Book Review: How to Get Into the Twin Palms

If you’re drawn to this book, like I was, because of its cover–crimson daggers plunging through skulls–thinking you’ll get a drug lord tale à la Breaking Bad, turn back. How To Get Into The Twin Palms, the first novel by Karolina Waclawiak, is the slack tale of immigrant Los Angeles. Within the stucco backbone of apartment buildings lining the palm tree blocks found on the west side, Waclawiak builds an outsider’s story, a narrator in search of a different life, or sometimes just a change in hair color.

We first meet our narrator, Anya–a twenty-something alien attempting to shed her Polish feathers in exchange for a Russian sable coat­–on her balcony, hiding behind a ficus, watching a man and woman fuck against a car outside the Twin Palms nightclub. So begins Anya’s quest to become Russian, to gain access to the Twin Palms, and to discover a place in the world that feels tolerable. Much of the book takes place in Anya’s apartment, a squat building in the Russian populated neighborhood of Fairfax. Her inherited apartment is “vertical blinds, beige carpets, bare off-white walls, and small things” left behind by previous tenants. And here we learn that Anya is a cataloger of stuff: bobby pins, hairballs, and ramen.

Waclawiak’s prose of clipped, vibrant sentences moves the story forward in a way that suits our narrator, whose English isn’t quite perfect, but who clearly misses her homeland. Even as Anya is rejecting Los Angeles, she isn’t considering going anywhere else:

My dark hair makes my eyes more cat-like and brighter in hue. More Eastern European. Less American. I am starting to make sense to them. I am taking off all my American skin. Killing my ability to pass for the Middle American and quiet and from here. Instead I am from the bloki again. Soviet-built and dooming.

When Anya’s not sizing up the men at the Twin Palms, she’s driving her car, occasionally to her job, most often with no clear destination in mind. Enveloped in her steel universe we’re along for the ride, going anywhere but here:

I took the 170 to the 101 and headed back to Hollywood. Past the car dealerships and the mosque, the deaf children’s school. Nothing made sense anymore. The giant neon cross on the hill was leaning down toward me. I opened the window and breathed in the air. It was blowing in my face and it felt fresh and I felt like I was flying. I accelerated and when I saw red taillights in front of me I quickly pulled off the freeway onto an exit, careful not to lose my stride.

The author is funniest when she pushes Anya into scenes with Mary, an older woman she befriended at her bingo job. When Anya gives her a ride home, Mary tells her about her dead husband, saying, “I’ll show you my wedding photos. You’re pretty but I was beautiful.” Anya shakes her head: she can’t even compete with an 82-year-old. The author is saddest when she pulls Lev into Anya’s life, a man she says, “ When I see him I know it’s going to be him,” but later in the book, once she knows his flaws, numerous that they are, she begins to change her mind, “We drove back in silence. I didn’t know if he wanted to sleep over and I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to. I didn’t want his sweat to spoil my bare mattress.” Losers and loners alike, we want to push these people away, even as we keep turning the pages.

Much of our narrator’s world lies in the unknown cracks of Los Angeles: calling bingo at the Holy Virgin Russian Orthodox Church; sitting beside a cheap motel’s ash-covered pool talking to a stranger; hiding on the porch, taking note of men coming and going; and chasing down a fire that is raging in the mountains. In the end the existential grind of the city drives our narrator to irrevocable action. She heads to Griffith Observatory. Climbing high above the valley she tries to purge herself of the city, and her current boyfriend, a Russian gangster who’s already married. In the end all she is left with are charred remains: “Los Angeles wasn’t leaving and I couldn’t make it go away.” 

Waclawiaks’ mix of sad, dark humor is compelling and creates an other-ness that’s hard to shake. In the end, taking the bus along with Anya–now car-less–we feel, like our narrator, a little singed and covered in ash. But heck, maybe that’s not a bad way to start over?

First published on The Rumpus, July 17, 2012.

