The Strawberry Fields Whatever International Supper Club, Vol. II: Bao, Hot Dogs & A Berry-Themed Dessert

WORDS BY LIZ & LJ, ILLUSTRATION BY JEN

Welcome to our new (-ish!) column wherein LJ (who lives in London) and Liz (who lives in Los Angeles) will go out to eat and order the same foods and report back on those foods, from their respective continents. Here we are with bao, hot dogs, and berry-themed desserts. (You can read Vol. 1: French Onion Soup, Spaghetti, & Doughnuts HERE) 

1st COURSE: BAO

LJ: To celebrate our "one year of living in London" anniversary, Mark and I gave in to the foody bloggy Instagram publicity machine that had spent the past couple months brainwashing us into believing that our lives were valueless and would remain so until we ate dinner at London’s hottest bao hotspot, Bao, by eating dinner at London’s hottest bao hotspot, Bao. Bao was the talk of the Instagram town for most of the beginning of summer, until it was knocked off its pedestal by the jiggly magenta pork fat rectangle immersed in a puddle of different kind of fat dessert from the restaurant everyone calls “Nuno Mendes’ new place” like “Nuno” is a friend of ours who we all know personally and hang out with on the regs. In fact he is sitting across the table from me as I write these words.

I arrived at Bao a little before Mark and had expected to see a queue around the block but there was no queue! Or so I thought. It turned out that the Bao queue was positioned across the street instead of out the door, which is a deceptive place to put your queue since it tricks people who don’t initially see the queue into thinking they don’t have to queue outside a restaurant that you infamously have to queue for and that gets you extra-stoked to dine there THAT SECOND but then you’re hit with the harsh blow of realizing that you actually DO have to queue, but you’ve just gotten yourself so revved up for it you’ll do ANYTHING… I don’t know, maybe it just relates to zoning laws and I am reading too deep into things. 

        Anyway, the queue was not too long since it was mad early. A nice young Irish or Scottish (I forget- don't worry, I know the diff between the 2 accents) gent was tasked with keeping the queue-peoples' morale up and frequently came by to take our drink orders. He was peppy and upbeat in a really waitery way that I didn’t love but respected. I ordered a Diet Coke and he was distracted so said “Sorry, Coke, or Diet Coke?” and then I changed my order to a cider because that was obviously the Universe’s way of telling me not to get a soft drink, you know? Very cute cider, nice hefty glass bottle with the little apple-tag, the natural kind of cider that tastes like you chucked a bunch of apples into a vat of brown vinegar and then blended them up and ran the results through a Sodastream. It sounds like I am trying to describe something very disgusting but I like that taste. I love a vinegarious cider.

        Mark arrived and ordered a queue beer. About fifteen minutes later, our table was ready, and the Irish/Scottish guy led us inside. The restaurant was tiny, but not unpleasantly so, and paneled in pale wood— teak? I don’t know the names of all the woods but I’ve been calling it teak in my head. Bao is aesthetically neutral in a way that a dyed-in-the-wool maximalist like myself can’t help but respond to with a resounding "eh" (I WANT A STAINED GLASS YIN YANG! I WANT AN AQUA EAMES CHAIR! BE ROCOCO! BE BY DAVID SALLE!)— but I’m not too proud to admit that it’s a decent-enough space to have spent forty-five minutes of my life dining inside. Although, as an extension of the Spartan décor, the poor waitstaff are forced to wear offensively drab labcoat-style jackets as a uniform: they’re white, buttoned up the front, with Nehru-style collars and Bao logos emblazoned on the chest. They would make anyone who wasn’t a one hundred-and-thirty pound dude look like a lump of something. Fabric, marshmallows, laundry, cake. Etc.

