A New Taiwanese Restaurant Spotlights Pig-Ear Chips and Tomato Granita. It's a Must-Try.
It comes from Tony Inn, a Taiwan-born Queens kid with a 25-year career, mostly in high-end Japanese restaurants like Morimoto and Masa. Had it not been for the pandemic, he'd be helping run Suzuki, the namesake restaurant of New York sushi legend — and his mentor — Toshio Suzuki. (The restaurant closed during the pandemic.)
Instead, he's fired up his own spot, which marries refined techniques with the Taiwanese dishes he grew up eating at home — cooked for him through generations by his great-grandma down to his mom. 'I want to bring Taiwanese food to a higher standard of what I think it should be from a chef perspective,' said Inn.
It plays out in the food, with techniques like a Chinese medicinal version of sachet d'épices and high-quality ingredients, such as heritage pork for the sausage he makes in the restaurant. As for decor, the 55-seat dining room is outfitted with leather chairs, ceramic plateware, and linen napkins. 'I put in half a mil in here just for decoration,' he said.
The food menu features a mix of 21 small and large shareable plates. Many dishes are excellent, so here's how to order them by occasion. Dining solo
The iconic Taiwanese beef noodle soup ($25) is a full meal: vegetables, beef, carbs, and broth. That broth — from roasted bones and herbs — contains so much collagen, any leftovers gel in the fridge so you can definitely skip your collagen powder for the day. Big chunks of tender, marbled beef are nestled inside the tangle of chewy noodles. Anyone who's usually left wanting more tendon after finishing a beef noodle soup won't here. Plus, the tendon pieces are very soft. Vegetables like bok choy, pickled mustard greens, and carrots balance things out.
JaBä is still waiting on its liquor license, but it offers refreshing beverages like sarsaparilla soda (it's like a clean, herbal Dr. Pepper) and wintermelon spritz. Dinner for two
Rich and stewy with minced fatty pork, the lo ba beng ($18) — braised pork over rice — balances well with the garlic cucumbers ($14) so this pairing is a must. Spice-infused lard slicks up the rice and adds notes of licorice and cinnamon. The fried tofu and jammy egg add savoriness while the pickled red cucumbers and yellow daikon add some fresh crunch and tanginess — along with that cold cucumber salad.
Imagine pig-ear potato chips. While the draw to pig ears is often their chewiness, Inn has dialed up the crispiness of the pig ears ($17) so much they crack into little pieces — they're so thinly sliced. The shiso-flavored cucumber provides a nice counterpoint.
For dessert, order the sweet and savory tomato granita ($14). 'Yes, tomato is a dessert,' Inn states in his menu. (Koreans look at it this way, too; I grew up on sugar-dusted tomatoes plucked from my family garden.) The taste evolves in your mouth: shreds of ginger; sweet, tangy pops of plum; light, savory soy sauce-laced broth.
Three- four- or more-tops
The sausage ($15) Inn makes at the restaurant is densely meaty, sweetly lacquered, and nicely charred. The raw garlic slices give a nice, sharp kick.
If you're a fan of mochi textures and bamboo flavors, get the bawan ($12). Known as a crystal meatball, it's served as flat slivers of jiggly, translucent starch studded with mushrooms, pork, pickled bamboo, and a sweet orange-hued chile sauce in a bowl.
Move on to the seafood portion of the menu. The cured whole mackerel ($44) is delightfully soft yet meaty, salty but not briny; he employs Japanese techniques to minimize fishy flavors. Pockets of miso mayo are subtly threaded into the mackerel. The grilled lemon is a nice touch, complementing it with a smoky tanginess.
Big, meaty, and firm with clean flavor, razor clams stand in for the clams with basil dish ($36). The cooks then do almost all of the work of separating the meat from the shell so you don't have to wrestle with it. Slices of red chiles punctuate the dish with spicy notes that build as you go through the dish.
For dessert, the Taiwanese shaved ice ($16) is very sweet and decadent, owing to the condensed milk, a quenelle of mascarpone cream, and what looks like oozing strings of dulce de leche. Grapes add pops of freshness.
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Boston Globe
a day ago
- Boston Globe
‘How can this be happening?' The coincidence that put my family trauma in a new light.
