Lingbo Eats

For a foodie, I had a spartan culinary upbringing.

Perhaps it began in utero, when my mother ate tomatoes by the bushel during her pregnancy, believing it’d lead to a smarter child.

Out I came, eight pounds of screaming joy, born to China’s new breed of post-Cultural Revolution, university-educated brethren. Becoming American was an unlikely reinvention for my father, whose family, up until a few years ago, lived in a two-room concrete building heated by a coal furnace. Chickens still roamed the dirt roads.

Free food comes at a steep price.

A few years ago, I didn’t understand this. The mere words “free food” were enough to motivate me to scale mountains. I signed up for a two-week sleepaway chemistry camp junior year of high school purely because the itinerary advertised restaurant outings. I spent my interview rhapsodizing about Stephen Hawking and the theory of relativity, mainly because I couldn’t say much about chemistry. I figured physics would be a good stand-in.

I got in.

I have to say this when initiating new dining companions. My friends, however, already know the drill.

No meal, no matter how beautifully plated (especially if it’s beautifully plated), is complete without an extensive photo shoot. I’ve been known to sharply reprimand errant dining partners who ruin the perfect photo of a chocolate-chip-heaped cannoli.

No, seriously—this is a sacred and inviolable ritual. First, I hold my iPhone to my forehead for the extra glow it imparts in a dimly lit dining room. Never mind that I look like a tech-brainwashed spelunker. Then I squint through the viewfinder on my DSLR camera and fiddle with the ISO and exposure settings. Then, and only then, I snap at least two or three photos, check, recalibrate, and give the plate a twirl to see if I can find a more flattering angle.

When the going gets tough, the overwhelmed escape town. That was my rationale behind why I wouldn’t feel guilty for a mini-vacation in the midst of midterm season, recruiting, and an ever-mounting stack of responsibilities. I’d been “planning” my culinary vacation to Portland, Maine for about a month. By “plan,” I mean that my better half had taken care of the inn reservation. A week before departure, I tried to make dinner reservations on OpenTable, only to discover that all the top picks were booked solid.

A lot of my plans are like this. Forging ahead in chaos.

Thankfully, a sushi place not on OpenTable still had spots open. Miyake at 8:15 p.m. it was. We rolled into Miyake (129 Spring St.) after a surprisingly pleasant drive. It was a small restaurant with brightly colored walls and a reputation for excellent omakase—a chef’s choice tasting. The evening was nothing short of magical. The first course included raw lobster, slippery and fresh as the sea, along with artful cuts of raw fish. Then came seared scallops with delicata squash and roasted brussels sprouts. Our waitress then carried out the most tender, melting swordfish with fingerling potato in a dash broth. The fourth course was more French than Japanese—a beautifully plated duck confit and roast duck with foie gras and quince paste. We were getting full, but there was still unagi and sardine nigiri, picked up with the fingers and quickly consumed.

I knew things were going badly when I began squeezing the blood out of the pancreas glands. I’d bought them for my offal-themed dinner featuring less traditional cuts of animals. Several friends were late—or never ended up showing—but I was still defrosting the beef tripe and manning a pot of braised pork belly.

“I’m failing so hard,” I said to my better half who was obediently stirring the green beans. He said something about being confident in my abilities.

This was all in the name of competition. A food blogger competition sponsored by Foodbuzz. My blog, LingboLi.com, had been cruelly abandoned in the wake of schoolwork and jobs, so I was happy to be coerced into blogging. The third challenge in the competition was to host a “Luxurious Dinner Party” to introduce guests to “new and exotic flavors.” I wasn’t sure how luxurious offal was, but it was surely new and exotic to some of my friends.

At Harvard, competition is cutthroat, but lotteries are bloodbaths.

Promising an all-star roster of guest speakers that reinvented cooking, Science of the Physical Universe 27: “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science” was a class that could exist only at Harvard. While deep pockets and institutional clout drew the talent to fuel the intellectual burners—including world-renowned chefs Ferran Adrià and José Andrés—only pure chance would fill Science Center C’s 300 seats.

No senior standing. No preference for students looking to fulfill a General Education requirement. And no special treatment for food bloggers. Any one of those would’ve helped me.

Yesterday, I finally tripped.

