Streetbird in Harlem Delivers Delicious Soul Food and Unique Hip Hop Culture

With hip hop music blasting from a boom box, walls covered with colorful graffiti, and a pair of Converse sneakers hanging from the ceiling like a chandelier, Streetbird Rotisserie - the latest restaurant in Harlem by the famed Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised chef Marcus Samuelsson - feels more like a museum than a restaurant. But this interior design, a unique homage to Harlem during the era of hip hop, is only the "first course" to an amazingly delicious experience you will have at Streetbird Rotisserie.


Specializing in soul food with an expansive menu that highlights the namesake bird, Streetbird whips out some of the best chicken dishes I have ever tried. The restaurant recently launched brunch - everyone's favorite meal of the week - all day on weekends. Who can say no to good ole' chicken and waffles for dinner on a Saturday night?


Don't expect the ordinary from Streetbird's Chicken & Waffles ($13.50). Instead of boring, flabby buttermilk waffles, you get delectable red velvet waffles with crispy edges and moist inside. On top of the waffles are two pieces of perfectly fried, tender chicken with pieces of scallion. Top it off with bourbon maple syrup, and you get all the flavors, from sweet to savory, as well as all the textures, from crispy to juicy, in each and every bite.


Streetbird's rotisserie chicken is everything you dream of. The chicken is seared slowly in heat to produce crispy skin, while sealing in the flavor and juice of the meat inside. The Half Bird & Stuff ($21) includes half chicken served on a platter with creamy mashed potato and Notti Greens, or roasted green beans with chili and peanuts.


For sides, I would recommend the Auntie's Cornbread ($5) and the Jack Fried Rice ($6). The two big pieces of corn bread are thick and dense with actual pieces of corn in the bread. The Jack Fried Rice, sauteed with kimchi, egg, and scallions, is seasoned nicely with slight kick of spiciness from the kimchi.


After feasting on the delicious food, be sure to walk around the restaurant to admire the arts by Harlem-based multimedia artists, including graffiti painting, colllage that depicts Harlems' street activities and artisitc culture, and black and white photographs of the Harlem community. Streetbird is a must visit restaurant - both for its amazing food and unique culture.

Korean Air: The Limits of Food on Air

Korean Air is known to offer one of the best airline foods. My expectation wasn't too hard nonetheless because it is extremely difficult to cook delicious food that had been pre-cooked and heated prior to being served.

During my 10:20am flight to JFK, lunch was served about 90 minutes into flying. The passengers were given a choice between bibimbop with "Gondre" vegetable rice or beef dish. I don't trust pre-packed, mass produced meat so I easily went with the former option.

In the large bowl were three different types of vegetables (radish, spinach, and some other greens) and ground beef.

On the way to Incheon, I had a regular bibimbop with white rice, but this one had the added Gondre vegetables. The white rice also tasted seasoned.

Put them all together and mix! Sadly the rice was way too sticky and it kept clumping together. I had to put some spoonfuls of seaweed soup in the rice to make it easier to mix. The bibimbop tasted average. I have a spoiled taste in bibimbop because I usually eat it in a hot stone pot that keeps the dish warm throughout the entire meal.

About four hours before landing, we were served dinner. The meals on the plane is so systematic: you eat and drink when you are offered. At first I chose the "Korean rice cake" dish because the stewardess said it had no meat. When I opened the package, the first thing I saw were pieces of beef. I changed the menu to the Chinese style seafood dish with fried rice.

Without an exaggeration, this was absolutely inedible. The fried rice was bland and flavorless, and the "seafood" rice had 3 pieces of jerky squids and a huge, FRIED, and extremely dry fish in awful black/brown sauce. I could taste extreme amount of sodium.

The jellyfish on the left was also very tough that I kept chewing and chewing but it won't disappear. The lychee had weird texture.

Underneath the fried surface was disgusting scales. I can't believe Korean Air would serve such thing.

Creamless Curry and Omelet Rice

Indian food used to be my favorite cuisine until I realized how much cream it uses in the curries. Assuming that food in Korea is relatively healthier than those in America, I decided to order a curry dish at Loco Curry, a chain restaurant in Korea.

At Loco Curry, diners can choose from three different curries - the brown (rich), the yellow (creamy), and the red (spicy) - and toppings, such as chicken, shrimp, beef, or pork. I asked if the curries could be cooked without added cream, and the waiter happily told me that the brown curry doesn't have any cream in it! Yahoo! That was probably the quickest I have ever set my mind on the menu. I just got the basic curry because all the toppings were fried.

The rice was served in the shape of an oval. It was lightly sprinkled with some cilantro. I thought the sticky rice tasted way too dense, especially compared to the fluffy, light basmati rice that accompanies Indian curries.

The basic curry had little tomatoes that oozed their juices as I bit into them.

The mushroom added nice texture, and there were also some raisins in there. I realized that the curries at Loco Curry are not Indian-style, but Japanese-style. They are not as rich or creamy (thus the lack of cream in the brown curry), and slightly thicker. I wish there had been more sauce because towards the end, I only had rice left and no sauce.

My friend got omurice, or fried rice covered with egg. It was topped with tomato sauce and fried pork cutlet.

