Month: February 2019

Peak Pasta

To test out new shapes, chefs only need a few ingredients: flour, eggs, water, and an internet connection. “I think the advent of YouTube is when everything changed. You can just look up different shapes. Before then, you had to actually head to Italy to see the shapes, find the book, or work with someone who had actually worked there.”

Xiao chi

Stretching from 40th to 65th Streets on 8th Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn’s Chinatown is one of the best neighborhoods in New York to experience 2 unique styles of Chinese cuisine–Fujianese xiao chi and Cantonese dim sum. Because of these demographics, Brooklyn’s Chinatown has become a culinary destination for Southern Chinese cuisine, especially Fujianese xiao chi 小吃 (Little Snacks). Essentially, this covers anything that falls outside the Chinese definition of a full meal, in which rice is accompanied by several dishes of meat and vegetables. Comparable to Spanish tapas, xiao chi are small servings of dishes, most often noodles, dumplings and pastries meant to be eaten as snacks or a light lunch. This culinary category exists in every region of China. Cantonese dim sum, with its small servings of different dishes, is a type of xiao chi, although it’s considered more formal and often served in large restaurants with seafood-focused banquet dinners. Here are 5 restaurants in Sunset Park to sample this cuisine. Since the prices are affordable and the serving sizes are similar to tapas, try as many dishes and places as possible for the true xiao chi experience.

  • Lin Mini Café
  • Uncle Wang
  • San Qiang
  • Hong Kong Dim Sum
  • Park Asia

Fortnite Concert

People have gathered in virtual worlds for decades. People have attended virtual concerts for years. Yet the Fortnite event represented something different by many orders of magnitude. By one (unsubstantiated) estimate, 10M concurrent users attended the show in the game’s “Showtime” mode. In other words, this was something much more than a concert. It was a peek, albeit a short one, at what an AR- and VR-suffused future looks like: connected congregations of embodied avatars, in mass-scale events that still manage to feel personal.

Perovskite Solar

There are estimates that perovskite solar panels could cost just 10 to 20 cents per watt, compared to 75 cents per watt for traditional silicon-based panels — anywhere from 3X to 8X cost savings. Perovskite’s conversion efficiency has increased at an astounding rate over the last 4 years — from 4% to nearly 20%. And this is just the beginning — the theoretical limit of perovskite’s conversion efficiency is 66%, compared to silicon’s theoretical limit of 32%.

Superb Owls

This Sunday, the subreddit /r/superbowl will host a gathering of hoo-ligans. They’ll be fans of the Nocturnal Flying League. Real birds of a feather. The Superb Owl community will kick off an Ask Me Anything with biologist James Duncan, who has spent his entire adult life studying owls and a mere 3 weeks playing football.

Tac ‘N Roll

One of the East Village’s greatest culinary sleepers is Tac ‘N Roll, a 3-year-old fusion cafe owned and operated by chef Eric Wong, who traveled the world while in the Marine Corps and blends international flavors he was exposed to during service. While I generally run in the other direction when a restaurant is labeled “fusion,” in this case the term fits and the result is splendid. Here’s the gimmick: pick corn tortillas or a paratha, sandwich roll, burrito, salad, nachos, or rice bowl, and then choose from among 6 principal sauced ingredients to fill them. Beef with chimichurri goes well in the double tortillas, sending the taco spinning in an Argentine direction, while the chicken tikka belongs in the flaky paratha, which tastes more like the parathas eaten in Singapore than those found in India. All receive lush garnishes. Finally, there’s a notable pureed soup made with kabocha squash, smoothies, and a few more snacks