Frankly, I was happy to put Boston behind me. My childhood was miserable, filled with trauma. I never wanted to return to this place, except perhaps for holidays or funerals. Or so I thought. I had received a job offer from The Boston Globe, a paper I long idolized, and just had to take it. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up The Facebook invite was from Kellie, a person who wasn't quite a friend in high school. But we got along — I recall we danced a bit on stage when we performed in our high school musical. 'Who would you like to invite?' Kellie asked. Good question. I didn't really keep in touch with anyone. But I was Facebook friends with several people like Kellie, classmates who were friendly acquaintances but people I never spent time with outside of school. When you're a kid and struggling, you think you're the only one who's struggling. Trauma is not something people easily speak about, especially in high school where the number one goal is conformity. You sit in a classroom and stare at the other kids and wonder what it might be like to be normal. So, it was shocking to see them at the cookout now as adults, stumbling through life just as I was. Not everyone I invited could make it. A few weeks later, I received a Facebook message from someone I'll call Madeline for the purposes of this story. 'Hey Tom, sorry I missed your welcome back party! I was away. Wondering if you would like to come have dinner sometime. ... I live in Watertown with my husband and kids. I think you'd like my husband. He's nice.' 'Sure,' I replied. 'That's nice of you. What's your address?' Her response froze me. For several seconds, I stared blankly at the number and street name. No. That's not possible. Good and bad reality My parents emigrated from China to Boston in the 1950s. They started a laundry business before Dad went to work for New England Telephone Company. He would sit on a bench and assemble parts into landline telephones. Like many Chinese families, they wanted desperately to have a son, which proved difficult for them. By the time I was born in 1977, Dad was already 49 years old and father to four daughters. No one would ever mistake us for the Brady Bunch. Dad was an angry, abusive man who frequently unleashed his verbal and physical wrath on his wife and daughters. He never laid a hand on me, though he was psychologically abusive. Mom suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. She could be loving and caring in one moment and then suddenly attack me with a ruler or Wiffle ball bat for the tiniest of infractions. She heard voices and insisted that the neighbors were using a machine to monitor our thoughts. My eldest sister, whom I'll call Susan, started to lose her grip on reality in her late teens and was also diagnosed with schizophrenia. She would chase me throughout the house with a pair of scissors, threatening to castrate me. She would frequently try to climb into bed with me. I coped with the chaos the same way many trauma victims deal with such things: I buried it deep inside me. I started to compartmentalize reality. There was the 'good reality,' the one where I hung out with friends, crushed on a girl, acted in high school plays, and wrote for the town newspaper. The world in which I exercised a degree of control and provided my life with some measure of hope and meaning. And then there was the 'bad reality' of the horror and fear that I endured at home. The reality that still terrifies me. I vowed to keep these realities apart. Not just out of self-preservation but also out of fear that my bad reality would somehow pollute or 'infect' my good reality. That's why I rarely spoke about my parents or siblings or why I freaked out when someone I knew saw me in public with them. No, these two realities must never meet. 'What else was I missing?' After high school, I went to college and tried not to look back. Over the next 25 years, I lived and worked in New York, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, and San Francisco. One of my sisters died from cancer in 2003, and Dad passed away three years ago. Both times, I kept my distance, though before my dad died I did return home once to help my parents move into a more senior-friendly house located just down the road from my childhood home in Watertown. Susan's life had rapidly deteriorated. She could no longer hold a job or live on her own. So she moved back in with my parents in their new home. Unfortunately, Susan's schizophrenia started to mirror Mom's. Susan thought the neighbors were out to get her. She accused them of trying to break into the house and prank-calling us. She convinced my mom to change phone numbers and to install a home alarm system. She even called the police on the neighbors. Yet my view on Susan gradually softened. Thanks to some difficult therapy and introspection, I began to see Susan as less of a monster who terrorized me and more of a human who was also a victim of my father's abuse. Once, when our sister was dying from cancer, Susan sent her a note that read: 'I'm sorry that you're sick. I would help you but as you know I'm not feeling really well myself.' The note stunned me. I didn't know Susan was even capable of such compassion, such clarity of thought. She had gotten so bad that I had doubted she could even read and write anymore. What else was I missing? What would have happened if Susan hadn't been abused? If she had received the care and treatment she needed? What kind of big sister would she have been? Would we even be pals? My thoughts were racing. I started to process everything by writing about mental health and familial abuse on social media. 