April 2022
Life
On the first day of April, I flew to Dallas to meet an old High School friend who was soon heading to China for work. Working in China since COVID requires a lot of determination - it is no longer the same ‘foreigner-welcome’ place that I had left back in 2016. In order to enter China, he needed a special approval letter that took 10 months to receive, then had to stay put at the place of departure (Dallas) for 7 days while taking a series of tests that cost upwards of 4 digits. The consequent quarantine that was required after landing was the worst part; with the recent outbreak I think it was only some time in May that my friend finally reached Guangzhou.
I recently heard someone describe Dallas as just a big version of Modesto (guess where they’re from), and I can see where they’re coming from. It’s a true American city that has been designed for the automobile; points of attraction are scattered around its endless urban sprawl that rivals LA, with public transit being an afterthought. Nonetheless, we had a productive weekend walking around the downtown area that included the Art Museum, the niche MADI art museum (think colorful and abstract geometric art), and plenty of food including creative tacos at Velvet Tacos and (of course) Texan BBQ. I tried a Sloppy Joe sandwich for the first time, which is tasty but really doesn’t make sense in the form of a sandwich because of how leaky it gets. We also went to the opening weekend of Carbone in Dallas, which I found to be slightly lesser than my first time in NYC; I can’t tell if it’s because it was my 2nd time, or because the original location is better.
My next stop was New Orleans, which I stayed for a bit more than a week. I wanted to take advantage of work still being remote, and reasoned that since New Orleans is mostly about food, a longer stay where I worked during the day and dined out at night would be best. I consulted the different lists & guides for food in New Orleans then made reservations every night, trying the best of what Cajun & Creole food had to offer. If you’re wondering – Creole food typically uses tomatoes and originates from New Orleans, while Cajun food is more country style.
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| French Quarter in New Orleans (this is probably the most scenic building in the entire quarter) |
I feel like I unintentionally chose the best time to visit New Orelans. The weather was agreeably in the 70s to low 80s most days in early April, and there weren’t that many tourists during the shoulder season. You wouldn’t know this if you were walking down Bourbon St though; it reminded me of Nanjing East Road back home, bustling with tourists and tourist traps all day and all night. Aside from Bourbon St, the French Quarter was otherwise a charming historic hodge-podge of architecture between the colonial Spanish, French, and later American styles. Some parts felt uncannily Parisian, but most other areas in the quarter were very unique to New Orleans: the cast iron galleries that loomed over the sidewalks, green courtyards hidden away from the streets, and colorful buildings with plenty of greenery draping from the sides.
I have a lot of fond experiences from my time in New Orleans, and I’ll share three short ones that aren’t about the food I had there. One is visiting the the Southern Food and Beverage Museum; a must if you’ve ever wondered ‘what even is American cuisine?’. Another must-do activity in New Orleans is riding the St Charles historic streetcar – the oldest continuously operating streetcar in the world – which I took frequently to get back to my hotel. Lastly, I enjoyed browsing the shops in the quarter; there are some pretty fun shops from antiques to modernist food art galleries beyond all the cliché souvenir places. I also got to watch Klay Thompson drop 38 points on the New Orleans Pelicans in the 2nd last game of the season for 15 dollars, and probably had too many Sazeracs before concluding that I didn’t even really like the drink (definitely recommend visitng the Sazerac house, though).
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| Morte Mantle by Mitchell Gaudet: 13000 AR-15 casings representing the last 5 years average of people murdered by guns (at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, MS) |
I also took two day-trips during the weekend to add 2 new states; Biloxi, Mississippi and Mobile, Alabama. In Biloxi, the headquarters of Barq’s root beer, I saw a small art museum designed by Frank Gehry (!) and walked along the white sand Gulf Coast beaches. In Mobile, I visited the USS Alabama, a storied battleship that first served in WWII.
I spent about a week and a half back in NYC before heading out to Chicago to help staff a Quiz Bowl tournament. It had been more than a handful of years since I was last involved. The experience was a fond throwback to what it was like to be part of quiz bowl, but at the same time a stark reminder of how much I had forgotten since High School, from excerpts of poems to the House of Tudor. After the tournament, I leveraged the reimbursed flights to fly to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Sioux Falls is perhaps one of the most boring cities I’ve intentionally visited – on the level of Fargo, North Dakota or Fresno, California. The lack of availability on Uber and Lyft discouraged me to explore far beyond my hotel, located by a bland lake decent for jogging and not much else. After a whole 24 hours in South Dakota, I took a bus to Omaha.