Book Review: Fear of Food

In Harvey Levenstein’s new book, Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat, we spend a great deal of time wallowing in the early 1900’s. As a Jewish girl from Los Angeles, I felt like I was being followed down the grocery aisle by my mother. Scratch that, my grandmother.

When I read the title of the book, I had high hopes. I anticipated getting a better understanding of my own food issues. To put it plainly: I’m a picky eater. I avoid bread (bad, bad, evil carbs), I don’t eat processed foods (most of the time), I try to buy organic and, when possible, I eat local. Did this book explain any of my “issues” to me? No. Well, mostly no.

Levenstein, a professor emeritus of history, sets forth in his preface to “uncover the forces that have lead to Americans inability to enjoy eating.” He goes on to say that he will regard his book as a success “if he can help lessen even a few people’s anxieties and increase the pleasure they get from eating.”

Read the entire piece, originally published on The Inquisitive Eater.

A Carriage House in Manhattan: The Mount Vernon Museum & Garden

The Mount Vernon Museum & Garden you must first head east, along 61st Street, past 3rd, 2nd and 1st Avenue. When you see the giant Bed, Bath & Beyond you’re close. Almost under the heavy metal cantilever of the Queensboro bridge, just a stone’s throw before the East River, and you’ll know you’ve arrived. Now walk up the brick stairs, shrug off the 21st century and go back in time. All the way to the late 1700s.

The Mount Vernon Hotel, built in 1799, began its career as a carriage house and, if you poke around the gardens at the end of the tour, you’ll see the second floor driveway used for just that purpose. It didn’t last long as a carriage house; we won’t talk about the dreadful fire that did away with the Manor House across the way. Its new owner, Joseph Coleman Hart, benefitting from said unsaid fire–perhaps an overturned candle–turned it into a full-fledged hotel in 1826. It was mainly a day hotel, used by the upper middle class neighbors (who lived below 14th Street) for a day in the “country”. It was occasionally used as a hotel by foreigners travelling by on boat, but its main use was a weekend getaway for locals.

Read the entire piece, originally published on Untapped Cities, New York.

Skee-ball, the next Olympic sport?

Last Sunday Joey Mucha, a twenty-five year old web marketer from San Francisco, started the morning at a downtown Manhattan hotel with his parents, and a breakfast buffet: scrambled eggs, two sausages, a Belgium waffle, and a little fruit. When they finished they headed back to their room to watch a few inspirational sports videos on YouTube and, with the time left, Joey took a short nap. When he woke, he donned his custom made game outfit of brown, spotted, fake fur pants and matching vest, an orange T-shirt and black skateboarding shoes. Then they hailed a cab for Brooklyn.

Read the entire piece, originally published on Untapped Cities.

New fangled Mexican in the East Village

Until recently, Mexican food wasn't ever on my New York to-do list. I mean, why try to match what I've had in southern Mexico, Tijuana, San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco? But after hearing reports from friends and reading the NY Times review, I decided it was time to change my mind.

Last week, with a friend from California in tow, I made my way through the East Village over to Empellon Cocina. Leaving our west coast suspicions at the door, we enjoyed a vibrant meal, plus a few good cocktails. For anyone who wants just the short story: it was 4-star good (maybe actually a very high 3.5). Some of the meal was incredible. Some was hmm.

And now for the longer story. We started with the almost obligatory guacamole. This appetizer is so good you could easily make a meal of it (along with a drink of course). It's spicy, chunky and has whole pistachios wandering around it. It comes with flatbread crisp (Empellon's take on tortilla chips) that, if you can focus long enough, are delicious even on their own.

Our first dish, roasted carrots with mole poblano, yogurt and watercress was different, interesting, unusual and good. The mole poblano came in small spicy sheets. The carrots were whole pieces of small carrots, tender to the bite. The carrots were spicy, offset nicely by the yogurt. More watercress would have been nice and, while the dish was served in a bowl, I think I might have preferred it on a plate so I could see the ingredients better and get a little bit of everything in one bite.

