Finally a visit to the Momofuku empire

After walking around the "Festival of Ideas for the New City StreetFest," I finally paid a visit to two parts of David Chang's Momofuku empire--Momofuku SSam Bar and the LES branch of Momofuku Milk Bar.  Sitting at the long bar at Momofuku SSam Bar is the way to go for first time visitors.  You can see all the delicious food others are enjoying, while you make up your mind.  Since it was early, we decided to order from the "Small Dishes" part of the menu.  We started off with the Steamed Buns, which everyone seemed to be ordering.  These are definitely not the steamed baos found in every Chinatown from Manhattan to Flushing to Clement Street.  These pillowy, flat disks of dough envelope wonderfully tasty pieces of pork belly, garnished with hoisin sauce, scallions, and almost translucent slices of cucumber, that still retained a bit of crunch.  Next came the Bar Bun, another pillowy, flat disk of dough.  This time the pork belly is crispy and accompanied by slices of avocado, basil and smoked mayonnaise.  Feeling guilty about eating all that pork belly, we ordered some veggies.  First we had the Asperagus served with trout roe, lilly shoots and sunflower seeds.  A new combination for us.  Then we had the Market Greens (Bok Choy), which are stir fried and served in XO sauce and garnished with fried leeks.  There was a hint of heat after each bite of these dark greens.  While the red wine ordered was enjoyed, beer will be the beverage of choice on the next visit. 

Now, if I can only persuade 5 or 7 other pork lovers to venture to the LES, we can order the Bo Ssam--a whole pork butt roasted, a dozen oysters, kimchi, rice and lettuce for a real pig-out.

After all that porky richness, just what you need is a cookie, whose first ingredient is butter!  But I am a sucker for any commercially baked product that lists butter as its first ingredient.  The Compost Cookie is tasty, but it was hard to discern the influence of some of its many ingredients in addition to butter and chocolate chips--potato chips, pretzels, coffee, oats and butterscotch.  I was hoping for that ideal balance of butter, chocolate, sugar and salt, maybe next time.