So the thing about Mei Mei is not that the food is amazing, although it is, or that the restaurant is readily accessible from three different branches of the Green Line, although it's that, too, or even that it's locally sourced in ways that make the menu deeply variable by season, which means we are really looking forward to spring and summer. It's that it's four months old. I want to see it survive its first year. The life expectancy of new restaurants seems to be comparable with that of salmon fry—I'm still mourning the closing of DooWee & Rice and while M3 still serves their superlative hog wings and shrimp and grits, it's in kind of amazing defiance of their general disorganization and turnover. I suppose if this means I have to hop on the subway once a month and do my part to support the existence of a restaurant that thinks smoked chestnut cream is a normal condiment, I'll just have to deal with it. Dinner tonight with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks was the best restaurant experience I've had since the Lone Star Taco Bar or Bronwyn.1
The menu is Chinese fusion. Most of the dishes are recognizable as originating in one tradition or another, but somewhere along the way they awesomely exploded. I am not talking about deconstruction. It's more like a process of introduction, resulting in counterintuitive but delicious reactions. The food at Mei Mei comes in four sizes: snacks and sides, small plates, medium plates, and finally large plates to be shared among two to four people (which we regretfully but correctly steered away from, although they're a good incentive to come back with a group); we split a snack, a small plate, a medium plate, and that just left us room for dessert. The parsnip and apple fritters came out first. Somewhere in their genetics was an identifiable hushpuppy. The sweet cornmeal told us that. But then the parsnips were used for their sweetness, too, such as almost nothing outside of Rush's parsnip cake does, and the apples were chunked throughout and steamed soft from the deep-frying, although the fritters themselves were not at all heavy, and the sriracha aioli laced generously across the dish was not just there for a towel-snap of capsaicin, adding more cream than bite, and even before I get to the matchsticks of watermelon pickle scattered on top, is this beginning to make sense as an aesthetic? The beef heart tartare was among the best I've had, all the buttery brightness I want from raw steak with the dense savor of organ meats, floral with the juniper dressing. It should have been a complete fender-bender of flavors, like a diner upset their G&T into their filet mignon, and instead I'm hoping it stays on the menu when the seasons change. The chestnut cream is almost certainly a winter accompaniment. The mapo doufu with smoked beef shank is where I start to wave my hands and sound like the Sidney Harris cartoon, because I don't like wheatberries and Rush doesn't like mapo doufu sauce and neither of us likes green onions sliced all over the top of a dish and by the time the waiter came to ask about dessert there was absolutely nothing left. Even the sliced apples. Which should have just confused the dish, too snappy and busy in the mouth; instead they were the balancing contrast to the chewiness of the wheatberries and the incredible dark smokiness of the beef, which more or less shredded at the touch of a chopstick. It was thoughtful of the restaurant to provide spoons so that we didn't have to lose any of the broth, or resort to licking it off the plate. Dessert-wise, the snow cream was out of the running, since between the coffee syrup and the crushed peanuts we would have needed to delete half the ingredients in order to make it safe for me, and besides the fried steam buns looked ridiculous. They were ridiculous. Crisp, fluffy spheres of hot sweet dough, halved and plated with homemade chipotle nutella, tart cranberry jam, and sheets of cocoa nib brittle so dark and flavorfully burnt, for all their sugar they were hardly sweet at all. It was just possible to discern that the dish had begun life as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It wasn't by the time we met it. Mei Mei's dumpling skills are mad.
(The restaurant doesn't have a liquor license. That's okay. It has drinks like the Haymaker's Punch, cider vinegar sweetened with honey and twisted with bitters, and the Bird's Nest in a Pine Tree, a sort of resinous egg cream, both of which Rush ordered. I was done the moment I saw they offered hot buttered fire cider. I drank two mugs.)
If Mei Mei's food truck menu is anything like the quality of their restaurant menu, and if Arisia does not arrange for their food truck to loiter conveniently outside the Westin Waterfront all four days of the convention next year, it will be an absolute failure of this year's stroke of genius.2 This is the kind of restaurant where as you leave you are already thinking about what you'd like to try next, not because you are not satisfied, but because there is just so much you've never seen before. I keep thinking about the Double Awesome, which looks like the best drunk food ever (a scallion pancake sandwich with cheese and eggs, ham by request; we guessed it was impossible to order and then eat anything else for the rest of the day, but I still plan to try it sometime). And the fact that more restaurants should work with organ meats, because I like the results so much when they do. But mostly the hope that this time next year they'll still be in business, because to discover food this good and just have it vanish is a sad and plaintive thing.
And the MFA was wonderful, especially the time we got to spend with the ancient coin collection and the newly restored sarcophagus of Thanchvil Tarnai and Larth Tetnies and the more obscure Impressionists like Théo van Rysselberghe, and when we got back to Davis with half an hour to go before Rush's bus, we hung out in J.P. Licks and I learned that cheesecake is a terrible flavor for frozen yogurt, and I have my own copy of Larry Marder's Beanworld: Wahoolazuma! now, but I just wrote something over a thousand words about food and I need to sleep before my voice lesson tomorrow. It was a good day. It was a good Valentine's Day Observed. Best cousin.
1. Qualification: a few nights agoderspatchel and I ordered in from Some 'Ting Nice, which was stunning Trinidadian comfort food. Next time I'll try the goat roti to see how it differs from the St. George's curry goat, but I know now that callaloo and melongene choka are basically my Platonic ideal of vegetable sides. Rob turns out to like mauby and I will continue to order the homemade ginger beer in hopes that next time they haven't run out, although the substitute fruit punch was also homemade and nicely passionfruit-heavy. That said, it was takeout: we didn't eat there in person, although we could if we went down by McGrath. We now return to reviewing the other restaurant that started this post.