After the carrots we had melted tetilla cheese with lobster tomato frito and kol. This dish was really good, as long as you had lobster with your bite, when you didn't it was just cheese (and melted cheese on it's own is only good at a ballgame, on nachos). In a perfect world I probably wouldn't have had this dish. Too much cheese, too much oil dripping from the cheese onto my hand. I wanted more lobster, less cheese. To offset how rich it was we ordered the tomatillo salsa, which was incredible and helped cut the fat of the dish. But we shouldn't have to order something extra to make a dish work better.

Next was squid with potatoes, chorizo mayo and black molé. An incredibly tasty dish with a somewhat messy presentation. It might be that I like my food a little cleaner looking. Less Jackson Pollack more Frank Kelly. But, disregarding the visual, it was spicy and cold, with varying textures. I took bits of the dish, plunked it in a torn off piece of tortilla, added one of the salsas and gobbled it up.

No Mexican restaurant would be complete without clear alcohol and salt. Empellon's bar menu is dense with this and more. Many of the ingredients were entirely new to me, which is fun, but with a cocktail, also scary. I stayed on the safe edges and stuck to the classic margarita, a reposado with a twist: a spicy serrano tincture. So tangy and good I had two, easily downed along with too many chips.

A perfect restaurant has three things in equal amounts: food, service and atmosphere. I'm always sad to see good food come with bad decor. The bar at Empellon Cocina felt like an outdoor pool scene in Miami, a half circle like you see in those swim-up bars. The booths were pleasant but the largest seating area was almost virtually in the dark. It might be that I'm on the border of young and old (and so I shouldn't complain), but really, it was too dark. From the bar, looking towards the back of the space, you can spy the kitchen, bright and clinical, as if it were a lab. The brightness just accentuated the darkness, your iris going big then small. But, if that's my biggest complaint, well...I'll probably still make my way back one day. There's still quite a bit on the menu to try, so I look forward to going back. Maybe brunch?

Snap, Crackle, Pop: the new menu at WD-50.

You know your life is not that hard, or that bad, when your biggest decision of the evening is five-courses or twelve. As I sat across from Melissa Sunday night we both shrugged, "I don't know, what do you want to do?" we said, and then quickly moved along to discussing the pros and cons of each route. "The five-course is shorter, probably less food, but it's nothing new," I said, even though I had never dined at WD-50. "The new menu," I said, which had been announced on the front-page of the food section in the New York Times a few weeks prior, "has only been out for a little more than a week." I'd taken time at home to read Yelp, to no avail, so I had very little to go on. After about five minutes of back and forth we decided it seemed silly to opt for old standards when the unknown was so close.

And so began a twelve-course journey into the heart and soul of chef Wylie DuFresne. Our first course was mackerel nigiri, which looked like sushi, had fish on top like sushi, but tasted like no sushi I had ever had. Firm rice was replaced with a rooty, vegetable mash made of salsify. Roe eggs on top were replaced with beads of colorful vegetables. It was a slight of hand, a fake to the left. Popping it into my mouth I was greeted with an entirely unfamiliar bite. There was so much in my mouth at one time that I had a very hard time distilling the tastes. Mostly the bite was overwhelmed by the root mash. I'll admit, I'm not sure sushi is meant to be set atop salsify. The best I can say for the dish is: beautiful to look at, soso to eat.

Our second course was a lobster roe pasta with bites of lobster, green grapes, lemon and coriander. The pasta, a bright pinkish, coral color, was described to us by a server as being made completely out of blended lobster roe, then spread out in a pan to dry and finally cut into narrow pasta ribbons. Pretend pasta (another fake out). The taste was the most intense, wonderful shellfish bite you'll ever eat. In it's current size I was happy to savor each salty, sea breamy bite, wishing for more, but content with what I had.

Next on our culinary adventure was a stunt double to Vietnamese pho noodle soup, called Pho Gras. It was a mock up of the traditional spicy, clear-brothed soup, with the addition of a round slice of light and airy foie gras, which was, a little reluctantly, the best part of the dish. WD-50's version of pho just didn't come together for me. The broth was rich and meaty but it was lukewarm. Was this on purpose? If it was, it didn't work. The soup wasn't spicy either. The beauty of this dish, at the hole-in-the-wall spots I frequent, is the push pull between hot and spicy. This dish doesn't have that. I was happy eating the foie but I left behind many of the other components.

