Eating, central NJ

Sure, this blog hasn’t updated since the first post—and in the time since, dòubànjiàng has become commonplace enough to appear on the Asian shelf at the local Wegman’s and in the still-moderately Sinophobic pages of Cook’s Illustrated, though many other essential ingredients, yácài included, can still only be had at Kam Man (or Ranch 99, a little further away)—but eating has continued in Central Jersey. Where to begin again? How about a post on Olive Press Eatery, a recently opened Palestian restaurant and bookshop in Metuchen.

We liked very much everything we’ve eaten there. The Tagine Chicken Pocket contains a very good tajine. The grilled halloumi is an achievement in grilled-cheese literalism. All three spreads are excellent: hummus, m’tabal (eggplant), labneh. Falafel is extremely crunchy and tasty. We have to admit that the french fries were also delicious. The Palestianian shakshuka was good of its kind (but shakshuka just isn’t our favoritest egg dish, to be honest). We haven’t tried the meat platters because meat platters are rarely our thing at lunchtime but experience suggests everything on this menu is worth trying.

We hope lots of locals do try. Metuchen is a tough town for restaurants: some very mediocre places seem to succeed because of their location, or, more depressingly, because the clientele wants mediocre, middle-of-the-road food. Meanwhile small treasures are lost (Thai Garden down the alley by the tracks, far superior to Phattra on Main St.—or the old incarnation of Mangia Toscano with its excellent bread baker). We never even got to try the Chinese restaurant that opened on Main St. with an ambitious Sichuanese menu before it was replaced by the uninspiring lowest-common-denominator offerings of Pink Lotus. Olive Press is an example of ambition: a quite specific cuisine, not otherwise represented locally, notably distinct from the more generic “middle eastern” places in the vicinity.

The bookshop component is pretty impressive, too. There is a very nice selection of books in English about and from Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East, including non-fiction, fiction, quite a lot of poetry, and kids’ books. There’s a whole Edward Said shelf too, which is a certain way to win me over. May Olive Press Eatery thrive.

I love living near a big Chinese supermarket. From Metuchen, Kam Man is only a few minutes away down Route 1. I don’t know enough to really judge the market against others of its kind: in terms of size and variety of things on the shelves, it seems comparable to (my memories of) big places serving large Chinese/Chinese-American populations like 99 Ranch in Mountain View. I have never tried anything from Kam Man’s big, intimidating live/fresh seafood department, but this is where we go for stocking up on our Chinese fridge and cabinet staples, like multiple jars of the life-altering Chili Bean Paste (dòubànjiàng 豆瓣酱, or, as it’s labeled on the Lee Kum Kee-brand bottle, “Toban Djan”).¹ The take-out lunch counter is good and was in fact, as I recall, Chowhounders’ strongest recommendation for Edison-area Chinese, in the time before the fall. Choosing is hard, especially since one of my choices always has to be bitter melon. It probably violates many rules of culinary grammar, but I have been known to add on another take-out dish hiding in the refrigerated section, stewed kǎo fū 烤麩 (wheat gluten) with mushrooms.

Anyway, on our most recent trip we spotted something we’d been looking out for for years without ever seeing it: Sichuanese yá caì 芽菜. Other readers of Fuchsia Dunlop’s marvelous cookbooks will know what I mean. This is one of her “magic ingredients,” flavoring a whole bunch of dishes, including a summer/fall vegetable standby, dry-friend green beans. But despite combing the refrigerated, jarred, and canned pickles in Kam Man and other markets I’d never seen it. We’d been using a canned pickle labeled “Szechwen Preserved Vegetable,” which is very good, but I suspect not really the same thing. This time, though, we found Suimiyacai brand pickle, exactly as depicted on Dunlop’s blog, in a little plastic sachet (“Please do not eat if the package is swelling”). Just made a version of dry-fried green beans using it, more or less according to the recipe in Every Grain of Rice. Delicious and savory little shredded bits of pickle, quite different from the “Szechwen vegetable,” which is crunchier and sourer. This makes me eager to re-run more of Dunlop’s recipes (dàndànmiàn!). I used long beans that we’d impulse-bought on last week’s trip to Patel Bros.—but that’s another local supermarket deserving its own post in tribute.