They serve food on the plane now? Eurasia/west Asia Economy 1st Edition

As much as we would like to forget (that ABC has no problem bringing back via their Pan Am show-- <sarcasm>Thanks, ABC...</sarcasm>), there was a time when traveling was glamorous and was much of a fan fare (Exhibit A:  the airline breast).  Most of us are selectively amnesic of the good times, where flight attendants greet each passenger with white gloves instead of handcuffs, booze was flowing fast and furious like the Niagara Falls (gratis, of course), and you get real, hot food on a tray with metal silverware instead of one pack of peanuts/pretzel (okay, maybe two if your FA was nice) that comes with your non-alcoholic drinks, just to justify and tolerate our current sad state of affairs.  Actually, there’s still good times to be had, just not traveling within the US, Canada, and a good part of Europe (I can’t speak for the other continents because I haven’t flown there-- yet).  This is a start of a series where I would post photos of airline foods I have encountered during my travels.  There won’t be too many comments about how tasty the food is-- it’s still airplane food, after all, no need to get all worked up about the quality.  However, there will be comments about how unpalatable the food is.  This is a food blog after all-- we can’t skip talking about quality entirely.  

Let’s start things off with a bang.  This edition would include Turkish Airline (official, wiki), Air India (official, wiki), and Kingfisher (official, wiki, coincidentally, Kingfisher’s tag line is “fly the good times”-- see the connection?).  These pictures are taken in Nov 2011 when I was on a trip to India.  Enjoy! 

Turkish Airline: JFK to Istanbul 

The first thing that greeted us was a paper menu...  

 

...that actually told us what our choices were for the flight.  Not just "chicken or beef" without any description on how it's made.  Also, everything you need to know about the catering for the flight is all on the menu.  Turkish Do & Co are responsible for our food on all Turkish airline flights and the Turkish Airline lounge food in Istanbul (*drools).  Apparently they're a huge event, airline catering outfit.  The JFK Lufthansa lounge also uses Do & Co for their lounge food (sorry, no photos on lounge food, That's another show.)  Beverage selection feels a bit skimpier on the alcohol side.  I highly recommend the sour cherry juice.  It reminded me of ginjinha of Portugal or vişinată of Romania-- minus the alcohol of course.  

"Polenta" ve Kofte.  Minced beef with Polenta "ball" and spinach.  The "ball" is more like a hockey puck, but I'm not complaining.  Spinach is only OK.  It certainly reinforces the image of yucky spinach* that kids scream to get away from.  

*Disclaimer:  I like spinach, I just don't think the way they did it look appetizing.  It is at least not water logged like the American version, which gives me even more of a hibbie jibbies...

Chicken Brochette with potato gratin and sauteed vegetable.  Chicken has better flavor than the minced beef, and it's not bone dry like the grilled chickens they serve in certain restaurant in Terre Haute, IN.  

Front left to back left:  Tabouleh, yogurt with cucumber, and lemon tart.  The Tabouleh is very good-- good balance between tart and fresh.  Center:  hot bread!  They say it's oven fresh, but I saw it came out of a plastic bag so I think it's just re-steamed in the cabin.  Still-- nice touch!  We never opened that bottle of Turkish white in the center.  We didn't drink it on the plane and can't take it on the Delhi flight due to security screening.  Bummer.  

There was also a mushroom "omelette" with grilled tomato, grilled green pepper, and sauteed potato (no pictures yet, check back later!).  This "omelette" resembles more like scrambled eggs with mushroom pieces on top rather than an omelette.  With that said, the eggs were very tender-- no plastic elastomeric eggs!  This is extremely difficult to do in a fast food setting, let alone on the plane.  

Turkish Airline:  Istanbul to New Delhi

Found this menu in the seat pocket in front of me.... 

...which turns out to have no bearing on what we're eating on the vegetarian side.  The chickpeas salad was nice and have similar seasoning as the tabouleh.  The yellow-on-white substance in the center top is a coconut pudding/jello, possibly made with gelatin and coconut milk.  It's pretty good.  The "main course" is curried chickpeas and cauliflower with turmeric rice.  Clearly not "rigatoni."  Again, hot rolls...  

