Family Dinner, Corn Ice Cream, Five Pounds of Ramp Butter
Eating in and dining out, late March through April.
Lots of good eating from late March and April! At home, I hosted a Latin-Vietnamese-American fusion dinner party, cooked for some relatives visiting town, and had friends over on Easter Sunday. Out on the town, somehow I wound up eating at Rosella thrice, ate two outstanding corn dishes at a fancy izakaya, and commemorated the Fall of Saigon. Plus, an update on that ramp butter.
Three Dinner Parties in My Apartment
One ticketed dinner and two private parties for friends and family 🙂
American In Me (Spring Edition)
A spring update to the American In Me dinner party series (a novel blend of Ecuadorian, Colombian, and Vietnamese cuisines). Largely kept the same menu from last fall, but swapped out beef pho with a mix of chicken and hen to keep things a touch lighter. It’s such a fun, inspired combo so John Carlo and I plan to host one every season.
Menu for American in Me, Spring Edition:
Pan de bono (manioc rolls with cheese, lard, guava)
Bánh mi crostini (Chả lụa sausage)
Bún chicharrón con salsa de maní y nưởc chẩm (Braised and fried pork belly, rice vermicelli, peanut sauce, fish sauce)
Phở gà con gallina rompe camisa (chicken pho with stewed hen)
Sandhi "Sta. Rita Hills", Chardonnay 2022 (this bottle was the crowd favorite)
Steam-fried branzino with achiote oil, mushroom medley cooked in achiote butter, spring veggies, plantains
Pandan waffle with tres leches ice cream
Cousin Oscar "On se l'arrache," Rimbert NV (post-drink/sobremesa wine)
Carignan Vieilles Vignes, Dom. Tour Boisée 2020 (post-drink/sobremesa wine)
Dru & Ric’s Family Meal
The week my cousin Kevin’s new novel was published1, his whole family came into town. It was also my other cousin Jon’s birthday, so Eric and I put together a full Dru & Ric’s dinner party for everyone who was in town. For this special occasion, I opened up the last of my smuggled Spanish conservas, a tin of hake kokotxa. Besides a chorizo & seafood paella (which made use of a seafood stock I made from stockpiled lobster carcasses and fish heads from the above dinner party), the menu pulled heavily from the Four Horsemen cookbook. Thanks to my brother Brian for taking photos!
Menu for Dru & Ric’s Family Meal:
Dutch Crunch sourdough, Ramp Butter, Hake Kokotxa, Crackers
Scallop Crudo w/ Daikon and Leche de Tigre
Little gem salad w/ green goddess dressing, radishes, fried croutons
Seafood & chorizo paella with fiddlehead ferns and ramps
Short Rib Bò Kho with Parsnip Puree
Cheese (3 Year Aged Comté, Tomme de Savoie, Cave Aged Shiso Chizu), Toasted Hazelnuts, and Kumquat Marmalade
Les Hérétiques VdP de l'Hérault, Iché 2022 (Easy sipping table wine with some tannins. Excellent value, paid $8 for it.)
Japanese cheese cake (purchased from Keki)
Middle EASTERn Sunday Dinner
A week later, Shruti was in town and I had her over for a Sunday dinner, along with her husband and some of our friends. In a feat of unintentional wordplay, the menu skewed Middle Eastern, and it was happening on Easter. The centerpiece was braised lamb shoulder and shanks, served with Arab rice, homemade toum2, and sumac-pickled red onions. (Recipe came from the excellent Arabiyya by Reem Assil.) Spent the entire day prepping and cooking by myself, which was meditative. More pics on my Instagram!
Menu for Middle EASTERn Meal:
Beet-tahini dip, Dutch crunch sourdough, ramp butter, crudité, sourdough discard crackers
Hosmer Dry Riesling, Cayuga Lake - 2022 (Dry rieslings are redeeming that grape!)
Ramp/raisin/pine nut agrodolce on smoky whipped ricotta toast
Loubia - Moroccan white bean stew
Mashawi - braised lamb shoulder and shanks
With Arab rice, salad with citrus vinaigrette
Lebnani Ahmar, Mersel Wines 2022 (Served chilled, very juicy and natty. As the night continued and wine reached room temp, the tannins came out more.)
Cheese break - kumquat marmalade, crackers, hazelnuts
Dessert from Tabatha: taffy apple salad (what the hell are they doing in Minnesota)
Three more casual “having friends for dinner” hangs:
A long awaited bucatini night (bucatini all’amatriciana, side salad, black calypso bean & cauliflower spread, jarred eels)
Leftover chicken pho
Jamaican oxtail stew (with rice & moro beans and side salad)
Two other wines I really enjoyed in April:
Lucien Crochet - La Croix du Roy Sancerre Rouge 2023 (Paired with tuna & kimchi toast at Cocktail Coalition.)
