Tea and Terroir

Newly opened in Soho.
Photo courtesy of Palais des Thes

Not too long ago, I attended a fascinating tasting at the newly opened U.S. flagship of the French tea company Palais des Thés.  The Prince Street shop opened hot on the heels of the brand’s first foray into the U.S. on the Upper West Side. Leading the tasting was company founder François-Xavier Delmas, who, it turns out, is a treasure trove of knowledge on all things tea from cultivating to tasting.

Tea brewing is an exacting art, Delmas explained, so it’s important to follow brewing directions to the letter, or number, in this case. Filtered water is best, and when a tea calls for a temperature of 90 degrees Fahrenheit, it won’t cut it to heat water to 110 degrees and then cool it. Water shouldn’t be reheated, either, since boiling depletes the water’s oxygen, which is not restored upon cooling or reheating. The bitterness sometimes detectable in tea is not a negative, we learned, as long as it is balanced with acidity.
  

Aurelie Bessiere, who with her husband Cy heads the company's
U.S. expansion, left, and Delmas.

Delmas suggests using an electric kettle with temperature settings, noting that in some tea-drinking countries, it’s an art to be able to detect hot water temperature by different sized bubbles forming on the water’s surface. I love the descriptions born of this pre-electric-kettle method because they’re the kind you won’t forget:“shrimp eyes” and “fish eyes” are two such descriptors.

We learned that color does not necessarily indicate quality, as there are beautiful “white” teas (a delicate mix of immature buds and leaves, steamed lightly and unfermented) that are nearly colorless, and that smell is more important than taste when judging tea. Tea tasters swish and slurp tea much as wine tasters do, as the tea liquor must be aerated in order for the full spectrum of its tastes to register on the palate. Delmas also suggests that tea drinkers lean forward slightly when drinking tea, as bitterness is detected at the back of the tongue. Once again, as I noted in this tea-related post, the parallels between tea and wine are striking.

Darjeeling and Bao Zhong grand crus
Photo by Alex Kotlik Photography

Among the 200 or so different varieties Palais des Thés offers are 15 grand crus teas, which are grown in small batches on single estates and distinguished by their extraordinary quality, balance and harmony. We tasted two grand crus: Darjeeling Puttabong “Muscatel,” a limited edition second flush (“flush” refers to which harvest of the new season the leaves hail from) of a rich copper color that was astringent then fruity and woody on the palate, and a first flush 1999 Bao Zhong “antique” tea from Taiwan.

Delmas noted that more recently, the idea of single cépages, or varietals, has taken hold. He is especially interested in understanding which prized tea characteristics are attributable to terroir (the unique characteristics of the soil in which the tea bushes are cultivated) and which from cépage. Happily, tea exchanges are underway between tea research centers in Indian, China and Japan. In one, Delmas notes, “Japan is trying to produce ‘Japanese teas’ in China.” Other exchanges involve experimenting with different cultivars and propagation by cutting, seed exchanges and comparing disease fighting and organic growing methods.

Tea cuisine: tea leaves and katsuobushi (shaved dried skipjack).
Photo courtesy of Palais des Thes

You can get an even more detailed education in tea by reading Delmas’s charming and informative book Chercheur de Thé: Discovering Tea, a collection of the first year’s worth of his blog posts. Thanks to this book, I now know how my beautiful tea canister covered in Japanese cherry wood was made, about the turbulent movement to create a separate state in Darjeeling, the ongoing belief in yeti in Nepal (some of them are quite short, less than a meter tall!) and unusual dishes such as the one above from Asahina, Shizuoka Prefecture, made with wet tea leaves, katsuobushi (shaved dried and fermented skipjack) and soy sauce. Delmas, a sympathetic and open-hearted traveler, pronounces it “absolutely delicious.”

Palais des Thés

156 Prince Street (between W. Broadway and Thompson St.)

New York, NY 10012

646-513-4369

194 Columbus Ave. (between 68^th and 69^th Sts.)

New York, NY 10023

646-664-1902

Roger Shimomura, Artist, Collector

American Guardian, 2007

Earlier this week, I attended the opening of Japanese American artist Roger Shimomura's exhibit at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute's new digs at 8 Washington Mews, a part of New York University.

