i read srishti’s latest newsletter about things she ate around the city this past weekend and i was inspired to write something similar. there is something to be said about how it can be so interesting? comforting? soothing? to read or look at photos of things other people are enjoying and eating. i love the off the cuff photos of food someone made in their kitchen on a random weekday night or blurry, low resolution photos of dishes taken out at dimly lit restaurant. i find it so charming and endearing! it feels like a more honest peek into a little yet intimate part of someone’s life.
to be honest, i rarely take photos of dishes when i go out to eat. for the most part, i really enjoy keeping my phone tucked away in my purse while out to dinner and this week, i was a little offline so photos are even fewer. but! i thought i would share some of the things i loved eating the last couple weeks and what i found very disappointing…
i went to good good culture club last weekend and was pretty excited to go back considering i really liked the food when i went a couple years ago for viv’s birthday. i remember the ambience being fun and the flavors to be really interesting and memorable. i was fucking starving so i was very excited to eat. we started out with the lao style snack plate which consisted of sesame beef jerky, pork puffs (basically chicharrones), plain cucumber spears and this eggplant jaew (a thai style dipping sauce). i wanted to like this so bad because 1) i love snack plates 2) i do not like my food touching and all of the components were NOT touching 3) i like beef jerky and chicharrones and cucumbers. but i did not love this. it all felt discombobulated and there wasn’t any instruction from the server on how to eat the dish…if there even was a proper way to eat each of the components. the beef jerky was less than spectacular? it was somehow overly salty but not salty enough (how is that possible). sure, the cucumbers were absolutely cucumber-ing. the chicharrones were fine. the eggplant jaew was interesting and something i had never tasted before. i give this a 2/5 and i would probably not order this again. then we ordered the scallion steam bun which…not to be mean but yawn….it was a bao bun with pork belly.
*blink blink*
i found it to be like any other steam bun that you can find. i wish there was something more interesting about it! something that gave it some zhuj. it wasn’t amazing but it wasn’t bad, at all. it was a perfectly fine steam bun stuffed with pork belly and some pickled radish but for $10 each, i would probably be content not ordering these again. okay, next.