Eating In Translation

St. Francis of Assisi Korean Bazaar

Ppopgi is an old-fashioned Korean treat that's traditionally served with a challenge: Leave the pressed-in design intact while removing the surrounding candy, and you earn another ppopgi. For the scale modelers among you, however, the task is not so simple as trimming away flash with an X-Acto knife. Your allowable tools — teeth, tongue, and lips— are much less precise, and your subject — a confection made only from caramelized sugar and baking soda — is much more brittle.

A design with few abrupt contours, such as a heart or a star, gives you a fighting chance. But as for this airplane, which presents so many twists and turns, it's an entirely different kind of flying, altogether.

St. Francis of Assisi Korean Bazaar
Broadway between 31st and 32nd Sts., Manhattan
www.StFrancisNYC.org/2015/06/17th-annual-korean-bazaar
(The 2015 bazaar was held on June 21)

Gereja Bethany Indonesian Food Bazaar

The ingredients of rujak, a mixed fruit-and-vegetable salad, are hard to distinguish once they've all been dressed in thick brown sauce. Even au naturel, a few may be unfamiliar.

YourPanadas

Fried empanadas, one filled with spicy mac and cheese, one filled with red velvet cake and decorated with cream cheese icing.

YourPanadas
888-627-3336
www.YourPanadas.com
Appearing in rotation at Vendy Plaza at La Marqueta, 1616 Park Ave. (at 115th St.), Manhattan
www.VendyAwards. StreetVendor.org/plaza
Sunday afternoons through September 6

The Economy of Food

Several works from this exhibition, the third in a two-year series of ten under the collective title Food Systems, Surroundings & Sensibilities. Shown: "59 cents" (Project 59, 2015), which name-checks a frequently recurring price for food and farm produce; "Electrolux" (Lisa Hein and Bob Seng, 1993), a vacuum-bag cornucopia whose "fruit" has been shaped from dirt; "Reflections in Tea" (Michele Brody, 2007-current), stained filters annotated by the patrons of the artist's mobile teahouse.

The Economy of Food
Bronx River Art Center's temporary gallery space, 305 East 140th St. (Third-Alexander Aves.), Mott Haven, Bronx
www.BronxRiverArt.org/gallery-archive.cfm?recordID=74
(The exhibition was on display June 3-20, 2015)

Safari

To my knowledge Safari is the only Somali restaurant in New York City. It may well be the first: Although Yemen & Somalia Restaurant operated on this very West Harlem block in the 1990s, Robert Sietsema noted at the time that the proprietors were Yemeni; the chow he described seemed Yemeni, too. At this family-run business, by contrast, the two cousins I spoke with were born in the southern Somali port city of Kismaayo (kiss-My-oh), namesake of my Kismaayo chicken suqaar (soo-Car, "diced"; $13). The spicing of the chicken was less pointed than its ruddy hue would suggest; a pale green housemade hot sauce picked up the slack.

Over many centuries, Somalia's long East African coastline has opened the country to many commercial and culinary influences. "Suqaar," for example, is Arabic, with Somali one of the country's two official languages; order the beef suqaar, however, and you'll find it infused with the Ethiopian spice mitmita. For my accompaniment I chose basmati rice, whose aroma and elaborate decoration seemed almost Persian, but I might easily have been swayed to order the humbler-looking chapati. (A complimentary round of that Indian flatbread, once it had cooled to the touch, proved to be thin and light yet many-layered.) A third starch option, spaghetti in a cream-based basil-and-rosemary sauce — a legacy of Italian occupation — must await a return visit.

Safari soft-opened in May. The restaurant, which keeps halal (most Somalis are adherents of Sunni Islam), is open during the month of Ramadan from 5:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. However, even though food is served by light of day, just as at Midtown's many halal carts, long-cooked dishes such as hilib ari, roasted goat, may be ready only at sunset, when observant Muslims break their fast. Safari's grand opening, and earlier dining-room hours, are planned to coincide with or shortly follow this year's Ramadan-ending celebration of Eid al-Fitr. This begins, in North America, on the evening of Friday, July 17.

H/T Ethnojunkie (via private communication)

Safari
219 West 116th St. (Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd.-Frederick Douglass Blvd.), Manhattan
646-964-4252
www.Facebook.com/pages/Safari-NYC/473631086125538

Moegyo Burmese Food Fair

Noni, one of many vernacular names for Morinda citrifolia, is native to Indonesia and Australia and naturalized throughout the tropics. The fruit has many applications in traditional Pacific Islander medicine (and, purportedly, in contemporary medicine as well), and in Burma the unripe fruit may be cooked in curries or eaten raw with salt. The ripe fruit, however, is fetid and considered fit only for the local fauna.