The Seattle-born Sansei (third-generation Japanese American), who's spending this year as artist-in-residence at A/P/A,  has made a name for himself as a painter, printmaker and theater artist. His visual work speaks the language of pop art, comic books, Japanese wood-block prints and manga, but their bright, shiny surfaces upend expectations by delivering sly doses of subversive commentary on race and exclusion.

 The A/P/A exhibit focuses on Shimomura's screen prints and lithographs, along with selections he's made from his collection of pop and kitsch Americana. The two parts of his life, his work and collecting (everything from mutant peanut shells to wind-up toys, Disney memorabilia and folk art) have informed and shaped each other, Shimomura says.

Kansas Samurai, 2004.

 In Kansas Samurai, Shimomura depicts himself as a samurai warrior, defiant in the face of rejection by mainstream culture, represented Dick Tracy, Popeye, Donald Duck and Pluto, whose backs are turned to him.

The artist admitting to his addiction to e-Bay,
the digital era's gift to collectors.

"My life can be measured by what I was collecting," he told the gathered crowd, noting that he amassed his first collection, of soda bottle caps, by making frequent trips to the neighborhood grocery store on his handmade scooter. "We'd buy drink flavors that we would never normally think of drinking just to get the different caps," he explained, which he and his friends affixed to their jackets like badges.

In graduate school at Syracuse, Shimomura began collecting advertising displays of food items, and still relishes the memory one of his biggest coups, a 7-foot-tall cardboard ice cream cone that was the envy of his art school classmates.

Enter the Rice Cooker, 1994.

For the exhibit, Shimomura included his copy of a movie poster for the 1959 film noir, The Crimson Kimono, which depicts James Shigeta kissing Victoria Shaw underneath the headline, "YES, this is a beautiful American girl in the arms of a Japanese boy!" Also on display are a giant plastic Donald Duck, a Chinese ceramic Minnie and Mickey mouse, and a Superman trophy.

Geta salt and pepper shakers; note holes in front for shaking.

Shimomura spent several of his early childhood years in the Minidoka, Idaho U.S. government prison camp during World War II, and the camps and their barbed wire are recurring motifs in his work. Included in the exhibit is a pair of Shimomura's over 50 salt-and-pepper shaker sets in the form of geta, the traditional Japanese wooden clogs that prison camp inmates fashioned out of found wood to keep their feet above the muck during trips to the communal lavatories and showers. In American Guardian, a guard in a Japanese prison camp, machine gun between his knees, observes a small-boy version of the artist himself riding a tricycle.

Another source of inspiration were the 56 years' worth of diaries kept by his grandmother, who arrived in America as a picture bride and worked for decades as a midwife. Shimomura had parts of her diaries translated and then incorporated into scripts for performance art pieces he staged during his long tenure as art professor at the University of Kansas. He included one of those diaries in the exhibit, part of a trove of personal papers that is being collected by the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art.

When an audience member asked whether incorporating racist images and monikers in his work undermines attempts to enlighten the public about their offensiveness, he replied, "To make it go away, you have to make it appear first...in some ways I am bringing things up that are painful in order to make them go away."

Prints of Pop (& War)
Curated by Roger Shimomura
A/P/A Institute at NYU, Gallery
8 Washington Mews
New York, NY 10003
(212) 992-9635
Through May 9, 2013

Talkin' Cocktails: The Waysider

Alt-Julep: The Waysider

As promised, I'm introducing you to this refreshing cocktail, which I came across at the charming and laid-back Louisville restaurant Decca. It's on East Market Street, in a neighborhood that in recent years has seen the arrival of a clutch of restaurants, art galleries, and antique shops, including the Mayan place across the street that my savvy barkeep Krista says is also very good.

The drink pays tribute to the Wayside Christian Mission, formerly housed on the site. Bourbon-based cocktails are a dime of dozen, but the trick is to find those that are balanced and not too sweet. The Waysider's combination of bourbon, lime juice, simple syrup, ginger beer and mint give it a bracing herbal and slightly musky flavor.

