Tables for Two Tango: Hannah Goldfield's "Lhasa Fresh Food"

Photo by Christaan Felber, from Hannah Goldfield's "Lhasa Fresh Food"

This is the sixth post in my series “Tables for Two Tango,” a celebration of Hannah Goldfield’s and Helen Rosner’s wonderful New Yorker restaurant reviews. Each month I select a favorite piece by one or the other of them and try to say why I like it. Today’s pick is Goldfield’s delightful “Tables for Two: Lhasa Fresh Food” (May 20, 2019). 

I love soup. Two of the best soup descriptions I’ve ever read are in this piece. Lhasa Fresh Food is a Tibetan restaurant in the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, New York City, that serves dumplings, soups, stir-fries, and noodle dishes. Goldfield likes the dumplings and the noodles. But what she really savors are two soups – thenthuk and karsod. She writes,

Better yet is a traditional Tibetan soup called thenthuk, thick with hand-torn wheat noodles—described charmingly on the menu as “not longer than a thumb”—a few strands of glass noodles, bright-green bok-choy leaves, wood-ear mushrooms, translucent triangles of radish, red onion, and your choice of browned lamb, chicken, beef, or pork. Fresh cilantro floats on the surface of the cloudy, rich beef or vegetable broth, which is redolent of ginger, celery, and garlic and carries a subtle heat; the same beautifully balanced flavor profile is at work in a brothless, stir-fried version of the dish.

Of the karsod, she says,

But my favorite dish might be the karsod, another soup. With a putty-pale sheet of lightly oiled dough stretched over the top of the bowl, it resembles an uncooked potpie, a broadcast of blandness. To pierce the surface and access the piping hot broth inside is to be reminded that mild does not necessarily equate to boring. In a version with lamb, the simple, slightly gummy pastry and the clear, fragrant liquid, dotted sparingly with scallion, cilantro, and translucent coins of potato, provide an optimal canvas for the gently gamy flavor of the simmered meat—as humble yet surprising as the restaurant itself. 

What impresses me about these descriptions is their details. These soups may appear simple, but they’re not. Goldfield notes their subtle ingredients: “hand-torn wheat noodles”; “few strands of glass noodles”; “bright-green bok-choy leaves”; “wood-ear mushrooms”; “translucent triangles of radish”; “red onion.” That “clear, fragrant liquid, dotted sparingly with scallion, cilantro, and translucent coins of potato” is pure poetry. I’ve never forgotten it. 

Best of 2020: Photos

Photo by Joseph Michael Lopez, for "April 15, 2020"

Here are my favorite New Yorker photographs of 2020:

1. Joseph Michael Lopez’s photo for “April 15, 2020,” May 4, 2020 (see above).

2. Naila Ruechel’s photo for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: EMP To Go” (November 23, 2020).

3. Dina Litovsky’s photo for Helen Rosner’s “What We’re Buying for the Quarantine” (March 18, 2020).

4. Paolo Pellegrin’s photo for Ben Taub’s “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” (May 18, 2020).

5. Collier Schorr’s photo for Amanda Petrusich’s “Opened Up” (October 19, 2020).

6. Andre D. Wagner’s photo for “April 15, 2020” (May 4, 2020).

7. Caroline Tompkins’ photo for Hannah Goldfield’s “Table for Two: Aquavit” (January 27, 2020).

8. Christaan Felber’s photo for “This Week” (April 27, 2020).

9. Christopher Payne’s photo for his “Vital Vessels” (December 7, 2020).

10. Heami Lee’s photo for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Edy’s Grocer” (December 7, 2020).

August 29, 2016 Issue

This week’s issue contains pieces by two of the magazine’s best writers – Nick Paumgarten and Dana Goodyear. Paumgarten’s “The Country Restaurant” probes the “myths” surrounding Damon Baehrel, a gourmet restaurant in Earlton, New York, that Bloomberg News calls the “most exclusive restaurant in the U.S.” The restaurant is named after its “presiding wizard and host, who serves as forager, farmer, butcher, chef, sous-chef, sommelier, waiter, busboy, dishwasher, and mopper.” One of the “myths” is that the restaurant is booked through 2025. Another is that all the ingredients of the dishes it serves are derived from the “twelve acres of yard, garden, forest, and swamp” on which it’s located. The skeptical nature of the piece is expressed in its tagline: “You can’t get in. It’s booked through 2025. Or is it?”