I guess if you've got your own restaurant you can do pretty much anything you want. Want to serve peas and carrots as part of a lengthy meal that costs well over $100 per person? Go for it. Of course, if you're Defresne it means you'll do them any ole way you want. Which brings me to number four, a dish as tasty as it was visually stunning. Hands down it was one of our favorites. The course arrived with an egg yolk brined in amaro, along with chicken confit, carrot gratings and, rolling around and placed delicately atop, several slightly larger than standard faux peas. These green marbles were actually bits of carrot that were rolled around in dehydrated pea dust. They tasted just like you remember from childhood: slightly overcooked and soft, like frozen veggies that have just come out of the microwave. But different, interesting. They were perfect. The carrot peels covered the egg yolk, wrapping it up like a little dairy present. Each bite was soft, with crunch from the carrots and was deftly flavored–nothing too strong. It was a whimsical dish I'd eat again.

Our high from the fourth course continued into five as we were served paper-thin, sliced, veal brisket with plums, dehydrated mustard chunks, and a spice mixture called Za'atar. It was with this dish that I realized the theme of the meal, and here's the connection to my title. Every dish had some form of snap, crackle or pop. They each had an element of unexpected surprise. In this course it was the mustard. Not content with the usual form of mustard, Defresne combined the ball-game condiment with meringue, turning it into uneven, chalky chunks; dehydrated, inch-long pieces of intense mustard flavor. Realizing what it was I quickly made sure to eat a a small piece of meat, along with a bite of green bean, a sliver of plum and finally, with kid like delight, the mustard wedge. It was the consistency of Pez meets brittle. I could see myself buying it at Dean & Deluca.

I have yet to mention what I was drinking and, since I'm still on my white kick, that's what I drank with most of my meal. I chose a white from Greece, from the town of Larissa to be exact. It tasted like a crisp, young Albarino, but this was from '05 and had a deeper complexity that I enjoyed. Good enough to track down and drink again. Now, where were we? Ah yes, we're halfway there. For our sixth course we were served crab toast with saffron, kaffir and arare. Arare sounds like some crazy middle eastern spice, but it's not. Arare is the base of those funny seasoned rice crackers you buy at the drugstore. For this version they're, of course, a step above. The round little granules (see photo below), were tasteless for the most part, lacking the salty, soy sauce taste of the usual crackers. Set on top of the dish they added a nice crunch to the crab and the toast. Three distinct textures in your mouth that worked very well together: crab meat, crunchy toast and granular ping. I'm also a big fan of kaffir, so this dish was another bite I would bite again.

The seventh course was missable, at least for me: sole with licorice, fried green tomato and fennel. The fish was boring. The licorice, while interesting and something I like, was not something I really wanted with fish. The ingredients in this dish stood apart rather then melding together. Let's move on, to red wine–a North Coast Pinot–as well as our eighth course: lamb sweet breads, nasturtium buttermilk, zucchini and pistachio. The lamb looked and tasted like a deep, smoky meatball. The two highlights for me were the nasturtium leaves, which tasted like a spicy cousin to arugula and the pistachio tuile, which, no surprise, I wanted more of. An inventive dish, it was fun to poke around and put together different tastes.

Still with me? For our ninth course we had the savory caboose: root beer ribs, rye spaetzle and an apricot relish. This dish was just ok. The meat had the consistency of corned beef, stringy, somewhat dry meat I didn't really enjoy. I'm actually wondering why we need meat to be the last dish. Because it's the richest and most savory? I'd argue for a different ending. I left most of this dish uneaten, saving myself for the dessert(s).

