November 2, 2010
Chasing Stingray All Over Town
KOK FYE SEETOH shot me a warning look.
I was jammed into a restaurant kitchen in Queens with the pre-eminent translator to the English-speaking world of the food of Malaysia and Singapore. I had serious doubts about a sauce.
A sweet sludge punctuated by large pieces of raw shallot, it was presented by the restaurant’s Malaysian owner as “popular with Americans.”
As the owner turned away to put the fish in the fryer, I asked Mr. Seetoh under my breath, “Would you really eat this in Singapore?”
“We’ll talk outside,” he said, tersely.
Mr. Seetoh, a former photojournalist who now publishes exhaustive guides to street foods in Southeast Asia, was my wingman for what may have been America’s first stingray crawl. Its goal: to mine Mr. Seetoh’s expertise by choosing one popular dish from the alluring, often bewildering menus of New York’s Southeast Asian restaurants, and chasing it all over town.
In sunglasses, he strode into kitchens with the imperious confidence of Keith Richards and judged them with the tender harshness of Gordon Ramsay. He rode waves of enthusiasm and dropped into valleys of despair, pleasantly surprised by the juicy fish at one place but tormented by the careless spicing at another.
“They make too many compromises here,” he said flatly as we left, dismissing the offending sauce as not authentic and, worse, just not good. Ikan pari pangang, stingray coated with a spicy sambal and grilled on banana leaves, was the test he chose for local cooks. (Stingray is known on our tables as skate; the French call it raie).
Originally a dish for fishermen and peasants, made with what was considered a “trash fish” but deliciously aromatic from the spice paste and toasted banana leaves, ikan pari pangang is now a classic outdoor dinner and an accompaniment to cold beer. As the moist heat suffuses the fish, it should take on a tangy, dry crust but stay juicy near the central spine. (The flesh slides off easily after cooking.) Served with wedges of lemon and rings of onion, with lots of juicy bits to poke at with chopsticks and swipe through the sauce, it makes a pleasant, indolent meal, like picking at a whole barbecued pork butt.
It is a dish with Malay roots, which sets it apart from the many popular Chinese- and Indian-influenced snacks that the region is famous for, like curry-rich roti canai (pronounced CHEN-nye), Hainanese chicken rice, kangkung belachan (water spinach cooked with shrimp paste) and savory stir-fried Chinese-based noodle dishes like char kway teow, a crunchy, savory tangle of rice noodles, bean sprouts, shrimp, pork and chili paste.
But grasping those flavors, especially from far away, is not easy.
Southeast Asia covers a huge area, in both culinary and geographic terms. Singapore, with a slightly smaller landmass than New York City, is a dot in the huge stretch of islands that swirls off the coast of Vietnam — including Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Singapore’s history as a free port under the British empire, its central location on trade and spice routes and recent decades of high-speed economic growth have made the cuisine there a heady international brew. And Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s ever-expanding capital city across the Strait of Johor, has a food scene almost as intense.
In New York City, “Southeast Asian” restaurants try to cover a range of food from Malaysia and Singapore, often stirring in popular dishes from Thailand and Vietnam; some have hundreds of items on the menu. Most restaurant owners here are ethnically Chinese: noodles, rice, stir-frying and steaming are fundamentals, and even kung pao shrimp may appear on the menu. But dishes with chilies, lemon grass, galangal, coconut, curry spices and funky fermented seafood products like belachan (shrimp paste) are signs that the food isn’t just arriving from China.
I knew that Mr. Seetoh, whose Makansutra guidebooks contain detailed culinary analysis of individual dishes, down to the perfume of the duck broth and the springiness of the fish balls, would be able to answer my lingering questions: What makes one dish Malaysian and not Singaporean? Why are some dishes called by Malay names, and others Cantonese? And most important for a food lover, does this dish taste as good as it is supposed to, or was the flavor lost in translation?
Malaysian food leans more toward tangy flavors, and Singapore food toward the richness of peanut and coconut, Mr. Seetoh said, but other than that, the distinctions are usually traced to individual cooks.
At Coco in Elmhurst in Queens, where David Lim, the chef and an owner, serves a local crowd of Southeast Asians, Koreans, Chinese and Latinos, the stingray was sweeter and less redolent of dried shrimp and shrimp paste. At Sanur in Chinatown in Manhattan, Mr. Seetoh was impressed by Sun Chen Lai’s hack: to adapt the method from an outdoor grill to a basement stovetop, Mr. Lai, the chef and an owner, deep-fries the fish first, then enfolds it in a round lotus leaf and tosses the packet deftly in a hot wok until it is good and charred.
But Mr. Seetoh was not entirely satisfied with anyone’s sambal, the cooked sauce that acts as a cooking medium and a table condiment. “When they gentrify the food, it’s understandable, but it is completely the wrong idea,” he said.
Barriers of language and culture, he said, prevent many immigrant cooks in the United States from presenting their best food to outsiders. “In traditional culture, selling food on the street is one degree above prostitution,” he said. “We need to learn to be proud of what we have.”
It is a given for Mr. Seetoh, a first-generation Singaporean whose parents were born in mainland China, that hawker versions are always an improvement on the original dish: more savory, richer, better balanced.
“I went to Hainan to taste the chicken rice,” Mr. Seetoh said, referring to the island off southern China that was the birthplace of Singapore’s unofficial national dish of steamed chicken, white rice, cucumbers and chili sauce. “It was totally boring,” he said, pointing out that in the Singaporean version, the white rice is gilded with chicken fat and butter, and scented with the sweet, vanilla-like pandan leaf.
Hainan chicken rice is a main dish of the region, making it a subject of frequent squabbles between Malaysia and Singapore. Last year, Malaysia’s tourism minister staked an official claim to the dish for his nation, bringing simmering cross-Straits resentments to a boil.
Singapore is especially reliant on food hawkers, according to food historians, because it was initially populated by young, mostly Chinese men, who could not afford their own households. The thousands of food vendors (in Singapore they are gathered into “hawker centers,” and in Malaysia a food stall is a “warung”) tend to specialize in a single dish or a small family of foods, refining it over the years to try to grab a bigger piece of the market share. Thus, Mr. Seetoh said, the best food always wins.
“Food is the greatest democratic institution in Singapore,” he said. “There is truly no bland food and no bad restaurants.”
Even by New York standards, Singaporeans seem to be obsessed with food. “I have tried to cook Singapore food in Brooklyn, but at the end there was always something missing,” said Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, a writer whose memoir of “food and family” will be published in February. When she left Singapore to attend Northwestern University in Chicago in 1993, she said, she missed the food of home so much that she would trek through snow to the computer center to gaze at Internet photos of her favorite dishes. “A lot of what you love in Singaporean cuisine is the flavor of the hawker center,” she said. “It might be MSG, it might be the heat or the humidity or the sweat, you just don’t know.”
Continuing the crawl solo at Overseas Asian in Chinatown, I found an ikan pari that seemed too wet to my Seetoh-trained palate. (But the best roti canai I’ve had in New York: fluffy, yeasty, lightly sweet.) The last stingray was the best: an excellent, smoky version at Redang Island in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, where the fish is rubbed with spices and steamed before the final cooking.
One of Mr. Seetoh’s primary goals is to preserve such dishes, which he sees as a product of diverse, resourceful and often desperate communities. The hawker food will be lost, he fears, as the population becomes affluent and aspiring cooks can afford Western education — culinary or otherwise. Asian cooks are opening French and Italian restaurants in the cities now, he said, and the traditional hawkers are aging. “They are old, and their sons are old, and their grandsons go to Harvard,” he said.
Just as many hawkers have transcended street life and the day-to-day grind, Mr. Seetoh himself has become more than a food guide. He appeared on “Top Chef” last season and has taught Martha Stewart to make laksa, the iconic meal-in-a-bowl of the region. Now he is a global entrepreneur, working with real estate developers to build self-contained hawker centers, populating them with his favorite cooks and tailoring the food to its neighborhood. “In a business district, you don’t want noodle soup — too messy for office workers, and it takes too long to eat,” he said.
Over all, he said, Southeast Asian food in New York City is about 50 percent as good as at home. To lift that number, he hopes to bring a hawker center here. “Like Eataly, but with hawkers,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be great?”
Some places to taste Southeast Asian food in New York:
CAFE ASEAN 117 West 10th
Street (Sixth Avenue), Greenwich Village; (212) 633-0348 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (212) 633-0348 end_of_the_skype_highlighting, cafeasean.com.
COCO 82-69 Broadway (Elmhurst Avenue), Elmhurst, Queens; (718) 565-2030 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (718) 565-2030 end_of_the_skype_highlighting, cocoasiancuisine.com/elmhurst.html.
OVERSEAS TASTE RESTAURANT 49 Canal Street (Ludlow Street), Chinatown; (212) 925-3233 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (212) 925-3233 end_of_the_skype_highlighting.
REDANG ISLAND 5112 Eighth Avenue (51st Street), Sunset Park, Brooklyn; (718) 686-6680 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (718) 686-6680 end_of_the_skype_highlighting.
SANUR 18 Doyers Street (Pell Street), Chinatown; (212) 267-0088 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (212) 267-0088 end_of_the_skype_highlighting.
TASTE GOOD 82-18 45th Avenue (Broadway), Elmhurst, Queens; (718) 898-8001 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (718) 898-8001 end_of_the_skype_highlighting.
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November 2, 2010
Sambal Stingray in Banana Leaf
Adapted from K. F. Seetoh
Time: 1 hour
FOR THE SAMBAL
1 ounce (about 1/2 cup) dried red chilies
2 ounces (about 1/2 cup) dried small shrimp (available in Asian markets)
10 to 12 large garlic cloves
8 to 10 shallots, peeled
3-inch piece ginger, peeled and coarsely chopped
3-inch piece lemon grass, white end, coarsely chopped
1 teaspoon belachan (shrimp paste, available in Asian markets) or 2 teaspoons fish sauce
1 tablespoon tamarind paste or lime juice, more to taste
2 tablespoons light brown sugar, more to taste
1/4 cup raw peanuts
2 tablespoons vegetable oil, plus more for fish
For the fish
1 whole, skinless skate wing, 1 1/2 to 2 pounds, or firm fillets like snapper, about 3/4-inch thick
3 banana leaves (available frozen at Asian and Latin markets)
Slices of lemon and white onion, for garnish
Sprigs of cilantro, for garnish.
1. Make the sambal: In separate bowls, soak the chilies and the dried shrimp in water to cover for 10 minutes, then drain. Remove and discard stems and seeds from the chilies.
2. In a blender, combine the chilies, shrimp and remaining sambal ingredients, except the oil, with 1/2 cup water. Blend until finely chopped but not smooth. Heat the oil in a frying pan over medium heat and add the sambal. Cook, stirring often, until it is moist, thick and dark red, adding water 1 tablespoon at a time if needed to prevent scorching.
3. Cook the fish: Rinse and dry the fish and sprinkle it with salt. Heat a grill to high, or place a heavy skillet (with a lid) over medium-high heat. Spread one side of the fish with a thin layer of sambal. Place a banana leaf on grill (or in skillet), drizzle lightly with vegetable oil and place the fish on top, sambal side up. Cover grill or pan and cook about 8 minutes, until the banana leaf is toasted and the sambal is dry and fragrant. Remove the leaf and fish from the heat. Place a new banana leaf on grill or in pan, drizzle it with oil, flip fish onto it and spread more sambal on top. Cover and cook another 6 to 8 minutes, until cooked through.
4. Place another leaf on a platter. Flip the fish onto it, spoon more sambal over the top and garnish with lemon and onion slices and cilantro sprigs. To serve whole skate, slide the fish off the spine with a spoon.
Yield: 4 to 6 servings.
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