Michele Humes (I live in New York and I write about food.)

Two Restaurants Whose Names Begin With “Ch” But That Otherwise Have Little In Common

(Cha Chan Tang’s chandelier. Photo by Adam Kuban.)

1. Cha Chan Tang (45 Mott St.)

In Cantonese, “cha chan teng” is the generic name for the East-meets-West diners indigenous to Hong Kong. This year-old café gets the transliteration a bit wrong, but the execution mostly right.

Cha Chan Tang is a real treat for Hong Kong nostalgists. Four mock windows–that is, flat-screen TVs with shutters–look out onto looping footage of Hong Kong at sunset. (I assumed at first that they were webcam feeds, but the time difference didn’t add up). The central light fixture is a chandelier made from Vitasoy bottles. And Hong Kong’s iconic iced milk tea is treated here with almost comical reverence: no ice is added to the tea itself, for fear of diluting the precious elixir; instead, each order comes nestled in its own ice bucket.

There are other restaurants in the area operating in the Canto-Western idiom, but Cha Chan Tang is both the sleekest and the most focused. Unlike its competitors (I’m looking at you, Hon Café, with your billboard touting “Sichuan Home Cooking”), Cha Chan Tang doesn’t try to be all things to all tourists. It sticks to the canonical items: crustless toast with condensed milk, ketchupy rice casseroles, beet-free Cantonese borscht. It does this pretty well, and it does it at prices that, even for Chinatown, are remarkably low.

2. Chuko (552 Vanderbilt Ave., Brooklyn)

I’m going to try not to lash out at Chuko, the new ramen restaurant in Prospect Heights. It’s just that I was so looking forward to this addition to my neighborhood’s grim Asian-dining landscape.

(Artist’s impression of the Fort Greene/Prospect Heights Asian-dining landscape.)

It hasn’t delivered.

The good: the noodles are fine, the eggs are great. But Chuko’s pork-broth ramen is very, very rich, and not in a pleasant way. I have had Thai coconut curries thinner than this broth. It actually feels emulsified, almost fluffy on the tongue. And there’s no sharp or pickled element to relieve the palate. The mustard green topping was probably intended to fulfill this role, but it doesn’t. This ramen is exhausting to eat.

I noticed a lot of customers leaving with plastic tublets of left-over broth. Maybe the cooks are congratulating themselves on this imagined coup: “Oh, they love it so much they’re taking it home with them.” But if I were working in that kitchen, I’d be asking myself, “Why are we serving ramen so rich that a diner can’t finish it in a single sitting?”

Montauk Lobster

I was very lucky to catch, this past weekend, what was truly the last summer weekend in Montauk. Naturally, there was lobster–in two forms.

1. This rather Schiaparelli-like sugar cookie from the Montauk Bake Shoppe:

2. The lobster roll brunch (there were garlicky steamers, too) that followed the wedding of one of my oldest friends:

(Photos by Marisa Marchitelli.)

So, I’ve made my peace with summer and am now fully ready for fall.

Food Fatigue: It Could Happen To You

In between culinary school, food writing, working towards my M.A. in Food Studies, my food-dominated Twitter feed, and constant exposure to adherents of the middle-class movement to Save The Underprivileged Fatties From Themselves, I have had it. I want to crawl into a hole and work on a submission for the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine or sort out my unexamined feelings about having grown up with live-in servants or, I don’t know, something, anything. Anything but food.

There is a Cantonese expression that pops up in kung fu movies to describe an over-eager disciple who has practiced his moves too much, too hard, and has totally snapped as a result. It sounds like “dzou foh yup moh,” which translates literally to something like “the fire is extinguished and the beast enters” (although I could be mistaken on that count since I was never taught to read Chinese–coincidentally, another topic I would rather write about right now than food–and am just kind of guessing phonetically at the morphemes) and it perfectly describes how I am feeling at the moment. It’s similar to the Western idea of “burning the candle at both ends,” but it covers the consequences of over-extending oneself, too: that is, leaving one vulnerable to all sorts of bad things, represented here figuratively as demonic possession.

It doesn’t help that almost all of the social issues in food are what sociologists call “wicked problems”–problems, that is, with complex and changing requirements that mean that there are no true or false solutions, merely better and worse ones. (School food is a perfect example.) Every wicked problem produces dozens of opposing camps, each with its own perspective and arguments, and the trouble is that I am usually sympathetic to several of them at once. Trying to decide where I’m going to stand in the debate overwhelms me to the point where I’d rather retreat altogether.

So, for a little while, I think I’m going to retreat. I’m going to let my brain breathe and see how I feel. And I’m not coming back until I’ve written a goddamned detective story.