Category: Culture

It’s safe to say that everybody loves steak, well almost everybody (except for the vegetarians). If you love steaks, then you have come to the right place. Every kind of meal has its own purpose, its particular ritual and significance. Burgers are meant for tailgating, road trips run on fast food, and French restaurants seem fit for special occasions like anniversaries. Chief among dining rituals is the steakhouse dinner, when friends and colleagues gather around a generously sized table to eat charred flesh and drink. It’s not just an “ordinary” meal. It’s a beef séance.

The Palm

The Palm is also a well known steak house in the United States. When The Palm opened in New York City in 1926, it was an Italian restaurant that served steaks on request. You can still get classic Italian-American dishes like veal marsala and chicken parmigiana there, but the restaurant is best known today for its decor, caricatures of celebrities, politicians, otherwise famous patrons and its Prime grade steaks. The Palm’s signature cut is a New York strip, but the rib-eye at their Theater District location, one of four locations in the city, was seasoned and cooked perfectly. You could even say that they have a very particular set of skills. True “skills” that they have through the years over a very long career.

Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse

Unlike The Palm, which is intimate and borderline genteel as steakhouses go, Del Frisco’s in midtown has a big “pile” of beef, quality steaks as well. It fills out 18,000 square feet and three floors, each with its own martini-slinging bar and a floor to ceiling view of 6th Avenue. The food here is absolutely amazing. What you get is an almost comically large rib-eye that’s been neatly trimmed and nuked under a 1,500º broiler, giving it a crust that looks like polished lava rock.

Ted’s Montana Grill

If you’re looking for various “meat” dishes, then Ted’s Montana Grill is the place for you. Ted’s Montana is really more of an American restaurant and grill than what we might traditionally consider a steakhouse. The focus there is meat, though, and there’s also a buffalo head mounted on the wall at the New York location. Ted Turner is the owner of these chains, supplies the bison from his 15 ranches in the western plain states. Depending on the location the steaks differ, it’s a combination of beef and bison, with cuts ranging from bison strip steaks to beef prime rib and all of it butchered in-house. Better try the bone-in cowboy bison rib-eye, this baby gets seasoned and seared on the griddle in olive oil rather than broiled. It’s noticeably leaner than beef, and the flavor is light and a little sweet compared to the round richness of a beef rib-eye. No doubt it’s very fine steak, one of the best.

Morton’s The Steakhouse

You couldn’t talk steakhouses without going to Chicago. Chicago is America’s meatpacking capital from the Civil War through the 1920s. Morton’s was founded in Chicago in 1978, and today all of its 69+ locations still get their Prime-aged beef cut and shipped from the Windy City. We think of Morton’s as a businessman’s steakhouse, it has an old timely decor, dim lighting and plenty of room to spread out in a comfortable booth. So if you want to try quality steaks then this is the place to go. It’s scrumptious “meat” dishes will truly satisfy a person who loves steaks.

One of the most popular Filipino dishes is the “pancit palabok” or simply known as  “Palabok”. This is a very scrumptious meal and indeed one of the prides of the Filipino people. Palabok is a noodle dish with shrimp sauce and topped with several ingredients such as cooked shrimp, boiled pork, crushed chicharon, tinapa flakes, fried tofu, scallions, and fried garlic. A very tasty treat that is sure to relieve your hunger. There are other noodle dishes that are similar to this but the Pancit Luglog and Pancit Malabon are the ones that come close to the taste and appearance. The secret is the “orange sauce” that gives the palabok a unique flavor. The chicharon on top of the palabok is also the “finisher” of this delicious dish because it gives extra texture and flavor.

The Palabok is indeed a very popular dish and a lot of Filipinos love it. If you have a chance to try this in your local “Filipino Town” then better do so or you can cook it yourself. There’s a list of ingredients for you to follow.