The meat dish was the same as advertised.  Everything tasted decent.  Dessert is a chocolate cake with nuts and not quite walnut pear tart (maybe it was but I just can't feel/taste/smell the pear in the tart).  See the trend here?  

I prefer hard liquor over wine or beer, and when I see something interesting, I would put my liver at risk and try it out.  This plastic cup holds Raki (wiki) with a bit of water/ice.  It has a anise flavor, and remind me of absinthe (wiki, was banned in the US until recently for inducing hallucination), but without the sugar.  The cloudiness is induced by addition of water/ice.  It's very neat to see the swirl pattern as the water decrease flavor compounds' solubility in the liquid.  You have to be a chemist, a chemical engineer, a geek, or a drunk to appreciate the gradient lines that comes out from the melting ice cubes.  

 Turkish Airline:  New Delhi to Istanbul

Found another menu in the seat pocket.... 

Turkey ham and cheese toast, cheese borek with sauteed spinach.  Yogurt in the top center, white cheese, kasar cheese with olives on top left.  The cheese borek feels more like a moist lasagna made with phyllo dough.  Again, this spinach gives spinach a bad name.  Rolls, again.  

Found this menu under...

...this tray.  This is clearly NOT the Chana Cholaw as described on the original big menu (Again, see the trend here?).  It is definitely a toasted sandwich with eggplant and tomato.  Unfortunately the eggplant was chewy so it doesn't give a clean bite and the bottom of the bread is a bit soggy.  Top is definitely more toasty though.  I think they forgot to "oven-freshen" this roll...  

This is our snack pack:  pack of hazelnut, homemade cherry cake, and a coffee I just got for my other meal services.  

 Turkish Airline:  Istanbul to Chicago

Again, menu.  

Grilled chicken cutlet with creamy eggplant puree, rice, and fried eggplant.  Top right to bottom:  Green salad with mozzarella, marinated green beans (it's cold, french cut, and can probably be made with canned french cut beans), chocolate mousse.  The chicken cutlet is not bone-dry and it has a good seasoning over it.  The chocolate mousse tastes like the one from JFK Lufthansa lounge-- they are definitely related.  There's a pack of lemon juice with olive oil that comes with almost all salads.  The pouch actually holds some pretty good olive oil-- definitely better than the store brand cheap EVOO, and gives some of the bottled EVOO a run of their money.  

Turkish style minced beef, ratatouille, bulgar rice.  The bulgar rice is seasoned with tomato paste (?) and other herbs.  It's really good.  This minced beef was infinitely better than the minced beef on the JFK-istanbul flight-- better seasoning and all.  My brother chose French reds for this meal.  

The last service:  herbed chicken fillet with "mushroom" ravioli, yucky spinach.  The apple strudel was swapped with a banana pastry with banana pastry cream, and that salad was not artichoke-- I don't know what it is.  The ravioli had some nice brown chars on it.  A part of the edges were a bit too hard-- they probably over did the browning.  Chicken was comparatively drier than the other chickens I had on this trip.  

Air India:  New Delhi to Hyderabad

We reverted back to "meat or Vegetarian" with Air India. This is a vegetarian breakfast with cheese curd curry, naan, potato ball, and fresh fruits.   There's also a roll here, but it's not "oven fresh."  You can see the utensils downgraded a little bit here (aluminum tray instead of white plastic).  Kingfisher's "good times" is pretty lean because Air India's breakfast has more food than Kingfisher's dinner!  Makes sense though, considering Kingfisher is going through a famine period (see here, here, and here for starters.  Google for more) right now.  Not that Air India is that much further behind.  

This is Air India's non vegetarian breakfast featuring a real parsley omelette, potato and/or bean ball with celery and pepper, and a slice of breakfast potato.  This egg is spongy but firmer than Turkish Airline's "omelette" offerings.  It's definitely not plastic, elastomeric like the Dunkin Donut eggs.  

