First, be aware that there is no such thing as a light lunch with Josh Ozersky. I knew this well, and though we were scheduled to tour the Cantonese restaurants of Chinatown at 2 p.m., I didn’t eat a bite before that.
Josh is a well known food critic, having written for New York Magazine, Time Magazine, and now Esquire, where he’s their food critic. He also has a Ph.D. in American history and, importantly, is intensely interested in evolution. That provides a fantastic symbiosis, for he gets to ask me about evolution and I get to ask him about restaurants. And, like me, he’s an apostate Jew, very fond of BBQ. Our tour, then was, to concentrate on the BBQ of New York’s Chinatown. I was in Josh’s hands.
Our first stop was Sun Say Gai on Canal and Baxter, full of both Chinese and Westerners chowing down on barbecued pork, duck, and an assortment of steamed and baked buns. Our first order was half a barbecued duck and a large dumpling filled with pork, egg, and other stuff:
The dumpling halved, lateral view:
With the half duck (superb; I shall dine on the remnants now) we had a side order of bbq suckling pig, with incomparably luscious crispy skin:
Then it was on to the Big Wong, a nearby restaurant which, says Josh, has the best ribs in Chinatown. We accompanied the ribs with an order of salt-and-pepper squid:
The ribs—fantastic.
Josh met an old friend on the street, who took a really nice photo of the two of us, but sadly his friend pressed the “record” button and now we have about two seconds of a movie that I can’t show here.
On the way to procure dessert, we went by a store called “Evolution,” which really is about natural-history artifacts. They have fossils as well as mounted beetles and butterflies (which sadden me), and a passel of the old natural-history posters I love. I was photographed next to what I’ll look like in 30 years.
After all that BBQ, we both felt like some dessert, and gelato was on our minds. According to Josh, the best gelato in New York happened to be nearby (he seems to know where every good place to eat is in the city): Grom, on Bleecker Street. We both had a medium cup of gelato; his was dark chocolate, mine hazelnut, with whipped cream (we shared, as the combination is great). But we couldn’t resist an order of fig sorbetto as well, a fantastic concoction tasting exactly of fresh, ripe figs. Here is Mr. Ozersky before we dug in over intense discussions about the origin of life and the evolution of sex.
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