Hubba hubba Soba Soba

On a steaming hot July afternoon we popped into Cocoron, where Japanese soba, a thin noodle made from buckwheat flour, is always the plat du jour.  It's conveniently located for us at 61 Delancey Street on the Lower East Side. Cocoron is a small little noodle joint with counter seating and a smattering of tables that would probably feel crowded with 20 people in it. On the day we went, it was busy enough with 10 other diners plus the four other people cooking and a waitress. It was hot too, the air conditioning labored on with nary a cooling breeze to be had.. There is a lot of activity in the kitchen, because just about everything at Cocoron is made from scratch, and it shows.

Noodle team GO!!

There is quite a selection of soba dishes, many of them cold, to choose from and dip in homey Japanese Curry sauce, pork and soy based broths, sesame paste, and even some vegetarian options. But lets not jump ahead. We started our meal with a miso cole slaw and some kimchee, which for a fermented cabbage lover like me is hard to resist.

Miso cole slaw (above) and kimchee

These were small portions but very tasty and priced nicely at $2.50 each. Although I liked the kimchee,  I'm not sure that item is made on the premises and I will probably opt only for the cole slaw next time , which was chilled and extremely refreshing given the heat of the day, not to mention pretty to look at.

For those uninitiated in the soba way, the waitress will bring you an  instructional leaflet detailing exactly how to eat your noodles, but somehow we amateur soba eaters made do without them. You can either dip the cold noodles in a sauce or order them hot in a soup. As a curry lover, Ian couldn't resist the chicken curry option with cold noodles. I decided to try the Stamina soba with thin slices of delicious pork, served in a hot soy/pork broth with a very full but clean flavor with soy and miso notes..

Soba with Chicken curry

You get a nice portion of Soba

Stamina soba- finishing was no problem

Preparing to attack

A friend of Ian's mentioned that Soba changes flavor according to the time of year when the buckwheat was harvested. Our noodles had a beautiful mouth feel and were cooked to a  perfect al dente texture. They were so fresh you they almost tasted the field and they had a fleeting, beery finish that I really enjoyed. I could see that the noodles, as with everything else, were made with great care and treated with respect, which is important. A disrespected noodle can do enormous arterial damage if it has the mind to. I believe that these noodles were loved. In any case, I didn't have to reach for the Tums after my meal. Here is a peek at what Ian's dish looked like when it arrived at the table:

Meanwhile, Ian was really enjoying a very large plate of noodles that are actually weighed out on a scale in the open kitchen. To get a big plate of fresh and delicious noodles like that- all for you- it's just..... exciting. I had noodle envy- the noodles in my hot soup didn't look as big in the broth so next time I'll be chasing that heaping plate sensation. The curry wasn't as thick as most Japanese curries I have tried but was very flavorful without actually being spicy. If you require to turn up the heat a little bit, there are pepper shakers on the counter with a dry red pepper mix the Japanese favor in their soups. After the noodles are consumed, a hot pitcher is brought around. It's full of near boiling water that the soba had been cooked in minutes before and poured into the leftover curry sauce, which you can drink as a soup. The starchy noodle water thickens the curry and adds some of the buckwheat flavor and is certainly something to look forward to when you finish your heaping plate of noodles too quickly as we did.

Hot soba-seeped water is added to the broth

In the name of the blog, we decided to finish off the meal with a little dessert. We tried the house made Mochi, a Japanese treat of ice cream served frozen in a dough wrapping. At Cocoron, the Mochi is served on a mound of soy powder, which actually tastes like cocoa. It was delicious and the dough was as fresh as the noodles, although at $5.50 we would have preferred more than one piece. However, one has to acknowledge the attention to detail and the freshness of the ingredients. Yes, we could have had 4 pieces of store-bought prepackaged Mochi for that price, but  would they have been remembered so well?

Mochi love

Earlier in the week, we had eaten at one of our old standby's,Yogee noodle for Beef stew with Chow Fon noodle, reviewed here. That delicious meal came to $11 for both of us, an even $13 with tip, but man cannot live by Yogee noodle alone. Our lunch at Cocoron came in at a whopping $38, cash only,  which we rounded up to $45 with a tip. On top of that, it was my turn to treat, so it was a fairly damaging lunch from a financial standpoint. Ian's curry noodles were $14.50, and mine were $10. On the other hand, there are more economical options on the menu, starting at about $8. I feel that the quality of the ingredients, the care of the preparation, and the fresh flavor of the food merits the price. If we can practice some restraint, this is a restaurant that we would like to add to our weekly or monthly rotation. At a minimum,  we are going to need to taste the soba in every season to find out which one we like best. At Cocoron, there are a lot of soba combinations to explore, and we are planning to eat our way through the menu one dish at a time.

