- Liza: Welcome everyone to food curated., a show that takes you behind the scenes to meet today's most inspiring food makers.

I'm Liza de Guia, documentary filmmaker and food lover.

I invite you to discover the people and passion behind good food in New York City.

This is food.

curated.

Funding for food.

curated.

is made possible by.

Stele is a globally curated collection of artisanal and independent perfumes.

Hand-picked olfactory experiences that tell a story.

Available online and at two New York locations.

For more info, we're at Stele (dot) nyc.

Support for food.

curated.

comes from CMD Psych.

Bringing a holistic approach to child wellness and women's mental health care.

Helping patients find balance and harmony in their lives.

For more info, head to CMD Psych (dot) com Additional Funding provided by.

Liza: The rise in anti-Asian hate has touched so many communities across America.

Being Filipino-American, I know what it feels like to be targeted, to live with anxiety, to feel discomfort in public spaces.

It's created a level of fear many wrestle with daily.

To combat these feelings, Some A-A-P-I led businesses have become not less, but more vocal about their heritage, advocating for their cultures as a way to celebrate and support each other.

[music] - Hannah: My friends, family, neighbors all wanted it, and every time they saw me it was like my face equaled ice cream.

Like they see me and they're like, where's the ice cream?

It's like, okay, hi.

Like, it's me, Hannah.

[laughs] Like, it's like, no, but you're like the ice cream girl.

[music] Hi, my name is Hannah Bae and I'm the founder and noona of Noona's Ice Cream based in Brooklyn, New York.

Well, Noona's makes Asian American ice cream flavors.

We're trailblazing Asian American ice cream as an actual category in the most delicious, the most sustainable way possible.

There's tons of Asian Americans in this country, so they're all wanting their flavors and the flavors that they grew up with, you know, on the shelves.

Around 2014, yeah, it was mostly just what you would normally see in, in mainstream supermarkets, your local grocery store.

It's American flavors.

There's local artisanal ice cream makers making great things, but they're not the flavors that I wanted and was craving.

So I just started making ice cream at home like all the time, and it just became like this obsession.

Yeah.

When I started Noona's in 2016, I launched with three flavors, actually, our toasted rice, black sesame, turmeric honeycomb, and then I bought in our matcha green tea, our yuzu blossom, and then our taro that I'm obsessed with right now, and my family's obsessed with.

Everything's, you know, made in New York City here.

I'm just growing my business in a way that works for me and makes sure that Noona's still exists in like 10 years.

And I'm still here, like we're, we just turned five.

So it is a big year for us.

[music} So Noona means big sister in Korean.

Males use it as a term of endearment to refer to an older female that is in their lives that they respect, that they admire.

I love being in Noona.

I mean, I, I named the company Noona because I was thinking of a word that would evoke joy.

Yeah.

It's one of my favorite things being a Noona.

[Liza: Are you a good older sister?]

Hannah: Am I a good noona?

[laughs] I, I hope so.

Jonathan: I literally told, Dad: Let me see how, Hannah: Yeah.

My parents were born in South Korea.

Jonathan: This is, this is my dad.

This is our aunt, sister, grandma, and grandpa.

Hi, I'm Jonathan.

I'm Hannah's younger brother.

Paul: Hi, I am Paul.

I'm Hannah's older brother Jonathan: To, ah, use ice cream to incorporate our culture... Yeah, definitely.

It's awesome for the community, it's awesome for us.

It's awesome for the world.

[laughs] Hannah: I was just thinking about my family.

I wanted something that when they eat it, they're like, oh, like, like, okay, I see like, you miss me.

Like I see like you, you're thinking of me.

Jonathan: Yeah.

She is a good noona, for sure.

Paul: In Korean culture, I think the most important thing is that they feed you.

Hannah: Me and Jonathan, Jonathan: When I was, when I was younger, she used to like, take care of me and stuff.

And so for the longest time, I, I didn't, I didn't know they had names, to be honest.

So, so I would call like Hannah, Noona, like exclusively.

That's all I would say Hannah: As an Asian American, my style of making ice cream and how I make the flavors, like our recipes are just different.

If someone else made like a dalgona coffee ice cream, how are they gonna make it?

Like, it's not gonna be the way that we make it.

Dalgona is like Korean style honeycomb candy.

It's a little darker.

And I think that's unique for our company.

Our special flavors, our, our dalgona coffee ice cream, our toasty mochi.

And then we have our Makgeolli Blues ice cream.

Yeah, Makgeolli is a unfiltered Korean rice beer.

A lot of these flavors, it's like I develop it 'cause I have a, a, a very strong connection with a lot of the ingredients.

[music] Hannah: So I am a self-taught baker and I've always been baking my whole entire life.

In Korean culture, the desserts are like rice cake and there's not much baking involved.

Or it, it's very different from American desserts and treats, sweet treats.

I still love the R&D process.

I still develop all our flavors.

So yeah, I am the recipe developer for, for the flavors Texturally, I've always liked ice cream that's super creamy.

I like a nice mouth feel and like that sort of buttery texture.

You know, there is such thing as too rich.

Each production batch is anywhere from 3000 to 5,000 pints per flavor.

And you know, we move that pretty quickly.

I definitely took a year to develop the recipe for our toasted rice ice cream.

It just reminded me of my mother with all her stacks of nurungji which is like a Korean scorched rice snack.

Without rice in a Korean meal is kind of weird.

Like, it's like it's not right.

It still is one of our top sellers.

Yeah, it's, it is, it is a love letter.

You know, every single pint that someone buys, it does make a difference.

It makes a difference in terms of like supporting the Asian voice and those are the things that actually create change.

I wanna see Noona's like everywhere.

I, I wanna see Noona's everywhere and I think that's what drives me every day.

Like I truly believe this is what I was meant to do.

And having Asian American flavors is, I think, crucial.

[music] [music] Francis: It feels like a movie, you know, when you make that perfect dish, when you create that perfect recipe, there's just something about it.

When you nail that dish, whether it's cooking for a family, cooking for friends, cooking for staff, when the food comes out, you know that you put a hundred percent in it, it, it hits different.

Hi, I'm Francis Tanrattana.

I'm the Chef de Cuisine at Tong restaurant based in Brooklyn, New York.

[Sound: Ice cubes chattering & cocktail pouring] So today we're making our massaman brisket, that we won best original dish at Brisket King in 2022.

We were the only one doing curry, so, and served it with rice.

So everyone was like, wow, they got rice in this event.

[Liza: laughing] They were coming back for it.

Tong Restaurant is a Thai restaurant that's involved in selling small tapas-style food.

Small plate food that you eat and enjoy with beer and wine.

-Jutaporn: So we wanna show them like a small plate that you don't really can't find here.

So we bring a lot of street food or, and like, childhood dishes.

Francis: This is our oyster dish [Liza: Is that spicy sauce?]

Francis: Yeah, it's pretty spicy I would say like medium, spicy.

What makes Tong Restaurant different from other Thai foods in the city is that we try to take more traditional food and make it a little bit more modern.

The food that I want to taste is more homey, but when we put onto the plate, it's more finesse, you know, it's more, more eye pleasing.

The beef brisket, I actually brine it in fish sauce, water and sugar.

And then after it is brined for at least 24 hours, I confit it in the oven for at least four to five hours until it's tender.

And then while the curry is heating up, we also have fingerling potatoes that we boil and then we fry.

I'm gonna also throw in the peanuts.

Okay, so guess we gotta have a little bit finesse, you know, a little bit.

[music] It's really the ingredients and the techniques that we do differently from different restaurants.

This rice mixture is for nam tok it marinade with a red curry, eggs, a little bit of fish sauce and salt.

Then it gets formed to a ball and then fried.

What's great about this dish is that it's a little bit crispy, a little bit soft.

You get a lot of texture in this dish.

So there's a lot of fun flavors here.

Oh, and this is what makes the dish exciting.

The rice is soft, refreshing herbs like mint, shallots, and gingers, lime juice, dried chilies.

This is a nam, which is a sour pork sausages.

It's a really refreshing and fun dish.

Here we go.

So here at Tong Restaurant we don't really focus on a specific type of Thai region.

We try to focus on everywhere, you know, there's no limitations.

Jutaporn: I have one dish that I was like, it has to be here.

Nobody sell it here.

It has to be on the menu.

That will be the banana blossom.

Mostly, Every dish that we make here is from scratch.

It's always fresh.

The vegetables, how they cut it, yeah, it's like homemade.

Francis: Our chili jam with coconut milk and chilies [Liza: Looks really good.]

Francis: We get our broad noodles from East Sunshines.

They make broad noodles every day and we cut the noodles in house.

We have our beef tartar, which is cormier that you really can't really get from a typical Thai restaurant.

Some people serve like pad thai, but for us, we serve from a different region.

We just like pad mee korat which is like, I guess a simple version of pad thai, which doesn't have peanuts because it has like soybean past and like fried shallots.

So it's a, it's a sweeter noodle [music] I think it's more about knowledge, teaching people how to eat our cultured food.

You know, it's like there's more than just pad thai, you know?

Jutaporn: I'll be like, here, I'm sorry, there's no no spring rolls here, chicken satay.

But hey, you know what, we have this.

[music: please remain seated.]

Francis: I'm Thai-American.

I was born in Maryland, Baltimore.

I moved to New York when I was very young.