We ordered a bunch of little bits and bobs, as one does, in London in 2015. Bao is one of those places that gives you a little notepad and you tick off which dishes you’d like to eat, which I guess is meant to be "authentic"— but the font, and the little graphics of all the different bao flavs, were unabashedly “hipstery little bits and bobs London in 2015 place”/inauthentically the thing I think they were trying to be ("like actual Taiwan"), which I found a bit confusing. But authenticity is a pretty confusing concept, "authentic" a word that begs to be confined by a set of quotation marks and accompanied by an eye-roll and a shrug. But hipsteriness is pretty straightforward, pretty point-blank. 

        On the one hand, I wish Bao would pick one avenue and then go with it, but on the other, I don’t care. Bao can do whatever it wants. It's not really my prob. Bao was good enough that I would eat at it constantly if I worked across the street, but I don’t. It's majorly out of the way for me, and everything we ate there was only kind of good. Or maybe it was properly Good, but I’d been led to believe that it was going to be… not just excellent, but MIND-BLOWING, and that too confused me— were all the Instagram food blog corporate machine bloggers who claimed that these pouchy little dough-wiches changed their lives lying? Do they not love Bao as much as they say love Bao, or do they just have lower standards than I do? Or am I wrong? Was my palate off that day? Is Bao paying them money? Can Bao pay me some money? 

Of all the dishes we ate that day, only three were actual bao. My least favorite bao was the fried chicken bao, which I can only describe as being “forgettable,” because I forget it, and my favorite was the classic bao, which has peanut powder on top. The bun was perfectly glutinous— a chilled-out, manageable level of wet— in a way that reminded me of either sushi rice or congealed white cheese on, say, a day-old baked pasta dish, eaten cold. Another thing that sounds revolting that I mean as a compliment. The peanut powder was cool because it tastes like peanuts and peanuts are delicious but I would have liked it better if it were just, you know… peanut butter. Or like a decadent peanut butter-oriented dessert or something more in that vein.

        I think that if I could have reinvented Bao to suit my exact Laura Jane needs, I would have nixed every single bell and/or whistle, and ordered two plain buns: both served hot with a generous pat of melted butter. And I wouldn’t have queued for them; I would have eaten them standing up, problematically drunk, in my kitchen at three in the morning. I probably would have said, or hummed, “Mmmm” aloud. The butter would have dribbled down my chin, and I’d’ve thought I was going to puke before I ate them, but then I wouldn’t puke. They would have cured me. 

LIZ: My bao day was two Saturdays ago, during the last gasp of L.A.'s disgusting mid-August heat wave. My friends and I had tickets to see Straight Outta Compton in the dome at Arclight early in the afternoon, so at some weird hour of the morning I drove down to Long's Family Pastry, which is a bakery in Chinatown I found by googling "best bao in los angeles." On the way I stopped at Guisado's and got a horchata spiked with cold brew and it made me feel like I could live forever.

        Chinatown was a ghost town. L.A. was hot and asleep. The only other people in the bakery were a bunch of old men drinking coffee, hanging out in the ugly plastic booths. But I'm sure at some point in the day things really get hopping at Long's Family Pastry, since everything seriously costs about a dollar and it was all so yum-looking. While I was there I decided I'd go back every Saturday for the rest of my life, which is a promise I've already broken - though this past Saturday I did go to Big Sugar in Studio City and got the most beautifully gooey/salty oatmeal cookie in the world, oh my god.

       So here's the part where I tell you I messed it all up: I thought I was getting black bean bao at Long's Family Pastry, but really what I ordered was black bean cake. And I have no regrets; my black bean cake was perfect. I don't even know if they have bao at Long's Family Pastry, so who knows what those weirdos on chowhound.com were going on about. Along with the black bean cake I got a pineapple bun and this crazy little can of iced coffee:

I brought the black bean cake home and ate it on the deck. On the ride there I'd listened to "Where Are Ü Now" and I had Justin Bieber's cute sad baby voice stuck in my head, which really enhanced the whole experience. My black bean cake was so fat and heavy and thick; each time I bit into it, my teeth sank so slowly through the nice gummy mochi and then the sweet crumbly black-beany paste. It was floppy and powdery and I held it with two hands and, after a few bites, peeled the top layer off: I like deconstructing my foods; sometimes when I'm eating sushi I take my chopsticks and pluck out the center of the roll, especially if it's an avocado chunk. I liked the textural experience of eating the top layer of mochi on its own, but then I missed the fatness of the intact cake and wished I could go back. I also had a few bites of the pineapple bun, which wasn't what I'd hoped for. I wanted it to be this insane thing where you crack it open and there's a whole world of pineapple inside: like, pineapple that's been smashed up and thrown into the oven until the sugar's crystallized, and now it's all sticky and sticks to your sticky fingers. Instead it was some plain old fluffy bun vaguely flavored with essence of pineapple. Whatever. This is my black bean cake btw:

After about half the black bean cake I felt full of mochi, so I wrapped the cake back up and stuck it in the fridge, then went to meet my people at the Arclight "Cineramadome." My review of Straight Outta Compton is I loved it and I mostly don't care that it's all sweetened up and sanitized. Like Eazy says to Cube: I like after-school specials. It gave me goosebumps at least half a dozen times and I cried a little and was completely unbored for the whole two and a half hours, and that all constitutes a successful movie-going experience for me.

       That night my pals went to see Hannibal Buress at the Bootleg but I skipped it, since I just saw Hannibal Buress like a month ago and really I just wanted to stay home and go swimming and listen to my currently fave band, Spoon. Before getting into the pool I stood at my kitchen counter and ate the rest of the black bean cake and read the pieces about clams and vermouth from the previous Sunday's New York Times, listening to "Holiday in Waikiki" by the Kinks and "When You Dance I Can Really Love" by Neil Young and "Super Stupid" by Funkadelic and "The Bed's Too Big Without You" by the Police and "Pressure Drop" by the Clash. Then I made myself a white wine spritzer with riesling and Le Croix pineapple-strawberry, went down to the pool and put Spoon on, swam and swam and swam and swam. I thought a lot about how every swimming-pool movie scene shot from underwater is beautiful, and also about when Betty Draper says "Night swimming: it's divine" to Roger Sterling in season one. And I thought about how the shimmery-quivery thing that happens on the floor of the pool from the reflection of our Christmas lights matched up really nicely with the synth on They Want My Soul, and how I value and admire Spoon because they're so elegant about being immoderately romantic. I can't remember which Spoon songs I listened to but I'm sure I played "Anything You Want," which is my seventh or eighth favorite Spoon song right now, and maybe of all time:

The Strawberry Fields Whatever International Supper Club, Vol. I: French Onion Soup, Spaghetti, & Doughnuts

WORDS BY ELIZABETH BARKER & LAURA JANE FAULDS, ILLUSTRATION BY JEN MAY

Welcome to our new column wherein LJ (who lives in London) and Liz (who lives in Los Angeles) will go out to eat and order the same foods and report back on those foods, from their respective continents. Here we are with French onion soup, spaghetti, and doughnuts/donuts.

