Global Street Food Celebrated In Recipes And Stories In New Book

by Laurel Miller on

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the reign of the “Two Hot Tamales,” Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken were the badass female chefs/restaurateurs of the ’80s and ’90s, and the darlings of the Food Network in its infancy (read: when it was good). They helped to put world and regional Mexican cuisine on the radar in the United States with their L.A. restaurants CITY, City Cafe, and the Border Grill, and subsequent TV shows and cookbooks.

Today, they’re still at it. Feniger competed on “Top Chef Masters” last year, and also has her first solo restaurant, STREET, in Hollywood. The menu is dedicated to one of her enduring passions, which is global street food. In July, “Susan Feniger’s Street Food: Irresistibly Crispy, Creamy, Crunchy, Spicy, Sticky, Sweet Recipes” (Clarkson Potter), hit the shelves: a lively collection of recipes adapted from her favorite street foods worldwide.

In June, I caught Feniger doing a pre-release-inspired cooking demo, “Irresistible Street Food,” at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen. I’ve attended a lot of cooking demos in my day, and she’s without doubt one of the most engaging, down-to-earth chefs I’ve ever seen, and not just because I’m piggishly besotted with street food.

Caught up in sharing the travel stories behind the recipes she was preparing (the book is packed with anecdotes from her trips to places like India, Turkey, Mongolia, Vietnam, and Singapore), Feniger was reminiscent of a modern-day Julia Child. “Oh! Salt. Forgot the salt. Oh well, let’s add some more gin!” she said of her Honeydew Cucumber Cooler. In her defense, I, along with the rest of the audience, was suffering a classic Food & Wine Classic hangover right along with her. The weekend’s motto should be, “You play, you pay.”

Feniger also prepared Indian Puffed Rice Salad, and Egyptian Bus Stop Kushary (a lentil dish), in between anecdotes. Whether you’re an armchair traveler or a street food-obsessed adventurer, her book will leave you inspired, intrigued, and hungry for a taste of what the world’s back alleys have to offer.

If you’re in the Bay Area, catch Feniger at a “Cooks with Books” event sponsored by Book Passage, featuring a meal made from the book’s recipes. She’ll also be doing a signing at Omnivore Books in San Francisco on September 21, and at the Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building on September 22.

Think Globally, Eat Locally At Culinary Backstreets

by Meg Nesterov on

Budget-savvy and food-loving visitors to Istanbul have found an excellent resource in Istanbul Eats for several years, and now can find more authentic and off-the-beaten-path tips in Athens, Barcelona, and Shanghai, with Mexico City on the way. Culinary Backstreets was launched this week as an extension of IstanbulEats.com, a blog reviewing Turkey’s best street food, hole-in-the-wall restaurants and unique dishes. Founded in 2009 by two American expats, Istanbul Eats launched a book in 2010 (now in its third edition, and available at nearly every bookshop in Istanbul and online, in English, Turkish, Greek, and even Korean!) as well as culinary tours through the Old City, Beyoglu, and even cross-continent. Istanbul Eats has garnished a devoted fan base who’ve been wishing for “an Istanbul Eats-like guide to restaurants in every city,” hence the creation of Culinary Backstreets.

Culinary Backstreets is a site for travelers who eschew tourist menus, ask cab drivers where to dine, and frequently find themselves the only foreigner in a cafe. Each city will be covered by local food writers who regularly comb the streets in search of the tastiest tidbits. So far, each city has posted a “State of the Stomach” guide, outlining the current food scene, the eats locals line up for, and practical tips for following your stomach to the traditional and the trendy restaurants. Culinary walks are currently being offered in Istanbul and Shanghai, with more cities coming soon.

Get hungry at CulinaryBackstreets.com.

[Photo courtesy of Yigal Schleifer]

I Found My Silver Lining At Grayton Beach State Park

by Elizabeth Seward on

My husband and I were wandering down the East Coast with our two dogs. We had just made an unplanned visit to West Virginia to be with my family during a medical emergency and, as a silver lining to the sudden and stressful trip, we figured we’d meander down the Atlantic and across the Gulf on our way back to Texas rather than traverse the highways we already knew so well; the ones that run through Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas. We didn’t have much of a plan, but we had a bed in our van and a small list of dog-friendly beaches we’d be passing through.