Kingfisher:  Hyderabad to New Delhi

Again, "Chicken or Vegetarian" here.  "Fly the good times" seem to indicate that there will be no salad with your meal.  We all know salads ruin a good time!  This is the vegetarian selection.  Vegetarian fried rice with vegetable cooked in tomato sauce.  Top left is a coffee mousse.  You have to pay very close attention to taste the coffee flavor.  

Meat selection:  Rice with curried beans (chickpeas?) and chicken in a tomato based curry.  This is not bad-- it beats the vegetarian entree by a bit though.  Everyone knows we need to finish our meal with a Taj Mahal tea... for regal-ness!  Note the Kingfisher branding on the water.  Kingfisher makes beer and water as well as operates as an airline.  The branding strategy is very strong, but didn't quite deliver results.  

Who's the winner?  

I'm going to pull a "everyone's a winner" a la the "no child left behind (in all games)" mentality in the 80s - 90s schoolyard here.  Given the circumstances, Air India certain holds its own on a domestic, 2 hours flight in terms of food selection.  With that said, Turkish Airline definitely takes the crown here for having the most diversified menu (The actual food served did not repeat at all on my 4 flights--  I wanted to say "menu" but that would be deceiving considering their "menu" is only right about 60% of the time), hot rolls in economy, and a chef from Turkish Do & Co on board to help with the cooking here.  Yes, I said a chef-- a guy who wore chef hat, outfit, and a Turkish Do & Co name tag-- on the plane, supervising the food "making" (more like re-heating if you catch my drift...  Us cattle class people do not deserve the attentive service and live-cooked food that comes with a Do & Co flying chef).  The Turksish Do & Co is also owned by Turkish Airline, which explains the aggressive branding on all the menus, lounge, and the chef on the plane.  All these add up to good chow at 10,000 m above the sky.  

Airline cuisine-- coming soon to a blog nearest you

Check back in the next few days for a new series about airline cuisine.  This is the post you don't want to miss if you hate words (How dare you hate words!  That is the building block of humanity!  Do you hate humanity now?  How can you explain yourself?).  Anyways, there'll be lots of pictures-- or, at least, the picture to word ratio would be a lot closer to 1:1 than previous posts.  Stay tuned!  

Diners? Mais Oui!

Though I live right next to the diner capital of the world (that’s New Jersey for those who don’t know), I rarely go to diners.  Somehow, diners seem to be all about greasy breakfasts and burgers, but not much else. When I visit a diner, I usually order a meatastic breakfast with eggs (over medium please!), bacon, sausage, and hash browns and regret every bit of it after the meal, when I feel my arteries slowly clog up as a queasy feeling escalates.  That is the quintessential experience of American diners.  According to Wikipedia, diners offer “a wide range of foods, mostly American, a casual atmosphere, a counter, and late operating hours.”  Other food cultures also have diner-like places.  The Hong Kongers have their cha chaan teng.  In the French/Belgian world, it would have been bistro.  Bistrot du Coin (official website, yelp review) would fit squarely in the French diner category.  


My brother came to DC for a conference and asked me to join him for the weekend.  When I arrived to DC, it was already 8:40pm -- pretty late for dinner, especially since we had to get up early to set up on Saturday.  We decided we would like to go to a place with lighter bites and chose Bistrot du Coin (official website, yelp review) located around Dupont Circle.  We got to the restaurant at about 9pm, and there was a line going out the door!  Thinking that we needed to be in line to put our name down, we went in line and waited.  We stood in front of the cheese platter for a while when we were in line.  I’m very verbose so I’m sure some of my saliva may have ended up on the $10 4 cheese plate that someone ended up eating.  After waiting for 20 minutes in the line, a girl came by and asked whether we needed to wait in line to put our name down. Our orderly sensibility took over our instinct of pushing everyone down to get a name on the list!  We ended up putting our name down about 20 min later and were seated at the "chef’s table" -- that is, the table right next to the kitchen door -- in another 10-15 min.  

