it difficult for Cubans to cook traditional dishes on a daily basis. They were enormously creative with whatever ingredients they had at hand, but their dishes didn’t taste like the Cuban food I was accustomed to eating. Even sugar— the country’s main export—was rationed.

Cuba is now doing better economically than in 1991, so it’s possible to find a wider range of ingredients, spices, and dishes. The cuisines seem more similar than different now.

After 50 years of separation, how has the food changed in Cuba?

A friend of mine on the island once told me that her family had to relearn how to cook the traditional Cuban recipes because ingredients were in such short supply for such a long time. What she understood to be Cuban food was different from what I associated as Cuban. Now there is a more sustained contact between Cuba and South Florida, allowing for a greater exchange of information. People travel back and forth more easily, bringing with them spices, ingredients, and assorted consumer goods. The distance between our two societies doesn’t seem as great.

I returned to Cuba for the first time in 1991 and found the food very different, to be honest. The rationing of beef, of 33

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The Art of Pastry 5 Dessert trends for 2016

text by cierra benson // photos by camille chan

Art, by definition, is the expression or application of human creativity, skill, and imagination. While it is usually thought of in the physical form of paintings or sculptures, few immediately have images of pastries come to mind. This lapse of consideration, though,

is detrimental to the idealized notion of what constitutes art, as only an artistic hand can formulate such creative ideas from sugar, flour, and water. If you have ever watched Cake Boss, Cupcake Wars, or passed by the window of any cake shop, you too have seen the

elaborate creations that can only come from the mind of a seasoned pastry chef. From the minds of brilliant NYC based pastry chefs and entrepreneurs to your mouth, I will take you on a journey through some of the most artistic 2016 pastry trends.

Prohibition Bakery

ALCOHOLIC CUPCAKES 9 Clinton Street, New York, NY

At the top of the list are alcoholic cupcakes. The perfect paring of booze and cake, these confections offer a contemporary take on the once innocent cupcake. At Prohibition Bakery, you can find decadent mixes of whiskey -infused orange cupcakes garnished with whiskey soaked cherries, accurately titled the “Old Fashioned,” or one can order the “Bee’s Knees,” a cupcake that fuses the citrus taste of lemon with honey, gin, orange and bee pollen. At the source of this trend you can find Brook Siem, a classically trained chef, and Leslie Feinberg, former bartender and lifelong baker.

Together these two brilliant minds have not only created the ingenious confections seen at Prohibition Bakery, but also Prohibition Bakery the book, which contains over 50 alcohol-infused cupcake recipes.

Dirt Candy

VEGE-CENTRIC DESSERTS 86 Allen Street, New York, NY

Candy’s menu are confections like the Vegetable Ice Cream Salad, which includes an assortment of vegetable sorbets, walnut cake croutons, dill sprinkles, and more.

The Doughnut Project

THE NEW TAKE ON DOUGHNUTS 10 Morton Street, New York, NY

Not just a sweet treat anymore, the doughnut has evolved to include savory options that mystify the mind and taste buds. At The Doughnut Project, Troy Neal and Leslie Polizzotto have worked hard to offer a wide variety of sweet and savory doughnuts. Options include “Those Beetz are Dope,” a ricotta and beet stuffed doughnut, as well as “The Wayney Wonder,” a salted chocolate-covered doughnut with a pretzel cookie crumble. The cofounders have worked hard to make sure that The Doughnut Project exudes a collaborative and creative air. They believe not only in working hard, but playing hard as well, which can easily be seen from the shop’s art décor, use of custom Spotify playlists, and showings of classic movies for guests.

Lafayette

The first vegetable-focused restaurant in NYC, Dirt Candy is a leader in the advancement of vegetable based cooking and baking. The creator of Dirt Candy is Amanda Cohen, the first vegetarian chef to compete on Iron Chef. Using vegetables as alternatives to the standard ingredients, these desserts are a great option for anyone who has dietary restrictions or is looking for a healthier option. On Dirt

ECLAIRS 380 Lafayette Street, New York, NY

Lafayette Grand Café and Bakery is designed in the fashion of a traditional French bakery. While paying homage to numerous regions in France, their bakery offers creative remakes of classic French pastries. At the head of the pastry department is Jennifer

Yee, who has made a name for herself worldwide. Having finished her education at London’s Le Cordon Bleu, Yee trained in Gordon Ramsay’s, The Connaught. Since then she has been featured in magazines such as Saveur.

