The spicy Szechuan chronicles

Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we eat our way through the menu at Birds of a Feather. If you’re new, check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.  

Husband and wife special at Birds of a Feather

191 Grand St, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Not only have I been invited to five weddings in the past three months, it turns out that now my food is participating in holy matrimony, too. But hey, as long as I don’t need to buy a bridesmaid’s dress, or a 1000 dollar plane ticket, I’m down to party. I’m not sure what makes cold sliced beef married to tripe*, but it’s a great match. The beef is sliced very thin, and marbled with tendon. The tripe is cooked thoroughly, and not too chewy. All of it is drowned in a spicy (but not Ugly Baby level spicy) scattered with peanuts. If you’re not into eating all of the animal parts, this dish (and this newsletter) is probably not a great fit for you. But for everyone else who knows that the funkiest cuts of meat are the best cuts of meat, it’ll be a hit.

*But I’m sure we can all Google it.

Thousand-year egg and tofu rolls at Birds of a Feather

191 Grand St, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Thousand-year eggs are one of my favorite comfort foods. When my sister and I are both home for the holidays, my mom will slice up a few of these black-and-gray marbled beauties into quarters, and douse them with an absurd amount of black vinegar, followed by a mountain of minced ginger. (Our family is a family of excess when it comes to flavor.) So when this dish arrived to our table, I was taken aback by its delicacy: For eight dollars, you get four thin slices of thousand-year egg precariously perched on four little circles of silken tofu, each wrapped in a delicate ribbon of cucumber. Maybe I’m just a fan of excess, but for a restaurant where every other dish is booming with spices I wanted more bang for the buck.

Eggplant with chili at Birds of a Feather

191 Grand St, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Maybe my standards for eggplant are just too damn high — my mom makes amazing eggplant — but even though the flavor on this dish was pretty strong, I just wasn’t a fan of the eggplant itself. Cut into thick strips, it was way too tough to be served cold, and an unappealing shade of gray, not purple. It’s topped with tons of what seems like chopped garlic and scallion, also a milquetoast shade of gray. I still ate plenty of it at the table, and finished the leftovers within two days, because eggplant is one of my favorite vegetables, and even mediocre eggplant is delicious to me.

Mung bean noodles Northern style at Birds of a Feather

191 Grand St, Brooklyn, NY 11211

I love liang fen of all forms, whether drowned in chili oil or served with lots of vinegar. On a hot summer’s day, I want nothing more than to devour a bowl of cold, starchy glass noodles (followed by cold, vinegary cucumbers).* Unfortunately, the last time I ordered lian fen from another Szechuan joint — Han Dynasty — it had too much chili oil, even for a chili oil fiend like me. The liang fen at Birds of a Feather fares much better, with a nice balance of spicy, mouth-numbing oil to light, vinegary noodles. It’s a great side dish to order, but heads up that the leftovers do not keep well (I learned the hard way), as the noodles start to fall apart.

*P.S.: If you have a good recipe for how to make liang fen at home, please send it to me! You can reply to this email directly.

Dan dan noodles at Birds of a Feather

191 Grand St, Brooklyn, NY 11211

I saved this dish for last, because I’m about to confess something shameful: I don’t think I’ve eaten dan dan noodles before? I mean, I must have, because I’m a voracious consumer of noodles and this is, like, top three in the Chinese Noodles Hall of Fame. But my life’s been all about zhajiangmian and ma jiang mian, supplemented by ra-mian and beef noodle soup. So what I’m saying is that I’m bringing this review to you with a dan dan palate as unadulterated as purely driven snow!! Anyways, I really enjoyed this dish. I thought the flavoring was good (Birds of a Feather does have their hot chili oil down pat). I’m not sure what kind of noodles is usually used in dan dan mian? But these were thin and spaghetti-like and I wished they had more bite (I always want my food to have more bite). Dan dan experts, please send me your recs so I can grow my palate!

Stay spicy,

Soph