Crepeshow

I met Banana Sara before I met Sara Christensen.

Senior year in college when you think you're hot shit and ready for the big city, we would drive downtown for dinner on Saturday nights (via Lake Shore Drive south from Evanston, always going local Clark Street back up north for the scenic route). This is how we found places to eat: we would log on to Citysearch (pre-Metromix, pre-Yelp, pre-Time Out Chicago, pre-Twitter days, if you recall - or not) and check off the following search criteria: "Lakeview/Lincoln Park," "$", "alcohol"). Then methodically, we visited each of the search results and felt quite grown up that Saturday night stopped meaning dinner and a movie at Old Orchard.

The best part about this Mary Tyler Moore-style gastronomic process was that I continued to frequent most of these restaurants we discovered years after I'd graduated to "$$" in dining criteria. Such as Matsuya, that Wrigleyville bastion of cheap, filling and decent sushi and Japanese rice bowls with the leery chefs behind the counter and Penny's, great for Sunday night pajama pants pick-ups. And then there is La Creperie, with its garden and summer jazz and larger-than-life crepes bursting with all sorts of French concoctions and desserts that instigate 10-minute long internal battles just deciding which ones to have for dinner. Since 1999, to stay at peace with myself, I have stopped looking at the menu - it would always be the Boeuf Bourguignon and the Banana Sara and either Goose Island Summertime or 312; as dining budgets got a little more indulgent, the Assiette de Pate to start.

Me and Banana Sara at La Creperie.

Although these are all regular haunts, La Crep never feels like just another stay-in, snowed-out fallback in the 'hood. Even if it was just Friday night before a movie across the street at Landmark Century or on the way home from work, knowing I was headed there was as exhilarating as the prospect of four softball games on Sunday - it had the sabbatical quality of a crepe cathedral. Some extremely important occasions took place here: birthdays, first dates (the crepes have nothing to do with these not working out eventually), and July 23, 2004, my last day at Ketchum, where Banana Sara Christensen (the crepe and the person are inseparable in tribute) took me to dinner after she picked me and my boxes of five years of agency life up from the Aon Center.

Sara Christensen grew up in the La Crep garden and her mom, Joanie, and Sara Roignant, half of the team that opened the little bistro, were best friends. Banana Sara (wheat crepe with bananas in a brown sugar caramel sauce, topped with rum and vanilla ice cream) was named for Mrs. Roignant and these days, Ms. Christensen rightfully claims it to be hers. I met Banana Sara playing softball, and I don't remember if the La Crep connection cemented the friendship, but I'm sure when we are 75, I will remember it as such. When we recently were deciding where we would go for five days in France after Paris, it wasn't too difficult settling on Bretagne, where the crepe was birthed to bring the world so much joy. The more intriguing question: How many crepes will we eat a day?

Saint-Malo on the northern coast was our first stop, and this is exactly where you'd imagine the crepe was invented: a lovely, understated seaside town with a gorgeous historic area settled within ramparts. The crepe doesn't barge into your consciousness like foie gras or demand your attention like duck confit - it's simple, honest, and happy to lay flat. Breton crepes are served open face, folded over at the four edges, so that a "peephole" in the middle salaciously reveals what's within your buckwheat beauty. There were lots of crepe lessons to be learned in its native land: for example, we understood our very first crepe in Bretagne, at La Petit Malouin, to come with a country sausage, but we didn't think it was going to be on the crepe, rather than sliced up and inside. We would also learn that the assortment of crepes at Breton creperies is astounding - galettes are the basic set-ups (egg, Emmental, mushroom, ham, and so on) and spécialités are the complex ones with several ingredients. While all savory crepes are made from buckwheat (at La Crep, they are a mix of buckwheat and wheat - I assume to be more endearing to the American palate as buckwheat can be overpoweringly hearty), some dessert ones may be made with plain wheat. If the selection of crepes at La Crep was a B.A. in Creponomics, we were approaching a Ph.D. in Quantum Crepostromy in Bretagne.