During her time at Lafayette, Yee has been able to modernize, the long-time established eclair. This traditional French pastry is getting a new twist, as eclairs earn the number four spot on the 2016 Pastry Trends List. Basically an interchangeable dough shell, the eclair has the ability to transform from a simple confection to a complex sweet.

At Lafayette, you can purchase an apple pie based eclair that consists of a caramel apple pie compote filling and pastry lattice garnish.

Eggloo

WAFFLE CONE CREATIONS 60 Mulberry Street, New York, NY

A new take on egg waffles, at Eggloo you can purchase griddled egg waffle cones stuffed to the brim with different ice creams, fruits, mochi, pocky, and more. Each waffle is made to order, and at $8 a cone, they are the perfect choice for anyone who is looking to escape the summer heat. This tasty treat has been reinvented by Mike Tan, having a distant memory of eating from a local egg waffle cart as a child. Reminiscing about his experiences, Mike Tan met David Lin, the two becoming cofounders. From there, they were able to bring on Jessica Tam, a cake specialist for Momofuku. Together these three minds have been able to create a Chinatown hotspot in Chinatown and have begun to build an egg waffle empire.

the aesthetics of

authenticity text by victoria sadosky // photos by camille chan // artwork by vittoria cutbirth When one enters a restaurant featuring Vietnamese or Filipino cuisine, the last thing one contemplates is the forethought which goes into opening the restaurant, including its design, the owner’s background, the menu offerings, the mission of the restaurant, etc. As is expected, the food dominates the discussion at the table, the guests typically looking at the restaurant through the lens of the food itself.

However, sometimes we need to adopt a different vantage point and perceive the view from the perspective of the entrepreneur, exploring how their vision has cultivated the restaurant’s identity.

More times than not, the restaurant and its aesthetics, along with the food, are a reflection of the owner’s themselves and their culinary traditions. With this in mind, we visited a sample of restaurants in New York City to interview these first-generation Filipino and Vietnamese restaurateurs.

Jeepney/Maharlika Nicole Ponseca, a first-generation Filipino-American, is the owner of two Filipino restaurants in the East Village (Maharlika and Jeepney), an area which has historically provided a home to Filipino immigrants. Before moving to New York, Nicole grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood in Southern California, a place that fostered insecurities in regard to her Filipino heritage. She remembers being ashamed of the Filipino meal her mother packed for her school lunch every day.

Filipino food on the map.” After Nicole realized that there were no Filipino restaurants she could recommend to her co-workers, she decided to leave her job in advertising at Saatchi & Saatchi, opting to observe the restaurant and bar industry for more than ten years in order to gain the requisite experience. She opened Maharlika in 2011, and its sister restaurant, Jeepney, the following year.

When asked about her vision for Jeepney, Nicole commented, “This is meant to be like a waterhole, like what you would find in the craziest part of Manila, a place where you would grab drinks after class or work, like the Lower East Side. I wanted that feel, escapism.”

Even though Nicole is creating a “waterhole” atmosphere which would be akin to what one would see in Manila, its menu items, which use American staples as the foundation for Filipino ingredients (such as the Banana Ketchup chicken wings or the “Choriburger”) complicate its authenticity.

Despite Jeepney possessing an eclectic bar-style menu, with both Filipino and American influences, once a week, Jeepney opens its doors for the traditional kamayan dinner. This Filipino dinner does away with eating utensils, and lays food out on a long table. It’s been known for a style of eating called “boodle fight.” According to Nicole, this tradition especially manifested itself when the Filipinos were serving in the U.S. military: “They [the Americans] treated them kind of like animals. So they dumped all the food and you had to eat as fast as you could within the allotted time.”

