hong-an tran

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So last week, my friend Tsz asked if I wanted to take a last-minute open spot in an 8-person dinner reservation at M. Wells; without even checking my calendar, I took him up on his offer on the spot. Dinner! M. Wells! With a big group to share a lot of different plates, maybe get a couple of the bigger ones too! Yes!

It ended up being 7 of us in the end, a ragtag group of Asian kids who are all on an eating-out email list run by I think one or two food-minded people.  Hilariously, the one person that the other folks knew in common couldn’t actually make it — I think she made the reservation long ago, not realizing that she’d be in the middle of marathon training.  Alas!

But no matter — we forged ahead anyway, ordering multiple plates of the escargot + bone marrow and lobster rolls; I’d had the snail/marrow before, and it continued to satisfy deeply, an unctuousness that I don’t encounter often in my daily eating.  The lobster rolls were mayo-based and punctuated with Old Bay seasoning, the cold lobster filling marrying nicely with the warm, buttered toasted rolls.  The lobster roll at the Red Hook Lobster Pound remains my favorite in the city, but the M. Wells iteration was still quite delicious. 

The fellas also dug into the steak tartare (not pictured), which appeared to suffer from the same fate that I encountered when I ordered it a few months back — the egg yolk had just set, so there wasn’t a lot of runny eggness to coat the beef with.  We also got the General Tso’s sweetbreads, a dish I’d heard about a while ago and had been angling to get the next time it showed up on the menu.  The flavors didn’t depart that much from your standard General Tso’s [insert whichever meat here], though the texture of the sweetbreads was great, as was the decision to pair the meat with pineapple chunks, giving the dish a nice sweetness to offset the sweetbread funk. 

And the big dishes — oh yes, we ordered a few: the bibiM.Wells, the Wagyu beef tongue, and the Shrimp Chicken.  Of the three, the bibiM. Wells disappointed mightily — a relatively small dish of rice + seafood + veggies + bibimbop sauce, an incredibly small portion of food with not a whole lot of flavor.  Unclear why this was in the ‘big dishes’ section when it would barely feed one moderately hungry person.  But the Wagyu beef made up for that in spaces — lots and lots of tongue, super-tender and not at all uh … tongue-like.    Still hungry, we ordered the Shrimp Chicken, basically a mostly-deboned roasted chicken with a shrimp stuffing that brought out the umami-lovers in all of us.  An unexpected, slightly random delight. 

We ended the meal with one slice of banana cream pie — that was basically all we could eat after the preceding madness.   The guys at the other end of our communal table, who had squeezed four people into a three-person spot, had also stuffed themselves silly, ordering bottle upon bottle of nice wine and offering their server and the owners glasses of wine to toast along with them.   Everyone in the place was in a celebratory mood, and this was just the 6pm seating — there would be two more seatings before the night was over.   I’m not sure what it is about M. Wells that invites such ridiculous bacchanalia-esqueness, but my god, while I’m sad that the restaurant is closing, I’m sort of thankful that I’ll have a little bit of time to recharge, burn off the excess calories, and get back into proper banquet-eating-mode before it opens in its new location, wherever and whenever that may be. 
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So I don’t know what took me so long to try Cong Ly, the Vietnamese place on Hester near Chystie Street.  Maybe it was the deep-seated suspicion that all Vietnamese places in Manhattan would be terrible; maybe it was the fact that the last three or four meals I’d had at Vietnamese restaurants made me a little ill.  Maybe it was because, quite frankly, I’m not the biggest pho fan, and that’s what Cong Ly is known for.  So yeah, it basically took two white  guys New York Jews from the local (love you, Tony and Mitch! It’s not that I thought you were white, just uh … whiter than me?) to tell me that I’d been missing out on the best Vietnamese food on the island, before I finally made my way there this weekend.

First thing’s first:  we didn’t order the pho, which was probably not the best way to go about our first time at a pho joint.  And, of the three things J and I ordered — the bun bo hue, cha gio, and cary ga — the first two were fairly unspectacular.  This is what bun bo hue should look like.  It should be heady, unctuous, with a slick of hot oil and a deep, dark, murky brothy.  The one at Cong Ly was not bad, but if you can see from the photo above, it just wasn’t very complex; it got the job done, but in a somewhat timid way.  The cha gio — spring rolls — were bland, and the wrapping was not of the variety I’m used to (entirely different brand or flour, maybe?  unclear); more damningly, despite being crispy, the rolls were only barely golden in color, as if they hadn’t been fried enough.  It was an odd thing.  So yeah, no to the bun bo hue and the cha gio. 

But!  Cong Ly has an entire section — to be sure, only four entries deep — devoted to cary ga, or chicken curry.  And the four options in that category were simply curry over rice, vermicelli, rice noodle, or egg noodle, so it’s not like there were four different kinds of chicken curry.  But still — an entire cary ga section boded well, no?  So we ordered a bowl of it, asking for only a toasted baguette on the side; this is how I often had it growing up, back when my maternal grandmother was alive and would cook cary ga at least once a week.  It is her cary ga that I think about, often and lovingly, as the exemplar of the dish; the idea of it is what keeps me eating mediocre Vietnamese food in Chinatown, as a quickfix attempt to cure my occasional homesickness.  And while I know that everything will disappoint when you’ve got a late grandma’s dish on the brain, I keep holding out that there’s a kitchen east of the Mississippi that can at least approximate it. 

And, well, yeah.  Cong Ly fucking rocks the cary ga.  It was great — a little bit oily, with a bit of spiciness, and with a great neon orange glow.  The chicken pieces were a little skimpy on meat, but no matter — I just tore apart the baguette and dipped it into the curry with abandon.  This isn’t a coconut milk-heavy curry; though there is some of the c-milk in there, this is more about the lemongrass + curry powder + oil combination.   Wasn’t quite like being home again, but it’s the closest I’ve come in a long while. 

So while a couple of the dishes disappointed, I’ll totally be back soon, to test out the pho, and to order another bowl of the curry.  Sorry it’s taken me so long to find you, Cong Ly.   The white guys Jews totally speak the truth. 

[Oh, and the top photo?  No idea.  It’s like the Leica decided to pull a Lomo and produce an inexplicable light leak.   That, or the camera was anticipating the bowl of neon curry that was about to hit the table.]

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