Diamond in the Rough

A weaker, more fragile self likened my kismet move to Cambridge to that of Napoleon’s banishment to Elba. I dreaded the ghost stories told to me by youth in revolt: there’s nothing to do there. It’s a giant flee market- outlets everywhere, no good Chinese food. The great paradox of the place, from what I could understand after multiple run-ins with early twenty-somethings- tattoos and ear plugs and barbells and all- was that if you wanted to understand the kind of city dweller, you should spend some time in a garbage dump. I found no humour, nor sense in the statement. For if you’re one telling me that everyone living in Cambridge is garbage, are you yourself not the same garbage? 

Riddles aside, and leaving any Socratic rhetoric alone, I did my best to tread lightly with my ethnographic accounts. I oozed arrogance and snobbery without even trying, but just by merely asking where to eat, or talking tea with, of all people, young tea enthusiasts. Coffee was another touchy subject. Starbucks was their cup of tea, if only because they got it for free. 

A forced 2 hour conversation left me jaded and unsure. Maybe where I was, for the most part sojourned, really was a sad, sad place, with little night life, and the depraved civilian riddling so many of its spaces, that locals were just turned off of going out and sharing space with them. That’s my biggest qualm with the city’s people so far. But urban politics aside, I was resolute to make my time here as positive as possible. I have a bigger home, nine foot tall showers, HBO, and a restaurant stove my dear mother made a promise of buying all her life. In these past two months, my days, for the most part, have consisted of cooking whatever elaborate meals I could on a stove that doesn’t belong in a suburban kitchen, recording television, reading whatever theory I can get my hands on, and practicing what little kung fu knowledge I have left in the dug out foundations riddling my neighborhood and its million dollar homes. When the scaffolding goes up in one home, I make an effort to move, night by night, on to the next, until everything’s all done. For now though, excavators are still my alarm clocks, and my unfinished kitchen, my own little restaurant.

Architecture is another thing that has occupied my time, as well as the odd teashop, the multiple libraries, and all of the city’s beautiful rivers. There certainly are spaces worth trafficking, which makes me question what the young have told me for so long. Either that, or my years dreading this place have awoken an old appreciation of urban study. Serendipitous, no doubt. And when I feel a little more adventurous, I campaign Joey to come and explore with me. We’ve been to quite a few dives, and so far, liked them all. It seems on most of our outings we’ve converged fluidly with an older crew. Are we getting old? Or is the city just cliché? Polite adults peppered with a majority of bored young people who are too lazy to go out and make their city a playground? My flaneur behavior makes me think it might be the latter. There are, after all, three different downtowns, all charming in their own right. If they’re not cosmopolitan enough, they certainly will be in the near future; but I’m sure the youth will complain it’ll be too expensive to live by that point. Alas, the grass IS always greener. But, I’ve found the grass here to be just as green as my old home. I’ve found an apiarist, a Viet-Thai grocery store, and what I consider to be probably the most impressive coffee shop in the Region. Is that a big claim? Good, because I stand by it. 

***

I’ve been slowly making my way around every café in town, looking for a local bag of beans if only to avoid the devastating shelf life that ruins any chance of a really great cup. And certainly, giving the city’s youth the benefit of the doubt, I expected to find absolutely nothing, just drip. Around here, the barista has been muscled out by laziness and big box stores that could deliver the same simply because no one was trying, or so I thought. 

Monigram Coffee Roaster’s location caught my eye. The building’s outer urban charm, and simple bold font design stamped onto its outer wall lured my cynical attention. It echoed the coffee cosmopolitanism I associated with so many third wave coffee joints. It was obviously the last place I went to look for a bag. And I expected nothing else. Something along the lines of beans brought in, but better than a grocery store; at least there might be  some contact with the mad scientist roasters around Ontario. I was caught off guard by my own defeatism though, because when I went in and asked if they had any bags, the shop's patron pointed to a shelf behind me next to a roaster. I was relieved to know I had finally found a place with fresh beans, but floored more by the knowledge. 

I didn’t really care about the roaster; in fact, when I see any in coffee shops, I never fully trust the places using in house roasting as a selling point. Why would Monigram Coffee Roaster’s be any different? So what swayed me? To the point, my questions of connoisseurship were answered with finesse. There were multiple kinds of beans, each with their own profile; they were shelved, dated the day of their roasting, and thrown away every ten days. Nothing around here is fresher. 

Monigram offers guests the coveted pour over, and the NEVER seen Siphon Coffee maker- the most regal of Japanese coffee invention. In the summer, I was told, they even offered the 24 hour cold coffee drip. All third wave theatrics not even done in Kitchener-Waterloo, pour overs aside. Monigram Coffee Roasters is as surreal as coffee can get. I’d say it’s cornering the market, but in the city of Cambridge, more specifically, downtown Galt, it’s playing a game all its own, and it doesn’t care that it cares a million times more than every other coffee shop. It cares about coffee, not the pretense of coffee for the sake of going to a café. This isn't coffee for the sake of the Enlightenment. It is an epitaph for the gastronomic greatness that can someday riddle this city though; perhaps a dooming one for the cynical youths that claim there is nowhere good to go. I reckon if I still lived where I used to, I’d make the trip out to Monigram before I would the places in my old back yard. If only I knew sooner. But luckily, I don’t have to. I bet my cool coffee friends feel pretty foolish, and if you don’t head to Monigram, you should too.











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The Authenticity Polemic

I woke to something very irksome on the culinary web today, which I suppose would serves me right for waking up if only to read and not watch cartoons like the manchildren of mumblecore.  

The fait accompli of said mush was focusing on one man’s journey to find authentic food and then recreate it. Though I’ve no qualms with any sort of recreation, I do, as you all know, have a huge problem with the dangerous snake pit of authenticity. Authenticity is like perfection. It’s a ridiculous, controlling concept. It’s a charmed circle. It might work with one painting that sticks around for a long while, and is the source of copy and profit. Adam’s rib too might be authentic, but a dish certainly can’t be. Or so I like to claim, because it comes and goes. That magic argument, using a little reverse Nietzsche, is made into manure.  But here’s my bigger problem with anything authentic in the food world: authentic food imposes imperialistic ideologies on the less fortunate; it Others cooks, and encourages modes of power. For one White privileged male to spend his time in other parts of an ‘exotic’ world only to come back to the West ‘looking’ for the real thing is a delusional theatric consumers love buying into, specifically because it buys into the Western ideal of the individual, which in and of itself is destructive, because while we cannot find any kind of autonomy from anything authentic because it is a mere fantasy, we continually shell out cash and look for it. Also, it’s lumped under the genre of travel writing, so it’s strictly for entertainment. At least until you decide to impress your friends with a recipe at dinner. And that’s only the political economy of it. I’m not depending on it for making my argument. 

My real problem? My real real problem is this: asinine tripe like this, from a White privileged centre, going out and looking for the authentic and then trying to conquer it, or policing it in a multicultural space couldn’t be more imperial and destructive, especially when you try to own the people doing it to survive through the act of judging the product they prepare as true to the abstract ‘genuine article.’ I hope people know this kind of shit is why museums and zoos exist. So France and Britain could just fight each other like babies and one-up each other by conquering lands and displaying anthropological war trophies. That said, know this: when you go into an ethnic restaurant, or read about a guy who’s going into an ethnic restaurant to see if they made the ‘real thing’, you are entertaining your novel whims, but also Othering those poor ethnic cooks, and rendering them invisible if they can’t do it. This is a huge paradox, aside from a huge slap in the face to the poor folk running their restaurant. Is the Thai cook not making Thai food? Did they not come from their native country and decide to cook their food to make a living here? So how can you argue authenticity when they made it in their land originally, albeit a little variably. That’s why authenticity’s a hoax, man. That’s why it’s so easy to control a submissive party by accepting them or shaming them; unfortunately, if they’re approval seeking, they’ll suffer for it. Unfortunately, if we’re approval seeking, looking for cultural capital to elevate ourselves through consumption, they will suffer, because we’ll judge them on ‘taste,’ not taste. What do these kinds of White shenanigans say for the Thai family I spent two tender years working for? Are they not authentic because something doesn’t taste the same? (A customer once complained the pad thai wasn’t like the pad thai in Thailand- little did he know, pad thai is a Western creation, taken in by Thailand- no peanut butter, no ketchup) Or is their food authentic because they are a specific ethnicity? What does that say for the Chinaman who can cook great, fantastic laab? That’s Othering, man. Ignoring the struggle of a person and disqualifying them if what they offer doesn’t benefit us. 

