![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
We took a staycation this week. Sent ARR to daycare, stayed home. Did a lot of reading and sleeping for the most part.
But the big event was a food tour out in Jackson Heights.
We've done food walking tours before--they're a lot of fun. We've spent very little time out in Queens, and with ARR's various allergies, adventurous eating isn't as easy as it used to be. So I took the opportunity to sign us up for a private tour focused on Himalayan food.
It was awesome. (If anyone's interested, Joe DiStefano does a whole bunch of Queens-based tours of multiple cuisines, and will do custom tours on request.) We knew literally nothing about Himalayan cuisine. Joe took us to half a dozen different places, most of which I would never have found on my own. (One was in the back of a cellphone store.) We tried a bunch of Tibetan and Nepalese dishes (plus a couple Indian and Pakistani ones). My personal favorites were momo (beef dumplings that came with a ginger-garlic sauce) and sel roti dipped in chai. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the goat tripe. (Butter tea, on the other hand, turned out to be exactly as vile as I've been told. Although I think it might be like Gatorade for winter--if you were dehydrated from climbing around mountains all day in 30 below, salty buttery tea might taste pretty good.)
We also took a risk and took ARR to Talde, the new, very hip Asian fusion place. We'd been told the place can be deafening, and we also didn't want to ruin anyone else's meals in case ARR was fidgety, so we got there right after 5, when they had just opened and were mostly deserted. Got mostly dim sum, which turned out to be an excellent strategy, since they started bringing plates right away (which appeased the hungry toddler.) ARR's favorites were the ramen and the crab fried rice, which didn't surprise me. I was pleasantly surprised by how much he liked the tuna tartare spring roll, though. Ate almost half of one. I think the wide variety pleased him. He also got a little bit of short rib bao and most of a shrimp shumai. (We also got the pork and chive pretzel dumplings, which were great, but had some dairy. Which meant we got to keep them all for ourselves.) We did spill some milk, but we cleaned most of it up ourselves. And while ARR did crow at the top of his lungs a couple of times, I don't think he was any more obnoxious than the twenty-something dude bros at the bar were being. We got out before the full dinner rush really picked up. And while it was a little loud by the end, the key to avoiding the din is clearly going unfashionably early on a temperate day when they've opened all the glass walls.
But the big event was a food tour out in Jackson Heights.
We've done food walking tours before--they're a lot of fun. We've spent very little time out in Queens, and with ARR's various allergies, adventurous eating isn't as easy as it used to be. So I took the opportunity to sign us up for a private tour focused on Himalayan food.
It was awesome. (If anyone's interested, Joe DiStefano does a whole bunch of Queens-based tours of multiple cuisines, and will do custom tours on request.) We knew literally nothing about Himalayan cuisine. Joe took us to half a dozen different places, most of which I would never have found on my own. (One was in the back of a cellphone store.) We tried a bunch of Tibetan and Nepalese dishes (plus a couple Indian and Pakistani ones). My personal favorites were momo (beef dumplings that came with a ginger-garlic sauce) and sel roti dipped in chai. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the goat tripe. (Butter tea, on the other hand, turned out to be exactly as vile as I've been told. Although I think it might be like Gatorade for winter--if you were dehydrated from climbing around mountains all day in 30 below, salty buttery tea might taste pretty good.)
We also took a risk and took ARR to Talde, the new, very hip Asian fusion place. We'd been told the place can be deafening, and we also didn't want to ruin anyone else's meals in case ARR was fidgety, so we got there right after 5, when they had just opened and were mostly deserted. Got mostly dim sum, which turned out to be an excellent strategy, since they started bringing plates right away (which appeased the hungry toddler.) ARR's favorites were the ramen and the crab fried rice, which didn't surprise me. I was pleasantly surprised by how much he liked the tuna tartare spring roll, though. Ate almost half of one. I think the wide variety pleased him. He also got a little bit of short rib bao and most of a shrimp shumai. (We also got the pork and chive pretzel dumplings, which were great, but had some dairy. Which meant we got to keep them all for ourselves.) We did spill some milk, but we cleaned most of it up ourselves. And while ARR did crow at the top of his lungs a couple of times, I don't think he was any more obnoxious than the twenty-something dude bros at the bar were being. We got out before the full dinner rush really picked up. And while it was a little loud by the end, the key to avoiding the din is clearly going unfashionably early on a temperate day when they've opened all the glass walls.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-08-25 03:15 am (UTC)From: