Sichuan Odyssey

WHY MANHATTAN?

Asks the food blogger Susan J.

Because it is the borough where I have the most lunch.

Since receiving this blog I have eaten at:

Wu Liang Ye 49th Street; Sichuan Gourmet 39th Street; Famous Sichuan

Need to eat at:

Grand Sichuan Chinatown, Chelsea, Lexington, St. Mark’s, and the one in the 50s on the east side; Wu Liang Ye Upper East Side; new Sichuan Gourmet?; some place called Ollie’s near Penn Station that comes up on Google? Anything else?

And then my heart will explode.

NEW BLOG, INTRODUCTION, FIRST POST

(Stolen from this flickr page)

Hello, this is my new blog.

Beverly gave it to me for my birthday and wrote that first post. I’m new to blogging because, like playing in a punk band, it seems like the audience is necessarily limited to people who do the exact same thing as you. I already play in a punk band, so I haven’t really bothered to find a different insular group of weirdos and haven’t paid much attention to blogs (aside from, obviously, this). I will start now. My old roommate, himself an occasional food blogger, has showed me some cool ones, and in general I hope to follow their lead and avoid some of the things that I find annoying about internet food writing (embarassing prose, half “this meal was very nice” and half dated slang like “bomb ass” or whatever; a systematic refusal to understand how capitalism and food production works at scale; etc.) here.

As such, I’ve limited the scope of the project to—primarily—a discussion of Manhattan Sichuan places and what I like about them. Given that Sichuan food is the third best world cuisine (after Arabic food and the Birreria in Pilsen but before hamburgers and Per Se), this should be an exciting—if caustic and grossly unhealthy—project. A quick note about authenticity: one of the worst things about food writing and its culinary Orientalism is the idea that authenticity can be sought out, understood, and explained. As a blogger I find that stupid and lame, and as a student of cultural anthropology I find it troubling and full of incorrect assumptions about basically everything. So, I’m not going to describe this stuff as if there’s a central, essential Sichuanness that I can appraise and these places can emulate, I’m just going to talk about whether or not I like them.

Finally, the project takes its inspiration from my friends Matt and Mike L.’s successful year-long Worcester Pizza Odyssey to eat at every pizza place listed in the Worcester phone book and, obviously, from this guy.

Soon I will outline a plan of attack.