Who moved my pork cakes?

Consider this a eulogy of sorts.

Last night we went to Tu y Yo, the bestest Mexican restaurant in Somerville (and beyond).

We know the menu pretty well at this point, so it didn't take us long to order.

The Boy chose the cochinita pibil and I asked for the tortitas de puerco, which are fist-sized patties of shredded pork in a sauce of xoconostle, a sweet-sour cactus fruit. This has become one of my favorite dishes, a perfectly balanced blend of flavors and textures.

When my parents were visiting, we brought them to Tu y Yo and my mom had them. She loved them too.

"I'm so sorry," our lovely waiter said. "I don't think we have any more."

Okay, I figured, they're out. Not surprising; we're coming up on a holiday weekend, and—

"We're changing the menu," he continued, "and that's one of the dishes we've discontinued."

What??

Okay, must recover. Let's go with the usual Plan B: the Pollo Yunkaax.

"Yes, that we have," our waiter said, looking strangely apologetic. "But ... um ... we'll be taking that off the menu soon as well."

And so, we come together to remember the loveliness of Pollo Yunkaax.



Kind of startling if you haven't encountered it before. So green! So vibrant! (That's the spinach and cream sauce, by the way).

Inside, its secret weapon: cuitlocoche.



The menu at Tu y Yo describes cuitlocoche as "corn's black mushroom," which is a polite way of saying "a disease of maize caused by a pathogenic plant fungus." (Which would you rather eat?)

The flavor is neither mushroomy nor moldy; it has a light, fresh, subtle earthiness. Together with the moist chicken and the creamy sauce, it makes—um, made—for a perfect summer meal.

I ate extra-slowly, realizing this was probably the last time I'd get to taste this particular dish.

The Boy consoled me with forkfuls of his fabulous pibil.



As usual, the beans were divine.



So, Tu y Yo, I have just two questions:

1) Can I get the recipe for the tortitas de puerco (and a source for xoconostle)?

2) Do you need someone to taste-test the new menu??

Walking to Mexico

I know, I know. I've already waxed rhapsodic about Somerville Mexican restaurant Tu y Yo on many occasions. Oh, their frogs' legs! Oh, their annual Festival of Gastronomy! Blah blah blah.

Usually, our visits there begin and end with an entree; the servings aren't ridiculously huge, but for me they're generous enough that I often just eat the main dish (pork in a garlic-orange sauce; chicken in red mole; the always-fabulous pibil) and take the rice and beans home for breakfast. Which gives the added benefit of starting the day with this:



Last night, however, I walked from my office to the Central Square T stop—a good two-mile walk—and by the time I arrived in Davis, I was ravenous. I called The Boy, who was just getting home, and we organized a rendezvouz at what we refer to as "the Mexican place."

He ordered the nopales en salsa verde.



How much more green could it be? (The answer, of course, is none more green.) The sauce is bright, with a vinegary edge; the sesame seeds add a note of nutty sweetness.

I had tinga poblana, a dish of shredded chicken stewed with sweet onions, peppers and tomatoes:



(Hmm ... it looked much better than that. Apologies for my weak PhotoShop abilities.)

I ate the whole thing, reflecting only briefly that it meant we'd be having cereal for breakfast.

And then, still hungry, we ordered (gasp!) dessert.

The Boy had flan. Why? Because he always has flan if there's flan to be had. It was light and delicate and sat in a cinnamon cream sauce. He was happy.

I'd hoped to try the avocado napoleon, because I'd always cast envious glances when other diners ordered it: layers of mille-feuille stacked with vibrant green sauce. But when you're not up to date on the latest dessert news, you fall victim to the ancient adage regarding somnolence and associated loss.

(You snooze, you lose.)

Napoleon had been exiled from the menu. Instead, there was an avocado cheesecake and a cactus-nut bread. After much prolonged weighing of the pros and cons, I went with the former.



It was creamy but not too dense; the avocado gave it a light, fresh flavor. It was much like a desserty guacamole, which probably makes sense. The crushed pistachios on top added a nice crunch, and the drizzle of condensed-milk sauce added a boost of sweetness. The Boy said it reminded him of a Vietnamese avocado milkshake.

Next, time, I'll try the cactus bread. Just have to go for a good long walk first.

What is ethnic food?

The first time we ate at A Salt and Battery, Manhattan's nostalgia-inducing (if unrealistically expensive) approximation of a good old Northern chippy, a woman at the next table looked at her companion over a basket of battered fish and exclaimed delightedly, "I just love ethnic food!"