I’m normally not a big fan of drugs. I was in Amsterdam for one day when I had to make a decision: to shroom or not to shroom? I decided against it. Sure, it was legal, but why see the dour, bike-filled city under the influence when I could get high off the beautiful colors of the Van Gogh paintings?

So when I heard about the taste-altering miracle fruit in an article in The New York Times, I thought it was a fantastic joke at first. A dangerous one. A naturally occurring fruit that makes all sour foods taste sweet? Was this even legal?

I’ll be honest: I’m a fearsome eater. One of my proudest moments was vanquishing an entire table of drunken Australian businessmen at an all-you-can-eat Japanese grill in Shanghai; while they ignored bowls of fried rice and poked at lackluster ice cream, I wolfed it all down.

But I’ve found that describing myself as a food writer has led to awkward lines of inquiry. I’m scared of a certain question. And it always comes, revealing me as a rank impostor. After finding out that I write about food, someone always asks, “Oh, so do you cook?”

I’ve come up with a few ways to answer this.

I began to worry after I’d eaten my seventh banana in two days.

I had embarked on a three-day raw food veganism challenge, relying on fruit, salads, and some unroasted convenience store nuts to fill my uncooked days.

I had no blender, knives, or kitchen. I did, however, have a lot of homework, social commitments at restaurants, and HUDS produce. I already knew that gourmet raw food—which I had sampled at all-raw Grezzo in the North End—was a sensory delight. But my DIY approach smacked of banana-infested, blender-lacking monotony.

“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” —Brillat-Savarin

I was on a date at a Scandinavian-themed restaurant. I pored over every inch of the menu, thrilled that reindeer was an entrée. My dining partner, on the other hand, zeroed in immediately on his dinner.

“I’ll have the sirloin,” he told the waiter.

Food is every bit as prone to trends as fashion. Just as thigh-high boots are having a moment on the fall catwalks, food trucks are enjoying an extended welcome on the dining scene.By spring, food truck frenzy reached its media tipping point. In late April, the Boston Globe ran a piece on Clover, an eco-friendly MIT food truck. In June, the Wall Street Journal investigated the nitty gritty of the ambulatory food biz. Then came July, when the LA Times devoted nearly 1000 words to the topic, highlighting Korean BBQ sensation Kogi, which shills short rib tacos to mass acclaim. Why all the fuss?Let me explain it this way: it’s like the difference between spotting a rare Iberian lynx in the wild versus watching it in a zoo cage. Hunting down that Korean short rib taco from something as sketchy as a food truck is just a whole lot sexier than ordering it in a restaurant. Sometimes, the truck locations will only be communicated via Twitter, adding another layer of mystery. I’m obviously not referring to lukewarm dogs and Mr. Frosty soft serve—this isn’t your grandmother’s food truck. The eco-friendly Clover Food Lab on Carleton Street near MIT showcases higher aspirations. Think: handcut fries married with rosemary and salt, a bomb chickpea fritter, and vegan banana nut muffins. Lunch is imbued with so much more coolness if you have to hunt it down and trap it like the hardened food warrior you are.Plus, there’s that thing called the Recession that makes budget eats appealing. Isn’t it nice to know that you’re not actually paying for a restaurant’s gold bathroom fixtures?Ever on the cutting edge, our beloved chickwich-schiller HUDS (I write that fondly) installed three food carts, two in Harvard Yard and one by Dudley. They each have their own theme. The Science Center one is “Organic Deli,” which means that the sandwich fillings have gratuitous adjectives like “sun-dried” and “dry cured.” Walk across the Yard, and you’ll hit the Mediterranean stand by Boylston Hall, where you can get a falafel fix. The last stop by Dudley is standard American fare—burgers, hot dogs, and chicken sandwiches. They join the ranks of two non-HUDS food trucks which can’t use prime real estate: a pizza and pasta purveyor on Divinity Ave and a little-known Chinese food truck on Oxford St outside of Maxwell Dworkin.In the name of research, I gave two of the HUDS carts a try.Organic Deli was my first stop. My lunch partner and I used the colorful new chairs in the Yard. When I opened the paper wrapping and bit into my chicken salad sandwich ($7.50), I can only describe it as one of the most unfortunate bread failures I’ve experienced this year. The success of a sandwich relies, in large part, on the carbs that lovingly cushion the top and bottom. And this stuff was terrible. What did this innocent loaf do in a previous life to justify this? Even my friend, a red-blooded male, complained, and he was eating a version with bacon! And I thought that bacon could make anything delicious.By the time I came within an inch of the crusts, the bread was so dry it had begun to disintegrate. The chicken salad was solidly in the gourmet-inspired mediocrity class—large chunks of white meat interspersed with dried cranberry and celery—but nothing was able to overshadow the whole wheat terror of the bread. You could, like, refill a kitty litter box with this stuff. I deeply regretted not buying a drink.I fared much better with the Mediterranean cart parked in front of Boylston. I perhaps wisely avoided the falafel ($4.95), which is tricky to get right, and went with a beef kebab wrap ($6.25) on Syrian bread. Like the spice lover I am, I ordered it doused with tahini—a sesame paste—and hot sauce. It was best eaten in giant, gaping mouthfuls and washed down with some Diet Coke. The fresh crunch of the tomato and cukes contrasted nicely with the juicy chunks of well-seasoned beef.My major bone to pick is that this stuff is not freshly made. But there was definitely potential in my beef kebab wrap. Sure, they could have cut the beef into smaller pieces. They could have at least heated it up to capitalize on how friggin’ delicious a hot, greasy kebab is. But it was good enough. And good enough, by HUDS standards, amounts to not damn bad.This isn’t an invitation to rejoice that the food truck trend has hit Harvard Yard. But it’s not a bad option.Just stay away from the whole wheat bread.