Côtes de Provence Rosé "MiP," Dom. des Diables - 2024 (It’s rosé season, might as well drink a good one. Drank it on a friend’s balcony.)
Five Notable Restaurant Meals
Konban
Inspired by an Instagram reel compiling compelling corn-based dishes around the city, I had a pre-show dinner at Konban, a tranquil izakaya in Chelsea. Walking past a zen garden on the way to the wood-panelled dining room, we had an efficient one-hour meal. The sabazushi (mackerel sushi) was my favorite: the fish was brushed with soy sauce then broiled, with a healthy dose of wasabi serving as a buffer between the fish and ginger rice. It’s a very well-considered bite that layers sweet, salty, and spicy. But we were really here for the phenomenal grilled corn rib, laced with umami, and a logic-defying corn ice cream, which was encased in molded white chocolate (think Magic Shell) then sprayed with yellow color. It looks like a piece of corn on the cob. But it’s ice cream. Both were such standouts you may well call this restaurant “Cornban.”
Rosella (3x)
Wound up going to Rosella thrice in a month: once as a planned outing, another as a drunchie-driven post-saké party bite, and the last trip to check out their newly introduced happy hour menu. The portions are scaled down, so while most items are not massively discounted, it does give one or two-tops the ability to order a wider array of dishes, or just eat a snack while sipping on a glass of wine. (The five-piece nigiri set, $25 pre tip/tax, is a good value.) Running through the happy hour menu, plus spicy apples and spicy avocado handrolls shared across three diners, totaled to $80 per person after tip/tax, plus another $15 for discounted saké or wine.
Eyval
Every time I eat at Eyval, I wonder why I don’t go there for all of my meals. (I especially love a restaurant that boxes up your leftovers.) The octopus kebab and fava bean borani remain must-orders. The intriguing wine list featured a couple bottles from Drood, a Swedish-Iranian winery that cleverly avoids strict alcohol regulations within the Islamic Republic and sanctions placed upon it: grapes grown in the Zagros mountains are frozen and shipped to Sweden, where they are fermented and aged. Their medium-bodied red wine, named “Irdabama” after a wealthy businesswoman in Ancient Persia, was pleasantly natty and punchy to complement the bold flavors of Iranian cuisine.
La Dong
We Viets tend to thumb our noses at Viet restaurants owned by non-Viets, but if the food is really good I’ll gladly make an exception. The owners of La Dong are Thai, but that didn’t stop the restaurant from getting auntie approved. That’s the best endorsement you can get. Highlights: Tofu Scallion (đậu rán tẩm hành) and fried whole branzino (Cá Chiên Nước Mắm).
Kitchen Cô Út
April 30 was the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon3. Each year, my friend Alex brings together all her Viet friends in New York to get dinner together. We went to Kitchen Cô Út, which has quickly become one of the most reliable traditional Viet restaurants in Manhattan. It was a fruitful conversation, with each of us discussing how our upbringings influenced our varied relationships with our identities. I guess it wasn’t a bad way to ring in “AAPI Heritage Month,” which technically no longer exists thanks to an Executive Order by the Trump administration. (We share a bunch of appetizers, and I ate a big bowl of Hu Tieu Nam Vang, a dipping noodle soup with shrimp and various pork cuts, including liver.)
Five Pounds of Ramp Butter
Quick update to last week’s ramps report: I didn’t see any ramps at the Union Square market Monday morning… I feared that the season was over, but Monday for Wednesday and Freshdirect still have ‘em in stock, so I think I just got there too late or the rainy weather got in the way of foraging the wild alliums. In any case, ramps won’t be here much longer, so I got ahead of things and made a crapton of ramp butter. I got a bulk brick of Ronnybrook butter and big 3 lb bag of ramps delivered4 and got to work. If you wanted to know what nearly five pounds of ramp butter looks like, here you go:
I put all the butter in the freezer, some to sell, others to portion out throughout the rest of the year. For the bulbs, some were set aside to use in my day to day cooking, and I pickled the rest with coriander seeds and chile flakes.
Rhubarb wasn’t at the market either, which should be coming in now… but again, I went on a rainy, late morning Monday. But here’s some rhubarb inspo:
At some point I may write an essay on the experience of reading your cousin’s book in which the characters are cousins (that’s really wordy but it’s not actually “about” cousins) and seeing how real-life experiences are transformed into world-building details
I had to add an egg white because I couldn’t get an emulsion without it.
If I were smarter/more calculating, I would have exploited this day to write about being Viet-American or the lack of prominent Viet-American movies or something like that, but honestly I’ve been so busy that the day snuck up on me and I haven’t read any of the journalism produced around this anniversary, maybe because it’s a lot of stuff I probably already know.
The ramps yielded enough leaves to combine with 3.5 lbs of the butter.