• 2 tbsp cooking oil
• 1/2 lb ground pork
• 1 tbsp anatto powder
• 3 cups pork broth
• 1 piece shrimp cube
• 6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 2 tbsp fish sauce
• 1/2 tsp ground black pepper

Toppings:

• 1 cup boiled pork, thinly sliced and cut into small pieces
• 2 pieces fried firm tofu (tokwa), cubed
• ½ cup tinapa flakes (smoked fish)
• ½ cup chicharon (pounded)
• 2 hard boiled eggs,sliced
• ½ cup cooked shrimps (boiled or steamed)
• 1/4 cup green onion or scallions, finely chopped
• 3 tbsp fried garlic
• 2 pieces lemon, sliced (or 6 to 8 pieces calamansi)

The modernist cuisine movement started in the turn of the 21st century. It was first coined as molecular gastronomy in 1992 by the late Oxford Physicist Nicholas Kurti. It is a sub-discipline of food science, which seeks to learn more about the physical and chemical transformations of ingredients through investigations, explanations and finding practical usage. Modernist cuisine movement focuses on the evolution of cooking as well as artistic, social and technical factors that affect culinary and gastronomic phenomena. Molecular gastronomy became a sense of modernized cooking practiced by scientists and food professionals. Other terms that are used for this movement are techno-emotional cuisine, culinary physics and experimental cuisine.

The modernist cuisine movement is identified today as close to the works of Ferran Adria, a Catalan chef, at the elBulli restaurant. The evolution of the movement battles a formal doctrine and focuses on independent development and communal participation.

Some of the implications of having this food science sub-discipline are discussed in a book by Nathan Myhrvold called the Modernist Cuisine. The different principles demonstrated in the book are as follows:

1. Viewing cuisine as creative art. This entails a dialogue between the chef and the diner which makes food the primary medium allowing them to communicate. All sensory factors that are present during the dining experience contribute to the dialogue.

2. All culinary conventions, rules and traditions should be understood. However, these factors must not become a hindrance to development and creation of creative, new dishes.

3. Breaking culinary rules is powerful when done through creative means. Creating new and inspired dishes engage diners and let them live through and feel the dining experience.

4. Create food that defies the expectations of the diner. It is best to engage them to the work and make them lose their explicit or implicit expectations – make them intellectually engaged with the work. An example would be manipulating a dish that has familiar flavors but with unfamiliar forms.

5. Not only surprise could be obtained when presenting cuisine. There can be a burst of emotions, feelings, thoughts and reactions from the diners. A modernist chef does not only focus on the flavor and texture, but puts emphasis on the variety of emotional and intellectual responses that their clients would go through from the food.

6. Acknowledge ideas from other chefs. Do not just borrow ideas and inspirations without acknowledging from whom you got them. A part of the chef’s role in the modernist cuisine movement is having creativity, inventiveness and novelty with their work.

7. Ingredients from food science are powerful tools. They help in producing the dishes which would be impossible to create without them. These are emulsifiers, enzymes, hydrocolloids and others.

8. Resources from science and technology could also be used to produce and enable culinary inventions deviating from the traditional ones.

9. Using first-rate ingredients are part of the collection. They are the foundation of the cuisine, such as expensive ingredients like caviar or truffles.

The movement inspired a new craft for modernist chefs. The modernist cuisine movement was a project to elucidate culinary precision by investigating on phenomena involving cuisine and incorporate artistic values to experimental cooking.

The red earth spread out around us, and from up above, we would have appeared not so very different than the thousands upon thousands of stones scattered upon her surface. I imagined that we were being watched; even an atheist succumbs from time to time to fantasies about a watcher up above.

We found ourselves in a desert, not of sand, but of packed dirt and stones sprawling as far as the eye could see. The Moroccan sun was hot, but my companion, David, was accustomed to that after spending almost a year teaching English in Errachidia, an eternally sunny city situated between the High Atlas and the nether regions of the East. David didn’t even wear sun-block lotion anymore. His skin had taken on the honey hue of the locals. It was easy to forget where he came from; it seemed as though he had always lived in Morocco. I suppose that my extended visit from the United States served as a reminder to him, a connection to his past.

We weren’t proud men, and I don’t say that of David because he was my friend, but because he was truly humble. I imagine that he remains so, though I haven’t seen him for years. This is a story that occurred in the past when we were young and taken to adventure.