Decca uses Old Fitzgerald 100 proof "Bottled in Bond"bourbon because, explains Krista, "The spicier, high-proof whiskey is a nice complement to the ginger beer and helps balance out some of the sweetness of the drink." She says Old Forester Signature, another hundred-proofer, would make an acceptable substitute. (If you're interested in the history and complicated modern ownership status of Louisville distilleries, here's an interesting post.) I found Fever Tree ginger beer at my neighborhood Fairway.

The ice doesn't have to be crushed, but Krista recommends"definitely a smaller, more meltable ice cube like hotel ice (or as we call it in bartender circles, 'cheater ice'). This," she explains, "is for the refreshment factor. You want your ice to melt a little and dilute the drink just a touch."

Here's to the refreshment factor!


The Waysider

In a highball glass, stir together, without crushing mint leaves:

1 sprig mint, leaves only
1 oz. lime juice
1/2 oz. simple syrup (2:1 ratio of sugar to water)
2 oz. bourbon

Fill glass with crushed ice or smallish cubes

Top with Fever Tree ginger beer, about 1 ounce (give bottle a shake before opening)

A Quick Trip to Louisville, Kentucky

I'm just back from a foray into bluegrass country. Louisville is a compact and genteel city, where the faded glory of its nineteenth-century homes and buildings bumps up against a percolating farm-to-table and innovative drinks scene. It's hard not to like a city where life seems to revolve around horses, college sports, bluegrass music, food, and drink, a city whose most famous sons (broadly speaking) are Muhammad Ali and the Louisville Slugger.

The $82 million, six-story Muhammad Ali Center could have ended up the ego-driven deification of a great, still-living athlete. It does do its share of deifying, but focuses equally on Ali's humanitarian acts and moral courage, as well as his vision for international peace. I loved this installation by Korean artist Ik-Joon Kang, part of a larger series of 3" x 3" drawings that he has collected from over 135,000 children around the world. The drawings express their makers' hopes and dreams, so from far off you can see that the images spell the words "Hopes & Dreams." From close up, you can examine each child's individual visual message.

Ik-Joon Kang's "Hopes and Dreams." 

"Hopes and Dreams" from close up.

Dining in Louisville brought back memories of eating in Atlanta, Richmond and New Orleans, where the deep, sweet, sour and smoky flavors of barbecue and collard greens seem to inform those region's cooking as a whole. In Louisville, good baking and desserts abound as well; the biscuits, bread puddings and cobblers put northern attempts at the forms to shame.

Biscuits at the old-line Oakroom at the Seelbach Hilton Hotel.

Knowing how to get the best out of pork products is part of the Southern genetic heritage, as Decca chef Annie Pettry's super hay-braised pork cheeks with wheat berries, rutabaga, pistachios and apricot  demonstrated. Born in North Carolina, Pettry has cooked in kitchens in San Francisco and New York as well.

Hay-braised pork cheeks at Decca.

At chef Edward Lee's 610 Magnolia, the Brooklyn-raised Korean American chef mixes southern flavors with Asian accents (his king crab with coconut-banana, mango, red pepper and daikon sprouts is one example). When Lee arrived in Louisville eight years ago he began playing with forgotten and/or local products. He was so taken with the region's network of small farms and their handling and processing of livestock that he ended up staying. "Why would you use French honey when you have sorghum in the backyard, or spend money on osetra when a mile-and-a-half away you've got spoonbill (native paddlefish) caviar?" he asks.

Bourbon, of course, is Kentucky's spirit of choice, and we came back with our share of the mind- boggling array on sale in any liquor store. I'll share a dynamite bourbon-based cocktail I tried at Decca in my next post. 

Cassoulet All the Way

Who says cassoulet can't include pizza toppings?

I love the contrarian and agrarian bent of Jimmy's No. 43's annual Cassoulet Cookoff, which unspooled yesterday afternoon amid an avalanche of delectable bean and pork stews.  While the general post-holiday zeitgeist is centered on exercise and diet apps (and maybe even the actual doing of exercise) the irrepressible Jimmy Carbone takes the opposite tack, massaging winter blues away with a healthy dose of beer and cassoulet.  Thus, even though it was unseasonably balmy, the annual cookoff went forward at Carbone's boisterous East Village pub/restaurant.