It was about as big as a White Castle slider patty. It was crowned with the bright yellow of poached quail egg and a magenta flower.  It was a calf's brain, and I was about to eat it.  My brain quest began early—several weeks before, when I was trying to think of the most ridiculous offal I could consume. Testicles came to mind, but I could not find a restaurant that served them. So I turned to brains instead, locating KO Prime (90 Tremont St., 617-772-0202), a swanky steakhouse that served cerebellum.  My friend Will and I arrived early, hopping off the Park Street T stop and making a short walk to the dimly-lit steakhouse. We seated ourselves on some stools near the window and contemplated the menu. Alas, the only calves brains on the men was presented as a quiche, with pancetta, hazelnuts, and fiddlehead tomme. If I was going to be eating brains, it might as well be distinctively brainy. I wanted to be able to distinguish one lobe from another. I wanted to see all the nooks and crannies which once held the simple, grass-eating thoughts of a calf awaiting slaughter. Fears of mad cow disease would not stop me. (Swine flu, maybe.)  In Spain, they make brain burritos. I wanted, however, to be converted at the high end.  I decided to go out on a limb and asked our waiter if the chef could make something more “brainy” than the quiche. He came back with good news—the chef would create a special appetizer just for us.  The chef came out to personally present us with the creation, a brain with a poached quail egg, on top of a layer of fava beans and morels, and anchored with a layer of toasted brioche. He poured a tiny pitcher of spring pea soup at the base. This was no normal, Fear Factor gross-out brain. This was haute brain.  The waiter came over for a peak and declared, “Hell yeah!”  It was time. My knife cut through the gray matter (actually, it looked like a turkey burger) like it was room temperature butter. I speared that, a bit of brioche, and dipped it in the soup. I put it in my mouth.  Strangely, bliss.  Brain has very little flavor on its own. It is soft and melts in your mouth like a particularly good cut of fat. The flavor came from the other elements of the dish, with the brioche crucial in giving it any textural heft. Will and I enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, marveling at how well each element of the dish worked together. Our only criticism was that the brioche disappeared too quickly. By the end, I ate a large chunk of brain without supporting actors, feeling a little queasy since it was a particularly stringy, evocative portion.  I suggested that the chef put bull testicles on the menu. “Come back in a month,” the manager told me, after reporting the chef’s excitement. He promised he would personally send me an e-mail. I’ll be back.