The best crepe ingredient ever is the andouille Guéméné, a sausage made from chitterlings, pepper, onions, wine and spices - 20 to 25 large intestines of a pig are needed for each sausage, which is wrapped in beef casing, then slowly cooked in broth stock flavored with hay. When we entered La Brigitaine for dinner, I picked up this amazing aroma - it was like everyone in there was eating the same thing, but they weren't - it was just that brawny, assertive, a nothing-like-it fragrance that packed a power punch straight to the palate! Since the andouille Guéméné was the only thing I didn't recognize on the menu, that's what I ordered, and 10 minutes later, I was engulfed in that scintillating scent as wafts of it emanated upwards from the la Guéménoise. It was a karmic link.

The andouille Guéméné, sausage king.

An affair to remember -  the Surcouf (caramelized bananas, chocolate, grilled almonds, cinnamon ice cream and chantilly creme.)

The next night at Cafe An Delenn, where the husband-and-wife owners (why are the best creperies run by a married couple? Is it because crepes are a match made in heaven for everything on earth?) are "very sympathique," as our hotel host Francois told us. We tried hard not to play favorites with crepes, but theirs definitely superceded la Brigitaine's. I had thought the ones from the night before had been left on the griddle for just two heartbeats too long - these were perfect. My smoked duck breast with Emmental was a genius equation, and it was Banana Sara's turn at the andouille Guéméné, and it was such a pleasure to be eating another crepe combination while engulfed in the scent of my favorite sausage.

My Perigord - classy French tater tots, so sassy like the Dominique Strauss-Kahn of potatoes.

Pig tales: the andouille Guéméné.

Revolution Road: the Route de Rhum (caramel ice cream, banana, rum, and sea salt butter caramel).

When we got to Rennes, the capital of Bretagne, we quite literally stopped in our tracks when we saw a stand selling hot dog crepes and ham-and-cheese crepe roll-ups. Sold. And devoured in five minutes without moving an inch from the same spot where we felt the animal magnetism of these street crepes.

Crepe with street cred.

The next night - also our last on the trip - we had money from Joanie Christensen to have dinner, and Banana Sara chose Creperie Ste Anne in the middle of the city's most bustling plaza. Banana Sara hits a lot of home runs, but this might be one of my favorite ones - I had to have the andouille Guéméné once more, and the la Forestiere crepe suited the theme of the day, since we had gone hiking/gotten lost in the Foret de Paimpont during the day. We did not encounter any of Merlin's magic that the forest is famous for, but that crepe was the Excalibur of buckwheat. For dessert, the la Rennaise. Chocolate. Caramel ice cream. Salted butter caramel. Jesus Crepe.

Gutted.

If I'm ever salty, it's going to be sea salt butter caramel salty.

In Singapore, I have made earnest attempts to uncover worthy creperies and the first time I visited Entre-Nous, I unfairly based it against the stratospheric standards set by La Crep. This time, with a better appreciation for Breton crepes, I went again, lapped up all the pictures of Saint-Malo and Mont-St-Michel on the walls of this little place run by a couple (again!) from the province itself, and had a much better time appreciating the buckwheat. There was homemade sea salt caramel, and all the ingredients are imported from Bretagne.

E! - Egg and Emmentaler.

But Creperie Des Arts, where I went last Friday, took the crepe: the Popeye, a combination of spinach creamed in Roquefort (seriously?) was hearty and wrap-turous. Not to mention that the lovely Val de Rance brut cider that I first sipped by the beach in Saint-Malo, plus hospitality that rolls in right from the shores of the Plage de Bon Secours. A lovely evening on the patio, lanterns above, a cinema across the street... if Germaine Roignant had come by with his trumpet in his striped waistcoat and hat, it could've been La Crep. Almost.

"I yam what I yam!"

However, still no sign of the andouille Guéméné nor Banana Sara. The pleasures of life that you can always rely on to make you happy - those don't come by too often.