1st COURSE: FRENCH ONION SOUP

LJ: When my Dad came to visit me in London we ate at Balthazar. On the morning of the day we ate at Balthazar we went to Kentish Town and one of my eyelids was swollen because I am allergic to my housemate Pearl the beagle's dander but I hadn’t figured it out yet so I spent most of the day freaking out about eye diseases. We went to the London Bridge and it was boring so we took a bus that started with the letters RV which I think stood for River which took us to Covent Garden. We were an hour and a half early for our reservation so I went into a store called the Astrology Shop while my dad stood outside the Astrology Shop doubting the necessity of its existence— personally, I sort of hated the Astrology Shop, but then I felt like, If I hate the astrology shop, then who does the Astrology Shop have left???
        After the Astrology Shop we went to a pub situated in the upper corner of a Flatiron-shaped building and my dad had a Jameson’s and I drank a cider. My dad had a nice view out the window and looked out of it, watching all the people do their things and live their lives. I had a nice view of my the guy sitting next to my dad.
        I spaced out and thought Cider is wine made of apples and I wished that cider would do a better job of marketing itself as apple wine but also, and probably more importantly, wished that I could hang out with my cool Jameson’s-drinking Dad on a more regular basis. I was angry with London for not being the place where my Dad lives.
        We left and walked through the part of Covent Garden that is a market. It smelled like the Axe deodorant body spray factory. We arrived at Balthazar a half hour early for our booking but Balthazar were cool with it. The dining room was sprawling and noisy and I felt tiny and useless inside of it, like an ant that is small for its age. I looked around. I will never be a rich person who is from Hong Kong, I thought.
        Our waitress was ugly in the purest sense of the word. She would have been well-cast as a no-nonsense peasant lady helping a cow give birth in Ireland circa 1875. Her ugliness made me think that she was going to be a really good server but she wasn’t. She was just about the brusquest person I ever met.
        Dad and I shared a half bottle of Chablis and it tasted like Chablis. My dad ordered cauliflower soup and the Dover sole, which he badassly de-boned himself, much to the chagrin of the Balthazar employee whose job it was to de-bone it tableside. My order was a no-brainer: French onion soup and a Nicoise salad. It would take a hell of a lot of extenuating circumstances to have me eat at a French restaurant and not order French onion soup and a Nicoise salad. I bet even on the day I was born my infant self knew in some vague way that I would grow up to be a person who near-exclusively ordered French onion soup and Nicoise salads at French restaurants.
        French onion soup is the exception to a rule: normally, I don’t have time for soup. (Another thing I’ve recently realized I don’t have time for: slicing my own pizza. You know, I wasn’t joking around when I grew up and decided not to become a pizza chef.) Ideally, when it comes to food, I just stab things with a fork and then shove them in my mouth. If the food is really good, fine, I’ll use a knife. But ideally I wouldn’t. Spoons are okay sometimes, like for yogurt or cereal. Yogurt and cereal are firm, and they don’t threaten to fall out of the spoon’s belly if you aren’t super confident and focused on the spoon’s journey from the bowl to your mouth. Don’t even get me started on pho— the dribbliest aspects of spoon usage mixed with the most labour-intensive aspects of using a knife, only they don’t even give you a knife! You could use the time it takes you to eat a third of a bowl of Pho to run, like, eight errands. I could maybe get on board with a bowl of minestrone but I’d rather eat all the chunky ingredients without the soup part. And pureed soups are just like, ugh. I grew teeth for a reason.
        But French onion soup is something different. When I was a kid I went through a phase of pretty much refusing to eat in restaurants that didn’t serve French onion soup. French onion soup (or, FOS) is soup with some real backbone. It’s got a really ursine energy to it, fat and meaty and brown. One of my favorite things is when dishes that don’t have actual pieces of meat in them still have meat in them, i.e. the beef stock in FOS or greens sautéed in bacon fat. And then it’s got soggy bread in it (I really like soggy food), and a whole sweet tangle of slithery dark onion bits that sink to the bottom of the bowl like buried treasure hidden at the bottom of the ocean. French onion soup has a real “Ariel from The Little Mermaid’s grotto” vibe to it. Oh and then there’s cheese! Heaps and heaps of burnt (I also love burnt food) and bubbling cheese. If there was one soup in the world you could eat with a fork, it would be French onion.
        The French onion soup I ate at Balthazar was the best French onion soup I’ve ever had. Guess what it had loads of in it??? No! Seriously! Guess. Just guess. Just come up with a little guess in your head. Try to think of the number one ingredient that could make the most soul-warming and nostalgia-inducing food imaginable even MORE soulful and evocative. Your hint is… Christmas.
        Okay! You give up. It was CLOVE. I wanted to curl up and fall asleep inside that clovey bowl of soup like a puppy in a velvet dog bed. It made me wish I was a little kid again, when all you have to worry about is which is your favorite kind of soup and the answer to some really easy math equation and your parents are always there and they keep you so safe and they love you so much and you’re not embarrassed about loving them back, which is cool. They own a house and a couch and a television and a million other things and you can use all their shit for free; in fact they want you to. You can curl up under a blanket and lie on their laps, and you’re watching either Frasier or Entertainment Tonight and it would be snowing out, but you wouldn’t have to leave the house unless you wanted to and even if you did it would be in a car that your mom already pre-warmed up for you so all you have to do is run from the house to the car and you can just sit and chill inside the cozy hot car while she scrapes the ice and snow off the windows with a scraper. If I could take that feeling and turn it into a taste it would be that clovey French onion soup, ideally accompanied by a glass of Beaujolais, because what can I say? I grew up.