Grand Sichuan Chinatown- the redheaded stepdaughter of Grand Sichuan Chelsea

We decided for once not to have a hot pot dinner at Grand Sichuan on 125 Canal Street. This is a well known "hot pot" stop, where you should order your broth half spicy and half regular so you can dip a variety of tasty vegetables, meats, and seafood into the aromatic broth, swish it around for a few moments while they cook in the gurgling liquid, and summarily  gulp them down. When we walked in on a Friday evening there was a pot on every table ...except ours. We decided to order from the menu and forgo our usual favorite dish. We were daring, we were adventurous, but most of all, we were disappointed.

There is another, grander Grand Sichuan only a few miles North of Chinatown at 229 9th Avenue in Chelsea. They are the gold standard for Sichuan food in Manhattan (there may be other hidden gems in Flushing). At the Chelsea location, nearly every dish is delicious, with the exception of the Ma Po Tofu, which I found a bit salty and overpowering there. Still, everything else is glorious- dishes like fiery Au Zhou chicken are rife with tongue numbing Sichuan peppercorns and the Dan Dan noodles are the best I've had, although to be fair I've only had them in three or four places. The Canal Street restaurant is most likely of no relation to the Chelsea variant or to the 1/2 dozen restaurants also calling themselves Grand Sichuan in NYC, but I'm not sure- hey- I'm just a blogger!

We started out with a few appetizers, including wontons in a spicy oil, Dan Dan noodles, cold noodles in sesame paste, and some garlic cucumbers to cool us down.

Wontons in spicy oil

WIDE SHOT---- so so  DAN DAN noodles on the right.

All of the dishes in this pic were just OK. As a matter of fact, that seemed to be the theme of the meal, everything was just OK. I mean, do I look happy?

OK I look happy.

OK- so even so so noodles are enough to delight me. However,  Eugene was perplexed, and Ian tried to put on a happy face, but I'm not sure I believed him.

Eugene interrogates his dinner

Looks happy but crying inside?

The main dishes were all decent but vaguely disappointing. The kitchen is actually downstairs and dishes arrive via a dumbwaiter system. I imagine it's a lonely and dark existence down there in that basement, which might account for the lack of love our dishes received. There was nothing noticeably wrong with anything, but that's no great compliment either. For mains courses, we chose sesame beef, Kung Po chicken, braised beef filet in Szechuan sauce, sauteed water spinach and sauteed string beans. The braised beef was a spicy, oily, stew served on a bed of Chinese cabbage and was the most handsome  and the best dish of a middling bunch, but it still lacked star power.

Braised beef in Sichuan Sauce front and center

The best I can say about this meal is- no one went home hungry. DO come to Grand Sichuan for the hot pot. It's tasty and above all it's fun to eat, especially if you're with a big group. DON'T come to Grand Sichuan for a Sichuan dinner, instead head uptown to 9th Avenue and 24th street, to the other Grand Sichuan, where typical Sichuan dishes are much better.

Old man curry noodle

This is  not a politically correct blog. Sometimes we come up with our own special names for the restaurants we frequent like Cong Ly at 124 Hester Street. Our name for Cong Ly is "Curry Alzheimer Noodle joint". Let me explain before you judge me. This Vietnamese restaurant is run by an older gentleman, a very nice Chinese/Viet as you can probably tell from the picture below.

NICE MAN on left. The gentleman on the right is somewhat dubious.

Like father like son? You be the judge.

He is a very nice man and tremendously proud of his food, especially his curry noodles. However, no one at Cong Ly is very good at getting an order right, they are "forgetful" you might say. To take my incorrectness to an even greater level, the rest of the people that work at Cong Ly are F.O.B, or Fresh Off the Boat. To get an order filled correctly, you must repeat, you must cajole, you must will them to understand. If these Jedi mind tricks don't work, and half them time they won't, you may find you aren't getting exactly what you ordered. Sound like a lot of trouble? Well, it's worth it.