Eline Saglık, Fethi Celikoglu!

Once again, I am about to expose a neat little secret, but I'm very happy to do so this time. As my friend Baha Kocamaz, one of the owners of Han Hotel in Istanbul, would say, "It's better for you."

There is a little pedestrian walkway that connects Haig Road to Tanjong Katong Road in my neighborhood, and just about five minutes down that path from my house, you'll get to June Eating House, as local a Singaporean coffee shop as can be. In the back, there is a big kitchen area serving zhi char, which is basically almost every simple Chinese dish that would take a bit too much effort to cook at home. In front, a cai peng stall, which is a sprawling buffet of cooked dishes from which you pick servings to go with rice or porridge. Under the TV mounted next to the "June Eating House" sign, playing a Chinese soap opera, is a döner, and carving slices off the rotating roast is Fethi Celikoglu.

The only thing better than a slice of pizza? A slice of doner kebap.

The old guys sitting al fresco at the tables along this pedestrian walkway don't know much English, but they actually know two Turkish words: "Fethi - pide!" And Fethi will roll up the dough and knead it out, scatter the ingredients of the day all across, and pop it into the oven. About a cigarette later, the pide would be done, and served to these old-timers who grew up on rice and stir-fry. The pide goes very well with cold lager served with ice, in this Singapore heat, just as it would with a bottle of Efes in Turkey.

Fethi is from Istanbul, and has lived in Singapore for more than 10 years. He was busy tonight, so I didn't get to chat with him more. He has a menu that is inexplicably simple: beef kebap platter, salad, Iskender kebap, Turkish bread, garlic bread, Turkish pizza, spaghetti bolognese. However, I'm not really sure you're supposed to order off the menu. In some of my favorite eateries in Turkey, I would pick what I wanted, but my host would come by and offer something else that was, yes, "better for you." I would always go with their suggestion and was the happier for it. So I ordered the beef kebap platter, but first, a surprise arrived: zeytinyağlı pırasa, an Ottoman dish of leeks braised in olive oil, a common sight on dinner tables in Turkish homes. It wasn't on the menu, and Fethi told me about the health qualities of leeks, then pointed to his protruding belly and said, "I have no choice, I have to eat this!"

I didn't need to be forced to polish off the entire plate.

So good, it needs its own Wiki-leeks.

Then, instead of a beef kebap platter, the Iskender kebap was served, a Bursa dish of grilled strips of beef over diced Turkish bread doused in salça, then drenched with a hearty dose of fried butter. A dollop of yogurt, grilled peppers and tomatoes try to salvage this local favorite from gut-busting purgatory but really, just love it for what it is - greasy Turkish street food that will bring you so much palatial pleasure. It's not the brain surgery of the culinary arts. But if I'm going to have Iskender kebap, then I want a beefy guy who looks like he owns the dish preparing it. Like, he looks the way he does because he's eaten Iskender kebap all his life and knows what it takes to make an excellent one.

 

A toast to this roast!

As with the best eating experiences in Turkey, an excellent meal is made even better by warmth and graciousness. Fethi will be gone on vacation for a month starting Saturday, and learning this was the only downside of dinner, not including envy that he will spend part of his time off in Turkey. Who would have thought - I have been in cold Turkey ever since I left that wonderful country, and now, just steps from home, I can actually almost smell the Bosphorous?

Don't Mess With Mezze

The best places I ate in Turkey were tucked into corners and shied into courtyards, as if to do their own thing without the cruise ship tourists tripping over the cobblestones. Like Açık Mutfak in Istanbul's grungedgy Galata district, which seems to exist purely for the pleasure of chef-owner Esra Şener's neighbors and friends. In these places, you don't have to force Adana kebap, French fries or Turkish pizza onto the menu, or have an Armenian woman rolling gözleme in the window, things you ought to have for the foreign visitors. You might re-interpret your grandmother's Anatolian recipes or prepare the comfort food you ate growing up, except you put in the goodies your mother never would, but that you always clamored for as a child.