LIZ: I ate my French onion soup at Taix, which is a French restaurant in Echo Park. I hardly ever go to Taix anymore but when I first moved to L.A., about 11 years ago, sometimes my friends and I would hang out in the lounge with these dudes who lived in our building. The dudes were all older than we were and musicians; they were in a semi-big-deal rock band in the late-'90s/early '00s, the kind of band that would get played on heavy metal/hard rock radio, if heavy metal/hard rock radio still existed today. I low-level-worshipped them because they'd devoted most of their lives to being in bands and I'd never really known anyone like that, and it all seemed very brave and glamorous. Their couch was a row of seats ripped out of their band's old van, and one time when the glasses were all dirty Stephen drank his wine from a measuring cup, and their cutely degenerate lifestyles seemed glamorous to me too. I used to refer to our building as Grunge Melrose Place, because our lives entwined and sometimes shit got sordid, and also because the building was disgusting and falling apart and we were all kind of slackers who loved complaint rock. I can't remember why Taix was the dudes' spot of choice, but I do remember going to see Matt and Mike's band play in the lounge one Friday night. They did a cocktail-jazz version of "War Pigs," and at the "Satan laughing, spreads his wings" lyric, they all flapped their arms like they were birds/Satan and their arms were wings. Cute move.
        But yeah, my soup. I went to Taix on some sort of weekday: I'd been writing work stuff in the coffee/ice cream shop across the street and on the walk home I decided What the hell and headed over to the Taix lounge and sat at the bar. Nearly everyone else in the lounge was a guy in his 50s and 60s, drinking post-work beers and chatting up the bartenders. On the bar were pencils for Keno, and the stereo system was playing Edith Piaf or some other melancholy/whimsical music to remind you that you're in a French restaurant that's very earnest about its Frenchness. I got a $4 glass of riesling and it was perfectly un-sweet. And then my soup arrived and it looked like this:

       Here's the part where I'll reveal that I was totally incompetent in my food journalism on my trip to Taix. I can tell you that the broth was vaguely winey, like it was made with the wine I was drinking, and that the cheese was overwhelming in a mostly enjoyable way. Each time I'd go to take a spoonful of soup, I'd start twirling the cheese around my spoon and get hypnotized by the twirling and just keep it going, twirling twirling twirling twirling. And each time I'd stop twirling and bring the spoon to my mouth, the very good-looking bartender would walk by at the exact moment that I was disengaging from the soup and trying to negotiate the strands of melted cheese stretching from the spoon to my mouth. It was little embarrassing but I didn't care. I was in another place. I'm not all that nostalgic for when I used to hang out at Taix with all those guys when I was 25 and 26, but I liked the feeling of sitting there at the black-leather bar and lazily recalling lots of moments I hadn't thought about in years. And then I got caught up in the idea that there are all these spaces you can go to trigger the memories you'd never retrieve on your own. It's kinda like tourism: visiting a place and taking what you need from it in a way that's both cheap and naive. It's unadventurous but cozy and maybe the easiest way to practice emotional manipulation on yourself. I'm into it. I want more.

        So anyway. Post-soup, I headed to the bathroom and took selfies for five hours. The Taix ladies room is gorgeous, all pink-and-gold wallpaper and golden lighting and fake pink flowers and stupid pictures of Paris. I like my shirt so much.