After scanning through their extensive menu and the yelp review, we decided to go with the foie gras frais poele (avec) risotto de sorgo truffe (sauteed fois gras with barley risotto and truffle sauce), escargot a la Bourguignonne (snails with garlic butter), and Moules au pistou (steamed mussels with pesto, prosciutto and French ham) as our “main course.”  My brother tagged a beer on with the order.  Their beer/wine/cocktail list is not as extensive, and the beer cost considerably more than other joints.  Unless you really wanted a beer, I would stay away from ordering beers there.  We took the time catching up and checked out the decor.  It was undeniably trying to transport the feeling of a bistro in France to DC:  wooden chairs, small, crowded tables, tacky plastic table cloths on some tables, small strips of mirror around the restaurant, yellow light, posters and memorabilia from the yesteryear of European French culture, and the centerpiece at the bar.  From the writing on the mirror at the bar, I also found out that the restaurant was in business for 11 years.  This is no small achievement -- especially since there is a lot of competition in the DC area.  This speaks volumes to their product quality.  The bread arrived first and there was nothing special about it.  Just good ol’ room temperature baguettes.  My brother, being a genius, didn’t eat anything for the whole day except a small snack in the morning.  He and I started chowing down on the bread, mostly because he was hungry, and my teeth itch when I don’t chew on something.  While we were chowing down, the foie gras arrived.

Foie gras frais poele, risotto de sorgo truffe 
(sauteed fois gras with barley risotto and truffle sauce)

For those of you who are against foie gras on humanitarian ground and want to burn my place to the ground, I apologize.  I do realize that there were some unsavory practice in the foie gras raising industry.  However, I would like to point out that some geese and ducks would fatten their liver naturally in preparation for migration. and there are outfits that “grow” foie gras naturally.  I’m not sure exactly where Bistrot du Coin gets their foie gras from, but I would like to think they obtain their raw materials from a reputable outfit.  The foie gras slice was about the size of half a fist and just shy of half inch thick.  I have had larger piece of foie gras, and it usually comes with a tart tasting sauce to neutralize the queasy effect of foie gras.  This foie gras came with creamy, al-dente risotto in a “truffle” sauce.  As much as I like to go for “bigger is better” mentality on certain things, foie gras isn’t one of them.  A big piece tastes amazing, but I would feel my arteries clogging like I was eating eggs and bacon in American diners, especially without a tart sauce.  This fois gras size was perfect for a non-tart sauce.  It was crunchy on the outside, soft like custard on the inside -- a perfect balance.  The salad was a nice touch as well-- it cut down the richness of the foie gras.  The mushroom sauce was good though it was definitely lacking of truffle taste.  It wouldn’t have been too hard to throw some synthetic truffle oil to impart the taste (at the price they’re asking for, I do not expect to see anything that resembles real truffles in the sauce).  This is a matter of correct representation!

Next up was the escargots.  

Escargot a la Bourguignonne (snails with garlic butter) , front.  
Part of the Foie Gras dish , back.

The method was pretty traditional -- garlic, butter, probably some aromatics, and a generous dosing of salt.  The escargots’ texture was tender:  not chewy, not ultra soft, but my brother would have preferred a bit more al-dente texture.  As we finished our foie gras and escargots, the mussels arrived.

Moules au pistou (steamed mussels with pesto, prosciutto and French ham)

Mussel dishes are typically pretty hard to screw up provided that the ingredients are fresh.  With that said, mussels (and by extension, other bivalves) tend to have a mind of their own.  Time management is the most important factor in bivalves cooking.  The bivalves would need to be pulled from heat right when they opened up, exposing the succulent, soft flesh inside.  Shell thickness and size both contributed to the cooking time.  While most cooks cannot control the shell thickness, they certainly have some controls over mussel sizes.  At Bistro du Coin (official website, yelp review), they certainly didn’t pay close attention to the mussel sizes.  As you can see in the photo, some were about the size of 2 AA batteries, while others were about the size of 2 of the small round batteries.  This contributed to uneven cooking:  the big mussels were soft and succulent, while the small ones shrunk like certain phallic symbol faced the bitter cold.  Shrunken mussel meats were usually a bit chewy.  The menu stated that the mussels were cooked with basil, French ham, and prosciutto.  There were plenty of ham and basil in the mixture, but I didn’t see much prosciutto at all.  Most of the broth flavors were carried by the ham.  The basil felt like certain Chinese pickled leafy vegetable (Traditional Chinese, google-translated-barely-comprehensible English) added into the broth, probably caused by a combination of color and the savoriness of the ham.  I should have listened to my brother and ordered the moules Normande (Steamed mussels in cream sauce with celery, leeks, mushrooms, potatoes and bacon) instead.  