I was shocked. Ethnic food? This wasn't ethnic; it was chips and pork pies and sausages and Irn-Bru. It was the food of my childhood, as familiar and simple as a bowl of cornflakes. But to this woman, it was downright exotic.

Lately I've been thinking about this wake-up moment, especially in light of a couple of discussions currently taking place. One concerns The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, Jennifer 8. Lee's (yes, her middle name is a number) exploration of Chinese food in America, and the way it's so far removed from authentic Chinese cuisine that it's almost unrecognizable to visitors from China.

The other revolves around changes to Britain's immigration policies, which have reduced the number of new arrivals from the Indian subcontinent while increasing the population of Eastern Europeans. As a result, Indian restaurants, struggling to find cooks with first-hand experience of the cuisine, are instead hiring kitchen staff from places like Croatia. The concern is that knowledge of traditional techniques and recipes will disappear, or will eventually only be understood by a handful of old-timers.

And these discussions have me wondering: what is "ethnic"? What is "authentic"?

If, for instance, I asked you to name some ethnic cuisines, what would you say? Thai, Jamaican, Cambodian, Cuban? Mongolian and Nepalese? Yeah, they probably fall under the heading.

So does "ethnic" food mean "foreign" food?
What about Italian? That's foreign, right? Well, it depends what we mean by "Italian." Pizza is Italian, but does that mean the excreta of Domino's can rightly stand shoulder to shoulder with the creations of Da Michele in Napoli?

Maybe Italian food isn't a good example; in the US, at least, it has largely been reduced to what Henry Hill in Goodfellas refers to as "egg noodles with ketchup"—a fast, cheap, indigestion-inducing way to carbo-load. Non-nativeness alone is not a strong enough distinction.

So does ethnic mean "alien, different, strange"?
What about French cuisine? It's decidedly alien, almost treacherously so (remember the hysteria over "Freedom Fries"? Could you imagine similar censorship over lasagne?). It's often hard to pronounce (Ris de veau renversé sur une tarte aux champignons et son jus de truffe, anyone?). It involves strange ingedients: frogs' legs and pigs' feet and tête de veau.

But it conjures up images of starched tablecloths and obsequious waiters and excellent wines—things we like to associate with sophisticated civility; things we're comfortable with (or imagine we should be). Different and strange don't necessarily work as sole identifiers of ethnic food.

So does "ethnic" mean "authentic"?
In the sense that ethnicity is a marker of belonging to a group, that could be more appropriate: it's the recipes handed down from mother to daughter, a transfer of internal, culturally relevant knowledge going back generations. (I'm thinking of the comforting, complex cochinita pibil at Tu y Yo, from a family recipe dating back to 1908.)

And that brings in the idea that "real" ethnic food can only be created by the people who grew up with it. Which explains the concern over Bosnians standing in for Bangladeshis in the curry houses of Britain.

But on the other hand, authenticity is no guarantee of quality, in Indian cuisine or any other, as anyone who has valiantly masticated a gristly General Gau's will tell you. (Of course, as the above-mentioned Jennifer 8. explains, this dish is an American creation, unknown in the general's hometown. Still, provenance notwithstanding, a restaurant that screws up deep-fried battered chicken is unlikely to excel at other dishes.)

And does authenticity rest in the creation or the creator? If I make Puerto Rican habichuelas using Goya sofrito from a jar, is that less authentic than my mother-in-law in San Juan following the same recipe, using the same brand? Does my Englishness negate the authenticity of the dish?

The conversation spilling from the kitchen at Davis Square's Irish pub, The Burren, suggests the guys working the grill are more familiar with Quisqueya than Cork. Does that mean they can't knock together a fine English breakfast (not unlike this one)?

For that matter, do people think of Irish food as "ethnic"? Apparently so, if this selection of Google search results is any indication. Oh, I'm so confused.

And then there's this report from Deloitte, which defines ethnic food as representing "dishes (and their ingredients) that can be attributed to a specific ethnic group." Not a bad umbrella definition.

Wait—does that make me ethnic?

Weekend food roundup: Morocco, Mexico, France

Saturday night
The Boy whipped out his tagine (ooer missus!) and threw together Tagin Djaj Bi Zaytoun Wal Hamid, aka chicken stew with preserved lemons and green olives, from Claudia Roden's cookbook Arabesque.