Reading “The Country Restaurant,” I found myself cheering for Baehrel. I didn’t want him to be unmasked as a fraud. “Betrayal” journalism, in which the writer secures the subject’s trust and then proceeds to write an ugly portrait of him, gives me the creeps. Paumgarten comes close to writing such a piece, but, in the end, after noting all the “bogusness,” seems to side with Baehrel and his “sublime” cooking. He writes,

Later, back outside, as Baehrel led us [Paumgarten and a photographer] around the property and identified plants, my attention wandered, and I thought about my first visit, months before, and a particular dish, the sixth course, which had so engaged my attention that the only surreptitious photo I got of it was of a plate licked clean. It consisted of a small layered cube of wild daylily tuber and wild honey mushrooms—a phyllo of the soil. He’d sliced the tubers thin and soaked the mushrooms in fresh maple sap, then stacked them in more than a dozen fine alternating layers. He then roasted it on a slab of oak wood, dribbled it with grapeseed oil and wild-fennel-frond powder, and added a drizzle of dried milkweed pods cooked in fresh birch sap, which he’d mashed in a stone bowl with some rutabaga starch, and a second drizzle that he called burnt-corn sauce, made from liquefied kernels that he’d scraped off the cob onto a stone, dried, then thinned out with sycamore sap. Somehow I got all this down in the notebook. Beneath it, I’d written, “Sublime.”

Now, down by the road, near the gate, Baehrel guided us alongside his garden beds. In one of them, a single sprig of asparagus rose from the earth. He snapped it off and handed it to me. It tasted like—asparagus.

It’s a great ending. I confess I’ve read that last bit about the asparagus numerous times. What does it mean? It could mean that Paumgarten was relieved to find at least one thing at Damon Baehrel that was what it appeared to be. Or, it could signify that Paumgarten had decided to put aside all his doubts about Damon Baehrel’s authenticity and go with the evidence of his senses. It’s a fittingly ambiguous conclusion to an arresting, delicious piece. I devoured every word.

The authenticity of Dana Goodyear’s subject – seventy-one-year-old earth sculptor Michael Heizer – is never in doubt. What a wild, crazy, brilliant guy! Here, in Goodyear’s terrific “The Earth Mover,” is our first view of him:

At a crosswalk, Heizer—ravaged, needy, fierce, suspicious, witty, loyal, sly, and pure—leaned against a lamppost to rest, thin on thin. He wore a felt rancher hat whose band was adorned with the tips of elk antlers, and a jackknife in a holster at his waist. In the eighties, Andy Warhol photographed him wearing plaid flannel, his hands raised like claws and a vague, suggestive smile on his lips: Am I scaring you, honey? Now, with his hat casting an elliptical shadow on the pavement, he looked ready for another portrait.

That “thin on thin” is pure Goodyear; she’s a superb describer. And here, in one of the most memorable scenes of the piece, is Heizer painting in his New York City loft:

He picked up a can of paint that a studio assistant had mixed—imperial Venetian bronze blended with carbon black and dark brown to create a tone he called “volcanic”—and poured it through a net into a tin tray. Painting with a roller is physical work. With effort, he covered the roller with paint and stepped up to a canvas whose bottom-heavy angularity resembled an origami swan, banded with green tape. He climbed a ladder to the third rung from the top and started painting from the upper left in long, smooth strokes. Within a few seconds, something had gone wrong. “Arrrgh! Not good!” He got down from the ladder and inspected the painting for impurities. There was a fleck of white, which he picked out with the tip of his knife. On his knees, he went at the lower portion of the canvas, bending double with each stroke and pulling himself up again with the ladder.