'Over the years, I came to accept she had an awful illness and was also physically and sexually abused,' I wrote on Facebook on Oct. 16, 2022. 'I'm also sorry that she suffered so much in her life and that her sickness produced so much collateral damage.' My posts found a wide and compassionate audience. 'The fact that you came to understand how sick she was shows how you've grown in your awareness and understanding,' one friend wrote. 'It does not make your pain any less. But you are managing.' Said another: 'We grow through our painful experiences, but also through the experiences of others willing to share.' The things that bind us together When people learned I was returning to the Boston area, they assumed the reason was family. 'No,' I said. 'I'm here for the job. That's all.' That wasn't quite true. I wondered how Boston would look to me as a middle-aged man rather than as an angry, emotionally volatile 17-year-old. The dinner invitation from Madeline came as a surprise. For one thing, I was shocked that she had moved back to Watertown. Madeline, her older sister, and I had performed in the same high school plays. In fact, I had a major crush on her sister. That was a major part of the 'good reality' that I so desperately tried to protect from the 'bad.' And later, Madeline had tried to pursue a career in acting. She attended theater schools and auditioned for movie and television roles. I imagined her in New York or Los Angeles maybe. But yet here she was, married and raising a family in Watertown. But until I received her dinner invite, I didn't know exactly where. As it turned out, Madeline lives right next door to Mom and Susan. Could it be that Madeline and her family were the same neighbors my sister fixated on? The people she called the cops on? During the dinner, I tried to read Madeline and her husband, whom I'll call Greg, for some clues about whether she knew that my mom and sister lived next door. But they gave no indication of that. I started to think it wasn't them. I decided to find out. 'Hey, this is pretty weird,' I said. 'But did you know you live next door to my mom and sister?' Greg's face changed color. Madeline stopped eating. Silence. OMG. They were the neighbors. No, they didn't know it was my family. And yes, my sister called the cops on them. Three times. She accused them of racism. The cops had taken Susan's complaints seriously. Each time the police arrived they brought some kind of crisis interventionist/social worker to teach Madeline and Greg how not to be racist. 'I am not racist!' Madeline insisted to me. No matter how hard Madeline and Greg tried to convince Susan, she heard something different. 'First of all, I am so sorry," I said, mortified. 'Secondly, it's better that you do not say anything to her. No matter your intentions. She is just very sick.' 'I know,' Madeline said. 'At first, we were very upset. But then I started to read the social media posts of this guy I knew, who wrote on Facebook about mental illness and his family. He taught me compassion toward people who were struggling like this.' Who was this guy? 'You,' Madeline said. The world grew exponentially smaller. Let me get this straight: Madeline, an acquaintance with whom I had not spoken in 30 years, read my social media posts about mental health, which allowed her to better understand the actions of her ill neighbor, who turned out to be my sister . So in a sense, I was paying it forward to myself when I wrote those posts. To this day, I wrestle with what happened. I don't believe in coincidences. Everything has a reason. What was I supposed to take from all of this? I concluded that I had been mistaken to draw a distinction between 'good' and 'bad' reality. There is just reality. We view our lives holistically if we want to heal. We have to confront past trauma and reconcile it with our present and future. The bad stuff in my life occurred simultaneously with the good stuff. It's true that my sister chased me with scissors. It's equally true that I happily performed plays with Madeline and her sister. And somehow the universe saw fit to remind us that life can be filled with mysterious little coincidences that seem unrelated but ultimately bind us together. The question is whether you want to see the big picture.