And if you’re all, ‘Hey, man, no, I mean ingredients are what make some dish authentic.’ Please. Take that shit up with the ghost of Barthes. I shamed an economics professor for trying to tell me Chinese food in China is better than Chinese food here made by Chinese immigrants, in front of a whole Chinese class, so I’ve no bone about doing the same to you. Save that authenticity garbage for 17 year olds reading Thoreau for the first time and somehow, for whatever dumb fuck reason, associating nature with what is real and true and genuine and autonomous. Please. Thoreau didn’t care about wilderness; that’s not why he left. He hated the political climate and wanted to get away from it and try and make his own, only to fail and come back. So, just as an aside, can we stop trying to associate the environment with human autonomy and spirit too? While we’re bringing up the subject. I mean, that’s like me leaving Waterloo’s people for Cambridge’s because, they’re more ‘real.’ Ha. It’s like going to the market to buy Canadian bananas. That’s bananas! It’s like going to China to learn real kung-fu, when everyone knows Mao totally mutilated kung-fu. He destroyed Shaolin, he burned down temples. Now you gotta go to Taiwan, or Japan and find secret masters. Do I sound ridiculous? That’s because I’m being ridiculous. It’s ridiculous! If someone’s good at kung fu, they’re good at kung fu. If they can teach you to defend yourself, then you can defend yourself. Nothing’s more right. And so I make the same claim for taste. 

Seek food not because it’s authentic, because that doesn’t mean it’s literally better! You can allude yourself in thinking that yes, but just seek for tasting good. Period. And there’s the other variability, and even I’m disqualifying myself. Everyone’s palate IS different. Food writing’s just flashy rhetoric, sprinkled with a little bit of credibility. Anyone can eat and say something tastes good or bad. But how well can they convince you? Get out there and eat. Or don’t, but please don’t support any notions of authenticity so some patronizing White butthead can lord his tongue over poor immigrant workers depending on free family labour and illegal workers. Life’s hard enough as it is without categorizing cooks into authentic, not authentic. Can we all PLEASE stop eating the Other? Can we just strike ‘authenticity’ from the lexicon? Call me a communist, but at least I don’t have to listen to another fathead tell me he’s better than me because he had ‘authentic’ poo soup. At least then, I won’t have to see another old Thai woman cry in a corner, knife in hand. 

-w

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Journey to the West

Eat your heart out, Korean-Cosby.

West of Seoul's 'opening' seemed like five long centuries. I like to think I waited for its vehicular arrival for about as long as Su Wukong waited for the opportunity to be released from the Buddha's own hand. I checked websites, looked in the streets, read tweets, even tweeted to the point of being ignored by them. But, eventually I had to come to the understanding that I’d either be around when the damned thing got some gas and hit the pavement, or I’d be up in the air, on a plane to Red China waiting to eat dog in the streets. Fortuitously however, the Universe- at least I like to think so- wanted me to have both. 

Some Sundays ago, Bingeman’s park- just one of the many places Joey and I have been ‘dismissed’ from (Joey for no bad behavior whatsoever; me for corrupting the youth of Athens)- hosted what the Region called the largest food truck event ever. The less backhanding individual would politely introduce it as the 2013 KW Harvest Food Truck Rally for Charity. So, though inevitably expensive, I managed to absolve my cheap guilt by telling myself over and over again, ‘it was for charity.’ But let’s face it, I was perfectly prepared to spend what I still contend is a ridiculous amount of cash for novel street food. That said, let me just answer the question I seem to cleverly skirt with backhanded statements: will I EVER think food trucks are worth the cash? No. Not ever. You’re better off going to a restaurant. At least you can sit, loiter, eat, and not shit in the streets for the same amount of money, tip included. But again, it was for charity!

So, calling Joey out of an inebriated slumber, he, the XuanZang- the Tripitaka, the Tang Sanzang- to my Great Sage Equal to Heaven, journeyed with me if only to release me from the culinary tyranny that had enslaved my curiosity for so, so long.