%Gallery-160758%But by the time we reached Jacksonville, we were over it. One dog had already climbed up onto, and proceeded to puke off of, the lofted bed and onto everything we had with us in the van, causing us to pull over in a random rural driveway in Maryland. We cleaned out the car as best we could with bottled water. We drove to D.C. in search of a 24-hour laundromat and we ordered Chinese takeout as we waited for the laundry to finish. The smallest bill I had was a 20, and with no attendant in sight to give me smaller bills, I walked away with $20 in quarters. In Virginia, I woke up to the smell of reeking Chinese food in the parking lot of my gym with a tow truck parked beside me that didn’t pull away until I entered the gym. Once I was in the gym, a cop came and talked to my husband after a call had been placed reporting that I had left my dogs in the vehicle unattended. I hadn’t. We arrived to a park we’d been hoping to camp at in Wilmington only to find out there wasn’t any vacancy. We stopped at the Highway 21 drive-in movie theater in Beaufort, South Carolina, and woke up to a flashlight in our faces at 2 a.m. and a voice asking us to leave. Everyone else had cleared the field and in our exhaustion, we didn’t even see the movie we’d come to see. The iPhone had gotten us lost more than once and if that wasn’t bad enough, we got into an accident in Savannah. The car endured a few thousand dollars of damage, but it was still drivable. No one was injured and everyone involved was polite, especially the officers, so we went on our way to Jacksonville. And we were beat. We made our way over to the park we’d been looking forward to, but we were 10 minutes late and they wouldn’t let us stay. The men working directed us to another park and when we finally arrived there, we found out it was a community playground, not a place to camp.

To hell with the romantic detour, we decided that night. We agreed to leave town early and just drive straight to Austin. Still, I noticed Grayton Beach State Park on the map as we drove through the panhandle. We got there in time for sunset and although we only spent 20 hours there, that park was our silver lining. The dogs weren’t allowed on the beach, so we had to spend our beach time separate. I went first, inhaling more deeply than usual during yoga postures. With my feet rooted in the wet sand and the sun setting to my right, I felt as though, for the first time in two weeks, I could breathe. With each crashing wave that was lapped back up by the ocean, my muscles loosened. My head fell to the ground before me and, just like that, I let it all go.

We got delicious takeout that night from a little Italian place near the beach called Borago. We drank big pours of wine and whiskey at the bar while we waited for the food. We took the boxes back to our campsite and with the headlights turned on and shining toward us, we dined at 10:30 p.m. at the picnic table.

We continued west in the morning. We stopped at the KOA Baton Rouge on our last night of the trip. A woman in an especially sour mood greeted us. She scoffed at us for having a bed in our car and seemed intent on not letting us stay at all until a colleague of hers shooed her away and took over. He told me about his plans to drive straight down to Panama soon. He used to live there and is eager to return. Were it not for the reprieve we found in Grayton Beach State Park, the kind of “hospitality” the KOA woman showed us would have, I am guessing, broken my last nerve. But that 20-hour vacation is just what we needed. It was enough to redeem the two weeks that preceded it. It was enough to keep me focused on the drive to Panama this man would soon be making.

The Problem With Guidebooks, Or How I Came to Hate Lonely Planet On A Sunday in Crete

by Dave Seminara on

Have you ever been so annoyed with a guidebook that you wanted to track down the author and bludgeon them to death with a rusty hatchet? Neither have I, but yesterday I came close.

I almost always invest in a guidebook when I take a trip. But I’m not sure why, because I’ve been led astray on so many occasions. After arriving in the Greek isles at the start of a six-week trip, my wife and I bought the Kindle edition of the Lonely Planet Guide to the Greek Islands.

I’m generally very high on Lonely Planet but this book is awful. For example, yesterday I convinced my family to make a day trip to Anogia, a remote village in the mountainous interior of Crete, on the basis of an enticing description of the place in the book (see photo above). The author described the village as “memorable” and “known for its rebellious spirit and determination to express its undiluted Cretan character.” (Whatever that means.)He or she went on to say that the town’s cafés were “frequented by black-shirted mustachioed men, the older ones often wearing traditional dress,” and claimed that the town was sought out by “foreign travelers in search of rustic authenticity.”

I was also drawn in by the author’s vivid description of the town’s reputation for lawlessness and its history – villagers sheltered Allied troops in WWII and the Nazis murdered all the men in the town in retaliation. I knew it would be a trek from our base in Plakias, on Crete’s south coast, but based upon the author’s recommendation, I didn’t want to miss the place.

Google maps claims the trip should take one hour and 27 minutes each way, and I’m a fast driver, but it took us two hours on windy, torturously circuitous roads to reach the village, largely because we were constantly getting caught behind slow moving cars and trucks that were impossible to pass on the curved roads.

Here I have to admit, in full disclosure, that my adorable, yet sometimes highly annoying, 2- and 4-year-old sons also contributed plenty of stress on the drive, what with their quarreling, whining and intermittent demands for snacks, movies, entertainment and pleas to get out of the damn car.

I was exhausted by the time we arrived in the town, which, by the way, is at least an hour drive from anywhere that travelers might be coming from. But I was still ready to dig the place. The day trip had been my idea and I was eager to prove it had been a good one.

Anogia has two sections – a lower town, which has 2-3 cafes, a church, restaurants and 20 or 30 widows dressed in black aggressively peddling rugs, and an upper town, which has 2-3 empty hotels, two forlorn restaurants and a smattering of homes and other businesses. The cafes in the lower town were full of old people but none were dressed in traditional outfits and only two men had impressive moustaches.