I had eaten everything from vegan bacon to blood sausage. Now it was time to seek a new holy grail of culinary extremes: a cuisine hot enough to hurt me.I wanted to sear away my taste buds. I wanted tears to stream out of my eyes. I wanted something more wicked than wasabi and more nuanced than Tabasco. What I wanted, in short, was real Thai food.The kind of Thai food served in the average Cambridge Thai restaurant caters to a mild palate. I was afraid that if I tackled the meal alone, waiters would not take my request seriously. I needed, in journalism parlance, a “fixer”: a sage who could nimbly guide me through a forest of unfamiliar names and progressively more exotic forms of heat.He came in the form of Anthropology Professor Michael Herzfeld. After having done fieldwork in Thailand, he was a foodie fluent in the language of spice, and spoke of Thai pepppers, mysterious things literally translated as “mouse shit” peppers. (In Thai, “shit” is used as an intensifier.) He also showed photos of curries that would make people raised on boiled potatoes convulse in fear.Called “phrik khii nuu,” the Thai “mouse shit” pepper is rated on the Scoville Scale as very hot, with a Scoville Rating of 50,000 to 100,000. The scale measures the spice’s amount of Capsaicin, the chemical compound responsible for all that is burning, tingling, and masochistic about eating spicy food. Law enforcement-grade pepper spray clocks in at an SR rating of 500,000–5,300,000.Just as marathon runners run, I began a training regimen of a Thai-style hot sauce called Sriracha, served in the dining halls as a squeeze bottle with a green nozzle. My 8 a.m. wake-ups included breakfast pizza slathered in hot sauce. After two weeks of this, I escalated the pain by slapping on habanero Tabasco at abandon in addition to Sriracha. Herzfeld picked a Thai restaurant in Harvard Square called Aiyara (16 Eliot St., 617-497-8288), formerly named Smile Thai Cafe until it switched hands recently. He deemed its food “about as close to the real thing as I’ve ever eaten Stateside.” So on an ordinary Monday night, I went to Aiyara with my taste buds at a lifetime apex of pain tolerance.Herzfeld made his way across Mass. Ave with his wife Mia and Professor Theodore C. Bestor, who teaches Social Analysis 70: “Food and Culture.” He sported a small moustache and an accent cultivated across the pond. Herzfeld greeted the waiter with a small bow, hands pressed together. He then ordered in Thai.“The hottest food you get in America is unlikely to be as particularly hot as in Thailand,” Herzfeld warned me.We started off with bowls of tom yum soup, filled with shrimp and slices of mushroom. Small chili flakes and a smattering of mean-looking oil floated about ominously on its surface.The meal began abysmally. With my first mouthful, I choked on some chili flakes and spent a few minutes sputtering and speechless. Herzfeld’s wife handed me some Kleenex.I had tripped on the starting line. Thankfully, the next two dishes—a beef satay with peanut sauce and “Tod Man Pla,” or fish cakes—were not spicy. I had ample time to recover.In the meantime, Herzfeld imparted bits of Thai food trivia. The spicier Thai food got, he explained, the more you could taste the underlying ingredient.“The metaphor I like is a fireworks display: an initial explosion followed by a fireworks display of the various flavors of the different spices,” Herzfeld said.If in the course of adventurous eating you get burned, stay away from water. “Water weakens your saliva,” Herzfeld said. “If you’re being burned by something spicy, the trick is to eat rice.”We then started on a platter of “Nua Yang Nam Tok,” or Waterfall Beef. The recipe calls for fish sauce and ground dried red chilis. I took a bite.It had a bit of a kick, but I didn’t find it painful at all.This was followed by a dish of green papaya salad, composed of long shreds of papaya with bean sprouts, green beans, shrimp, and peanuts, then dusted in ground chili. This was significantly spicier, like Ashlee Simpson, post-punk makeover. It actually got spicier as it cooled. I ate it with sticky rice served in a small woven container.Noting that I had not collapsed, Herzfeld requested that our dishes be made spicier. “He’s worried about her,” Herzfeld said of the waiter’s trepidation. Maybe I should have worn khakis and combat boots instead of a skirt. Then came a trio of delicious but unfrightening dishes: penang, with carrots, peas, and strips of chicken in a red curry, then ground chicken with basil (I doused it in sodium-laden fish sauce), and finally, “Stir Fry of a Shit Drunk Man.” You know, drunken noodles.I wasn’t sure whether to feel disappointed or victorious. The food had definitely not been nuclear spicy, so I decided to make a final run for culinary extremes. I fished out a few infamous Thai “mouse shit” peppers from the pot of fish sauce. I popped them straight into my mouth.The two professors looked at me expectantly. I chewed. And swallowed.The burn was not a lot worse than a hit of Sriracha. They looked impressed. But later, as my body tried to digest the banquet, my stomach tingled and shuddered, a little angry at the introduction of straight-up chili pepper. I was proud. I felt that much more authentic.