The kimchi fried rice was a bit salty with the sweet tomato sauce on top.

The omelet, on the other hand, was exquisite! It was so light and fluffy, just the way I like my eggs.

Food On Air: Exploring Different World Cuisines at the Incheon Airport

For someone who appreciates food as much as I do, airline food is like the Jersey Shore of all TV shows: Trashy.

I went to the airport with Mom to say good-bye to DJ, and we had surprisingly delicious (and extremely filling) late lunch at a restaurant in the airport. Even though there were only three of us, we ordered four dishes because "Since the airline food is disgusting, I need to fill up my stomach so that I can go on without food for 13 hours," DJ said.

The place we found was called Food On Air. Incheon Airport is like a backyard to us since we have been there so many time, but for some reason this was our first encounter with Food On Air. The restaurant featured five different cuisines, featuring dishes from Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and Italian.

It was definitely a challenge to choose what I wanted from the extensive menu! Each cuisine seemed to have been named after the cook: Mr. Kim for Korean, Mr. Takenashi for Japanese, Ms. Huong for Thai, Ms. Pham for Vietnamese, and Mr. Toscani (?) for Italian.

Mom's Korean dish (spicy soft tofu soup and seafood stew with rice) was the first to grace the table. Different banchans (kimchi, seasoned squash, spicy squid, mushroom & quali eggs in soy sauce, and pan-fried fish) accompanied the soft tofu soup. The soup was made with broth from clam, oyster, and other sea creatures.

The seafood flavor was very rich, but the spicy chili oil in the stew balanced out the taste. The soup was a bit too oily and spicy for me because I personally enjoy the soft tofu soup plain white without any chili sauce.

DJ also ordered from the Korean cuisine. His cabbage and short-rib soup had the same banchans as the soft tofu soup.

There were big pieces of short-rib in the soup. Inevitably, they were fatty but the meat was quite tender and juicy. It's so interesting how vegetables that usually don't have any flavor taste...sweet when they are cooked, just like the cabbage in the soup. The cabbage was also very soft.

I had to wait forever for my dish, Thai-styler red crab meat fried rice, probably because I asked for minimum oil. The dish had pickled radish, carrot, and cucumber, sour cream sauce, two pieces of thin pita chips, and miso soup.

Typically, when you cook fried rice, you pour greasy oil. They must have cleaned the wok to get rid of every last bit of the grease...just for me!

I was very happy that the fried rice had abundant red crab meat. That's right, not those gross imitation crab meats, but the real stuff. I would have preferred a bit more seasoning in the fried rice, but at least it wasn't overly greasy or salty. In one word, the fried rice tasted healthy.

I really enjoyed that sour cream sauce! It had tiny carrot bits for the crunchy texture. The pita chip was plain--nothing too interesting about it.

We also ordered a cold soba and roll combo set from the Japanese corner. It had quite a pleasant presentation, with the unexpected squid, squash, and potato tempura, salad, and picked radishes.

The shrimp tempura roll looked a bit messy because of too much flying fish roe and tempura crumbs on the side.

I didn't taste the roll, but DJ, who doesn't like seafood, said he really liked it, so it must have tasted sort of artificial. Haha.

The cold soba was very refreshing. The broth was too sweet though.

We added grounded radish to make the broth taste "cooler." The soba noodle is apparently a lot healthier than other types of noodle. Anyways, it was a satisfying meal and hopefully DJ will be able to endure 13 foodless hours on the airplane!

Oriental Spoon: Asian Fusion Restaurant

Asian fusion food is popular in Korea because most Koreans consider Asian food to be food-you-eat-at-home rather than food-you-go-out-to-eat. Fusion food offers something different in that sense.

I went to an Asianstyle cafe/restaurant, Oriental Spoon, with one of my fellow interns at Chosun Ilbo this past summer.

After browsing the brown menu, which included rice dishes ranging from Thai curries to Indonesian fried rice, and noodle dishes with influences from China, Thailand, and Japanese. We ordered one rice dish and one noodle dish and decided to share.

The Seafood Noodle Soup (Chinese rice noodle soup with seafood) came first. Even though the broth was clear, it was still pretty spicy from the green chili pepper. The soup had huge pieces of bok choy, carrots, and garlic mounted on top of rice noodles. There were quite a lot of seafood as well--mussels, clams, shrimps, and baby squids.

I couldn't stop drinking the broth because it had just the right amount of spiciness from the green chili pepper, together with the deep, ocean-like flavors from the seafood. It was a smart choice to order a dish with broth to warm the cold body.

The texture of the rice noodle was tangy. Thank god it wasn't made with flour because after nearly two days of exclusively flour-based meals, my stomach would have been very unhappy with another flour food.

As we were enjoying the seafood noodle soup, the waiter brought us the Nasi Goreng, Indonesian fried rice with chicken and vegetable. The visual of the fried egg on top reminded me of a one-eyed monster...haha. The iceberg lettuce on the side gave me a brain freeze.

The rice was sautéed with chopped scallions, red pepper, and basil in sweet and sour sauce that tasted like a mixture of soy sauce and teriyaki sauce. The scent of the basil wasn't that strong, though.

Sunny side up!