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| The Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge in Omaha |
Omaha is still a small city, but felt like Tokyo compared to Sioux Falls. I visited the Durham Museum, one of those museums where the building itself is cooler than the artifacts it houses. That’s not a dig at the exhibits though - mostly Midwestern history with a particular emphasis on the history of trains – just the building itself was really cool. The museum repurposes the Omaha’s old Union Station, a grand exhibit in and of itself on Art Deco styles, once the “most important railway terminus in the Midwest”. I also tried a ‘phosphate soda’, the predecessor to modern sodas, from the old school soda fountain in the museum. The other cool attraction I visited was the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian bridge, which lights up in a colorful and changing manner at night. You can cross the bridge to go into Council Bluffs, Iowa. It made for a very pleasant evening inter-state walk.
Food
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| Collard greens melt at Turkey and the Wolf |
- Turkey and the Wolf (New Orleans, LA): a special restaurant augmenting and elevating comfort food. Each dish is wild yet feels very personal, and most importantly they all work tremendously well. The head cheese taco is inspired by Taco Bell, while the collard greens melt is a special and contrasting creation – a double decker sandwich with slow cooked collard greens on one half, and coleslaw on the other.
- Cochon butcher (New Orleans, LA): I came to this butchery and charcuterie shop quite a few times for lunch. The muffuletta is delicious – so good that I probably wouldn’t mind having it daily – and it’s a bit more elevated than the typical. It starts off with a well toasted sesame bun, spread with a light olive salad, and goes well with the many yet not overwhelming layers of house cuts.
- Lengua Madre (New Orleans, LA): an excellent modern Mexican place that doesn’t lose its “Mother Tongue”. Each dish in the five course tasting menu is well executed, and my only wish was that there were a couple more courses - both for variety and for quantity.
- Willie Mae’s Scotch House (New Orleans, LA): the fried chicken here is one of the best I’ve ever had. The batter is excellent - it has a lot of uneven surfaces from bubbles, creating these satisfying crevices that yield an instant oily satisfaction. The skin is crispy and magically airy at the same time. The meat is tender, and actually a little flavored inside with a sauce that reminds me of a “New Orleans style chicken” sauce that I used to have in China (which I thought was totally made up as a Chinese marketing scheme).
- Kumiko (Chicago, IL): Kumiko is a bar first foremost, but it also has a stellar, albeit small, menu of small plates. Its drinks menu on the other hand is extensive and focuses in Japanese spirits. The place has a swanky interior inspired mostly from fine woodworking, while the bartenders’ technique and attention to detail reminds me of those of the most revered bars in Japan.
- Chislic (Sioux Falls, SD): the state dish of South Dakota, which consists of deep fried, non-battered, cubes of beef. Typically it’s paired with french fries or a salad. I had this twice in a row when I was in Sioux Falls.
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| Fried Chicken from Willie Mae’s |
Misc
Nathan Myhrvold’s resumé is quite fascinating. After attaining his PhD in applied math from Princeton and a post-doc under Stephen Hawking, he founded his own company that was bought by Microsoft and eventually became its CTO. Then, he went to cooking school, apprenticed in fine dining kitchens, and wrote Modernist Cuisine, a James Beard award-winning cookbook. He has a few galleries in NOLA and Seattle primarily exhibiting food photography with a focus on action. An associate told me a story about how he wanted to photograph macro snowflakes but couldn’t with existing technology since they’d melt easily, so he invented his own lens.
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| Just Texas things |
When my grandfather visited the US, he quipped that America is the land where 人胖猪瘦 (people fat pig lean). There’s a dichotomy between pork in Chinese cuisine and American cuisine - in Chinese cuisine pork is enjoyed for its fattiness, while this is much less the case in American food (barring bacon).
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| Not something you’d expect to find in New Orleans |
The difference between a balcony and gallery is that a balcony is not supported by posts reaching the ground.
While I enjoyed Ugly Delicious with David Chang, I found Chang’s Asian superiority complex to be a bit annoying. There was this episode where he asks a Vietnamese owned business selling New Orleans style crawfish why they didn’t do Vietnamese style crawfish because it was much more tasty, and I remember thinking that it was a bit arrogant. But after I went to NOLA and tried Cajun boil, I get it. The cajun spices by itself don’t taste anywhere as exciting or satisfying as the Asian style boils that feature plenty of oil and garlic.
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| Just Alabama things |
Fun fact: the founder of Popeyes won the 1st Annual International Award for Motorboat Racing.
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| At the Dallas Museum of Art |