Cong Ly does a number of things well like cold rice noodles dishes called Bun with your choice of expertly grilled Viet style barbecued meats and/or spring rolls layered on top. Summer rolls are good and Pho is decent enough although I would only ever order that if I REALLY wasn't in the mood for the piece de resistance at Cong Ly, the curry chicken soup with a coconut base. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Usually we start off with an order of summer rolls because we are hungry and they come very quickly, although in the colder months we will sometimes opt for Cha Giao, spring rolls stuffed with meat that you can wrap in lettuce and dip in a bowl of fish sauce.

Summer roll, the peanut dipping sauce is hidden but very good

I love my food spicy so I usually layer on some jalapenos or some of their homemade hot pepper sauce which consists of tiny red and green peppers floating in distilled vinegar. Usually you need to request the hot peppers, and there is only one bowl of the homemade sauce floating around the restaurant, so you may even need to "borrow" them from another patron. Then we dig in. I like to order my curry chicken noodle with thin egg noodles, the same type you might find in a bowl of Cantonese style soup with roast pork or duck. Ian is fond of the broken rice they serve and skips the noodles.

Heavenly curry gurgling in my belly

Ian cheats with broken rice

The curry hits all the right notes. It's savory without being overpowering, it's not too thick like a Thai curry and it's not too watery like a West Indian one. It's simply delicious without being too spicy, although I tend to turn up the heat by throwing in some fresh jalapenos. The dish is served with dark meat bone-in chicken which usually consists of a leg and a thigh that have been stewing in the curry for hours. They are good and filling and are accompanied by a good chunk of taro which complements the sauce well and dissolves nicely in your mouth. The egg noodles, which I tend to think of as more of a Chinese noodle , really sop up the curry sauce and have the perfect "mouth" feel- not chewy, not limp, but fun to bite into. Certainly they aren't made fresh, but they are nonetheless very good. You may opt for another type of noodle but my advice is stick with the egg noodle- I've tried the rice noodles and they just aren't as good in this type of soup..To top it all off, the soup can be had for the lovely, lowly price of $5.

Have I mentioned that we don't really choose our noodle joints for ambiance....or cleanliness? Cong Ly does have a bathroom, you need to go through the kitchen to get there. I must have eaten at Cong Ly at least 100 times but I've only used the commode once....it was an emergency.  There are things back there that I just don't want to see. The clients are a mix of locals and people that meander in while waiting for one of the many discount inter-city buses that are clustered around the shop, sometimes giving the place a real bus stop vibe. Still, I don't mean to paint such a dour picture, we love it here, the restaurant gets a lot of light, and it's always pretty busy although you won't have to wait for a table..

One of our earlier restaurant reviews at the beloved Lam Zhou Hand Pulled noodle house  mentioned that Lam Zhou only had a C rating from the City Board of Health. Sounds bad but wait, Cong Ly is the proud owner of a "Grade Pending" sign gloriously displayed in the front window. It's been there a while. I'm not sure exactly what "Grade Pending" means, but I suspect that Cong Ly just didn't pass the first inspection and that the city inspectors will be coming back......and we don't care. It's that good.

Overseas Taste

NOTE: Overseas Taste is no more- they folded in the summer of 2012

We tried Overseas Taste again recently. It's a Malaysian restaurant located at 49 Canal St. we have been to in the past, and while our previous experiences haven't been stellar, it's convenient to a friend's apartment and we decided to give it another try. We were joined by our good friend Eugene, who ordered Hainanese Chicken rice, a real favorite of mine. Unfortunately, last time I tried this dish here, I found it slightly overcooked and rubbery, and Eugene's experience was no different..

Eugene sardonically contemplating his overcooked chicken rice

Ian decided to try Nasi Lemak, a kind of smorgasbord of several different dishes, including curry chicken, hot chile sauce, fried peanuts, and usually  fried anchovies, cucumber and tomato slices, and a hardboiled egg- although I'm not sure Ian's had all of these ingredients. This potpourri of small dishes orbits around a mound of coconut rice dolloped out in the center of the plate.  Ian was slightly disappointed by the amount of curry chicken with the dish and wasn't exactly blown away by what he was eating.