A feeling of satisfaction had descended upon us, a feeling of achievement after having bicycled a good twenty kilometers over rough terrain. Our bicycles lay a few meters off, abandoned for lunch and a short rest. We felt justified in eating our picnic, eagerly tearing into the hard-boiled egg and cheese sandwiches that we had packed before setting out.

With full stomachs and happy hearts, a weariness crept in and a slight chill, so that we both put on the sweaters we’d packed and, not being in a rush, fell asleep under the sun.

I slept for only a short while before the hardness of the ground proved unbearable. I sat up, stretched, and squinted my eyes in the bright light. It was then that I realized there was a watcher after all. He was crouching a few meters past our bicycles. He was not from above; our eyes were level as we stared silently for a moment or two.

I told David to wake up. He would be able to talk to the man. He spoke his language, a distinctly Moroccan dialect of Arabic. I had already witnessed his ability to impress the Moroccans with an unexpected turn of phrase, or a bit of sarcasm that belied the brevity of his acquaintance with the language. David wished the man peace, asked about his health, his family. The man blessed David and asked if we were Americans. David said that, yes, we were Americans, and asked the man how he had guessed. The man said he had heard about an American in the big town who spoke Arabic, but he never expected to meet him out in the middle of nowhere.

The man was interested in obtaining a cigarette. I didn’t smoke and neither did David. The man became agitated at this news and explained how he had tried to stop smoking many times but couldn’t live without it. David translated for me and I nodded my head in understanding, for I had smoked in my college days and had found the habit hard to give up.

The man asked for water; he drank slowly, only a few swallows, and returned the bottle, thanking us excessively and blessing our parentsDavid told the man that he didn’t need to thank us; it was our duty. He then offered the man an orange and a package of cookies. The man accepted the orange and said he would eat it later. I wondered how, laughing to myself, for the man didn’t have a single tooth in his mouth.

He had been on foot all day, on his way from his village to the big town where he hoped to find work. David asked him why he didn’t take a bus to Errachidia and the man explained that walking is good for the health, which I found amusing, given his penchant for smoking.

I offered to give the man twenty Dirhams, plenty for him to catch a bus along the way. David would have stopped me, but the money was already in my extended hand. The man again blessed our parents and said he’d be going now. We shook hands, placed our hands over our hearts, and watched him walk away in the direction of the road.

We assembled our things, mounted our bicycles and headed away from the road, wanting to put in a few more good, hard kilometers before turning back. Feeling energized from lunch, we sang at the top of our lungs as we jangled and bumped along the rocky flats. We sang of wine and love and women and heartache and cheeseburgers and sadness and death.

When at last our legs began to tire, we turned back toward the road and the long route home. We had checked our watches, and we calculated that we would make it back to town around dusk, before dark.

We sang no more, but only pedaled, and I felt weary. I think David did too, but he didn’t say so, so I didn’t either. I fell into a silent, semi-conscious state of exhaustion. I listened to the crunch of the gravel and the rattle of the loose headlight fastened to the steel frame of my bicycle. Behind me, I heard David shifting gears, trying to find the right one.

Now I noticed a difference between us and the stones. We were moving. We were going somewhere by the power of our own legs. It occurred to me that the man, the watcher, had always lived by the power of his legs, so to speak. I thought that perhaps I should try to ride my bike more back in the States instead of taking the car all the time. Then, I thought about dinner and what would be good to eat. Chicken and fries sounded good to me.

Soon, we saw a man walking along the roadside up ahead. As we approached, we could see that it was the toothless man. I wondered out loud why he hadn’t taken a bus.

When we caught up to him, David greeted him and we again shook hands. David asked him if there had been any buses and the man said yes, there had been many buses along the road. Why didn’t he take a bus to the big town, David wanted to know. The man explained that he had no money for a bus. David protested kindly, pointing out that I had given him twenty Dirhams for bus fare. The man laughed and said that he intended to buy cigarettes as soon as he reached the big town.