Jimmy, as I've written before, is a tireless planner of events and doer of good, in this case donating all proceeds from the event (over $2,000) to Grow NYC and in particular to its very cool Youthmarket Farmstand Project.

Close to a dozen professional and amateur chefs showed up with steaming pots of cassoulet, and the variety and imagination on display were dazzling. The beans alone could have staffed a whole legume runway show. There were giant cream-colored butter beans winking from a delicious Iberian cassoulet featuring Asturian cider and Spanish blood sausage; Cayuga pinto beans with pulled pork, porter beer and fresh mozzarella; Great Northern beans from Matt, a home cook who riffed on Julia Child's recipe with lamb shoulder, goat, and Toulouse and garlic sausages; black-eyed beans camouflaged among burnt brisket ends from Mighty Quinn's Barbecue; a black bean cassoulet, and in the winning cassoulet, flageolet beans.

The winner: Laura Luciano.

Laura Luciano, a gifted amateur chef from Long Island who blogs at Out East Foodie, swept both the People's Choice and the judge's top spot (yours truly was a member of the second group), proving, as emcee and himself a producer of food "take-down" events Matt Timms, said, "that the judges are as smart as the people."

Luciano's two-to-three day cassoulet whispering process makes it clear why hers tasted so deep and transporting, as if French monks had been chanting over it for weeks. She braised pork butt on the stove with celery onion, carrots and bay leaf, added duck stock and cognac, and finished the braise in the oven.  Luciano pureed all the aromatics from her braise and added the mixture to her simmering flageolet beans, along with pancetta and duck sausage. Oh, and she confited her own duck and made her own duck sausage for the first time in her life, too, adding a layer duck fat to her beans as they cooked. Luciano credited much of the deliciousness of her dish to plenty of duck fat, though the fact that she took zero short-cuts mattered just as much. To top it all off, she added finely ground duck cracklings and minced micro carrot and parsley greens to her bread crumbs--all of it toasted, of course, in duck fat.

The judges' scorecard.

As we mulled over our top picks, several judges pointed out that a few of our favorites tasted great but weren't true cassoulets, such as the Iberian cassoulet and a delicious vegetarian cassoulet with parsnips created by Rich Pinto (so appropriately named that he was destined to place at least), a former Jimmy's No. 43 chef who still works the restaurant's catered and special events.  No problem, we just created a new category for them: "the best non-cassoulet cassoulets."

Back home, this discussion sent me to my Oxford Companion to Food, in which the late, great Alan Davidson wrote that the haricot bean is the most important ingredient in cassoulet, although Old World beans must have predated them (haricots did not arrive in France from the New World via Spain until the 16th century). Beyond that, though, there a fair amount of variety in French cassoulet meat types. Although pork and pork products predominate, cassoulet can include leg of mutton, duck,  goose or even confit d'oie (goose liver).

Despite its tradition-bound image, there are innovators in France: Davidson finds reference in Larousse Gastronomique to a cassoulet made with salt cod. Hear that, those of you planning your  bid for the sixth annual cassoulet cookoff title?

A Non-Traditionalist Japanese Chef does New Year's

Tojo's Great Pacific Roll

 Blog posts have a life of their own. You write them, forget about them, and then a day, week, a year later, there's a response. The process can be like sending out a message in a bottle, having it circumnavigate the globe and return to your shore with an answer.  Last New Year,  I  blogged about this article on Japanese osechi ryori,  which I wrote for Edible Manhattan.

I happened to be in Vancouver at the time, so I wondered where I might be able to find osechi in that Pacific city, home to lots of Japanese ex-pats and with great access to both freshly caught seafood and Japanese ingredients.

Then just recently, my bottle returned when I received this comment from Hopstepka, who I assume is a Vancouver blogger: "Just found your query. The best osechi ryori we've found is sold by Seto Sushi in Richmond. After that, there's Fujiya."

