Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

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Daniel Boulud on Beijing, Lotus Leaves & Duck A La Presse


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Daniel Boulud may like the potential of doing business in Beijing, but that doesn’t mean he likes Beijing.

Speaking via Skype to a small audience in Singapore Tuesday night from his home in New York City, where he was just getting his day started, Boulud was surprisingly candid about his thoughts on Beijing for a man who’d recently opened a restaurant in China’s capital. (Maison Boulud à Pékin opened in July, 2008.)

Boulud, who was dialling in to kick off the premiere of a reality TV-style show he’d done for the Asian Food Channel, recalled how he had flown to Singapore from Beijing during his trip last year.

“Coming from Beijing, I tell you, Singapore felt good — Singapore was a little more civilized,” he said, noting that one of the first things he did after getting off the plane was get a haircut. “I didn’t trust anyone in Beijing to cut my hair.”

Boulud, dressed in his chef’s whites and flanked with a portrait of himself hoisting a glass, then breezed on to close with a nugget, noting that he hoped to open a restaurant in Singapore. (A public relations person for Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands Resort & Casino was perched in the audience. Singapore’s first casinos, which are still under construction, have been courting high-end chefs to open in their establishments.)

Such frankness, unfortunately, was a little less apparent in the reality show, “One Night in Singapore — Daniel Boulud,” which chronicled the chef’s first trip to Singapore and his process of putting together a seven-course meal for a group of 50 diners.

The intention to showcase tension is there, of course — the show kicks off with a dramatic voiceover heavy with Discovery Channel gravitas that notes the obstacles Boulud has to overcome to make his dinner a success: “high humidity … a kitchen that is too far removed from the main dining area.” But Boulud is too skilled a chef for much of that to be believable.

Let’s face it, the man could probably toss together a seven-course meal with little problem if he were air-dropped into the middle of a desert and had one hand tied behind his back.

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Katsuhama: Pork Cutlets, Gussied Up


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There are few dishes more satisfying than a good pork katsu — a deep-fried cutlet that’s lightly breaded and perfectly crispy on the outside, tender on the inside and all the better if it’s drowned in sweet Japanese curry or just served plain with a side of Tonkatsu sauce, sweet and thick.

Given that I’ll order pork katsu whenever I see it on a menu, I’ve sampled it in restaurants and hole-in-the-wall dives all over Manhattan and Asia.

And I’ve pretty much always had good experiences with the dish — well, that was true anyway, until, I went to the new Katsuhama on West 55th Street.

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At wd-50: The French, They Came


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Walking into wd-50 early Monday evening, you couldn’t help but notice the distinct stillness.

It felt almost like entering a temple — the air was plump with reverence, laced with frissons of anticipation.

The dinner about to happen wasn’t just any dinner, after all — Michel Bras, one of France’s most highly regarded chefs, was manning the kitchen for just one night. And New Yorkers had been working themselves up into a lather over trying to get in.

Having had the good fortune of seeing the announcement of this dinner the moment Eater.com posted it (and also being in possession of fast fingers and a cellphone nearby), there we were, quietly filing into the dining room — hungry.

The meal that lay before us was a nine-course vegetarian tasting menu. Bras, a three-star Michelin chef, has made his name on dishes with inventive treatments and combinations of ingredients — powdered fruit, crushed seeds, sprinklings of whole flowers for added flavor — that are carefully orchestrated to taste anything but pedestrian. (It’s also worth noting that Bras, who also has a restaurant in Hokkaido, is also known for dishes that are presented with a tinge of Japanese artistry.)

Now, in his little restaurant overlooking Laguiole, a picturesque town in
the mountains of Aubrac in southern France, fresh fruit and
vegetables that grow wild in the region are the stars of the dishes. In New York, Bras applied the same strategy to his menu — from the moment he arrived three days before, he’d been scouring the city’s greenmarkets to come up with this meal after seeing what produce he could find, according to our waiter. In fact, Luc Dubanchet, one of the organizers of the meal along with three others featuring other French chefs at David Chang’s Momofuku restaurants this month, told the New York Times that Bras said he is “incapable of doing it any other way.”

And so it was that we arrived with open minds and eager stomachs.

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Bar Artisanal: A Big Brunch on a Budget


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Two things in life that I adore: A good brunch and a good deal.

And I like them all the better if I’m able to combine the two. 

Bar Artisanal in Tribeca? It delivers on both fronts.

The restaurant has gotten some mixed reviews since Terrance Brennan (of Artisanal and Picholine) opened the place in late April — Serious Eats raved about the lamb chops and lamb burger (“a flavor knockout punch”) while the New York Times’ Frank Bruni picked apart the “overpopulated” duck pissaladière (a French pizza) featuring duck liver, gizzard, confit and a duck egg.

But when it comes to brunch, the verdict is a little clearer — the menu is simpler, the food is perfectly decent. And the prices, well, they just can’t be beat, considering what you’re getting.

At $21 for two courses (which could include two main courses) and dessert, you could make off with a $40 meal for about half the price.

Which, suffice to say, is a pretty darn good deal in Manhattan.

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Pho Grand: Almost The Stuff Of Food-Porn Dreams


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The longest relationship I had in the six years I lived in Washington, D.C., involved a man with whom I exchanged just a few dozen words.

Once a week, without fail, I would show up at Pho 75 in Arlington, Virginia, where at the front of the line, I would tell my man how big a table I needed, he would gesture toward a spot and that would be it. (Sometimes, he took orders, which might elicit the occasional “You want Number 15 — large or small?” Exciting stuff, I tell you.)

I went back to Pho 75 every week not because of the guy, of course, but rather the beef noodle soup that they serve, which is consistently the stuff that my most mouthwatering, heart-pounding, bordering-on-porn dreams are made of.

The noodles are always perfectly cooked; the beef lovely and tender. But the broth, oh, that broth. (And the stirrings I feel whenever I think of it.) Made from simmering oxtails, cinnamon, star anise, onions and fennel seeds for hours, that soup is so succulent and hearty it could be a meal all on its own.

In the six years since I left D.C. for New York, I’ve been on a mission to find something comparable — to no avail. Sometimes it was the noodles or the beef that failed to measure up but all too often, the problem lay with the soups — they were bland, too sweet or not sweet enough.

After six years of pho-hopping in New York City, however, I’m happy to report that I’ve finally found a version that’s not bad.

Pho Grand in Manhattan’s Chinatown — it’s almost worth cheating on my D.C. man for. 

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