Perhaps the village-folk had received warning that a Lonely Planet author was coming to the town and they all prepared by growing stashes and getting gussied up in traditional Cretan outfits? Or perhaps the last Lonely Planet author to actually visit this town passed through in 1974 and everyone else has just used their description for subsequent editions since then?

Anogia is not an attractive town. If I had to describe it, the words I would use are: unremarkable, modern, remote, ugly, forlorn, impoverished, touristy and avoidable, among others. The town may have an interesting history but we saw no museums and none of the elderly people we met in the village spoke English. It’s the kind of place that’s fascinating to read about but not very interesting to actually see. How dead was this little village? I think this photo of an elderly woman taking a nap with her door open (right) says it all.

After deflecting offers from about two dozen carpet sellers, we’d seen all we needed to see of the upper and lower towns, both equally forgettable. Like gluttons for punishment, we decided to take the LP guidebook authors advice on a lunch recommendation and sought out a place called Ta Skalomata, which they claimed had “home baked bread” and “great grills at reasonable prices.”

In six weeks of travel around the Greek Islands, I’ve had exactly one bad meal and this was it. We took the waiter up on his recommendation that we try their fresh grilled lamb, but it was pricey and was about 85 percent bone, cartilage and fat. Revolting.

The torturous two-hour ride back to our base was filled with recrimination, along with a tremendous amount of whining coming from the back seat, and I felt terrible for killing our day on such a boondoggle. If we had a month in Crete, it would have been a pity, but with just a week, it felt like a criminal waste of our time.

The information you find in guidebooks is often just one person’s opinion and it has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Why had I led my family to a remote village in Crete, a place loaded with beautiful and interesting places to visit, solely based upon an enticing entry in Lonely Planet?

We’d already been burned by this book on more than one occasion. The authors told us about a “world class” Mexican restaurant in Naxos that was a joke. In Kos, we took a one-hour-and-20-minute ride on a public bus out to a town called Kefalos, based upon a description in the book, which claimed that it was a “traditional village” that was a good place for visitors looking for someplace “a little more authentic.”

When I read the words “traditional village” and “authentic” I conjure up images of a nice old town, with a square filled with cafes, pedestrian streets and old stone houses. Kefalos has none of those things. Like Anogia, it’s a very ordinary, modern town with little charm and nothing to see. Worst of all, we had no car and would have been stuck there for six hours, thanks to the limited bus schedule, if we hadn’t been given a ride by a very friendly pharmacist in the town.

There is no way to adequately cover all of the most interesting sites in all of the Greek Islands in one book. But what’s maddening about this one is that they devote tons of space to places that barely deserve to be in the book at all and gloss over or completely ignore other places that are really quite interesting.

For example, the book has a very slim chapter on Naxos, but inexplicably features a four e-page long description of a jewelry shop in Halki, another mountain village they over-hype as “one of the finest experiences” on Naxos, when in fact the place is eminently forgettable.

Likewise, there is no mention of San Michalis, an absolutely gorgeous place on Syros and the book gives short shrift to the beautiful western half of Samos and to some of that island’s amazing hikes to medieval churches and monasteries.

The problem with this and indeed many guidebooks is that the authors try to make nearly every place seem interesting and so travelers who don’t have time to see everything are left guessing which places they should visit and which they should skip. They delve into the town’s history, which is interesting, but what you really want to know is: what’s the place like and is it worth my time?

Guidebook authors are out in the towns they visit doing the research and meeting people who have a vested interest in attracting tourists to the place. It’s only human nature not to want to turn around and write that a place is an unremarkable hellhole after having made friends and contacts. But that’s a shame because travelers have limited time and need help prioritizing.

As for my disastrous outing in search of Cretan “authenticity,” I’m as much to blame as the author of that section of the guidebook, because I’ve been traveling and getting burned by guidebook advice for decades and I should have known better. The next time I read about a place that’s very “authentic,” I’ll be sure to give it a miss.

[Photo by Dave Seminara]

Medieval Tarot Deck, Webster’s Dictionary Manuscript Among Treasures On Display In New York

by Sean McLachlan on

The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City has opened its annual summer exhibition of rare items from its collection. These include everything from a draft of George Washington’s inaugural speech to a deck of medieval tarot cards, including the one shown here in this Wikimedia Commons image.

This card is the Wheel of Fortune, and comes from the Visconti-Sforza tarot deck, made in Milan c. 1450. The tarot cards are some of the oldest of 29 items on display. Much of the collection is more recent but no less interesting.

One item of interest to any reader is Noah Webster’s original manuscript for his first dictionary. The dictionary was first published in 1828 after Webster spent 27 years and learned 26 languages to complete it. Webster had the distinction of creating the first American dictionary, and he was the last to tackle the massive task alone.

Other items include Oscar Wilde’s manuscript for “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” including homoerotic passages excised from the print version; a letter from Ernest Hemingway to The Paris Review; and Edgar Allen Poe’s manuscript of “Tamerlane.”

The collection will remain open to the public through September 8.