Of course, Little Italy feels much less “Italian” than it did 20 years ago, but Il Cortile is still there. Once, despite the fact that my parents had retired to Texas, I ran into my father on Mulberry Street. “Uh, Dad? What are you doing here?” I asked him. He was heading to Il Cortile for the linguine with clams, of course.
Il Cortile 125 Mulberry St., New York, NY (212-226-6060)
4. Spaghetti with Bacon, Onion, Green Pepper, and Ketchup at Sake Bar Hagi
Sake Bar Hagi rocks out like an after-work spot in Tokyo might—lots of Japanese folk cutting loose for a drink or 16. It’s underground and open until forever o’clock, TVs show sports, and the servers are staying out too late for a school night.
In other words, the place is awesome. While I would not call the food precise and exquisite, it is mostly very tasty, and the most fun dishes sound like what Japanese latchkey kids might make for an after-school snack. One night they offered a special “pizza” that consisted of a flattened potato croquette topped with cheese and ketchup. Awesome.
Along those lines, I present you with the cafeteria-of-your-nightmares-sounding Spaghetti with Bacon, Onion, Green Pepper, and Ketchup. You can already guess that I’m going to say it’s awesome. But here’s why: The spaghetti is carefully cooked, the bacon is chewy and meaty, and the simple pleasures of onion and green pepper give the dish some crunch and vegetal interest. The whole thing is bound by a sweet, rich ketchup, which does a better job impersonating tomato sauce than most of the too-sweet, too-tart, too-tinny “tomato sauces” you buy in jars. To complete the picture, it’s served with a green shaker of Kraft Parmesan cheese and a bottle of Tabasco.
For a while, I thought that this dish just spoke to me in some perverse personal way. But you know what? I’ve taken dozens of friends to Hagi and ordered it every time. Every one of our spaghetti plates was left so clean you could see it sparkle.
Sake Bar Hagi 152 West 49th Street near 7th Ave., basement, New York, NY (212-764-8549)
5. Indian Mee Goreng at Taste Good
I don’t know why this is, but it seems that the Indians—or the South Asians generally—never really developed much of a noodle culture. The only noodle dish I can think of is falooda, and even that’s kind of a stretch; essentially it’s flavored sweetened milk with some arrowroot noodles for something to chew on. (There are Indian-Chinese places that do a lot of noodle work, but that’s a discussion for another day.) I often wonder what magic could have been made with a noodle backbone to all the saucy curries and stews.
But then there’s Southeast Asia, in particular Malaysia, where the food often tastes like an amalgam of South and East Asian influences. And there’s mee goreng.
Yellow egg noodles, cut thick and square to retain a certain firmness are, naturally, the base. But then everything else going on is a fabulous jumble of textures and flavors. At Taste Good, a Malaysian restaurant in Queens, they stir-fry the noodles with BB-sized bits of pleasantly rubbery squid; two kinds of dried tofu, one looser, one denser; eggs; potatoes cooked in chicken curry, rich with coconut and spices, lending their powdery softness to the dish; some greens; and the kicker, crisply fried shrimp crackers. There’s a lot going on here.
Taste Good 82-18 45th Ave. at 82 St., Elmhurst, NY (718-898-8001)
6. Bean Thread with Shrimp and Pork in Casserole at Sripraphai
Everyone loves Sripraphai. Go ahead, google it and see how all 8 million New Yorkers holler about its being the most truly, really, God’s-honest Thai restaurant in all the world, Thailand included. But when I first came upon Sripraphai—and yes, fell in love with it—I was moved, ironically, by how un-Thai it seemed. Or, rather, by how it expanded my understanding of that cuisine, in flavors and forms I’d never associated with Thai food.
The menu listed dishes that seemed, for lack of a better word, Chinese. These dishes didn’t center on lemongrass, fish sauce, and lime, but rather soy sauce and oyster sauce and other flavors that spoke to my past and home; they reflected the influence of southern China in the food, and added another rich page to a cuisine that was already deep in my mind.
The mung bean threads come out in a heavy stone crock, after a quick stewing in just enough broth to be absorbed into the slippery, translucent strands known as glass noodles. The flavor is of chicken and pork broth, especially when you take a bite highlighted by the sweet shrimp and the thin slices of fatty pork belly. But that note that you know but can’t place is white pepper, and that grounding herbal flavor comes from the stems and thin wispy roots of cilantro. When I ate this dish for the first time, I was struck by how satisfyingly it paired with the bright aroma of jasmine rice. I recalled that glass noodles, because they absorb flavors so thoroughly, were the only noodles we would ever eat at home as an accompaniment to rice. I don’t know if the Thais use this dish the same way, but my family would.
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