Putting the K(yrgyz) in K-Town
Welcome to our Tuesday edition, where we feature great writing about food. Thursday is for recipes.
IN THIS ISSUE: Low blows over high tea, Champagne habanero mignonette, and how to DIY your own Amtrak cafe car
Appetizers
Good Options for Bad Places
The best train lunch is an ekiben picked up just before your bullet train from Osaka to Tokyo. If you’re stuck in the Northeast Corridor, the best train lunch at Moynihan Train Hall—a noted hellmouth with scant seating, poor cell service, and an upscale but underwhelming food court—is the one-two punch of La Esquina’s generously portioned and well-seasoned moros y christianos ($6.53 at press time) plus a “Mexican Caesar salad” (terrible name, since all Caesars are Mexican, but the tortilla chips in place of croutons are great) from Ch*pt Creative Salad Co. ($10.66). Under 20 bucks, satisfyingly vegetable-forward, and a fair consolation when your not-so-bullet train hits delays just outside of Trenton. —N.S.
The Bittern Truth
Gourmet was pleased to see Hugh Corcoran, chef of The Yellow Bittern and London’s Premier Poster, return to Instagram to toss a Molotov cocktail in the direction of none other than the Prince of Pomegranate Arils, Yotam Ottolenghi. Late last year, Ottolenghi accused The Bittern—which serves a £50 set menu Monday through Friday at lunchtime, eschews online reservations in favor of the phone, has a big ol’ portrait of Lenin on the wall, and really got London in a hot lather a couple years back—of making lunch “harder and more expensive” in his Guardian column. Corcoran took to the captions to fight back:
I wrote to the Guardian to reply but they were not interested in publishing it, stating that “opinion columns cannot rebut things published elsewhere” (not true for the corbyn era when they went hell for leather to attack any pro-Corbyn opinions). After a while (far too late for readers) Ottolenghi retracted the part about making lunch more expensive. This was perhaps because I did some research (5 minutes online which he didn’t bother to do) and found out that his own restaurants are in fact far more expensive than ours.
(The Internet Archive confirms the retraction.) High tea, indeed! Gourmet formally extends Comrade Corcoran the opportunity to vent his spleen in our pages anytime. —A.B.S.
The Surreal OC
A strange cuisine, catering to diners who want to feel fancy without feeling anything at all, has emerged in the luxe kitchens of America: haute global nowhere. The southern half of California’s Orange County is a leader in this space—one can enjoy the following word salad at Splashes, Laguna Beach’s premier beachfront hotel restaurant. (Each menu item below is, yes, a single dish.)
- Oysters with champagne habanero mignonette and passionfruit pearls
- Greens mix, pecan, cured egg yolk, strawberry, Humboldt Fog, ice wine vinaigrette
- Ahi tuna crudo with compressed strawberry, purple radish, olive, watercress, aji amarillo emulsion, charcoal crisps
- Seared Bristol scallops, pea purée, violet heirloom carrot, English pea, cardamom carrot gel, saffron glass
- Chocolate “popsicle”, hazelnut micro sponge, gooseberry, tropical gel, hazelnut gelato
—A.T.
Putting the K(yrgyz) in K-Town
By Aleksey Kondratyev and Alex Tatusian
Photographs by Aleksey Kondratyev
Our photographer spends a day with the woman behind what may be Southern California's only Kyrgyz restaurant
Interviews for this story were conducted in Russian by Aleksey. His voice is represented in normal type. Alex’s additions are in italics.
Nine years ago, I moved from Detroit to Los Angeles for graduate school and quickly fell in love with the city. Composed of migrant communities layered atop one another, the city reminds me of Kyrgyzstan, my home, and Central Asia more broadly. Los Angeles life is dispersed across decentralized networks of strip malls, parking lots, and informal gathering places, circulating us like nomads. Restaurants here especially function as jailoos, high-altitude pastures pastoral Kyrgyz farmers retreat to in the summer, where diasporic communities can gather for a time before scattering again.
Cafe Ordo, a small Kyrgyzstani restaurant improbably tucked away in the corner of a Koreatown strip mall, is one of these pastures. After only eating Kyrgyz food at home or in the occasional Chicago restaurant for decades, I was astonished to hear about it from a friend. Despite the fact that a handful of other Central Asian and Uyghur restaurants in Southern California serve some Kyrgyz dishes, Cafe Ordo is likely the only Kyrgyz restaurant in Southern California. It makes sense: based on the last U.S. Census numbers, the L.A. Kyrgyz population hovers around the low thousands.
Alex and I descend on the restaurant hungry. After we nestle our cars into the fenced-off parking lot and walk inside, Shahrizada Toktogulova, 40, co-owner with her husband Kurmanbek, up-nods from behind the counter to point us to a table. Compact, sweet, and funny—and an accountant by training—she arrived in Los Angeles four years ago. “My sister was already here,” she tells me after sitting down at our table in a black and red chef’s smock and Crocs, “so we came too.”