I had read about Artichoke in Time Out Singapore, and in my ongoing mission to discover good Turkish food here, dropped by for dinner since I was in the area. I had the address, but I stumbled upon its historic Sculpture Square location before I even knew I was trying to look for it. There was chalk on a wall, my food radar started blipping, and I found myself here:

 Stalking Mediterranean flavors at Artichoke.

Merhaba. Except that Artichoke isn't a Turkish restaurant. It bills itself as "modern Moorish cuisine... inspired by the fascinating flavors and smells of Spain, Turkey, Lebanon, Greece and Morocco," but where they had me was the philosophy scrawled on the wall - mezze presentations for sharing at dinner. The interiors reminded me of that bohemian Istanbul enclave of Cihangir, with a retro weighing scale on this counter, an old mixing bowl in that nook, and a well-thumbed notebook right here. "We run a relatively small restaurant," they write. "This means a small kitchen and a lot of love." Other things I love: a small menu, which means each dish is individually and attentively prepared, with the ability to source artisanal ingredients or to make them on site.

That leads us straight to the albondigas. Real meatballs don't jive like sausages; they are not an afterthought, the result of scraping leftovers off the abattoir floor and stuffing them into casing as if nothing had happened. Real meatballs, when viewed as a cross-section, should tell you their life story. The texture and the colors betray exactly what that meatball is made of and at Artichoke, the albondigas are shaped by pork and jamon in a tomato sauce of eggplant, chorizo and manchego. Lookit:

Meat me in St. Luscious.

I thought that the jamon was a really smart move - you don't have to worry about messing with too many spices, which is usually an important component of globular gastronomy. By letting the jamon handle all the flavor infusions, chef Bjorn Shen elevates the mere meatball into levels of mighty machismo - like a genuine cut of meat, it didn't need anything else to enhance its tastes. It did, however, arrive in the great company of its sauce. I came here for Turkish food, Mediterranean, even, but was captured by the Moors and pirated off to somewhere along the Barbary coast, and I didn't care. I'll walk that plank.

 Belle of the meatball.

I have been addicted to bulgur and all types of salad mezzes since Turkey, and I was very happy to see the Forgotten Grain Salad on the Artichoke menu (quinoa, bulgur, wild rice, capers, seeds, nuts, fruits and herbs). How does one not remember how good quinoa and bulgur are?! This made me, and all my runner nutrition sensibilities, so absolutely bananas. I was getting a runner's high just by eating this - quinoa is packed with protein and bulgur with fiber, both bursting with carbohydrates and surging with vitamins and minerals while low in fat - so, a very good fueling meal. Plus, pomegranate seeds and a light touch of yogurt meant each forkful was an explosion of spring in my mouth. It was the Sufism of salad.

Mezze-ticulation.

All of this was doused down with a Mahou Negra, a tar-black dunkel style from Barcelona. Although a commercial brew, it was heartily malty and kept those meatballs honest - perhaps a poor man's Fauxtoberfest. For dessert, I had malabi, a milk pudding infused with rose water that's popular across the Middle East, and better known in Turkey as muhallebieh. The pudding was fantastic, but I felt somewhat cheated by the sliced grapes on top. They didn't quite belong - maybe they were meant to be a creative touch, but I thought it lazy. It was as if they ran out of something else they wanted, and someone thought sliced grapes was a good quick fix. That plus milk pudding made me feel like I should've been in a high chair with a bib around my neck. They would have been better off draping it with chocolate sauce, Saray Muhallebicisi fashion.

 Milky way.