Creme brulee, without flash.  Notice the dark, charred center. 

Creme brulee "closer-up" with flash for better color contrast between center and side.  

Usually creme brulee uses ceramic ramekin with a fluted exterior.  A fluted exterior increases surface area and heat transfer into the creme brulee.  Ceramic and bain marie act as a large heat sink so that the edges would cook at a pace closer to the center (side note:  making creme brulee is one the the best demo you can do to illustrate the nuances of heat transfer.  If you replace the fluted ceramic container and the bain marie with a fluted metal container and a bain “air”, you would get chewy on the outside, uncooked on the inside “custard”-- if you could even call it a “custard” at that point.  Trust me:  I have tried that before in high school and that was exactly what I got.  My appreciation of heat transfer class skyrocketed when I made successful creme brulee and understood why it works in college.  I can go into a little bit more detail on the science behind creme brulee, but That’s Another Show.  I know, I’m such a geek...)  Eggs can be very temperamental with respect to heat.  Slow and steady is the name of the game when it comes to creme brulee (and by extension, a lot of custards).  The bowl was a bit warm when the creme brulee came out.  The “brulee” part, consisted of torched up sugar, was crunchy, but maybe a bit too thick.  The sugar ended up sticking to the teeth as we crushed the sugar apart.  The custard was perfectly executed-- soft, tender, and fairly fluffy.  Personally, I prefer my creme brulee’s texture to be more like a soft ice-cream and less like a custard, but what they made was very good.  Interestingly, there was a significant temperature gradient across the little bowl.  If I recall correctly, the center part of the custard was actually warmer than the perimeters generally, even though the ceramic bowl edges were a bit warm when the creme brulee came out.  Judging from the distribution of chars on the sugar crust, it made a lot of sense-- the center of the creme brulee saw more heat than the outskirt, which caused the center to be more charred.  

Even though Bistrot du Coin (official website, yelp review) would technically be classified as a “diner,” its food certainly exceed the realm of usual greasy diner food.  In fact, I would rather let foie gras be the cause of my clogging arteries than Crisco with mystery-meat sausages and eggs.  There was a good reason why they stayed open for 11 years amongst tough competitions and extremely expensive beer selection.  With its rustic charm and better than average food, I’m more than willing to say “mais oui” on this gastro- and faux-visual journey to a French “cha chaan teng.”  

How can a chicken run around without a head?

I feel like that headless chicken right now.  Life has been keeping me very busy so I can't write the DC restaurant reviews as fast as I would have liked.  Good news is that at least one of them is coming!  It should be up in the next 24 hours....  Feel like you can use some Coin lately? I definitely do!  

It's fishy that your tax dollar doesn't buy you legislative representation

I just came back from Washington DC.  My brother and I went to a couple nice restaurant.  Stay tuned for reviews!