I feel cliché admitting this but, I loved the desserts. Is it so wrong to be more tickled with the sweet side of life? Sad but true, I'm a sucker for dessert. Maybe it's because I seldom order it. Maybe it's just who I am. Embracing my inner child I ate every last bit of every sweet thing they placed in front of me. First was a mix between a bowl of ice cream and a crazy science invention. A mostly lime green bowl of  jasmine foam, cucumber niblets, honeydew ice, chartreuse (I don't know where this tucked, maybe in the ice?), topped with cashew nougatine. Crazy good, you had to break through the top glass, like an ice skating rink, it was tart and sweet, strangely compelling when you grabbed a bit of foam, a dash of the cashews, a few cucumber bits and hmm, there was something else down below the ice, perhaps a fifth secret ingredient? It was like nothing I've ever eaten. As fun to think about as it was to eat.

The next sweet was a yuzu milk foam–which tasted and felt like a soft, fluffy, homemade marshmallow–with hazelnut sprinkles, rhubarb compote and black currants. I'm sure there were ten more ingredients in this, but that's all I could pull out. The overall dish looked like an impressionist painting. Maybe Dufrense spends his free time at The Met? (If he has any free time.)

Our final course was a showstopping take on the campside classic of s'mores. In this version you could even eat the stick (made out of bitter cocoa and beer)! Another marshmallow lookalike, but not actually a marshmallow, this was meringue with an ice cream center surrounded by a constellation of chocolate and graham bits and pieces and dollops. There were so many different consistencies and textures to the dish that were fun to savor, I'm not sure it could get any better, but maybe. Maybe it still needs more of a twist.

But wait, it's not over, not yet. Almost. Our totally last bite was a white chocolate truffle ball coated in freeze-dried raspberries and filled with an unusual goat cheese called gjetost. Yes, I even made room for this. It sounded weird but tasted great; crunchy, tart on the outside from the fruit and savory, sweet goat on the inside. If these were for sale in a shop I would buy one. Or two.

OK. So we sat and ate for almost three hours, and if you count up the dishes I enjoyed versus the ones that were a little dull, there were far more that I liked, than those that I didn't. Not a bad track record for a brand new menu. Would I do it again? I have to admit, I love firsts, so now that I've been I'll have to wait awhile before I go back. I do want to plug that you can sit at the bar and get any two dishes from the menu for only $25, an insane bargain, in my humble opinion, I imagine I'll go back to do this.

My last word on WD-50 is that the decor is so outdated it's hard not to notice how wrong it all looks. Our quickie redesign thoughts: paint the walls (lose the bright colors that are out of date), change the awful hanging lights (they remind me of the Chihuly ceiling at the Bellagio), re-upholster the banquets and, speaking of lighting, improve the lighting overall, especially over the booth area. I'd love to see this place lose the retro bowling ball vibe, bring in some of the history of the building and include more cohesion with the neighborhood. Think art from the Met meets brick buildings and bodegas of the Lower East Side.

By the way, thanks to my dinner companion, Melissa W. for taking the photos (mine are good, but hers are better) and sitting across from me for three whole hours.

Kajitsu: 7-Courses of Perfect Veggies

There are a handful of restaurants in New York that I have on what I call, Open Table rotation. Every once in a while I hop on the site and try to score a table. Kajitsu, a vegetarian, japanese restaurant in the East Village, is one of that handful. So, one day when I was trolling the site, I spotted a reservation for Saturday at 6:15pm. I clicked.

Walking down 9th Avenue, a cute block of shops and restaurants between 1st Avenue and A, I was both hungry and excited.There were several reasons for my excitement: Kajitsu is vegetarian (no meat and no fish) and it specializes in kaiseki, which is the Japanese version of haute cuisine. Kasieki is based on shojin cuisine, whose origin is in Zen Buddhism. In its present form kaiseki is a multi-course meal where each component of seasonal ingredients are prepared in ways that enhance the flavor, with the finished dishes beautifully arranged on site-specific pottery. Kajitsu changes its menu every month based on the seasons. I love good, clean food and I love the art of presentation so I went with a good friend and high hopes for a gorgeous meal.

