Romy Sial, owner of the Bombay Chaat House in Henrietta, is watching
anxiously as I bite into a creamy, cardamom-scented ball of gulab jamun. A few
moments ago, after I’d already eaten a plate of bhel puri (curried rice
crispies topped with tamarind and mint chutneys, raita, and a generous shake of
chili powder), two different samosas, and a kachori (a deep-fried pastry filled
with lentils and spices), I told her that I don’t really like Indian sweets.
She asked me if I’d tried her carrot halwa or her gulab jamun as she walked
behind her counter and started dishing me up a portion of both of them.

The tiny dining room has no polish, but it is all comfort, right down to the
ceiling-mounted heater that blows down hot, curry-scented air. My table, with
its plastic tablecloth patterned to look like white lace, could be in my
grandmother’s kitchen. The chairs are comfortable and look like they, too, came
out of someone’s kitchen.

The door opens and a blast of chilly air ushers two young people, both
Indian, into the restaurant. They greet Sial as “Auntie” – a sign of
both affection and respect. Sial beams at them, bustling about behind the
counter while asking both of them about their classes, about upcoming and past
job interviews, about how their winter vacations have been so far. All the
while, she is moving about her kitchen, cleaning, rearranging, checking a pot
on the household range on which she cooks everything, popping samosas into a
microwave for a burst of heat. Sial shows her love through food: this is
exactly like eating in my grandmother’s kitchen, and the people who frequent
the restaurant seem to be coming in as much for the warm reception as for the
superlative Indian street
food that Sial gets up at 6 every morning to make for them.

I used to fancy that by eating the food of a particular country I got some
sort of insight into its culture. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Searching
out new and strange foods and cuisines, taking pictures of them, eating them,
and then going home to talk about them has not made me Margaret Mead or T. E.
Lawrence. It has made me a tourist, and like all tourists I bring all of my own
baggage – assumptions and preconceptions about what I’m seeing, what I’m experiencing,
and what I’m eating – along with me.

What follows is a chronicle of six weeks of trying, and I think ultimately
failing, to understand the lives of Chinese, Indian, Latino, and Ukrainian
immigrants in Rochester through the
food that they shared with me. I found out how to get access to dishes and even
entire menus that aren’t available to the general public: you have to know
someone. Most important, though, I learned that when a waiter or waitress says
to you in broken English, “You no like,” what they are really saying
is, “You don’t understand.” If you haven’t lived abroad, if you
haven’t spent enough time in a place to feel homesick for “American”
food, you’ll never understand what secret menus, and even restaurants that are
hidden in plain sight, mean to the people who own them, and to the people who
seek them out looking for a taste of home.

The secret menu

It took me years to realize that a plate of chicken makhani, a pile of
deep-fried sesame chicken, or a bowl of pinkish borscht, while tasty, aren’t
what I see real folks from Punjab, Hong Kong, or Ukraine eating when I
encounter them in restaurants. I can recall several Chinese New Year’s
celebrations where I ignored the lion dancers, eyes fixed on the kitchen door
as waiters emerged with trays heaped with whole steamed fish, unfamiliar
greens, and crispy-skinned ducks that were whisked away to some unseen banquet
room while all around me my fellow diners were eagerly tucking into
twice-cooked pork, moo-shu, and General Tso’s chicken. When I asked about that
food, the stuff that was going to a party that I wasn’t invited to, invariably
waiters and waitresses would tell me, “You no like.”

It happened in Flushing, Queens.
It happened in Chinatowns in New
York, San Francisco,
and Toronto. It even happened here
in Rochester. I was absolutely
determined to get access to this secret menu and put a notch on my foodie
gunbelt at the same time. Asking clearly didn’t work, neither did begging. I
needed an in; I needed to know someone who knew the guy who held the menu.

I called Karen Poon, owner of New Ming Restaurant on Monroe
Avenue, explained what I was looking for, and
crossed my fingers. Ten minutes later, I had a name and the phone number for
the Shanghai Party House in Henrietta. Several days later, I was sitting at
Shanghai’s bar, trying to convince the manager, who tells me to call him
“Jimmy,” to let me try the special menu that I’ve been told exists
there. I’m not getting anywhere. First he tells me there is no special menu,
and slides the thick book that is Shanghai’s
regular (and very good) menu across the bar to me. Then, he tells me that I
almost certainly won’t like what’s on the special menu. Finally, grudgingly,
Jimmy produces a smaller menu with a plain cover reading “Traditional
Chinese Cuisine.”

