It’s sometime near 2 am and I’ve got work in the morning, but I’m at the bar at J.J. Foley’s, regarding an imposing row of pints of Guinness and large shots of Jameson. Earlier in the evening, at a slightly more civilized hour, one of my companions said, “I feel like we should do car bombs tonight. Are you guys car bomb people?” He paused. “If you’ve never done one, then you are a car bomb person.”
That would be chef Matt Foley, executive chef at the Merchant, the casually refined American brasserie that opened in the Financial District in early 2014. We’ve spent the better part of a Thursday night wandering through Downtown Crossing and Chinatown, in search of food, booze and perhaps a bit of mischief. We’re joined by Juan Pedrosa, who took a night off from prepping for the opening of Yvonne’s, the much-anticipated supper club set to fill the long-vacant Locke-Ober space this October, where he’ll serve as executive chef. Rounding out the group are sisters Irene and Mei Li of popular Chinese-American food truck and restaurant Mei Mei Street Kitchen.
These young guns agreed to indulge me on my quest to get a glimpse at what industry pros get up to when they get off their shifts. In a city where restaurants seem to open and close with increasing frequency, helming a busy restaurant’s kitchen is hard, high-pressure work—and chefs have to work in their own meals around preparing them for others. Often, it’s only after their restaurant closes, in the wee hours, that they get to indulge themselves.
Not surprisingly, it takes us to Chinatown. Boston presents itself as buttoned-up city, deferring to 24-hour metropolises like New York when it comes to after-hours revelry, but late-night fun can be had if you know where to find it. A large part of that scene goes down in Chinatown.So we all meet up for cocktails and beers around 10 pm at Silvertone, a favorite after-work haunt of Matt’s. Juan and Irene have crossed paths before; the rest of us are meeting for the first time. But nothing makes fast friends like strong drinks and a common goal, and tonight we have both. Armed only with a recorder and an appetite for adventure, I’m ready to see where the night takes us.
Our first stop, on Irene’s suggestion, is Taiwan Cafe, a tiny, no-frills joint off Beach Street. The hour is creeping toward midnight when we sit at a round family-style table—and we are hungry. We’ve all had a few drinks and order a round of Heinekens to keep us wet while we peer at the large (and for me, intimidating) menu. Irene takes the lead and rattles off our order expertly: Oyster omelet, fried pork chop, scallion pancake with roast beef and rice cakes with pork.
The dishes are delivered steaming just in time for us to toast their arrival with a second round of Heinekens. We cheer, clink bottles and dig in. I peer at the plates, searching for the rice cakes. It turns out they’re actually small, chewy white spheres that look a bit like water chestnuts and taste nothing like them.
“I find the rice cakes really comforting because I always ate them with preserved greens and vegetables at home with my sister and brother and mom and dad,” Irene explains. “Sometimes they’re really spicy, so my dad would rinse them off for me before we ate them. I love how chewy they are. They’re kind of like a gummy bear in texture.” She’s right, and I’m not yet sure how I feel about that, though I can’t knock the salty, savory flavor from the pork.
“The texture is awesome!” says Juan, who’s also never tried them, but doesn’t share my reservations.
“I think the shape is supposed to be lucky,” Irene says. “It’s a very polarizing texture, but we love them.” Mei nods her assent, mouth full.
Next, we sample the fried pork chop, which seems made for inebriated snacking. Irene sums it up: “It’s crispy first, and then it’s greasy, and then it’s salty, and then it’s sweet. It’s like magic. Can’t really argue with that.” Nobody tries. We all chew silently for a moment in mutual reverence.
“The scallion pancake is ridiculous,” Juan exclaims. It’s true, but it’s the oyster omelet that has our attention. It’s a head-scratcher, but the sum of its odd parts is delicious. “Somebody was really fucked up when they thought up this,” Irene says. “It just comes with this sauce that is, basically, ketchup. On the English menu it’s called ‘oyster omelet,’ and then on the Chinese menu it’s called ‘oyster pancake,’ so you just have to know what you’re ordering.”
“It’s crazy light and crispy and fluffy,” Matt raves.
But what’s the gooey stuff, we wonder? Irene swigs her Heineken: “If you have to ask, you don’t want to know what the gooey stuff is.” So we don’t ask, and frankly, it doesn’t matter because right now that gooey stuff is like salty, oozy manna from munchies heaven.