“Fu-u-u-u-uck, I can’t breathe anymore,” he said after a few minutes of intense application. His tongue was hanging out, and his mouth was open like that of a parched man receiving rain. Los Lobos’s sax came through the wall. “Here it is! Yo! Ha, ha, ha, yo!” he laughed, suddenly revived. With saxophone, the painting looked better to him: twenty bucks’ worth of paint from Ace Hardware transformed into a cosmic offering. He bent over, hands on knees, panting, and looked up with a giddy smile. “That’s somethin’, huh?” he laughed. “Cuidado.”

My god, I love that passage – so many piquant details! And that drawn out “Fu-u-u-u-uck” is inspired.

Heizer’s art tool of choice isn’t a paintbrush or a paint roller – it’s a bulldozer. In “The Earth Mover” ’s final section, there’s a scene in which Goodyear rides with Heizer in a 996K Caterpillar loader, “perching on the armrest of the driver’s seat,” as he moves earth (“a specially formulated dirt that looked like turbinado sugar”) and packs it around an eighty-foot-long steel box to form a sculpture called “Compression Line.” Goodyear writes,

A wooden wall with I-beams anchored in concrete was making it hard to back up; there was nowhere to turn around. Heizer smashed his bucket deliberately into an offending beam. Rales stood under a shade tent, watching. “She’s all wired up, thinks I’m going to knock her building over,” he said, and wiggled his fingers at her—“Don’t worry”—then signalled for her to snap a picture. To me, he said, “Wanna see the loader work?” and went at the beam again. He took his hands off the controls like a bronco rider, swaying, and put his fists up—whoop, whoop. I hadn’t seen him happier. Three workers in orange vests looked away.

It’s a great scene – one of many in this excellent piece. And it’s Goodyear’s presence in the cab with Heizer that, for me, makes it extra vivid.

“The Country Restaurant” and “The Earth Mover” are wonderful pieces. I enjoyed them immensely.

Postscript: Other aspects of this week’s issue that I enjoyed: Andrea K. Scott’s description of Agnes Martin’s paintings – “whisper-pale shimmering grids” – in “Art: Fall Preview”; Matthew Trammell’s “Night Life: Fall Preview” (“with electric odes to evening chills and a timbre that clears storm clouds”); Richard Brody’s capsule review of Hell or High Water (“Only Bridges emerges whole; with his typical brilliance, he leaps from the laconic to the rhetorical, making even the shady brim of his hat speak volumes”); the cocktails in Talia Lavin’s “Bar Tab: Pouring Ribbons” [“Complex cocktails arrive in ornate teapots or nestled in tiny chafing dishes: the Painted Veil (Scottish-toffee-pu-ehr-tea-infused Beefeater gin, Hong Kong Baijiu) is a frosted chalice of smoky caramel, while the Snake in the Grass (Tanqueray gin, coconut water, makrut-lime leaf) offers a compelling argument for pairing alcohol with Greek yogurt”]; Christaan Felber’s light-filled “Hao Noodles and Tea by Madame Zhu's Kitchen” photo illustration; Tad Friend’s description of Ben Foster – “his body a grenade, his face the pin” (“Out of Character”); Vinson Cunningham’s “A Darker Presence,” on the National Museum of African American History and Culture (“no one will leave without scores of wide-eyed did-you-know’s to share”); Julie Bruck’s beautiful “Blue Heron, Walking” (“these outsized / apprehenders of grasses and stone, snatchers of mouse and vole, / these mindless magnificents that any time now will trail / their risen bird like useless bits of leather”); and Curtis Sittenfeld’s wickedly good short story, “Gender Studies” (“Their eyes meet—she’s perhaps three per cent less hammered than she was down in the lobby, though still hammered enough not to worry about her drunkenness wearing off anytime soon—and at first he says nothing. Then, so seriously that his words almost incite in her a genuine emotion, he says, 'You’re pretty'"). 