UPI
2 days ago
- UPI
New memorial project brings Britain's bloodiest Korean War battle to life
SEOUL, July 25 (UPI) -- On the site of one of the Korean War's most ferocious battles, a pioneering hybrid online/offline tour was launched Friday to commemorate the British army's stand at the Battle of the Imjin River. "Stand in the Bootprints of Heroes," produced by the Seoul-based non-profit British Korean War Memorial Committee, features 11 QR-coded signs located at key sites around the battlefield in Paju, some 25 miles north of Seoul. The codes link to a series of 19 video episodes detailing the events of the three-day battle with narration, music, photographs, paintings and maps. The project's combination of real-world location markers with multimedia storytelling "brings history to life in a way that is immersive, respectful and accessible to all," Commodore Andy Lamb, Britain's defense attache in Seoul, said at a launch event held at the British Embassy in Seoul on Friday. "It is helping people connect with the past without altering the landscape itself," Lamb, who serves as the president of the BKWMC, said. The April 1951 battle came during the largest Chinese offensive of the Korean War and is remembered for the heroism of the British 29th Infantry Brigade, particularly the last stand of the Gloster Battalion. British and U.N. forces held off the Chinese 63rd Army in an effort to delay their advance toward Seoul. On April 25, the heavily outnumbered U.N. troops were forced to withdraw from their positions, but the Gloster Battalion was surrounded and fought valiantly until being overrun. The British held the key breakthrough point long enough to blunt the Chinese offensive and help U.N. forces maintain control of Seoul. With over 1,000 casualties, the Battle of the Imjin River remains Britain's bloodiest action since World War II. The 1950-53 Korean War left millions dead, including some 160,000 South Korean soldiers and more than 36,000 U.S. soldiers. Britain provided the second-largest contingent to the combined United Nations Command -- over 81,000 troops -- and saw 1,078 killed and 2,674 wounded. Despite the scope of the devastation, the Korean conflict has long been overshadowed in the West's historical memory, lost between World War II and the Vietnam War -- a situation the team behind the Imjin River project is hoping to help rectify. "It is widely recognized as the 'Forgotten War,' and this work tries to address that," Lamb told UPI. "We're trying to bridge together commemoration and education. As the number of veterans reduces and many of them come to the end of their lives, it's important that we find new ways to commemorate and inform." Younger Koreans also have much to learn about the history of the battles fought right in the backyard, said Lee Myung Hee, a Paju city official who attended the opening ceremony. Lee told UPI that the city is planning to promote the Imjin River project and is organizing a tour for students in October. "This project is a good opportunity for the younger generations, not only in Paju, but nationwide, to understand and remember what the veterans did during the Korean War," she said. "Standing in the Bootprints of Heroes" is the second project by the British Korean War Memorial Committee, which receives its funding from local business sponsors and private donations. The group installed a series of informative panels last year at Paju's Gloster Hill Memorial Park and is considering future expansions for the Imjin River site, including augmented-reality features and physical installations. A new project commemorating the 1951 Battle of Happy Valley in Goyang is also being discussed, organizers said. British Ambassador to South Korea Colin Crooks said in remarks at the launch event that the Imjin River tour is an innovative way to keep the stories of Korean War veterans alive. "One of the great privileges of being ambassador is helping to mark the British contribution to the Korean War," Crooks said. "As the number of living veterans declines, our duty to preserve their legacy becomes more urgent."
Eater
2 days ago
- Eater
The Easiest Way to Add Whimsy to Your Tablescape Is Through Chopstick Rests
Verdant green okra, golden brown croissants, glossy dango, roasted fish: No, this isn't a farmer's market or a boulangerie or a Japanese night market or a themeless dinner party; it's a peek into Namiko Hirasawa Chen's kitchen drawer, dedicated to her meticulously organized collection of hashi oki, or chopstick rests. 'I've liked miniature hashi okis since my childhood,' says Chen. 'I've been collecting them since college and my mom has a beautiful collection. Whenever we travel in Japan on family trips, we always stop by a local ceramic store to buy hashi oki.' Chen's collection, collected over nearly 30 years of cooking and traveling back and forth to Japan, is as vast as it is eclectic, a summation of her journey as the cook behind JustOneCookbook, the internet's largest English-language Japanese cooking site. It's also an inheritance, in more ways than one, from her mother — the original hashi oki collector in the family. If you peruse the hundreds of recipes that Chen has tablescaped on her website, you'll notice her photos include pieces from her collection — some of which she found, some she inherited from her mother — from the tiny ceramic eggplant she staged for her miso-glazed eggplant recipe to the shiitake mushroom hashi oki seen in her sukiyakidon recipe. For Chen, hashi okis are an unsung yet essential supporting player in Japanese tablescaping, and an easy, affordable, and meaningful way for hosts to elevate their dining tables. 'I think it's one of the most inexpensive investments out of all of the tableware that people can make,' Chen explains. While statement tableware pieces can run a pretty penny, hashi okis are remarkably affordable and approachable, with many priced around $10 in the United States — and even less in Japan, due to favorable exchange rates. 