Inside there is only one dish per page: a glossy photograph, an English
name, and a block of text in Chinese that is surely more descriptive than
“Spicy Szechuan Fish” or “Roasted Spare Rib with Scallion and
Pepper.” My companion and I selected a couple of items, more or less at
random, and then a heated discussion started behind the bar between Jimmy, the
bartender, and another man who I later discovered is the owner of the
restaurant, Quyen “Peter” Au. The three flipped back and forth
through various menus – some featuring text in what I recognized as Vietnamese
– for several minutes, reached consensus, and Jimmy headed for the kitchen.

Nothing that we initially selected ever came to us. The bartender set a
jiggling plate of cold jellyfish salad, and a plate heaped with fiery hot beef
shank and stomach, before us. As Jimmy looked on and poured tiny cups of sake,
my companion and I took up our chopsticks. Nearly three hours later, having
eaten pork spare ribs that have been braised, deep-fried, and passed through a
wok with chilis and scallions, orange roughie in a ground pork, chili, and
ginger sauce, a platter of mixed seafood in black bean sauce, and emerald green
Chinese broccoli finished with garlic and ginger, we staggered out into the
night, vowing to come back and let Jimmy and friends call the shots the next
time we came, too.

I started to wonder whether there were other places in the city where I
could find “secret” menus, where it helped to know someone to get
access to food that’s simply not available to the guy walking in off the
street. Six weeks later, I knew that the answer to both questions was yes.

The secret restaurant

Olga’s Restaurant is located in a nondescript strip mall on the western edge
of Irondequoit. Six years ago, when the place first opened, it featured a
regular menu and fairly regular hours. Owner Olga Dereshchuk, who is also the
proprietor of an Eastern European grocery store next door, initially had the
restaurant open six days a week, serving sensational Ukrainian food in a
setting that evokes the over-the-top opulence of New York City’s Russian Tea
Room. After only six months, she cut back to serving dinner only, then to
buffets on weekends, and finally considered closing the restaurant altogether.
On foodie blogs and sources like Rocwiki, it became common to hear that Olga’s
was open, and then to see a post immediately after it saying that it was
closed. That barely tells half the story.

Dereshchuk opened her restaurant initially because, as she put it, she
“had no enemies” in the community and wanted to create a place that
would serve as a party house for Rochester’s burgeoning Eastern European and
Ukrainian communities. While the restaurant never thrived on the walk-in trade,
Olga’s did steady business in parties, catering, and banquets for churches,
clubs, and even the Ukrainian Federal Credit Union. Dereshchuk told me, through
an interpreter, that she was always open, you just needed to call and make
reservations at the store next door. But she speaks very little English. The
lingua franca at her restaurant and store is Ukrainian, so unless you speak
Ukrainian, or perhaps Russian, your chances of successfully making a
reservation were, until recently, slim. Fortunately, I have a Ukrainian friend,
and he invited me to tag along with him on two visits to Olga’s.

On a frigid evening in early December, I’m sitting in the dining room at
Olga’s Restaurant with at least 50 other people, all of whom are singing either
a Christmas carol or perhaps an anthem in Ukrainian. When the singing stops, a
brief round of speeches, also in Ukrainian, begins. At some point, I hear my
name mentioned and realize, with a twinge of discomfort, that I’m an honored
guest at this Christmas party. I raise my comically large beer mug in a wordless
toast to my hosts and try to fade into the frescoed wall behind me – at least
until the speeches are over and dinner itself begins. I’ve been invited to this
party by the president of the Ukrainian Federal Credit Union. Having eaten
lunch with her, several of her board members, and the head of the
Manhattan-based Ukrainian consulate a couple of weeks earlier, I know what to
expect: I purposely haven’t eaten a thing all day.

Dinner begins, as lunch did two weeks earlier, with a selection of salads:
vinigret, diced beets, potato, and carrots with kidney beans; and olivye, a
sort of creamy potato salad with peas, carrots, and maybe a bit of pickle diced
into it. Lunch had included groaning plates full of thinly sliced sausages, a
pork roulade, and smoked pork roast. Dinner, on the other hand, offered dishes
of chicken and carrots in aspic, crepes with bright orange caviar, pickled
herring, and two different kinds of pickles: kvasheni ohirky, which are
somewhere between a kosher dill pickle and a gherkin, and kvasheni pomidory,
both green and red tomatoes pickled with garlic and dill. Two women across the
table from me, both of whom were Ukrainian, of course, were determined that I
should try everything, and take seconds and even thirds of the things that I
clearly enjoyed – which was everything except for the herring, which I assume
is an acquired taste.