2. Seriously, if the truck from Boston's Baddest Burger had not been there for me to order a roast beef sandwich from, I would not have eaten on Saturday.
rushthatspeaks was the best restaurant experience I've had since the Lone Star Taco Bar or Bronwyn.1The menu is Chinese fusion. Most of the dishes are recognizable as originating in one tradition or another, but somewhere along the way they awesomely exploded. I am not talking about deconstruction. It's more like a process of introduction, resulting in counterintuitive but delicious reactions. The food at Mei Mei comes in four sizes: snacks and sides, small plates, medium plates, and finally large plates to be shared among two to four people (which we regretfully but correctly steered away from, although they're a good incentive to come back with a group); we split a snack, a small plate, a medium plate, and that just left us room for dessert. The parsnip and apple fritters came out first. Somewhere in their genetics was an identifiable hushpuppy. The sweet cornmeal told us that. But then the parsnips were used for their sweetness, too, such as almost nothing outside of Rush's parsnip cake does, and the apples were chunked throughout and steamed soft from the deep-frying, although the fritters themselves were not at all heavy, and the sriracha aioli laced generously across the dish was not just there for a towel-snap of capsaicin, adding more cream than bite, and even before I get to the matchsticks of watermelon pickle scattered on top, is this beginning to make sense as an aesthetic? The beef heart tartare was among the best I've had, all the buttery brightness I want from raw steak with the dense savor of organ meats, floral with the juniper dressing. It should have been a complete fender-bender of flavors, like a diner upset their G&T into their filet mignon, and instead I'm hoping it stays on the menu when the seasons change. The chestnut cream is almost certainly a winter accompaniment. The mapo doufu with smoked beef shank is where I start to wave my hands and sound like the Sidney Harris cartoon, because I don't like wheatberries and Rush doesn't like mapo doufu sauce and neither of us likes green onions sliced all over the top of a dish and by the time the waiter came to ask about dessert there was absolutely nothing left. Even the sliced apples. Which should have just confused the dish, too snappy and busy in the mouth; instead they were the balancing contrast to the chewiness of the wheatberries and the incredible dark smokiness of the beef, which more or less shredded at the touch of a chopstick. It was thoughtful of the restaurant to provide spoons so that we didn't have to lose any of the broth, or resort to licking it off the plate. Dessert-wise, the snow cream was out of the running, since between the coffee syrup and the crushed peanuts we would have needed to delete half the ingredients in order to make it safe for me, and besides the fried steam buns looked ridiculous. They were ridiculous. Crisp, fluffy spheres of hot sweet dough, halved and plated with homemade chipotle nutella, tart cranberry jam, and sheets of cocoa nib brittle so dark and flavorfully burnt, for all their sugar they were hardly sweet at all. It was just possible to discern that the dish had begun life as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It wasn't by the time we met it. Mei Mei's dumpling skills are mad.
(The restaurant doesn't have a liquor license. That's okay. It has drinks like the Haymaker's Punch, cider vinegar sweetened with honey and twisted with bitters, and the Bird's Nest in a Pine Tree, a sort of resinous egg cream, both of which Rush ordered. I was done the moment I saw they offered hot buttered fire cider. I drank two mugs.)
If Mei Mei's food truck menu is anything like the quality of their restaurant menu, and if Arisia does not arrange for their food truck to loiter conveniently outside the Westin Waterfront all four days of the convention next year, it will be an absolute failure of this year's stroke of genius.2 This is the kind of restaurant where as you leave you are already thinking about what you'd like to try next, not because you are not satisfied, but because there is just so much you've never seen before. I keep thinking about the Double Awesome, which looks like the best drunk food ever (a scallion pancake sandwich with cheese and eggs, ham by request; we guessed it was impossible to order and then eat anything else for the rest of the day, but I still plan to try it sometime). And the fact that more restaurants should work with organ meats, because I like the results so much when they do. But mostly the hope that this time next year they'll still be in business, because to discover food this good and just have it vanish is a sad and plaintive thing.
And the MFA was wonderful, especially the time we got to spend with the ancient coin collection and the newly restored sarcophagus of Thanchvil Tarnai and Larth Tetnies and the more obscure Impressionists like Théo van Rysselberghe, and when we got back to Davis with half an hour to go before Rush's bus, we hung out in J.P. Licks and I learned that cheesecake is a terrible flavor for frozen yogurt, and I have my own copy of Larry Marder's Beanworld: Wahoolazuma! now, but I just wrote something over a thousand words about food and I need to sleep before my voice lesson tomorrow. It was a good day. It was a good Valentine's Day Observed. Best cousin.
1. Qualification: a few nights ago
derspatchel and I ordered in from Some 'Ting Nice, which was stunning Trinidadian comfort food. Next time I'll try the goat roti to see how it differs from the St. George's curry goat, but I know now that callaloo and melongene choka are basically my Platonic ideal of vegetable sides. Rob turns out to like mauby and I will continue to order the homemade ginger beer in hopes that next time they haven't run out, although the substitute fruit punch was also homemade and nicely passionfruit-heavy. That said, it was takeout: we didn't eat there in person, although we could if we went down by McGrath. We now return to reviewing the other restaurant that started this post.2. Seriously, if the truck from Boston's Baddest Burger had not been there for me to order a roast beef sandwich from, I would not have eaten on Saturday.
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