Oh, gritty, greasy joys of Chinatown. There is nothing more exhilarating than shoving through a horde of protesting Taiwanese ex-pats to claim your pineapple bun for mere change. Or finding deals on melons of questionable origin in a street stall. For the longest time, I thought only high-end restaurants broke the $10 ceiling on entrees.On Sundays, my parents would make a near-weekly trek from the Westchester suburbs to Flushing, Queens to purchase all their pickled, dried, hypertension-inducing spare animal and vegetable debris that would sit on our pantry shelves like lab specimens.So it was time to acquaint myself with Boston’s own den of all things cheap and Asian. I laced my sneakers and caught the temperamental T, dropping myself off in Chinatown on an unseasonably warm Saturday. After countless weekends of Manhattan’s and Queens’ Chinatowns, finally meeting Boston’s answer proved to be, well, a little disappointing.First of all, where were the crowds? In a recession, isn’t cheap food, in the vernacular of N. Gregory Mankiw, an inferior good? Visiting a Chinatown without the hordes is like visiting Paris in August, when all the French flee for the coastlines. Sure, the structures are there, but there’s no spirit.As I traipsed along deserted streets, I heard only a few snatches of Cantonese. There were a handful of cheap bakeries and frugal Vietnamese sandwich shops, but everything seemed restrained. Even the sight of a “cute cake” ($1.95) smothered in rainbow sprinkles and topped with frosting snowmen on top couldn’t cheer me up.The area reminded me of Cambridge in that Chinatown was also dealing with gentrification. Boston’s Chinatown was established in the late 1800’s by Chinese railroad workers seeking Boston’s many manufacturing jobs. Chinatown is sandwiched between the Theater District, the downtown shopping area, and South Station. Throughout its history, Chinatown has been competing for space with institutions such as Tufts, the New England Medical Center, and more broadly, the city of Boston itself. Today, Chinatown is one of the most densely populated districts in Boston, with a population that is 70% Asian and a median household income of less than $15,000.As I explored, I discovered a few standouts—New Saigon Sandwich Shop on Washington Street served up fantastic Vietnamese banh mi: sandwiches filled with anything from cold cuts to barbecue beef, served up with shredded cucumber, carrots, mayo, daikon, fish paste, and onions. Best of all? Sandwiches cost less than a tall Starbucks latte at $2.50. I ordered a frosty red bean bubble tea ($3) which proved vastly superior to any Boston Tea Stop confection. Another plus: a mere hop and skip away are two strip clubs, which solves the problem of no seating in New Saigon.A few doors down from New Saigon is Empire Garden (690-698 Washington St., 617-482-8898), which does a mean dim sum, reminiscent of that time in Hong Kong I failed at the same meal. (There is only one way to fail at doing dim sum: go by yourself.) Like most dim sum restaurants, it followed the general pattern of an campily grand foyer leading up a staircase to the main event: pushcarts of standbys like roast pork buns, dumplings, and beef short ribs.As I investigated China Pearl (9 Tyler St., 617-426-4338), which also serves a popular dim sum, I spotted Winsor Dim Sum Cafe (10 Tyler St., 617-338-1688) across the street with the word “congee” in the window. I knew what I had to do in the name of research.Congee, a savory rice porridge typically served with crullers for dipping, is a traditional Chinese breakfast food. The closest non-savory American equivalent is oatmeal. It’s boiled down to a creamy consistency and made with chicken or turkey stock for optimal deliciousness.I ordered the beef congee ($3.95), which came in a tureen that could feed three girls or one Lingbo. It was sprinkled with some scallions and a few tender strips of beef swam in its depths. I tasted a spoonful. Solid bliss: a decent, basic congee, with the hint of saltiness made even better with the addition of the chili flake-laced oil on my table. I sweated it out through the entire bowl.Also worth a stop was East Ocean City (25-29 Beach St., 617-542-2504), just to see the fish tanks in the window. There, I spotted thorny crustaceans that looked positively Mesozoic; they were big enough to eat a pesky toddler. Like any good tourist, I snapped photos.As night fell, I attempted to find a certain seafood market. It was closed. Still spooked by empty streets and darkening sky, I boarded the Orange Line amid a inebriated revelers. I may not have recreated my parents’ pantry, but at least I got my congee.