My hopes at Tong Restaurant is I want to break boundaries of Thai food.

Try to have people enjoy food that they never have tried.

I also want us to get another Michelin plate, [cocktail shaking] hopefully get a Michelin star, maybe one day.

That's the goal.

And lastly, I wanna put Thai food back on the map.

And I think we have a great opportunity that now that Asian food is trending.

I want us to be as popular as the Korean food and the Vietnamese food that are doing really well right now.

Brisket time.

Oh, it's so tender [laughs] Oh, I hate to break it.

I really to break it.

Curry is nicely seasoned, could taste the coconut milk, the, ahh the chilies, the peanuts for the texture.

The fish sauce is not too salty.

And a little bit of the tamarind.

Super tender.

Super tender.

Jutaporn: We have a lot of Thai customers.

I am not changing anything and everybody know we are gonna serve them like this.

We are gonna show them like we eat it like this.

[music] And even though they will like, [Sound of blowing in air when something is too hot] but yes, they, yeah, they, they coming back for more to hurt themselves.

But they love it.

[laughing] [music] [music] [music] Mogan: In New York City you have like about five popular pastry shop.

The first is being French.

Then it's gonna be Italian.

Then you're gonna have the Japanese, very recently, very popular.

Korean.

And then you have a Chinese bakeries, like, focus on Taiwan and mainland.

We are none of those, you know, we are, we are from Southeast Asia.

We eat very different.

[music] You know, our ingredients are very different.

If you wanna go Southeast Asia pastry shop in the city, they're not exist.

They're none.

Where do you go for all these flavors?

Seleste: Kuih is like, more like you could have it in the morning as breakfast, afternoon tea or supper, like after dinner.

So you like, ah, reserve a whole day [laughs] You can get it.

Mogan: Kuih is a culture.

Culture, yeah.

Kuih is a whole day culture.

Like you can eat any time of the day.

Yeah.

As a snack or sweet.

Seleste: Hi, I am Seleste Tan.

Mogan: Hi, my name is Mogan Anthony.

We are the founders of Lady Wong, Seleste: Based in New York City.

[music] Mogan: Lady, Lady Wong is a Southeast Asian focused pastry shop, like the kuih we call it in Malaysia.

We have traditional and nontraditional pastries that actually are native to Southeast Asia.

There's like millions of people enjoying these flavors.

Like there was like 60 million people Thailand, or 90 people for 90 million million people from Vietnam with 30 million people from Malaysia.

Like, they just grew up with this.

I said, this is super underrated.

I said, there's no reason for us to try to make this as a fusion and try to make up a version of what it's gonna feed into New York.

We don't want to do that.

I think, kuih generally regard as a like a street food.

In, in Southeast Asia, we are very textural people.

Like when you had that, that pandan custard on top, you have to have the glutinous rice at the bottom.

Like it's give you that textural bite, and the creaminess and the chewiness.

So they're like, they're like soft.

The rice is cooked perfect, you know, they're not falling apart when you take them out.

You know, you could see like the rice kind of like a stretch, like they're cooked and when you bite them, they have salty layer at the top and the bottom is a sweet layer.

And they have like, kind of like a pudding texture.

But I also feel like a lot of a, a western audience or, or for Americans, sometimes they feel like this, like a jelly, wobbly type of a texture that probably they're not very familiar with.

They, they spongy, they're soft that you could see that crust you, you know.

But people take a like, just quick bite on something like with, without really, like I always tell them this cake example like's called talam.

It has like a thick coconut layers and, and sweet brown sugar layer at the bottom.

When you just eat the coconut layer, there's no sugar and it's just salty.

Seleste: You have to do it, eat both, both together.

Mogan: together.

Mogan: So we kind of like teach people how to eat and so on.

I, I, I, I think East Village probably the best place we could have opened the place.

It, working on all this architecture, you know, it has to, it has to like soft and also like, it's obviously peelable.

So, but because of the New York weather, these textures are sometimes like hard to like achieve.

[music] Core recipes for Lady Wong actually come from Indonesia, Malaysia, Seleste: Singapore, Mogan: Singapore, Thai, Vietnam, Philippines, and Burma.

But, it could easily span like, you know, half a dozen countries.

As we grow older, we started to really appreciate where we come from, the flavors that we came from.

You know, like we say, like if, if anybody want to do these like some sort of a full swing or you know, this humble, timeless flavor of Southeast Asia - it's gotta be us.

Mogan: Hello everyone.

Welcome to our basement kitchen.

This is a kitchen that, that we did all the r&ds initial recipes.

We usually lay down the ingredients, the way you see right here: from pandan, you know, banana leaves.

You have all these different type of flours that we have.

So this is a pandan leaf.

This particular one come from our Vietnam.

Pandan, ah, pandans are native to Southeast Asia.