'Ever since I started blogging, I'm always thinking about how I can match my hashi oki with the dish based on the color, season, or food,' Chen says. 'It's a small thing that makes a huge difference in the presentation of a meal.' While the cutlery rests you see in restaurants and food editorial spreads typically adopt a sterile, brutalist aesthetic designed with function and minimalism in mind, hashi okis are, in contrast, delightfully whimsical. They are usually handmade by craftsmen in Japan and are endlessly varied in form, function, setting and origin. Occasionally, they are maximalist for the sake of being maximalist, despite serving a simple, sanitary function: to hold the tips of your used chopsticks. In an era of laissez-faire, anything-goes tablescaping, hashi okis are a perfect outlet for self-expression and experimentation. For the most part, Chen likes to match her hashi okis with the ingredients in the dishes she makes, but she also likes mixing it up, letting her intuition guide her. Namiko Hirasawa Chen 'Hashi okis are definitely necessary for a proper set up,' Chen says. 'I pick things that bring me joy. For summer, I'll use a hashi oki shaped like a fan or made of clear glass, but if I'm serving a vegetable-based dish, I'll use a vegetable hashi oki.' Her absolute favorites are hashi okis shaped like Mount Fuji. Chen's husband and business partner, Shen Chen, has his own preference. 'My favorite is the iron tea kettle hashi oki, the tetsubin, that can match a set-up that involves tea,' he says. 'There's an indescribable happiness that comes with matching hashi oki with a meal. Hashi oki really completes the story of the meal.' While hashi okis can be an endless outlet for creative tablescaping, there are limits towhat constitutes a traditional Japanese tablescape, Chen says. For example, your chopsticks and hashi oki should never be positioned vertically in your set-up ('That's a big no no,' says Chen) but instead placed 'between yourself and the plate horizontally.' Part of this is etiquette ('it's rude to point the dirty tips of your chopstick to someone else,' Chen explains) and context ('When chopsticks are vertical, it's used for a funeral in Japan'), but there's also a deeper history at play, one that dates back to hashi oki's origins as a ceremonial tool in 7th century Japan. Long before they arrived on dining room tables, chopstick rests were originally used by members of the clergy of Shinto shrines as a way to maintain the purity of their chopsticks when offering sacred food to the gods. Called mimikaware (耳土器), these clay rests were unglazed and, like their namesake, ear-shaped, and used in a horizontal orientation with chopsticks to signify a sacred boundary between the divine realm of nature and the impure human world. While mimikaware evolved and in the Heian period became hashi oki for aristocrats and the imperial family, this sensibility lived on as chopstick rests arrived at dining tables for the general public during the Meiji period with the introduction of western-style communal dining to Japan. Today, when Japanese people say 'itadakimasu' before a meal and lift their chopsticks from their hashi oki, they invoke a piece of this history, breaking a symbolic barrier with the impure to consume a sacred gift from the divine: food. It's this ethos — that dining and table settings are deeply intentional acts, loaded with history, meaning, and, yes, beauty — that Chen inherited from her mother, and one that she hopes to impart to diners looking to shape their own tablescapes with hashi oki, whether it's found online or at tableware stores across Japan. This sensibility is a large part of the reason why hashi okis are a prominent featured category on the Chens' tableware store, JOC Goods, which they launched last September after visiting 15 kilns across Japan. The process of starting the business, along with a trip they made to kilns in the Aichi prefecture last February, furthered their appreciation for the craftsmanship and deep history behind something as simple and small as a hashi oki. Jason Leung for Just One Cookbook 'In Japan, there are different regions and different regions have different clay, which leads to different styles of ceramics and craftsmanship,' explains Chen. 'We want people to know that when you see hashi oki, someone put care into making this, forming the clay, painting it, glazing it, baking it in the kiln, and inspecting it. So much is put into it compared to something that is mass produced.' If you're looking to buy hashi oki of your own, Chen recommends collecting individual pieces slowly over time, whether that be on your travels or browsing online. She believes that intentionality is key to the joy of hashi oki, and that your collection should reflect your personal tastes and experiences. 'I always pick things I feel connected to,' she says. 'If you have hashi oki you like, just using that every day, just stopping and looking at it, that can give you so much joy.' For the Chens, each hashi oki is a memory and a place; a reminder to pause, slow down, and appreciate the sacred in everyday life, whether that be a meal or a trip. There's the rustic, flat lotus root hashi oki they bought during an eye-opening 2023 trip to the Imbe township in the Okayama prefecture, the birthplace of the millennium-old craft of Bizen pottery known for its earthy red-brown tone and texture. There are the countless variations of ceramic hashi okis that they've found in stores across the Japanese countryside on summer family trips. And then, there are the hashi okis that started it all: the ones that Chen grew up setting on the table for her mother and carried with her halfway across the world in suitcases to the United States, where they now sit in her kitchen drawer, reminding her of how far she's come. Dining In With Eater at Home Highlighting the people, products, and trends inspiring how we cook now Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