Sang Kee vs. Sang Kee

I’m sure most people have encountered someone with the same name as them at least once in their lives.  Sometimes, strangers confuse you with a celebrity; other times, you happen to have the same name as someone on the terrorist watch list.  In the first case, you may be flattered.  In the second case, you may curse your parents, or your evil “twin”, as you as an TSA agent pads down every inch of you, feeling you up for bombs.  With small, local restaurants, I occasionally encounter places with the same name.  I usually assume that they’re sister restaurants, or a part of a local chain.  I felt the same way when I encountered Sang Kee in University City (yelp review, official site).  Isn’t this the same Sang Kee as the one in Chinatown (yelp review, official site), which is the same Sang Kee in Reading Terminal (yelp review, “official” site), and countless others dotting the greater Philadelphia area?  As it turns out, Sang Kee in UC is more of a homonym to the Sang Kee in Chinatown than sister institutions.  The Sang Kees in Philadelphia are known for their roasted ducks.  In fact, two out of three Sang Kees have a logo similar to Huey, Dewey, and Louis in the famed Scrooge McDuck cartoon, stylized in psychedelic colors.  Copyright infringement is a Chinese strong suit.  The one Sang Kee that decided to steer clear of copyright infringement was in UC.  I have tried the roasted duck at Chinatown’s Sang Kee, and found that they offer one of the more properly-made Cantonese-style roasted ducks in the US.  I will go into a bit more detail on what makes a great roasted duck in the future, so stay tuned.  As it turns out, UC’s Sang Kee also touts their roasted duck as one of the best.  

On a Wednesday night, I went with a fellow foodie (JP) to Sang Kee in UC (yelp review, official site) because I didn’t feel like cooking.  I have been to this Sang Kee before, but I really didn’t remember anything remarkable about the place except that the prices were a bit higher than the one in Chinatown.  Usually, if a place is exceptionally good, or exceptionally bad, I would remember them.  I tend to purge middle-of-the-road restaurants from my brain as it has a finite amount of space.  JP was here with another friend a couple nights before, and they ordered the pan-seared pompano with soy sauce, the XO sauce tofu, and the piece de resistance -- roasted duck.  She raved about the roasted duck and to some extent the tofu, but gave the pompano a thumbs down.  Being adventurous, we decided to go with the saute satay chicken and the plum roasted duck after mulling over the little pictorial menu on the table and the regular menu.  Being dyslexic when it doesn’t count, I ordered the Hong Kong plum roasted duck, thinking it was roasted duck with plum garlic sauce.  

While we waited for our meal, JP and I talked about why the pompano was a failure.  As she derided the chewy skin on the pompano, I watched the wait staff served other tables around me.  With the pompano, the idea was that the pan-sear would crisp up the skin while the soy sauce added a salty, moist contrast to a crunchy exterior, a la tempuras.  Under correct execution, it would have been perfection -- except perfection would only be within the 2-3 minutes after the chef pours on the soy sauce -- tops.  By the time the bus staff brought out the dish, placed the dish onto a serving tray on a stand, and the wait staff brought it to the table, a good 5 minutes minimum would have passed before they brought the dish to the table, all the while the pompano was basking in its own soy sauce juice, the skin soaking up the liquid, and getting soggier by the minute.  No wonder the skin was chewy-- there is no way it would have arrived any other way with their rendition.  The only way to get around that was to serve the dish, preferably on a hot cast iron plate, with seasoned soy sauce served on the side, and the diner would add the sauce to the sizzling plate at the table, or dip the fish into the sauce.  

The duck arrived while we finished our discussion on the pompano.  It was undoubtedly a Hong Kong style roasted duck, complete with brown jus on the plate and on the side.  The brown jus was the favorite part of my roasted duck ritual.  I would add it to the accompanying rice, mixed it up, and downed the rice like I have been starved for days.  The duck was tasty, but where was the plum garlic sauce?  I tracked down 3 different wait staffs for the “plum sauce,” as I would called it.  The first one gave me the brown jus that came with the duck.  I kept the sauce because it was delicious, but I told them that wasn’t what I wanted.  The second one brought me hoisin sauce.  Finally, I asked the third wait staff, who took our order, in Chinese for the plum sauce.  She then told me I didn’t order the duck with plum garlic sauce but instead ordered the Hong Kong roasted duck.  My dyslexic self finally had an epiphany-- no wonder I didn’t get my plum sauce!  I ordered the wrong stuff!  The waitress then said, no problem though, I’ll bring you some to try.  She then brought out this brown color, partially translucent sauce with numerous garlic floating inside.  I tried the sauce:  plenty sweet, not a lot of sour, and certainly tasted nothing like plum.  JP and I sat there, bemused, tried to take that all in, when the saute satay chicken arrived.  