Ian and his merry band of Nasi Lemak ingredients

 Finally, this a blog about noodles, allegedly, so someone had to order some noodles. Luckily I was there to step up to the plate (or in this case, bowl). I decided to try the beef stew curry egg noodles. They have one of those spicy pepper emoticons on the menu next to this dish. Once I see those on a menu, I will ONLY choose one of the spicy dishes cause I get a real sense of accomplishment out of sweating out a meal. Here's what I got:

Beef Stew Coconut curry noodle soup

That red stuff on the top is actually oil from the beef. Once that was skimmed off,  I was able to dig into the coconut curry soup. The curry itself had a pretty nice flavor but lacked a nice finish that perhaps some salt or MSG (Gasp!!!!) may have helped. I prefer not to consume  MSG, but eating in the types of restaurants we frequent, sometimes it's just a hazard of our vocation, which, of course, is eating noodles. The meat had a good stewed flavor, yet much of it was chewy and fatty and quite a few pieces ended up in my napkin which is kind of gross but nicer in the end than letting it decompose in your stomach. The egg noodles were much thicker than the common and thinner Chinese soup noodle and much more akin to a Lo Mein noodle- they were cooked correctly but quite unremarkable. Still, that didn't stop me from finishing the whole bowl.

At home in my special place

One of our favorite curry noodle places is going to be reviewed later this week, Cong Ly on Hester street. This restaurant is in heavy rotation and always has been because their five dollar bowl of curry chicken noodle soup is untouchable. Overseas Taste is OK in a crunch, and they do have some other dishes I would be interested in trying.  Perhaps we just haven't found the right dish yet.. Until we do, we'll be heading over to our old standby, Nonya, on Grand street to get our Malaysian food fix.

Hand Pulled noodle party in my mouth

Good noodles seem to taste better in a decrepit environment, which is why we love Lam Zhou Handmade Noodle at 144 East Broadway in Chinatown. With just a couple of tables, and the incessant sound of the "noodle puller" smashing a thick string of dough on a metal table 10 feet from you, it can be a tough place to go with a group. Don't be dismayed by the plastic spoons on the table or the fact that the servers speak little to no English, consider yourself lucky to be in one of the best Fujianese style noodle joints in the city! Most of the Fujianese, relatively recent immigrants to the US, are concentrated around the Eldridge street area just South of Canal Street, with Supertaste being the most notable Fujianese restaurant. We've eaten at Supertaste and a few others, but Lam Zhou is by far our favorite.

View from the street of Lam Zhou at 144 E. Broadway

We always start of the meal with an order of boiled dumplings. Normally anywhere else we usually order them fried, but the boiled dumplings here are so perfect and tasty we go for the marginally healthier choice. The dumplings are made fresh, and usually you will see one or two people in that back folding them. The filling of pork and scallions is a flavor bomb, and the skins are nice and light.  Unfortunately, we forgot to take a picture of them, but trust me, they are good!

We all have our go to dishes and at Lam Zhou, Ian always orders his noodles dry with a minced pork sauce.

Dry noodle with meat sauce

Those are good, but I usually prefer a good soup. I always order the vegetarian option, which includes a fried egg and some Bok Choy. I don't order vegetarian here because I'm enlightened- but rather because  Lam Zhou is the proud honor of a "C" rating for cleanliness, so it's actually more about self preservation. Just kidding- but honestly the meat in the soup here seems unremarkable- the true star of the bowl is the noodles.  To tell the truth, the soup isn't truly vegetarian because they use a beef stock, Like all good noodle joints in Chinatown, the price of this massive soup bowl hovers at around $5.

Delicious vegetarian hand pulled noodles

The noodles are fresh- you can entertain yourself by watching the expert noodle puller in the background. At any rate, he can't be ignored, the sound of the dough impacting with the metal table is ear thumpingly loud, so loud in fact that it actually hurts your ears, which is a good part of the fun. Back to the noodles- they are fresh, softer than an al dente noodle but not mushy, and full of fresh, fresh,  flavor. Don't forget to add some of the pickled greens that they have on every table- they are great, especially with a heaping portion of hot sauce straight from the jar. I enjoyed every spoonful of my soup!

Good to the last drop

Save some room for desert- for $3 or $4 bucks you can have some desert dumplings, filled with sweet rice and peanuts and served floating in a bowl of cool water.

Mmm, sweet desert dumplings.

Check out Lam Zhou Handmade Noodle- you won't regret it!