We’re all a little drunk at this point, so the talk turns to drunk food. When it comes to late-night cravings after a few beers, the greasier the better for this crowd. Chefs, they’re just like us!
“If we were crawling in Brookline, I could take you to my favorite place for chicken fingers,” Irene says. “Dragon Star in Washington Square. But the most wonderful thing there is the crab Rangoon.”
“Just give me the crab Rangoon,” Matt says. “Just give me fried cream cheese!”
“You don’t buy them because you want crab,” Mei agrees. “You buy them because you want fried.”
Juan is perhaps most eloquent: “You want to fucking dump that shit in duck sauce and suck the fucking cream cheese out of it, turn it inside out, suck the other side,” he laughs. “As a kid, that was the one food I was addicted to from Chinese takeout. And I think it’s like that for everyone. Because it’s one of the more approachable things—you’re like, ah, this shit doesn’t even taste like crab!”
We agree that we have to get crab Rangoon at our next stop, Peach Farm, and stumble into the night.
It’s past 1 am but Peach Farm’s subterranean dining room is about a quarter full of late-night diners. We order as soon as we’re seated—these chefs know what they want. Singapore noodles (Juan’s favorite), salt and pepper soft shell crab, fried duck tongues (I wince in fear at this), twoorders of crab Rangoon (“Fuck it,” Matt says) and another round of Heinekens.
“I think the misconception of chefs being incredible in the kitchen is, yes, you want to be able to showcase your talent, but we also really enjoy comfort food,” Juan says as we tip back our bottles and wait for the feast.
“I’d pass up a dinner at any four-star restaurant to feel good after a long week of working,” he continues. “Some chefs binge-watch TV, just to turn it off. I want the cheesiest, biggest pile of nachos that you can fucking throw in my face. And I will eat that and drink margaritas until the sun comes up. I hate saying that to people, because they’re like, ‘Dude, you cook for a living.’ And I’m like, yeah, but I also want to enjoy my life a little, you know what I mean?”
“I had a whole day off once where all I ate was two pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream,” Matt admits to hooting and applause from the table. [Ed. note: He tried to take this admission off the record, but he knows what he did.] “I went back in, and the same person was working…. I was like, ‘Oh, uh, it’s for my girlfriend.’ ”
There’s a couple seated to our left, and the girl is very drunk. A waiter brings them a large white bucket; they peer inside. Irene explains that he’s showing them the live fish they will soon be eating. The drunk girl goggles at her still-swimming meal. I hope she doesn’t fall in.
Then the dishes arrive, all at once, and Juan asks the waiter for a side of “spicy sauce” for the Singapore noodles. “The chili sauce is amazing here,” he says.
We fall upon the crab Rangoon like people who didn’t just come from a whole other meal, sopping up the crispy, greasy, cream-filled pockets with duck sauce and washing it down with the umpteenth round of Heinekens that have appeared seemingly unbidden. (I think Matt ordered them.)
Still, it’s the noodles I can’t get enough of. I find myself taking seconds and then thirds of the flavorful stir-fried noodles, a mix of curry spice, peppers, pork, shrimp and other seafood delights. I studiously avoid the bowl of duck tongues, but Juan isn’t having it.
“You’d better take those duck tongues,” he orders, nudging them in my direction. They look innocuous enough—small, brown and very fried, they don’t resemble any tongue I’ve ever seen. But still. “They’ve been in a duck’s beak,” I protest helplessly.
“It’s like making out with a duck!” Mei exclaims. Juan and both sisters put duck tongues between their teeth and waggle them at me lecherously. I sigh and accept defeat. I put a duck tongue in my mouth and chew. It tastes kind of like chicken.
“I’m glad we got these. I’ve never had them here before,” Matt says through a mouthful of fried tongues. “I’m gonna get them next time.”
“They’re an awesome snack,” Juan agrees. “I wish McDonald’s sold duck tongues. I wish I could get a 20-piece McDonald’s duck tongues. The McTongue!”
“The first time I had these as a kid they were cold and pickled,” Mei recalls. “Not sweet and fried like this. It was a very different scenario.”
I swallow my single tongue and go in for a fourth serving of noodles. “Well, you tried them and that’s what counts,” Juan says.
We lean back in our seats, drunk off beer, good food and good company.
“Everyone’s got a full belly,” Matt says, clapping his hands together. “Time for car bombs!”
Night Shift
Ride Along on an After-Hours Chefs’ Crawl.
