1. Shio Ramen at Ramen Setagaya
I have a Japanese friend, a total weirdo named Tetsuo whom we call The Professor and who calls himself a “Ramen MANIAC!!!!” When I visited Japan, Tetsuo schooled me in the ways of ramen. It’s so much more than 15-cent college all-nighter fuel; it’s a dish that inspires incredible devotion and never-ending creativity. But being schooled in ramen in Japan has its drawbacks—you eventually come home and have to eat the sad versions we have here. Even my favorite ramen shops in New York would be C-minus specimens in their homeland, so I kind of avoid them altogether.
BUT! Ramen Setagaya, an offshoot of a shop in Tokyo, opened to some fanfare last year. I went to check it out one night and didn’t stop thinking about the shio ramen for weeks afterward. The broth is thin but complex, trading in the richness of lots of ramen broths for a clean, clear flavor. The noodles are strong work: pleasantly resilient, not as chewy as my ideal, but they give you a nice mouthful to chew on. The toppings are first-rate—tender, fatty slices of pork, scallions, a feathery seaweed, lovely marinated bamboo shoots, and, most importantly, a ridiculously brilliant egg somewhere between hard- and soft-boiled. You can pick it up with chopsticks, but it’s silky-smooth and the yolk half-pours, half-floats off into the broth.
This is ramen The Professor would take seriously.
Ramen Setagaya 141 First Ave. near St. Marks Pl. New York, NY (212-529-2740)
2. “Dry” Hu Tieu at Cong Ly
When I first started coming to this place, it was a real dump. It was dingy and cramped; bad dudes would hang out there and smoke cigarettes, long after the citywide indoor-smoking ban took hold. They’ve since cleaned up and remodeled a little bit, and the owner even started asking people not to smoke.
But through it all, pre- and post-cleanup, Cong Ly has remained my favorite Vietnamese restaurant in New York. Most other Vietnamese restaurants in the city (and some of them are tasty) seem to exhibit a certain sameness—they all have the same menu, and it’s always expansive, stretching across regions and styles and levels of formality—Cong Ly’s menu reads very differently. It looks sizeable, but really most things are variations on the others. The kitchen only does a few things—noodles, grilled meats on rice, spring rolls—and it does them well. Who doesn’t love a specialist?
And the noodles are ace-on. The hu tieu, made from tapioca starch, are fantastic: glassy and thick-cut, chewy and squiggly in the mouth like nothing you’ve ever had. When you order this dish “dry,” they serve the broth separately and toss the noodles with a little bit of oil and oyster sauce, giving them a sweetness and a beguiling, blooming depth. Then they top them with a hard-boiled quail egg, a pair of shrimp, some imitation crabmeat, a few slices of pig. Of course, there are herbs and bean sprouts at your disposal. And, of course, there is the bowl of broth. It’s complex, sweet, deep, and crystal clear. I would even call it clean.
Cong Ly 124 Hester St. between Bowery and Christie St., New York, NY (212-343-1111)
3. Linguine alla Vongole at Il Cortile
I may be making too much of this, but sometimes I say that Italian food is what made me feel like an American. I grew up with Italian kids in New Jersey, and the fact that they ate noodles and were considered “normal Americans” gave me a connection from my home to the mainstream. So I loved pasta. And being the child of Cantonese parents, who privilege seafood above all else, I found myself eating a lot of linguine with clams.
Sometimes my parents would take me from their job in Chinatown to lunch in Little Italy. The linguine with clams at Il Cortile was always my favorite, particularly when eaten while sitting in the palatial back courtyard, which I have since realized is just an opening between old tenement buildings. The pasta is wheaty, sweet, and firm. The sauce is garlic and oil–based, loosened and made slippery with briny clam broth, and the clams are cooked until just opened. Being a fat little kid, I’d always stir in two to six pats of butter, too—a habit that holds over to this day. If loving emulsified clam butter is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
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.
Sripraphai 64-13 39th Ave. near 64 St., Queens, NY (718-899-9599)
7. Lobster Bolognese at Telepan
Telepan is a restaurant I’ve always enjoyed; the food is consistently delicious, made from superior local ingredients, and the fact that it’s on the Upper West Side is a plus in my book. I like to know that good things can happen in such culinarily benighted places.
For all its buttoned-upness—its location on a block of stately brownstones, servers neatly dressed in grays and blacks—the food is pretty fun. It’s playful with canonical dishes. The lobster Bolognese is the pinnacle of these homages, although it doesn’t have terribly much to do with a real Bolognese. Traditionally, ragù Bolognese is a sauce of minced beef and pancetta, a few tomatoes and aromatics, and wine, cooked long—I mean long—and slow. The idea is that as it cooks, the proteins eventually break down into amino acids, which create depth of flavor and a long, lingering finish.
Telepan’s lobster Bolognese tastes gently and quickly cooked, and the flavor of the sauce is bright and fresh, rather than deep and contemplative. So maybe one could take issue with the name. But whatever—the thing tastes great. The delicate, licorice-y herbs tarragon and chervil carry the aroma, while sweet and acidic tomatoes spark up your mouth. You start chewing the pasta and find bits of beautifully cooked lobster giving it some extra bounce and adding a briny, buttery flavor. I’m a purist when it comes to lobster. Give me one boiled, and stand back. But this is the most fun I’ve ever had with lobster that didn’t involve a raincoat.
Telepan 72 West 69 St. between Columbus Ave. and Central Park West, New York, NY (212-580-4300)
8. Ginger Scallion Lo Mein with Roast Duck and Roast Pork at Yee Li
The dish is ridiculously simple. You take thin egg noodles and toss them with a little oil to lubricate them, a touch of oyster sauce to flavor them. Then you plop thin shreds of ginger and scallion on top. Done.
So why, if it’s so simple to make, am I highlighting this as a something to go out for? Because, while lo mein noodles are tasty enough to eat as a po’-broke-n’-lonely meal, they’re much better when used as a base for a variety of roasted meats, and there are no better meat roasters in Chinatown than my friends at Yee Li. I’ve been following these dudes around literally since I was a kid, when they were at Big Wong, and then when they moved to the hilariously named New Big Wang, and now at Yee Li. Like dozens of other places in the neighborhood, the day’s meat selections hang from metal rods in big windows, dripping with juice and fat, the sugars in their glazes suspending sticky drops in midair, unready to let go of the meat from whence they came. The char siu roast pork is a Chinatown classic—sweet, salty, and pleasantly chewy. But it’s the roast duck that makes me happy to be alive. The skin is rich and salty, the meat earthy, smooth, and complexly fragrant with five-spice powder. Once, when meeting a woman I would later fall in love with, she asked me what I would have if I could only have one more piece of meat in this life. This was it.
Yee Li 1 Elizabeth St. at Bayard Street, New York, NY (212-219-3686)