On top of the very strong non-dessert parts of dinner, I really liked how much they seemed to enjoy their restaurant, sometimes stepping out of line - poutine with avocado mousse, really?? - but that's how Istanbullus like it, too. I didn't get to try any of the fish courses, but I appreciated the fresh daily selections - tonight, it was a blue hake. Service was warm and attentive - there were a few things the servers should have known, but they very quickly got the answer without skipping a beat. The next table had a problem with their order - I wasn't paying attention so I couldn't quite tell what, but manager Ronny Choo apologized profusely, after their sincere server had already done the same, and everyone got a round of gelato and coffee on the house. 

Gracious hospitality, just like in Turkey. Prices were more than reasonable for all that fresh produce and hands-to-stove preparation. It goes to show how much better a little restaurant becomes just by being open for all the right reasons.

Istanbul: Of Bizarre Bazaars

 Hanging out at the Grand Bazaar.

The truth is, there's nothing very grand about Istanbul's Grand Bazaar these days, unless it's grand larceny. You'll read about it, hear about it and see it unfold in any documentary in any media about the city. That's mostly because by 1461, it had become the world's most bodacious shopping mall, complete with ornate domes and intricate architectural details. Today, it covers 60 streets and 5,000 shops and hawks carpets, ceramics, lamps, copper and bronze trinkets, textiles, less prolific souvenirs, and everything that can be exchanged for liras. (Just imagine if Black Friday was celebrated in Turkey - everyday.) But it has also outlived its splendor - the paint that often flakes off the ceiling in forlorn flutters is common and reveals faded alabaster - and the locals have outgrown it. In fact, they've forsaken the world's first finest mega mall for the lively fun in the streets emanating downhill from the Grand Bazaar, where the true shopping in Istanbul's Old City is, and most prefer the contemporary Istiklal Caddesi stretch uptown across the Galata Bridge. The Grand Bazaar, sadly, is the Hotel California of souvenir peddling - you enter through one of the 16 gates, get lost in the complex myriad of streets - yes, each lane actually has its own name and various sections are devoted to different product categories - and if the vendors have their way, you can check out anytime you like but you can never leave.

Bowl game.

Upon my escape, I made my way to Zeyrek, a neighborhood that lies in the shadow of the fantastic Aqueduct of Valens, a feat of Roman engineering constructed in the late fourth century. The surviving section is only 50 meters less than the original length, and this district has every drop of Istanbul flavor intact. My main reason for this journey, I must admit, was Sur Ocakbasi, one of the best grills in town. Make no bones about it - it's a greasy spoon (yes, Bourdain has come by, although that's not how I heard of it), the bathrooms are abysmal, and you might be wiping someone else's drips and crumbs off the table before you'll put your elbows down. But when the only way to decipher the menu is by looking at pictures, the excitement mounts. There is something sick and sadistic about not knowing what might show up, but I went the way of where most fingers have pointed, which is the mixed grill platter, because I wanted a taste of everything. You know, it's the kind of place where the waiter whips out his cell phone to punch out the ocakbasi's WiFi password for you because he doesn't know how to say it in English, but the WiFi doesn't work anyway.

Grilled.

I made it through a large mound of meat - grilled lamb, minced lamb, chicken - only to realize it was a preliminary layer because a sausage waited patiently under a pile of bulgur pilaf. Then there was the beetroot slaw, tomato salsa and fresh onion slices and grilled vegetables. Happily, I strolled the local square after lunch, full of old timers playing backgammon, gossiping, sipping tea after Friday prayers at the mosque.

I stepped into a butcher's shop and hit my head against a slab of something cold, sagging, and swaying. It was the carcass of a lamb's rump hanging from above, but specifically, the top of me had connected with its very bottom - its testicles. I wouldn't say it necessarily knocked some sense into me, although it very well should have, but it definitely reminded me of all the things I enjoy about traveling, my way.

Ballocks!

Istanbul: The Magnitude of Magnificence

The first thing I saw in Turkey was a Burger King. Then I saw a McDonald's. Then I saw a Little Caesar's. After driving through boulevards neatly lined with trees and modern apartment buildings with shiny windows like any European suburb and, passing by diners that come from Barry Levinson movies, we made an awkward U-turn and suddenly, the avenue narrowed into Sultanahmet, the Old City.