The little pictorial menu depicted the saute satay chicken as a dry saute dish -- no sauce, just satay and chicken with vegetables.  This plate of satay chicken was floating in a sea of brown gravy.  The button mushrooms were still whole, scattering around the dish along with some green vegetable and carrots.  If there were rules against false advertisement, this dish would have made the cut with the brown gravy alone.  I don’t mind mushrooms so the addition was not troublesome-- or so I thought.  I bit into the mushroom and it felt barely cooked, maybe even raw, inside.  The good news was that mushrooms can be consumed raw, I told myself.  The chicken was marinated and had some flavors, but where was the satay?  I said to JP, “I’m depressed right now” as I looked into her eyes, asking for reassurance.  There was no satay taste with the dish!  She then tried it and said the same thing.  We wondered what happened to this dish while we picked out the vegetables so we would get some greens in our diet, drowning our sorrow with jus-soaked rice and roasted duck.  At the end of the meal, I tried the brown gravy again just to make sure my first impression was correct, and it turned out I wasn’t too far from the truth.  While there was satay flavor in the brown gravy, it only made up maybe 10-20% of the gravy’s entire flavor profile, and I wouldn’t even have tasted it had I not tried it after flushing my taste buds.  If this dish wasn’t violating any FTC rules on false advertisement before, it certainly would have been by now.  The duck’s flavor was so strong that it overwhelmed any sense of satay in this dish -- not that there was much to begin with.  

While we waited for our check, I looked around the dining room filled with patrons.  Some were celebrating their birthday, others stopped in for a quick bite before getting back to the grind.  I felt bad for the patrons, especially the birthday celebration table there, who spent their hard earn money at a mediocre place on their special occasion, but I felt worse for the Sang Kee in Chinatown (yelp review, official site).  That Sang Kee would only attain such popularity on weekend lunch and dinner -- they would never dream of having this kind of crowd on an uneventful Wednesday night.  Yet, the quality of the Chinatown Sang Kee’s saute dishes were far superior to this Sang Kee in University City (yelp review, official site).  The Sang Kee in University City would not have survived under the wheels of gastronomy outside University City, just like the saute satay chicken couldn’t hold up against the flavorful duck.  Simply put, there were no better Chinese options in this neck of the woods.  

As we paid our bill, our waitress informed me that this Sang Kee is not owned by the same folks as the one in Chinatown.  No wonder they don’t bear the same psychedelic duck tale logo as their counterparts.  The University City Sang Kee is a homonym to the Chinatown Sang Kee indeed.  

Something funky is just around the corner

The first REAL post featuring a Philly restaurant will be up soon! Make sure to bring some Fabreeze and popcorn to your computer surface. This funk won't go well with the sickly buttery popcorn smell. Don't forget a napkin for your buttery fingers. It'll be a long ride...

Putting the best foot backwards to launch

Welcome to MTLair Gastroland!  At the suggestions of many friends and colleagues, I finally started a blog to talk about one of my passions-- food.  That is a longer story and may deserves its own post in the future.  However, here's some tidbits on why I name my blog this way.  


MTLair can be read as "Mountain Lair" or "empty Lair" depending on which meaning of MT you use.  Since I'm going to write about restaurants and some in-house food musings, I figure either meaning could be apt.  If my lair is empty, I'm out to find my next gastro-tastic experience; if I'm in my lair, up in the mountain, I'm performing my own theoretical or practical gastro-experiments.  What else would you do when you're alone up in the mountain?  This blog will be filled with these double entendre and contrasts.  


I don't intend to be impartial-- the very definition of deliciousness has been and always will be a very subjective matter.  I plan to bring my insights and explain my preferences here.  If you don't agree with my assessments or just don't like the way I talk, I apologize in advance.  There's no need to throw pitchforks at each other!  We should reserve the pitchforks for sticking and holding large food item in a very hot oven, pit, or cauldron.  Another note:  I won't have a lot of pictures on here because a cell phone just doesn't take good pictures in the dark.  


I hope you stick around and see what's in store.