By Alexandra Cavallo | Photo Credit: Diego Navarro | Sept. 25, 2015
It’s sometime near 2 am and I’ve got work in the morning, but I’m at the bar at J.J. Foley’s, regarding an imposing row of pints of Guinness and large shots of Jameson. Earlier in the evening, at a slightly more civilized hour, one of my companions said, “I feel like we should do car bombs tonight. Are you guys car bomb people?” He paused. “If you’ve never done one, then you are a car bomb person.”
That would be chef Matt Foley, executive chef at the Merchant, the casually refined American brasserie that opened in the Financial District in early 2014. We’ve spent the better part of a Thursday night wandering through Downtown Crossing and Chinatown, in search of food, booze and perhaps a bit of mischief. We’re joined by Juan Pedrosa, who took a night off from prepping for the opening of Yvonne’s, the much-anticipated supper club set to fill the long-vacant Locke-Ober space this October, where he’ll serve as executive chef. Rounding out the group are sisters Irene and Mei Li of popular Chinese-American food truck and restaurant Mei Mei Street Kitchen.
These young guns agreed to indulge me on my quest to get a glimpse at what industry pros get up to when they get off their shifts. In a city where restaurants seem to open and close with increasing frequency, helming a busy restaurant’s kitchen is hard, high-pressure work—and chefs have to work in their own meals around preparing them for others. Often, it’s only after their restaurant closes, in the wee hours, that they get to indulge themselves.
Not surprisingly, it takes us to Chinatown. Boston presents itself as buttoned-up city, deferring to 24-hour metropolises like New York when it comes to after-hours revelry, but late-night fun can be had if you know where to find it. A large part of that scene goes down in Chinatown.So we all meet up for cocktails and beers around 10 pm at Silvertone, a favorite after-work haunt of Matt’s. Juan and Irene have crossed paths before; the rest of us are meeting for the first time. But nothing makes fast friends like strong drinks and a common goal, and tonight we have both. Armed only with a recorder and an appetite for adventure, I’m ready to see where the night takes us.
Our first stop, on Irene’s suggestion, is Taiwan Cafe, a tiny, no-frills joint off Beach Street. The hour is creeping toward midnight when we sit at a round family-style table—and we are hungry. We’ve all had a few drinks and order a round of Heinekens to keep us wet while we peer at the large (and for me, intimidating) menu. Irene takes the lead and rattles off our order expertly: Oyster omelet, fried pork chop, scallion pancake with roast beef and rice cakes with pork.
The dishes are delivered steaming just in time for us to toast their arrival with a second round of Heinekens. We cheer, clink bottles and dig in. I peer at the plates, searching for the rice cakes. It turns out they’re actually small, chewy white spheres that look a bit like water chestnuts and taste nothing like them.
“I find the rice cakes really comforting because I always ate them with preserved greens and vegetables at home with my sister and brother and mom and dad,” Irene explains. “Sometimes they’re really spicy, so my dad would rinse them off for me before we ate them. I love how chewy they are. They’re kind of like a gummy bear in texture.” She’s right, and I’m not yet sure how I feel about that, though I can’t knock the salty, savory flavor from the pork.
“The texture is awesome!” says Juan, who’s also never tried them, but doesn’t share my reservations.
“I think the shape is supposed to be lucky,” Irene says. “It’s a very polarizing texture, but we love them.” Mei nods her assent, mouth full.
Next, we sample the fried pork chop, which seems made for inebriated snacking. Irene sums it up: “It’s crispy first, and then it’s greasy, and then it’s salty, and then it’s sweet. It’s like magic. Can’t really argue with that.” Nobody tries. We all chew silently for a moment in mutual reverence.
“The scallion pancake is ridiculous,” Juan exclaims. It’s true, but it’s the oyster omelet that has our attention. It’s a head-scratcher, but the sum of its odd parts is delicious. “Somebody was really fucked up when they thought up this,” Irene says. “It just comes with this sauce that is, basically, ketchup. On the English menu it’s called ‘oyster omelet,’ and then on the Chinese menu it’s called ‘oyster pancake,’ so you just have to know what you’re ordering.”
“It’s crazy light and crispy and fluffy,” Matt raves.
But what’s the gooey stuff, we wonder? Irene swigs her Heineken: “If you have to ask, you don’t want to know what the gooey stuff is.” So we don’t ask, and frankly, it doesn’t matter because right now that gooey stuff is like salty, oozy manna from munchies heaven.