Thanks, Hopstepka! Seto's menu includes the delicious-sounding matsutake dobin mushi (translated as mushroom tea pot soup with seasonal pine mushroom) and an intriguing BBQ tako cake (BBQ octopus fish cake).

I got to wondering what my favorite sushi chef in Vancouver, Hidekazu Tojo, does to ring in the New Year at his eponymous West Broadway restaurant. Although he trained in a traditional Osaka ryotei, or high-end Japanese restaurant, Tojo says "I never really liked osechi. Everything is too salty, because the idea was that you put the food in a box that would last three or four days so you wouldn't have to cook during the holiday.

More of Tojo's sushi, fresh, fresh, fresh.

"Today, young people don't like overly salty cooking, and the people who come here are very health-oriented, they don't like foods that are to sweet, salty, or deep-fried. So I cook 'new traditional food.'"

For New Year's Tojo makes his usual omakase, or chef's choice menu, a series of small plates that progress from a sunomono, or vinegared vegetables, on to various steamed, fried and seared dishes as well as raw fish and sushi plates. He includes "new wave rolls" like his Pacific Northwest Roll of dungeness crab, avocado, scallop and fish roe, or his Northern Light Roll of wild prawn tempura, avocado and seasonal fruit rolled in a cucumber crepe.

During New Year's week, the chef will highlight traditional Japanese foods, where he updates osechi ingredients such as lotus root and black bean. He might lightly saute the lotus, and simmer the black beans in a less sugary-sweet syrup than the traditional style.

From the omakase menu, BC salmon with Asian vegetables, western-style sauce.

Referring to the somewhat westernized sauces and preparations that have crept into his food over 40 years in Vancouver, Tojo adds, "Even in Japan now, European, Chinese, Japanese food, all of it's mixed." In Canada, he believes, "The best way is to little by little introduce traditional Japanese foods."

Some osechi traditions die hard, though. Even an avowed healthy modernist like Tojo adheres to some of the symbolism that is an essential part of osechi. The colors red and white, he notes, are most important, symbolizing respect for ancestors, good health, and purity. They'll be represented on his plates in the form of the traditional kohaku namasu, a red and white vinegared daikon and carrot salad.  He'll also serve red shrimp, and a little bit of white dried fish.

So the traditional New Year's feast will be present at Tojo's, but in small bits and bites, slipped in between plates of some of the most pristine raw fish preparations you'll find on the West Coast.

Sounds great. The only problem: I won't be in Vancouver for this year's celebration.

Montreal vs. Paris: Advantage Pucks and Poutine

The great thing about Montreal is that it's so close and so French. I would call it a poor woman's Paris, but that would be doing the quirky Quebec city a disservice. It's only so in the sense that you can get there for less money than you would by jetting to Charles de Gaulle.

There  are so many only-in-Quebec things that make Montreal sui generis. Like poutine. This great ambassador of the category (below) was jumping with juicy bay scallops and shrimp, a real find on the menu of The Montrealais at the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth.

Or the Montreal Canadiens, whose glory days may live in memory only, but aren't ones to wallow in self-pity, as the team's unsentimental locker room motto indicates. (A good credo for life in general, don't you think?) Even during a dismal lock-out year, you can pay a visit to the Habs' Temple de la Renomee (a much more accurate and evocative name than the pallid English translation, "Hall of Fame") at Centre Bell.

And where in Paris would you find a cheese shop called by the Franco-British name La Maison du Cheddar, filled with an assortment of artisanal Quebec cheeses?

Nor could you locate this in Paris: My favorite Montreal restaurant find, Van Horne, a fine art-filled pocket place where chef Eloi Dion oversees a kitchen staff of one other person and tuns out (at very reasonable prices) precise, detailed dishes like this compressed watermelon salad with fines herbes-infused tomato, marinated shallots, olive, capers, house-made ricotta and tomato chips.  

Finally, I love that delicious and chewy St-Viateur bagels are sold at the airport, so that you can take a bag home like the parting gift from an over-generous host. I didn't even make it to the smoked meat category, but that's for another post.