“Making good wine is a skill The aesthetics and decorations

Nicole’s restaurants took more than a decade to come to fruition, fueled by a desire to banish her culinary insecurities and instead, create a conversation about Filipino food: “I really wanted to put

within Jeepney itself serve as physical manifestations of Filipino pride. Upon walking into Jeepney, one will be

“ I am a Filipino. Inheritor of a glorious past, hostage to the uncertain future. As such I must prove equal to a two-fold task - the task of meeting my responsibility to the past, and the task of performing my obligation to the future. I sprung from a hardy race - child of many generations removed of ancient Malayan pioneers...I am a Filipino. In my blood runs the immortal seeds of heroes - seed that flowered down the centuries in deeds of courage and defiance. ”

- Carlos Romulo greeted by an excerpt from the poem, “I am a Filipino” (1941)

by Carlos Romulo, plastered on the bar.

By Nicole placing this poem at the front of the restaurant on the bar, she is demonstrating that Jeepney is a restaurant which serves as a source of pride. In addition to the poem, if one walks to the back of the restaurant, the visitors will see two controversial photos of nude Filipino women, which serve as another extension of Nicole’s goal to showcase Filipino pride. Many guests have taken offense to the images and have misinterpreted them as yet another example of Filipino sexualization of women, a topic especially sensitive in the Philippines due to their history of human trafficking and slavery: “I did this on purpose to be provocative, to say that a woman can be smart and run a business. I think a lot of people assume this is a male run business. I remember reading a Yelp review saying that the men of this restaurant should be embarrassed for sexualizing women, but I’m the majority owner, I own eighty percent, and that’s very rare for women. I wanted to show the Filipino body as empowering.”

An Choi Similarly, An Choi creates an atmosphere and menu which are in sync with its owner’s definition of authenticity. Tuan Bui is a first-generation Vietnamese-American, and the owner of An Choi, a Vietnamese restaurant on the Lower East Side which opened its doors in 2009. Following a more professional path, including an eight year streak as a mortgage broker, Tuan decided (to the discontent of his father, also a restaurant owner) that he wanted to reconnect with his heritage by opening a restaurant which would serve as a middle ground between the “hole-in-the-wall” restaurants throughout Chinatown and the more upscale, fusion concept restaurants in Manhattan. Just as Tuan decided to change his career, his current chef, a doctoral student at Columbia University, was also changing careers.

l. Fine wine is an art.”

- Robert Mondavi

Tuan traveled to Vietnam with his brother and new chef to gather a deeper understanding of Vietnamese cuisine, and to contemplate a way to introduce the food, and his vision, to the New York City restaurant scene. Even though he was new to the restaurant industry, Tuan seemingly possessed the familial entrepreneurial spirit. Tuan resided in the Lower East Side for almost a decade before opening An Choi, and the diversity inherent within the neighborhood’s identity is what propelled Tuan to position An Choi within familiar grounds: “The rich history of any immigrant coming to New York settled in the Lower East Side, that is something I identified with, where can I go, where I feel comfortable.” The multinational identity of the neighborhood matched Tuan’s objectives for the restaurant’s customer base. He wanted to create a space in which Vietnamese-Americans would congregate, but he also wanted to become a neighborhood destination for the greater New York City area residents, providing an introduction to Vietnamese cuisine.

The restaurant is designed as one long alleyway which begins with an immobile sandwich cart. It is accompanied by a side room comprising a bar and communal table topped with several Café Du Monde tins. Propaganda posters advertising goods such as Tiger Beer, the #1 imported beer in Vietnam, along with inscribed phone numbers, line the walls, with cables and lightbulbs hanging from the ceilings. In fact, all of An Choi’s accoutrements have become commonplace in restaurant establishments in Vietnam. The telephone numbers placed on the walls are based on a local custom of repairmen using restaurants as a place to advertise their businesses.

However, in present times, this practice has become archaic and instead, the phone numbers have morphed into a type

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The Restaurateurs

Nicole Ponseca

Jeepney & Maharlika

Tuan Bui

An Choi

Fred Hua

Nha Minh 37

of cultural graffiti which still line the walls of restaurants in Saigon.

Nha Minh Fred Hua is the owner and chef of Nha Minh (translated as “Our House”), a small, Vietnamese coffee shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, located in an old warehouse space. His father came to the United States on a scholarship in the mid-1960s and attended high school in San Jose, California, where he was adopted by a German couple. As was the case with Nicole and Tuan, Fred did not originally envision himself as a restaurant owner or chef. After working in retail, he wanted to pursue his artistic aspirations and attended The Academy of Art University in San Francisco for three years before dropping out due to the high tuition.