We’re all a little drunk at this point, so the talk turns to drunk food. When it comes to late-night cravings after a few beers, the greasier the better for this crowd. Chefs, they’re just like us!
“If we were crawling in Brookline, I could take you to my favorite place for chicken fingers,” Irene says. “Dragon Star in Washington Square. But the most wonderful thing there is the crab Rangoon.”
“Just give me the crab Rangoon,” Matt says. “Just give me fried cream cheese!”
“You don’t buy them because you want crab,” Mei agrees. “You buy them because you want fried.”
Juan is perhaps most eloquent: “You want to fucking dump that shit in duck sauce and suck the fucking cream cheese out of it, turn it inside out, suck the other side,” he laughs. “As a kid, that was the one food I was addicted to from Chinese takeout. And I think it’s like that for everyone. Because it’s one of the more approachable things—you’re like, ah, this shit doesn’t even taste like crab!”
We agree that we have to get crab Rangoon at our next stop, Peach Farm, and stumble into the night.
It’s past 1 am but Peach Farm’s subterranean dining room is about a quarter full of late-night diners. We order as soon as we’re seated—these chefs know what they want. Singapore noodles (Juan’s favorite), salt and pepper soft shell crab, fried duck tongues (I wince in fear at this), twoorders of crab Rangoon (“Fuck it,” Matt says) and another round of Heinekens.
“I think the misconception of chefs being incredible in the kitchen is, yes, you want to be able to showcase your talent, but we also really enjoy comfort food,” Juan says as we tip back our bottles and wait for the feast.
“I’d pass up a dinner at any four-star restaurant to feel good after a long week of working,” he continues. “Some chefs binge-watch TV, just to turn it off. I want the cheesiest, biggest pile of nachos that you can fucking throw in my face. And I will eat that and drink margaritas until the sun comes up. I hate saying that to people, because they’re like, ‘Dude, you cook for a living.’ And I’m like, yeah, but I also want to enjoy my life a little, you know what I mean?”
“I had a whole day off once where all I ate was two pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream,” Matt admits to hooting and applause from the table. [Ed. note: He tried to take this admission off the record, but he knows what he did.] “I went back in, and the same person was working…. I was like, ‘Oh, uh, it’s for my girlfriend.’ ”
There’s a couple seated to our left, and the girl is very drunk. A waiter brings them a large white bucket; they peer inside. Irene explains that he’s showing them the live fish they will soon be eating. The drunk girl goggles at her still-swimming meal. I hope she doesn’t fall in.
Then the dishes arrive, all at once, and Juan asks the waiter for a side of “spicy sauce” for the Singapore noodles. “The chili sauce is amazing here,” he says.
We fall upon the crab Rangoon like people who didn’t just come from a whole other meal, sopping up the crispy, greasy, cream-filled pockets with duck sauce and washing it down with the umpteenth round of Heinekens that have appeared seemingly unbidden. (I think Matt ordered them.)
Still, it’s the noodles I can’t get enough of. I find myself taking seconds and then thirds of the flavorful stir-fried noodles, a mix of curry spice, peppers, pork, shrimp and other seafood delights. I studiously avoid the bowl of duck tongues, but Juan isn’t having it.
“You’d better take those duck tongues,” he orders, nudging them in my direction. They look innocuous enough—small, brown and very fried, they don’t resemble any tongue I’ve ever seen. But still. “They’ve been in a duck’s beak,” I protest helplessly.
“It’s like making out with a duck!” Mei exclaims. Juan and both sisters put duck tongues between their teeth and waggle them at me lecherously. I sigh and accept defeat. I put a duck tongue in my mouth and chew. It tastes kind of like chicken.
“I’m glad we got these. I’ve never had them here before,” Matt says through a mouthful of fried tongues. “I’m gonna get them next time.”
“They’re an awesome snack,” Juan agrees. “I wish McDonald’s sold duck tongues. I wish I could get a 20-piece McDonald’s duck tongues. The McTongue!”
“The first time I had these as a kid they were cold and pickled,” Mei recalls. “Not sweet and fried like this. It was a very different scenario.”
I swallow my single tongue and go in for a fourth serving of noodles. “Well, you tried them and that’s what counts,” Juan says.
We lean back in our seats, drunk off beer, good food and good company.
“Everyone’s got a full belly,” Matt says, clapping his hands together. “Time for car bombs!”
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