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| From the Water, Halong Bay, Vietnam, Watercolor with Chinese brush, Lucey Bowen. December 2006
In 2006, Gourmet looked back, as any 65 year old would. In the September issue, covers of bountiful produce, mostly from the 1940s and 1950s, prefaced very up-to-the-minute recipes, like "Sumac Skirt Steak with Pomegranate Reduction." Elsewhere in the same issue a menu for a harvest meal featured an extended, multi-generational, multi-racial, multi-ethnic family fronted an overgrown barn to eat at a rustic table. Were non-whites now welcome at the American table?
Change, full dangerous opportunity, is announced with the headline "Strip Steaks; Las Vegas has the best Chinese restaurants in the country, but to get a table you have to be willing to wager a fortune. Many of the so-called Whales who can eat there are gambling tourists from China itself. Even more change comes with the inclusion of restaurants from Portland, Oregon to Long Branch, New Jersey. These are not road-food joints, which had been featured in the magazine since 1994. These are serious restaurants with inspired chefs serving food as innovative as any in Manhattan.
Two places where "Asian-Fusion" cooking had historical roots, Hawaii and Malaysia, are featured. In fact Alan Wong's 11-year-old Restaurant in Honolulu made it to the top-10 restaurants, just behind Masa, with its very high priced sushimi and sushi.
The biggest change, to my thinking, is the mention of war in this magazine of good living. April's issue included "Culture Notes," headlined "Conflict Cuisine; A Roving Correspondent finds that during the hell of war, the comfort of sharing food becomes even more meaningful." Journalist Scott Simon wrote that he considered himself "privileged to have had memorable meals in places where the three stars are war, famine and pestilence." In October's "Memorable Meals," David Halberstam recalled meals shared in war-torn Saigon of 1962-64 with other journalists and soldiers. (Sadly, Halberstam would die in 2007 in a tragic automobile accident not five miles from my home in Menlo Park.)
Karen Coates, who would write about Asia and food until Gourmet expired in 2009, travelled to Halong Bay on Vietnam's watery border with China. While the photographs accompanying the article equal any National Geographic travelogue, her reflections convey her solitary sojourn, her willingness to take risks that the thousands of tourists who flock to the bay will not.
Coates' story recalls a hero's journey, The Odyssey. Without question the most serious contender for Homer and Odysseus is my fellow Vassar grad, the one I love to hate, Anthony Bourdain. In the June, 2006 issue, Bourdain travels to, no, not Las Vegas, but Miami. The trope here was Anthony against the "bizarro universe." He was lured into eating "Grass Fed Vietnamese-Style Bison Ceviche" at Afterglo, to him an outrageously expensive, pretentious place. He's went off in search of and found great food at the hole-in-the-wall kinds of places that are cooking for immigrants, be they from Central and South America, even Japan, Nigeria and Ghana.
Meanwhile, with my children having departed for the East Coast and college, I began to swim in an the ocean of Chinese culture lapping at my shores. Brush and rice paper at hand, I practiced Chinese brush painting and calligraphy, with Yu Chun Hui. At a local community college, I began to study East Asian Civilization with Douglas Lee. I continued to use a computer programs and CDs, like Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur to learn Mandarin. These two programs showed significant advances in language teaching since I'd left the field of linguistics decades earlier. I noted in my journals "I can never be Chinese BUT I can understand more." How could I not want to learn more about a culture and people that makes up half our world?
In those community college classes I was always the oldest student and usually the only Caucasian. Was I a solitary sojourner, creating an aura of singularity, member of an exclusive club of one? I would next go to Vietnam and Angkor Wat with a tour of Vassar alumni, among whom I was almost the youngest. Once again my preparation was intense. I found a Vietnamese student at City College to tutor me in Vietnamese. Alas, Vietnamese, with its six toned vowels proved far more difficult than Mandarin. Still, I took pride in learning Vietnam's national prose novel, the Tale of Kieu, whose female heroine is said to pre-figure 150 years of Vietnam's struggle against foreign invaders. |
New York:
Masa at Time Warner Center is still Masa.
San Francisco:
Medicine at 161 Sutter Street is closed.
Los Angeles:
Miami:
Hiro's Yakko-San 17040-46 West Dixie Highway is still Hiro's Yakko-San.
Bainbridge Island, Washington:
Madoka at 241 Winslow Way West, is still Madoka.
Hawaii:
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