Although Fred had grown up surrounded by Vietnamese flavors, he did not pursue cooking until he moved to New York City in 2002, a transition prompted by a chance encounter.

He was sitting in a Vietnamese restaurant on the Lower East Side and casually began a conversation with the chef, who later offered him an entry-level cook position. Fred’s first restaurant, Nha Toi (translated as “My House”), was also located in Brooklyn, and marked as an “authentic” Vietnamese takeout spot. However, Fred, keeping to his artistic roots, sought a venue through which he could be more expressive in his culinary endeavors. When Nha Toi’s lease was up, he took the opportunity to renew his dormant aspirations, finally opening Nha Minh a few years later.

Fred Hua is using the restaurant as a platform for his own culinary expression. Fred does not pretend to be something he is not; he describes his restaurant as a “Vietnamese-American coffee house,” which is an accurate description. Instead of attempting to be authentic in terms of staying true to the ingredients and dishes, he claims that he is being authentic in his approach to the food, and authentic to himself as an artist:” I’m trying to do something, push culinary boundaries. Too much pride and tradition, it’s a little suffocating, because you feel like you need to cook within those boundaries.”

Nha Minh taps into the essence of the indigenous Vietnamese farmer culture, which has been virtually pushed to the side in Vietnamese restaurants in favor of the dominant pho and banh mi: “Vietnam is rich in agriculture and they are countrymen, which is why you never find anything made from Vietnam, because everything is being harvested for the day and sold for the day. Just like a countryman, you work with the land around you…trying to capture or source ingredients

that come from Southeast Asia doesn’t make sense in New York City. You are going out of your way to pull these ingredients because they are not organically or naturally grown here, and Vietnamese countrymen wouldn’t do that. Vietnamese countrymen don’t use a lot of technique, it’s about freshness.”

Fred is essentially taking the founding principles of Vietnamese cuisine, and the concept of the Vietnamese farmer, and applying it to his rice bowls, a mélange of freshness filled with daily changing grains, vegetables and proteins, in addition to his creative banh mis and rotating pho offerings: “Vietnamese people have a simpler way of approaching it [food], and because the ingredients in Southeast Asia are so unique, it makes the cuisine unique.

They let the ingredient speak for itself, which doesn’t translate well in the United States. In my restaurant, that’s my argument for the rice bowls. A Vietnamese countryman wouldn’t necessarily use beets, but he would prepare it this way, a little sauté, some sauce, sides, fresh ingredients. And the vegetables change every day, so it gives that natural feeling from farm to table. That’s how Vietnamese countrymen would approach the vegetables in New York City.” In the spirit of Vietnamese farmers who rely on the natural land around them, Fred follows a similar path, only working with local or organic purveyors, such as Hudson River Valley Harvest, which is a broker for all the small farms in upstate New York. In fact, one of the main reasons Fred decided to settle in this particular area of Brooklyn was due to the fact that it has been known as a hub for restaurant supplies and produce distribution.

The atmosphere of Nha Minh also adds to the laid back Vietnamese mentality. Fred decided to identify his place as a Vietnamese “coffee shop” to provide a sense of a casual atmosphere, as opposed to a “restaurant,” which from the inception, carries an air of formality. Although it looks nothing like a typical coffee shop in Vietnam, the calm atmosphere bears some resemblance. Moreover, Nha Minh provided not only a chance for Fred to enjoy more culinary freedom, but also a vehicle for him to retain his artistic side. Every six to eight weeks, Nha Minh hosts an art show, combining music, art and food into one space, a sort of calling back to the old, grand tradition of New York City which made an evening out of an art show. The murals along the walls of the small space are physically painted onto the walls themselves, adding a legitimate, artistic feel. Not only is Nha Minh creating a space of conversation through the convergence of various arts, but is also giving its customers an opportunity to experience a combined culinary and artistic Vietnamese landscape.

Crème with a View

@wslblingblangbong (Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy)

@elisadjuharr (Brooklyn Bridge, New York)

@elysiaaante (Positano, Italy)

Winners 38 27

Cornell Gourmet Club