Becky Cooper's Ravishing "Tables For Two: Bar Omar"

Photo by Christaan Felber

Last year, in a memorable piece titled "Sacred Carnality" (newyorker.com, October 11, 2015), Mary Karr praised what she called “carnal writing.” “Every memoir should brim over with the physical experiences that once streamed in—the smell of garlicky gumbo, your hand in an animal’s fur, the ocean’s phosphor lighting up bodies underwater all acid green,” she said. I agree. The New Yorker’s “Tables For Two” is a tremendous source of carnal writing. A prime example is Becky Cooper’s ravishing Bar Omar review in this week’s issue. Of Bar Omar’s tagine, she writes,

But the tagine (lamb, chicken, or kefta) is the showstopper. Portioned for two, it arrives in a tall clay vessel, clutched between napkins. The waiter pauses for dramatic effect before rolling off the lid, letting steam billow out. If you ordered the lamb, swollen prunes, fat apricots, and egg-shaped potatoes hug two giant shanks sunk in a still-bubbling broth; the prunes collapse into a sweet, jammy mess the second they’re touched. Shovel some of the fruit over meat pulled clean from the bone, add slivered almonds for crunch, and it’s a perfect bite.

Mmm, so good! And Cooper’s description of dessert is even better:

Ending your meal with dessert is a must, and the crème brûlée is irreproachably classic. Shatter the shell of blistered sugar into pieces that look like stained glass and try not to smile.

Who is The New Yorker’s leading carnal writer? I vote for Becky Cooper. 

August 26, 2013 Issue

Of the many pleasures of this week’s New Yorker – Christian Felber’s photograph of my favorite jazz singer, Cécile McLorin Salvant; Shauna Lyon’s description of The Elm’s petits fours (“crazy-good smoky chocolate-chip blondies”); Simone Massoni’s delightful, frilly, concentrated, high-kicking “On The Horizon” illustration for Jean Renoir’s French Cancan; David Remnick’s brilliant use of a journal-entry-style sentence (“Early on a summer morning in the Jordanian desert, driving along an empty road toward the Syrian border”), to open his excellent “City of the Lost”; Ken Auletta’s witty “Bloomberg thinks of himself as a team player, as long as it’s his team,” in his absorbing “After Bloomberg”; the gorgeous, vital ending of Meghan O’Rourke’s memorable “What’s Wrong With Me?” (“And I remember being so lost in the sun and the dog’s joy and my pleasure in these hours of freedom that I had no sense that I lived in a body, except as a thing that could feel the sun and the wind and the dog’s cold nose”) – the most piquant is Ian Frazier’s superb Talk story, “By the Numbers,” about a New York City urban garden study. I love the way this piece unfolds - nine deft paragraphs, each a marvel of compressed specificity (like a Bruegel drawing), the whole combining a delightful assortment of details (tattoo of a New York City harbor map, “forty-foot-long telescoping carbon-graphite pole,” striped T-shirt, blue watering can, garlic, devil’s trumpet) and quotes (“From the start, we wanted no spreadsheets, no clipboards, no people standing with clickers at the garden entrances,” “And each garden is different, each has its own creation myth, its own characters,” “There are chickens in urban gardens now!”), sensuously ending with a cucumber crunch. Inspired!

Postscript: Meghan O’Rourke, in her “What’s Wrong with Me?,” mentions three aunts: “At Christmas, I had lunch with three of my mother’s sisters – humorous, unself-pitying Irish-American women in their fifties – at my grandmother’s condo on the Jersey Shore.” Reading this, I think, Hey, I believe I’ve met these remarkable women before. Aren’t they the ones with red nails who are “always laughing and doing their hair up pretty / sharing lipstick and shoes and new juice diets,” and who did “jackknives off the diving board / after school” in O’Rourke’s wonderful poem “My Aunts” [The New Yorker, July 20, 2009]? I believe they are. It’s great to meet them again. They appear to be in good spirits, even though at least two of them suffer painful afflictions. O’Rourke mirrors off their “humorous, unself-pitying” attitude. In “What’s Wrong with Me?,” she writes, “I thought about my aunts, and the matter-of-fact way they lived with their illnesses – as something to deal with, but not something to fuss over. In order to become well, I would have to temper my own fanatical pursuit of wellness.”