Walking down the small staircase we entered the serene garden-level restaurant and were immediately greeted and ushered into a back room, replete with muted tones of grays and browns, with almost no decoration save for a lone vase on a wall, with one pink-budding branch. There were only three other tables in our room. How novel. Of course, now I know why it took me so long to get a reservation. There are two options on the Kajitsu menu, a four-course or a seven-course menu. Thankfully Blyth, ever the easy going dinner companion, said whichever one you want. Why yes, I said to the Williamsburgy bespectacled waitress, we'll do the seven-course menu–with the sake pairing!

Our waitress, never setting down more than one plate, bowl or sake glass at a time, slowly went over the details of the first course (photo below): spring vegetable sushi with crispy cherry leaf, ginger petal, salted cherry blossom. She went on to tell us that it signified the coming of spring and that the crispy cherry leaf covered the vegetables underneath like a jacket. The vegetables below the "jacket" were crunchy and tangy. The sushi rice was perfect, so perfect it felt like the grains had been seasoned one-by-one. Taking small bites of the crispy leaf on top was a great fatty compliment to the crunchy vegetables. The next course was a grated-cauliflower soup with Rikyu-Fu (wheat protein). The soup was light with nice flecks of cauliflower. I liked that it wasn't whipped or heavy with butter or cream. It stuck to its broth best. The protein in it tasted a bit like a hunk of pumpernickel bread that had sat in the soup long enough for it to be soft but not mushy–it had a nice tug as you bit into it. The next two dishes were interesting and unique, but I'm going to skip ahead to the fifth course (photo above): grilled fennel with yuba and english pea sauce, sugar snap peas, and shiso flower. The dish came in a shallow porcelain plate along with a small golden utensil that looked like small ladle. It also looked like something that belonged on a wall in the Met. The sauce, light enough to be a soup, was light and grassy and the fennel broke apart easily when prodded with the golden spoon. Yuba, the protein in the dish, is the name for the thin skin that forms on the surface of soy milk when it is heated in preparation for making tofu. These ‘skins’ are lifted off as they form and then set out to dry. The yuba in our soup was composed of several layers rolled up tightly to make a chewy, soft bite. Did you know that yuba is so nutritious that it is considered the richest source of protein known (over 52 per cent)? I didn't either.

Between courses we had time to finish off our sake pairings, all individually different. The sake seemed a better accompaniment to the food then wine. Sadly I have no notes on what we drank. We also had time to check out the other tables. There was a couple to my left, he looked like a scientist or an accountant. She was a very pretty asian woman, on first glance I assumed it was an early date (their conversation was meager), but then I realized they were married. These kind of couples really intrigue me, I wondered how they met, what their home life was like, if she cooked for him while he sat silently reading the paper. The other table, behind us, had four japanese woman laughing and having fun. The table to our right was empty for half our meal. Empty! Again, now I know why it's so hard to make reservations.

Back to the food. Our sixth course was house-made mochi with butterbur (something herbal–a food dictionary would have been handy to have) and scallion mitsuba ankake sauce with nori and ginger. The dish came in a narrow, deep dark stone bowl. Once in front of us we added broth from a stone pitcher and then small squares of seaweed. The dish was warm and hearty and full of so many different textures and tastes. It always impresses me, how japanese cuisine can be so simple yet complex.

Dessert was gomadofu (made from sesame paste, water and kuzu powder) with azuki beans and vegetable chips (two pieces of lotus root and one tiny kumquat). The crunch and taste of the kumquat was so good, I definitely wanted more. The gomadofu–which tastes like a soft tofu and sweet red bean paste combined– was delicious. The portion was a few small bites, just enough to tell your palate you'd had dessert and it was time to go. But wait, there's one more course: tea.

The matcha tea was greener than the greenest grass and tasted like the freshly mown bits that come out of a lawnmower. It had a little froth on top. Alongside it they served three small, rice candies by kyoto kagizen-yoshifus. I discovered that if you placed the rice candy in your mouth and then took a sip of the tea you could invent a new hybrid, and thus sweeter, version in your mouth. A nice little ending to a perfectly complex meal.