And then there we were, standing in line with tens of trucks at attention, their engines all drowning out all the obligatory chatter us food fatheads could posture out of our glutinous mouths. We meant business. Joey meant to eat more than I thought he should have- without pacing himself, at least. Luckily, convincing him of the existence of other trucks, and not only the one we had ventured to eat, had him taking his time. West of Seoul’s docket had us choosing what I stereotypically considered Korean, culinary appropriations aside. I ordered what seems to be Waterloo’s proverbial food truck staple: Risotto balls, but Korean; and the only other item I considered patriotically Korean: pork belly. Unless doughnuts and apple cider are something I know nothing about. But cheap shots aside, and using Joey as the name-sake  for our order, we took our appetizers and ran into the giant residual tent left standing on the property after the previous night’s Oktoberfest celebration, where-in-which Joey witnessed a woman get pushed by a big drunk dude. Anyway…

The clever constitution of Kimchi rice balls never really seems clever in the least. In fact, it seemed too obvious when I read it on the menu; but I ate it. The things were hardy with glutinous rice, and briny from the kimchi mixed within. Still, I couldn’t help but think the things were missing an element. Otherwise, when it came to any sapidity, the things were bland, even with the Russian-esque Korean dressing, which’s familiar flavor you find in every other joint. Was it wise to play it safe? Or pander to pedestrian palates? Probably. Especially since I’m probably the most polemic eater around these here parts, and people would sooner listen to me than eat enough on their own and say, ‘hey wait a minute, I’ve had this before.’ Anyway, that’s the worst of it. What I did like was the flaky, light tempura used to batter the otherwise hardy staple. Frankly, risotto balls are the residuals of poor peasant proletarians who needed every calorie they could get. Eat enough and you’ll sink like a stone, so thank high cuisine for some gastronomic gentrification.

Texturally, West of Seoul’s pork belly was out of this world. I could feel the oil wet my lips, the tender fatty pork just melt away when I bit into it. No pull, no fibrous bite. It was unbelievable, especially around these here parts. Otherwise, it tasted salty and usual, which, unfortunately, had me yearning for something more. I won’t argue that simplicity is a good thing. Certainly, the popular convention today is that simple makes for the best kind of food, but the adage seems a little more than overused at this point. Simple can be good, but so can creative flavours, not that the pork particularly needed it. Still, buttery fat wasn’t enough to satisfy my adventure that day, and Joey wasn’t nearly comatose enough at that point. So we surveyed the long line of competition, inadvertently finding ourselves gathered around the attractively creative menu options of food trucks from out of town. What they were doing here? Charity, bro, charity. We were glad. And looking for something lighter than what we not minutes before crammed down our throats, found Hamilton’s Karma Chamealeon, apparently Ontario’s first 100% plant-based and animal-free food truck. Anyway, who really cares? Their Jamaican Jerk Tacos were enough to convert the most staunch carnivore, or the most unsympathetic, cynical eater who believes anything vegetable and restaurant related is a consumer trend. But I’ll be damned if Joey and I weren’t absolutely floored by marinated jackfruit pulled apart to match the texture of pork, topped with papaya-guava-salsa on blue corn tortillas. The creativity, the combination of tastes- sweet with savoury out of nowhere and a heat that came right at the last minute- made Karma Chamealeon our choice truck of the day, and forgetting trucks even existed in Waterloo. We went back just to smell whatever else landed in other customers’ hands. And since Hamilton seemed to dish out a great culinary chariot, we thought we’d try and make it a two-fer. 

Not two doors down, we visited Jonny Blonde, a truck offering a plethora of creative flatbead creations. And since the theme of the day seemed to me to be Korean, and the truck’s bulgogi sandwich offered a creative slaw with asian pear, as well as a mystery teriyaki sauce, I couldn’t stay away. Mixing our last little bit of dough, Joey and I begged for a sandwich split down the middle, and were humbly obliged. A soft, airy bread folded over rich sinewy short rib that curmudgeonly stuck between our teeth, but at least stayed true to a Korean staple. Jonny’s teriyaki seemed nothing out of the ordinary though, and would have saved him face to not call it his own. If anything, it was just more of the familiar. I could appreciate the creative chutzpah of combinations, but found myself done in by mediocre culinary rhetoric. A shame, but eatable to say the least. 

Hey, it took a humble monk 17 years to retrieve the sutras, and 5 centuries for a monkey to reach buddhahood, I’ll be damned if it doesn’t take me nearly as long to find something really remarkable to taste.

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