The recipe calls for some of my favorite aromatic ingredients--saffron, lemon juice, garlic, ginger, cilantro--and even though I was supposed to be doing other stuff, I kept wandering into the kitchen to inhale. And take photographs.



In goes the cilantro:



The Boy discovered preserved lemons at WholeFoods, so every now and then he brings some home. They're marinated simply in salt and lemon juice, and have a bright flavor that combines the best aspects of lemon and salt while minimizing the brash sharpness and intensity of both. Unsuprisingly, they keep pretty well, so over the next few weeks we'll find excuses to chop up a chunk of rind and throw it into anything that needs a lift.

Sunday morning
We'd dined at Tu y Yo on Friday night, and came home with leftover rice, black beans and cochinita pibil--the result of a deliberate act of sacrifice on my part. Even as I ordered the dish, I was already dreaming of the reheated remains on a warm tortilla with grated cheddar and a fried egg.



Sometimes, dreams come true.

Sunday afternoon
You know how you develop certain expectations of a dish, based on repeated encounters? Take apple pie, for instance. You start to define it as a kid, and refine your benchmark at diners and holiday meals. Right now, you can probably conjure up your definition of apple pie: the depth of the dish; the level of cinnamon in the sauce; whether the crust is glazed or sparkling with sugar granules.

And then, one day, you meet a pie that blows all your preconceived notions out of the water.

My awakening came over lunch at Petit Robert Bistro in Kenmore Square. The source of my enlightenment: coq au vin.

I thought I'd had coq au vin before. But apparently that was merely chicken that had shared a pan with red wine.

This was something else entirely: deep and rich, the red wine sauce almost carmelized onto the meat, with a generous fistful of bacon to add a smoky undercurrent.



It was amazing, and it is now my gold standard for the dish, but it was also not my lunch of choice: I had andouille and boudin noir, which was lovely, especially as it came with thinly sliced carrots bathed in garlic butter. (They're vegetables, so it's healthy.) The Boy was lucky, though, that I didn't steal his entire plate of chicken.

It was our first foray into this restaurant; it won't be our last, especially as they also have such interesting options as calf's liver and tripe and sweetbreads. The Boy points out that it's close enough to my office to be a lunch destination, which is a frighteningly tempting fact.

Sunday evening
On the menu tonight: baked haddock with steamed bok choy. It's probably for the best.

Eating Mexico

Call us consistent. Call us creatures of habit. Last night we went to Tu y Yo for their annual Three-Nation Celebration of Mexican Gastronomy, as we did last year and the year before.

Maybe we're getting in a rut.

This year's seven-course prix-fixe meal included dishes from Mexico City, Veracruz and Oaxaca and went something ... like ... this:



First up, a glass of agua de hierbas frescas, a crisp, subtly sweet blend of celery, parsley and cucumber over ice that was so refreshing, I eschewed the alternative of Dos Equis and stuck with it all night. Yes, that's right: I, Carolyn Grantham, opted for a non-alcoholic beverage.



Next, the first of two appetizers: moist duck breast in a red pipian mole, warm and nutty, with a salad of nopales and queso fresco.



App #2 was ensalada de chicharrón: fist-sized chunks of salty, crispy fried pork skin topped with pico de gallo.



The soup course was cazuela de mariscos a la veracruzana, and was a nice attempt at deconstructing seafood stew:



Both mussel and clam were fresh and meaty, comparable to chicken thigh (the former) and breast (the latter) but with a briny undertone, and the accompanying shot of seafood broth held flavors of fish and shrimp.

The Boy, being allergic to things that wear their skellingtons on the outside, had a lovely, earthy squash-blossom soup, served in a bowl apparently fashioned from the hull of some enormous seed:



And then to the entrees. First, beef in a yellow mole (which I neglected to capture for posterity). The meat itself, while tender and moist, had little flavor--doubtless boiled in water, as for ropa vieja. Combined with the sauce, however, it was fab--not too spicy, but warm enough to get the endorphins going. On the side, a mixed-veggie combo of steamed green beans, zucchini and diced chayote.

Next up, the dish we both liked best: pescado a la talla, a foil-baked fillet of tilapia with onions and ancho peppers and a hint of orange juice:



And then the last main--chicken in a green mole.



This was the only dish that could have been better executed. The roasted, shredded chicken was cold and dry, and the mini corn fritters turned out tough and chewy. Nice sauce, though. And the blackened pepper skins provided a smoky and unusual tone.

And finally, dessert: three sweet corn tamales with a schmear of intense berry sauce and a crème anglaise.



The choco version tasted a lot like chocolate pudding, which was cool. The raisin was somewhere between bread pudding and fruit cake, sweet and rich. But my fave was the pineapple, which was exactly like pineapple upside-down cake, which I haven't had in a decade.

And now to wait for next year's gastronomic celebration ...

OpenTable: the end of the reservation dance

I like to plan. For better or worse, I feel more comfortable about a situation if I know some of the variables are taken care of. Maybe it's fear of the unknown. Maybe my three months of Girl Scout involvement left an indelible "be prepared"-ness on my psyche.

Luckily, when it comes to food, I have help.

We've been signed up for OpenTable since early 2004, and it's our first reference for any dining-out decision. This browser-based system allows the user to check out restaurants in advance and make reservations online.

For us, this is heaven: we can decide what time we want to eat, see which restos have availability, view their menus, and--click!--reserve a two-top.

How perfect is that? No trying to remember the name of that Cambodian place, you know, with the great lime-chicken soup. No falling back on the same restaurants over and over because you can't think of anywhere new. And best of all, no need to call half a dozen restos and do the reservation dance: "So do you have anything for 8:30 instead? Well, how about 9? 9:30?"

The system generates an email with confirmation, directions and parking details. You can send an invitation to others in your party. You can even arrange for flowers to await your date on the evening, if you're into that kind of thing.

When you show up for your meal, you're automatically awarded dining points (100 is the usual amount, though some places offer 1,000 if you book an off-peak time) that add to an overall total you exchange for a gift certificate ($10 per thousand points) redeemable at any resto on the system. A small incentive, but a nice one.

And OT's international scope means we can see what's going on in other cities. So if we're planning a trip to NYC, or Montreal, or London, we can scope out the options and book ahead. It pleases me to know there's a table at Union Square Cafe with my name on it.

Of course, OpenTable isn't a one-way street; it would be crazy to have all that customer data floating around uncorralled and unused. For the restaurants themselves, OT is a great business management system. It allows them to track the flow of traffic, create marketing campaigns and--big savings--have the diners themselves, rather than an employee, take care of the reservations.

Another feature of the system is its function as a customer relationship management tool.

Apparently.

Both the OT website and a piece in April's Boston Magazine note that the wealth of diner data allows restaurants to keep track of what customers have ordered on past visits; whether they're regulars; when they celebrate birthdays and anniversaries. This info can then be used to provide (according to BoMag) "exceptional customer service," making people feel welcome, remembered, special.

Apparently.

Maybe most restaurants don't yet feel the need to employ this aspect of the system. Maybe we're not eating at the kinds of places that include personalization in their philosophy of the customer experience. Or maybe maitre d's take one look at us and assume we're not worth the bother (always a possibility).

But in three years of booking through OT, we have yet to meet the waiter who acknowledges our return, offers us the cocktail we ordered last time, comments on the availability of the dessert we enjoyed so much.

The BoMag piece especially concerns me, as it gives the impression that a high level of CRM happens as a matter of course at every resto. Will this lead to a flurry of frustration, as people who sign up for the system with visions of VIP treatment find themselves handled like any other anonymous diner? And how will that affect their perception of the (blissfully unaware) restaurant?

For us, at least, there is a place where the waitstaff know us; where the owner will come over and discuss the origins of the week's special; where they ask when we'll next be coming in for breakfast.

But that's Tu y Yo. We walk over there every other week. And they don't even take reservations.

It's not easy being (in) green (mole sauce)

Every time we eat at Tu y Yo, I give thanks that we're a five-minute walk from excellent Mexican food. The restaurant makes a concerted, sincere effort to create dishes that are not just damn delicious, but also inventive and unusual.

Their menu includes a special that changes out weekly. February's dishes included chicken breast in a sauce of garlic, guajillo chiles, cumin and melon; and sautéed red snapper, shrimp, crab and octopus in a broth of fish, rice, jalapeño and tomatoes.

(I almost always get the special; it's invariably interesting and saves having to make decisions.)

The standard side dish is rice and beans, the latter having a deep, intense, chocolatey flavor.

A couple of weeks ago, they changed their menu, dropping some dishes and adding others. Thankfully the chicken tinga and the cochinita pibil are still listed--standbys for when the special doesn't appeal. And so, interestingly, are the tacos de chapulines (deep-fried tacos stuffed with crickets and served with avocado sauce); either they're really really popular or they're just too damn curious to be discontinued.