But these were only the appetizers. After that came platters of stuffed
cabbage, fried cakes of minced chicken combined with garlic and bread crumbs
(similar to a chicken croquette), grilled sausages, and steaming bowls of
roasted potatoes to soak up the juices that pooled in our plates. I was unable
to stay for dessert, and would have had nowhere to put it anyway, having
already popped the button on my pants. But Dereshchuk makes most of her
desserts herself, and from previous experience I knew that I was missing out on
something special. Next to the door was a large table on which not a single
inch of space remained for more cookies, jelly rolls, rugelach, shortbread, and
hazelnut cookies filled with pastry cream.

My companion and I stumbled out into the dark, snowy night, and I recalled
that Dereshchuk had told me that it wasn’t unusual for parties at her
restaurant to stretch into the wee hours of the morning. As we left, the
conversation, all in Ukrainian, was rising to an earsplitting level, and the
entertainment for the evening was starting to set up at the edge of the
restaurant’s dance floor.

Hidden in plain sight

Several days before the Christmas party at Olga’s, I stopped in to El Sabor
de la Isla on Norton Street. Luis Tejada, co-owner of the restaurant with his
wife, Yesenia Cruz, had promised to make me mofongo – mashed plantains mixed
with garlic and pork cracklings – an item that he makes upon request, but
doesn’t put out on the restaurant’s excellent carry-out buffet. I was also
there because on Fridays, El Sabor puts baccalao (salt cod) on the buffet, and
I was anxious to try that as well.

As we stood near the counter talking about my lunch, I asked Tejada if there
was anything else he made that wasn’t on the menu. He reached behind him and
handed me a laminated sheet of paper listing at least 40 dishes that aren’t on
the buffet. Soon, Tejada is sitting across a table from me, and I’m looking at
this menu, mostly in Spanish, firing questions at him: what is kingfish, and
what’s the red sauce that it’s cooked in? What’s the green sauce on the next
item down the list? What’s the proper way to order a plate of mofongo? (There
are at least five variations listed on this menu.)

Finally, overwhelmed by the choices, I ask him to bring me whatever he’d
bring his family or best friend if they dropped by for lunch. Tejada asks
whether I like shrimp as he ducks around the corner into the kitchen. Ten
minutes later, a hot plate of tostone, deep-fried plantains served with
something like remoulade, hit the table, followed minutes later by fried rice
full of tender pink shrimp and strips of spice-rubbed steak. I’ve been eating
regularly at El Sabor for a year, and it never occurred to me to ask if there
was an alternative to the restaurant’s excellent buffet. I mentally kick
myself, pick up the menu, which has no prices, and start cross-referencing
words that I recognize, trying to plan my next meal as I dig into the current
one.

Tourists and expats

It doesn’t finally occur to me that I’ve missed the point of what I’ve been
doing for the past six weeks until a couple days after Christmas, when I sit
down to talk with Peter Au, the owner of Shanghai Party House in Henrietta. Au
and his wife, Amy, have put out the kind of lunch that you only see in an Ang
Lee movie: marinated, thinly sliced sautรฉed pig ear with chilis and scallions;
meaty, dark purple slabs of stewed cuttlefish; spicy beef stomach and shank;
tofu skins with a slightly sweet dressing; and a whole fish, deep-fried and
finished with filaments of ginger and scallion. The amount of food is
overwhelming, almost embarrassing when I think that this has been set out just
for me.

The same thing happened when I returned to El Sabor de la Isla, where I’d
fortunately brought reinforcements to help me eat a huge portion of spicy,
cumin-scented shredded salt cod, mofongo, mashed plantains (mangu), a plate of
pork chops with a huge heap of rice and beans on the side, and flan.
Dereshchuk, when I’d gone to her restaurant for lunch, sent me off with a tower
of boxes, because she didn’t want my wife to miss out on lunch just because we
couldn’t find a sitter. Romy Sial at Bombay Chaat House was insistent that I
try her desserts. The impulse of the restaurateurs to share the best that they
had to offer, and to do it in excess, was an unbroken thread running through
all six weeks of my off-menu tour of Rochester’s
restaurants.

I never really stopped to ask myself why, though. And then Peter Au
helpfully explained: sharing food creates bonds between people, it reinforces
community, it provides a bulwark against the unbearable pressure to assimilate.
The portions are huge because they have to be shared, and in the act of
sharing, people who have lived here for years and even decades can get a taste
of “home” among people who often speak their own language and share
at least a part of their history. Food is the expatriate’s teleporter and time
machine. While the food that I’d been eating was tasty, sometimes challenging,
and often unfamiliar, while I’d put several notches in my foodie gunbelt and
conquered four or five of my deepest food phobias, I was still nothing more
than a tourist desperately trying to go native, and failing spectacularly.

This article appears in Feb 10-10, 2010.