Apocalyptic Dumplings

[Florio Bessinger]

Asa graduate of the French Culinary Institute, former chef, and restaurant reviewer currently working as an investigative reporter as well as a guide for historical food tours around New York City, I take a sensual approach to food. One that understands it is a source of tremendous joy and belonging, fraught with fears and anxieties, and a site for heated political battle. How we understand food and cuisine can teach us a lot about how capitalism shapes our daily lives.

The reason for this divergence in price and quality comes down to how migration, labor and immigration laws, supply chains, and culture all interrelate. In essence, political economy can not only explain the production and distribution of food, it can also help us understand how capitalism shapes cuisine in aesthetic and cultural ways.

In Chinatown, cooks can be seen working feverishly in open kitchens. Because owners can pick from a large pool of employees, a type of natural selection occurs in which the fastest, most skilled, and exploitable workers get jobs. When I cooked professionally in New York City, I noticed that immigrants work harder and faster than nearly all the middle-class American kids inspired by Anthony Bourdain to pick up knives and tongs.

But not everything was milk and honey for restaurant owners. Chinese restaurants proliferated, the industry became hyper-competitive, and owners cut costs to the bone to survive. If a shack next door is selling dumplings for fifty cents a piece, you have to do so too.

Low-cost cafeterias and street foods are an ancient innovation. There are clues that street-side eateries catering to urban residents go back 5,000 years to Ancient Babylon. In Ancient Rome, street food was a major source of sustenance for the urban poor who lacked their own kitchens. In Pompeii, some eighty public cafeterias have been identified.

New York City is renowned for hundreds of immigrant communities with unique, superb, and inexpensive food. These communities gather thousands of immigrants who are intimately familiar with the foods of their home region. They are experts in how their cuisine should taste and be eaten, which further selects for high quality.

Immigrants will not shell out a lot of money for food they grew up eating, but they will flock to the best restaurants. If you spent twelve hours hunched over a sewing machine, nailing drywall, or driving a taxi, you would look forward to a hot, delicious meal as a daily reward. So the immigrant restaurants with tastier food than their competitors are often the most successful.

Jonathan Gold, the late Los Angeles food writer who is the only restaurant critic to have won a Pulitzer Prize, developed rules on how to locate the best immigrant food. He said that the best restaurants are invariably those furthest out from the city center and the hardest to get to and find.

I grew up eating Punjabi food every day. The cuisine runs through my veins. I know how the dishes should look, smell, and taste. I know how to make them, select the best ingredients, and properly serve and eat the food. With a glance or whiff, I can spot poor versions. Multiply my experience by thousands of people, and that explains why restaurants rooted in immigrant communities will consistently be far better than expensive knockoffs in foodie enclaves or touristy downtowns.

There is a slice-of-life focus to the main story, with activities such as cooking, harvesting food and caring for the house. There is some threat from humans and a brief fight scene with a wild dog, though none of this is graphic and issues are quickly resolved (apart from the cliffhanger at the end of the book, though that is quickly resolved in the next book).

Cooking is a big part of the book. Each chapter has a recipe, which Nagi shows in detail (with help from Asa). The ingredients are summarised at the end of the recipe. I chose the first recipe to try, which was chewy pumpkin dumplings.

In general, I felt the instructions were easy to follow, though it did help to write them out rather than trying to use the original book. Later recipes have fewer timings included compared to the first one, so some cooking experience is helpful.

Regarding physical plays, we played a lot of 2-player Spots, which is such a great and easy to play push your luck game, as well as a bit of Radlands which, to this day, is still my favourite lane-battling game. Easy to play and teach but high skill cap!

In a normal trick taking game this is all well and good, but Skull King adds special power cards that can be played any time to win tricks, duck out of tricks or just screw your friends over. The latter is the reason why dinner times at work get a bit rowdy. At the start of every round of Skull King you must bid on the number of tricks you will win, you must study your hand, take note of who goes first and try and gauge how powerful your hand is. Every hand in Skull King must be navigated to perfection and even when you play perfectly, your idiotic friends have cards that can irritate you at every turn.

The hands in Skull King increase every round from one card all the way up to ten, as the complexity of the hand increases, so does your score potential and the game ends in a glorious crescendo. We love Skull King, it's easy to understand, difficult to master and has just the right amount of skulduggery, messing your friends over and fluffy edges to make every game a fascinating dance that is constantly on the edge of madness. For the price and box size, there's not much better!

So what have I been playing? Well, a lot of Marvel Champions to start. I am slowly working my way through all the heroes and defeating all the villains. I have recently started playing two handed solo and the combinations and possibilities for combos is fantastic. If you have read any of my reviews or blogs, you know that I love Marvel Champions but I have recently gained a new lease of life for the game. The huge amount of content for this game is amazing but can be daunting. My advice, grab the core game and then just pickup the heroes/villains that you like.

Other games hitting my table this month have been Revive and Bark Avenue. Two very different games but two very good games. Revive is a resource management/hand management game all about exploring a frozen post-apocalyptic world. I love Revive, especially the hand management and tech tree style advancement. Bark Avenue is a charming hand management, action selection game where you are working as a dog walker in New York City. Manage the needs and traits of each dog. Travel around the neighbourhood and drop off your walked dogs at the relevant time. There are end game bonuses, in game bonuses and various ways to score points. It is on the lighter side but it is still fun and one that is worth checking out.

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