So what's new?

How about "pork cakes in a prehispanic sauce of cactus fruit"?

Or "chopped chayote squash in a pipian of pumpkin seeds, peanuts, cilantro, herbs, ancho and guajillo peppers"?

Or "chicken breast in a red mole made with chocolate, almonds, peanuts, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds and ancho, pasilla, mulato and chipotle peppers"?

Good as they all sound, none of these were our final choices. The Boy opted for nopales con longaniza en salsa verde y amaranto (Mexican sausage and chopped cactus smothered in tomatillo sauce and amaranth seeds). I ordered the ancas de rana.

The frogs' legs tasted, of course, like chicken, but more tender (and requiring extra work to dissect meat from teeny tiny tibiofibular bone).

They came in an appropriately Kermit-green sauce of pumpkin seeds, poblano peppers, tomatillos and amaranth. The sauce was complex, somewhere between sesame and fresh grass--like winter turning into spring. I almost asked for tortillas to mop it up.

The Boy's dish was simpler but still carefully planned, with the vinegar-pickled cactus serving as a bright foil to the pork-fatty goodness of the sausage.

Our waiter said they plan to stay with the menu in its current form for the next two years. Which is good, because I want to try everything on it. And if they keep serving up intruiging specials, it's gonna take a while.

Gastronomy Day

Yesterday was a good day, foodwise. As the weather was unseasonably warm, The Boy and I walked down to Harvard Square to have lunch for the first time at Cambridge 1. We really should have checked it out before now--especially as it's owned by the people who also run two of our favorite bars, Middlesex and The Miracle of Science--but for some reason we'd never got around to it.

Well, now we realize we need to make up for lost time. The menu is small in choice--pizza or salad--but inventive in range (pizza toppings include potatoes, arugula, rosemary, bresaole) and the crust is thin and buttery. Ah, read Robert Nadeau's review. I had the sopressata-topped pie, which went well with a glass of crisp, tart Sauvignon Blanc, and The Boy had the bolognese version and a very soft Chianti.

While we were there, a French(-Canadian?) photo-shoot started happening a couple of tables down. The photog and his assistant were all rumpled, unshaven, black-leather French stereotype artistes; the model was a Charlotte Gainsbourg waif with impossibly long, shiny, chestnut hair. They shot lots of moody, shadowy angles. We pretended to be cool in the corner ...

After lunch, we checked out the leftovers at Tower Records (going out of bidness). I picked up a "best-of" by The Beat (sorry, that's The English Beat) and also the Brazilian Girls album, which I suspect will become a fave.

In the evening, we wandered up the street to our favorite Mexican restaurant, Tu y Yo, which we love because a) it's five minutes away and b) there's always something unusual on the menu. This is not your extreme-fajitas place (there used to be a sign on the door that said, "We do not serve burritos"); many of the recipes come from the owner's family, and date back to the 1920s. They feature a different special every week, and are big into complex sauces, braised meats, and the whole Slow Food concept.

This weekend, they were hosting the second annual celebration of Mexican gastronomy. We went last year, and were fed crunchy taquitos filled with crickets in a mole sauce, and soup served in hollowed-out gourds. This year, the prix-fixe menu looked like this:

Cocina de la abuela
~
Appetizer
Picadas (tortillas topped with tomatoes, jalapeños and cheese)
Garnachas (tortillas topped with potatoes, beef, salsa and cheese)
Plátanos stuffed with cheese
~
Soup
Chayote and cilantro
~
Entrée
BBQ pork ranchero style (with tomatoes, chiles and garlic)
Squid stuffed with avocado and cilantro paté
Chicken Queretaro style
~
Dessert
Estela’s dessert

We assumed you had to choose, but no: they brought out everything. The soft corn tortillas were hand-made (you could see where the chef's knuckles had kneaded the dough into circles); the pork was served in tender chunks, sitting in rich, dark, spicy-sweet juices; the tiny squid came whole, three to a plate, their heads full of buttery, intense green sauce.

Dessert was a small bowl of shredded carrot, raisins, almonds, coconut, apples and cream--it wasn't particularly sweet, but worked perfectly to end the meal on a lighter note.

On our way out, the owner asked how we liked the meal, and reminded us that tonight's eight-course menu would be completely different. It sounds delicious, and includes pork loin in huitlacoche and mole with epazote (pork, chicken and beef with Mexican herbs), but frankly, I'm not sure I can eat that much again for a while ...