For culinary uses, the leaves are more highly regarded. Young, tender leaves are added to stir-fries, while mature leaves — this one, when unfolded, was a foot long and half again as wide — are used as wrappers during cooking. When raw, the leaves are bright green; during cooking, they add a slightly bitter flavor to dishes such as this fish stew while darkening to the greenish-black color of kombu. The texture, too, is similar to that of kelp, I found after a nibble, and then another. I'd read that older leaves are too bitter to be eaten themselves, but a dressing of Burmese fish stew works wonders.

This annual fundraiser to benefit humanitarian efforts in Myanmar, first held in 2008, seems to get busier every year. For the 2015 event I arrived a half-hour before the scheduled starting time and found the joint already jumping. Given the paucity of Burmese chow in New York, my usual plan of action is to immediately snag a few take-home snacks, like the noni-leaf-wrapped fish stew, to help stretch out the experience of the food fair beyond a single afternoon. Shown below, from previous events: dried river fish, fried tamarind leaves with dried shrimp, coconut palm sugar candy, and sweet-sour roselle buds jam. The noni leaves were gathered in a Key West backyard; most of the other items, I believe, were shepherded from abroad.

For many more photos from multiple years of Burmese food fairs held by the Moegyo (Moe-joe) Humanitarian Foundation, see the slideshow.

Moegyo Burmese Food Fair
Aviation High School, 45-30 36th St., Long Island City, Queens
www.Moegyo.org
(The 2015 food fair was held on June 14)

On & On Restaurant

(This venue is closed.) It's no Snickers: There's little crunch in a red date and peanut zongzi ($2). When these leaf-wrapped glutinous rice dumplings are boiled, the peanuts inside hold their shape but soften considerably. As for the dates, also known as jujubes, they're picked when they have the size and firmness of crabapples and a color that may be pale green, brown, or some mottled combination of the two.

However, hongzao — red dates or, literally, red jujubes — shrivel and soften as they redden. They sweeten a bit, too, though only within the customary range of traditional Chinese desserts. And inside a boiled zongzi, they fall to pieces.

On & On Restaurant
4046 Main St. (40th Rd.-41st Ave.), Flushing, Queens
718-359-6655
www.Facebook.com/pages/onon-Restaurant-%E6%97%BA%E6%97%BA%E9%96%A3/266872526685456

La Nueva Ambateñita

Be they freshly flipped parathas or à la minute obleas, it's fun to watch your food being made, by and large. When the setting is right you may even be able to customize your order — a little less of this, a little more of that.

Raw intestines, at least for me, were far less appealing until the grill had done its work. I'd been enticed into an order by the enthusiasm of another fellow and the sight of his bowl, to which mine ($10) — filled out with corn, beans, chunks of potato, and a slice of fat sausage in which potato was prominent — ultimately bore a likeness. As for the intestine, from some other Ecuadorian vendors I've found it almost inedibly rubbery; here the sliced rounds were lightly charred and enticingly chewy. The gusto of that previous fellow was confirmed by my own.

La Nueva Ambateñita
39-24 108th St. (at Roosevelt Ave.), Corona, Queens
(Sidewalk grill, shown here, in warmer weather only)
718-478-2215

Fruit stand

Even in the Dominican Republic, land of the backyard mango tree, the golden fruits from the southern city of Baní are highly regarded. The rich coloring of these mangos Banilejos ($1 each) intimates just how ripe and sweet they are — not merely dulce but "super dulce," according to the handwritten note at far left, on the edge of the box. "De chupar" introduces an even more primal appeal: Since the flesh of these mangos is too soft and moist to be cleanly sliced, the preferred approach is to peel and then "suck" them.

Fruit stand
Roosevelt Ave. near the northwest corner with 108th St., Corona, Queens

Pyza

Though I make good-faith efforts to eat my greens, sometimes I'm thwarted by culinary traditions that tend to offer few options. The menu at this Polish dining hall includes a half-dozen salads; the others feature carrots, red cabbage, sauerkraut, cole slaw, and beets. The last salad on the list was the most promising choice, but even for cucumbers mine were unusually pale. The greenest thing in sight, as it happened, was the garnish on a stiff wad of mashed potatoes and the comparatively tender chunks of tongue in horseradish sauce ($7.50).

On this weekday afternoon, Pyza's back room was dark; many of the tables in the front room were taken by solo diners, like me, oriented toward a TV screen mounted high at one end. At casual restaurants such as this that offer cuisine from back home, television programming from back home is a common amenity. During one lunch at Chipichape Bakery, in Sunnyside, I could follow along with the Colombian-accented Spanish; here, the newscast was in a language I neither speak nor read. Keeping up with current events, however, provides more context for televised news than you might think. When the president of a certain soccer federation took his leave amid a corruption scandal, I learned it first from the headline SZEF FIFA REZYGNUJE.

Pyza
118 Nassau Ave. (Eckford St.-McGuinness Blvd.), Greenpoint, Brooklyn
718-349-8829