It has, as we call it, a Indonesian vanilla, a Southeast Asian vanilla.

It has a very strong, um, some sort of a floral, grassy, vanilla note.

Eventually, it will fragrance the whole rice.

That's kind of the whole idea.

So we're gonna put them in the steamer.

The most popular dessert that we make right now is called seri muka.

It has a pandan custard, it has also rice at the bottom.

The direct translation meaning of seri muka means a pretty face So the, the concepts are made out of the simple ingredients, sugar, eggs, just like the cream brulee you mix [stirring] But the only special ingredients that we are gonna, we are gonna add here is the pandan When people want Southeast Asian, they want pandan.

Like I would say like a, like 99% of the menu, or items, has a pandan.

If you have a pandan allergy, you can't come to Lady Wong.

You know, like, like it's, that' what we use for everything.

Finally, we are gonna add the coconut milk.

While the rice is steaming.

We will start to prepare the dried blue pea flower from Malaysia.

Seleste: Color will release very quickly.

Mogan: At, at this point the rice is done.

We've been steaming them for like last 30 minutes, so we are gonna take the whole rice.

That's awesome.

We are gonna season with with salted coconut milk first.

Seleste: So the whole thing started February 2021.

During Chinese New Year time, Mogan: We are going through this some sort of like, you know, we, we, we say like some sort of a kuih depression.

[Liza: Why?]

Seleste: Because we usually travel back to Malaysia and Singapore during that time.

[That's true.]

Chinese New Year to be with the family.

Mogan: Yeah.

That's where like, she made a pineapple cookies and she made kuih and so on and she's like, listen Seleste: If we missing it, we can't go home.

A lot of people can't go home either, because every time we make these pastries, there's always tons left over.

So that's how the whole thing started.

Like, you know, we have to make by the tray or we want to give it away.

So, we put it on the social media and that's how the whole thing started.

We, we love like a thick seri muka, which has a lot of custard.

Seleste: I'm from Malaysia, Johor Bahru.

Mogan: I'm from Kedah, which is a, a northern states, very close to Thailand.

And we moved here probably almost 17 years right now it's going to be... Probably after two and a half hours, you may want to check.

And you kind of a gently move and you see that it's not jiggly They're nice and they're shiny.

Although we growing up eating all these pastries, but we are not growing up making them.

Although both of us are chefs, and we always cooked and traveled around the world and so on.

But this is not, I mean, you just take things for granted.

Son: Daddy, what are you making?

Mogan: This one's right here is a turtle.

Son: I love turtles.

[banging sound] Mogan: We never in our wildest dream that we thought we gonna open up a, Seleste: We gonna make kuih.

Mogan: It's a almost a forgotten arts and skills and it's a craftsmanship, [music] That's for sure.

[music] This is really good and stretchy [music & laughter] Mogan: It is like a very small window that you see that kuih has like really beautiful (texture).

So, we figuring it out like what is that window [music & pans clanging] [music] Mogan: It is a very daring move for like me and my wife to open up something so different in the New York City.

It was like almost like a going against a grain.

[music] Seleste: [laughter] It is very meaningful and special for our family.

They were, they were very surprised when we told them that Hey, we opening a kuih shop and then, my brother go, oh wow.

Like in New York City?

Really?

[laughter] Mogan: People, people eat kuih in New York?

-Yeah.

[laughs] So we wanna make it very accessible to everybody.

We try not to discriminate.

Kuih doesn't discriminate.

We have all kind of a long way to go and learn because a lot of these people that makes all this kuih, they do this for generations.

Sometimes, that's one of the reason that we go through the hard way of learning it because we are chef.

We figure it out.

But this is just the beginning.

-See you.

Seleste: Bye!

[music] [music] Liza: Building supportive communities and uplifting people within our own cultures is something we should all strive for.

These stories taught me to take pride in my culture in louder, more visible ways.

Sometimes the best way to address violence is by creating our own space with the people and communities who understand us the most.

That's it for this episode of food.

curated.

Thanks so much to all our featured guests.

I'm Liza de Guia Be sure to connect with us on social media and eat more stories.

I'll see you next week.

[music] Funding for food.

curated.

is made possible by.

Stele is a globally curated collection of artisanal and independent perfumes.

Hand-picked olfactory experiences that tell a story.

Available online and at two New York locations.

For more info, we're at Stele (dot) nyc.

Support for food.

curated.

comes from CMD Psych.

Bringing a holistic approach to child wellness and women's mental health care.

Helping patients find balance and harmony in their lives.

For more info, head to CMD Psych (dot) com Additional Funding provided by.

Craving more about the stories behind the craft.

Dive deeper into the makers we care about.

On our social pages, and at foodcurated dot com.

[music] [music] [music]