No matter how thronged with tourists the thoroughfares are, the fact that you are walking on grounds founded nearly 1,700 years ago will send tingles through your feet, creeping up to that history geek in your head like the Roman Empire advancing across this very same geography during that time. You think about the astonishing feats, whether engineering, mathematical, artistic, architectural or otherwise, performed then and you wonder how we've only come so far only to invent Autotune, Lindsay Lohan, and a computer that wins at Jeopardy!. To forget these infirmities for a while, I threw myself into the crowd tidal waving into Aya Sofya, definitely the most magnificent monument in the country.

 One thousand and seven hundred years of majesty. That's monumental royalty.

Aya Sofya is  Emperor Justinian's attempt at restoring the greatness of the Roman Empire, completed in 537 A.D. and the greatest church in Christendom until the Conquest in 1453. Mehmet the Conquerer then converted it into a mosque, where it functioned before it was transformed into a museum in 1935. It's astounding and majestic, and a lot to take in. Your camera doesn't know where to point first and when your lens finds its landing spot, it doesn't quite understand how to handle what's in front of it. You stop trying and just gape, starting from enormous gilted Arabic calligraphy to beautiful mosaic to stunning domes that put to shame any modern effort to out-tallest-building-in-the-world.

 The archangel Gabriel, looking down.

But I don't think I truly got it until I watched a group of priests and nuns stop to pray and kiss the Church of the Divine Wisdom's marble walls. Humility and faith, I realized, was what made Aya Sofya the most important landmark and preservation in Turkey.

Faith in the Fatih district.

Oh My God

Kathmandu, 2010. The gods must be feeling crazy, scattered all about one of these spindly traffic-choked pedestrian-impenetrable, impossibly choked, decidedly colorful streets. Yes, the stairway to heaven begins at dusty ground level in Nepal's capital city, which is 1,400 meters (4,593 feet) above sea level, and ends, in my estimation, at the top of snowy Mount Everest, the highest summit on earth, at 8,850 meters (29,035 feet). It is then fitting, and perhaps telling, that I am quite sure in this lifetime, I would only make it to Everest Base Camp (5,360 meters, 17,590 feet).

Buying a wooden deity off a tattered, unraveling canvas sheet on the street is one way to stay grounded in Kathmandu, this town of stratospherically extreme personalities. There's really something all of us can and should learn from how peacefully reverential Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist images lounge side by side on these makeshift tarpaulin blankets, so you can take home a piece of peace. This is a culture which believes that if you have one of these carved artifacts in your backpack, you would never fall into a crevasse while trekking the Himalayas, nor get washed away with an avalanche during freak snowstorms which make thunder snow on Lake Shore Drive seem like a summer 16" softball game.

The process of playing at buying god - haggling, remaining immune to sob stories, resisting caving in to more purchases - is much more than what you bargain for. Just remember that with street peddler prices, as with the Himalayas' most challenging terrains, what goes up, must come down. Wrap your new life insurance policy in newspaper, then tuck it snugly amid your trail mix and fleece jackets in that expedition pack, so that all of you return to civilization preferably in one piece.

(Please click on the image to see it better!) 

Nepali idol.

 On a street in Thamel, Kathmandu's backpacker and tourist district, Nepal.

Catnap

Shanghai, 2008. Shanghai, the Manhattan of the East, is a city that never sleeps. How can it - there's too much neon buzzing, and cloud-poking skyscrapers keep you constantly scanning the horizon. Other eye-popping experiences abound - Shaolin street performances, a mind-boggling array of street food, squabbles that seem to erupt at every corner, spit on the ground to hopscotch around.

However, when there's a will, there's a way. Or, when there's an alley, and there's a stool... one can easily steal away from the action and catch a catnap.

(Please click on the image to see it better!)

REMcat.

An alley off Dajing Lu in Shanghai's Old Town, China.