Lotus Cafe's daily staff meal: Simple, quick and a minimum of talk

The staff meal at Lotus Cafe in Hackensack today included platters of simply fried fish, above, and baby bok choy, below. Cooks and servers also ate white rice and some had soup, but kitchen and dining room employees sit at separate tables.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

The multi-course, price-fixed Chinese dinners and lavish banquets served at Lotus Cafe in Hackensack are strictly for well-heeled customers.

When the 15 cooks, servers and other employees sit down for a daily staff meal, the food is simple, and it's eaten quickly with a minimum of talk.

The meal begins at about 2:45 in the afternoon, and lasts only 10 to 20 minutes. Cooks and servers sit separately at tables in the back of the dining room.

The restaurant stays open during the staff meal, and I saw a table or two occupied by customers.

The cooks and dining room staff begin and end their 11- and 12-hour days in a 15-seat van driven by one of the waiters on the commute from Queens to the Home Depot Shopping Center in Hackensack, and back.

Chef Da preparing a dish of Chicken and Broccoli for me before I told him I no longer eat meat or poultry. But the food didn't go to waste. The staff shared it.

Chicken and Broccoli is a Chinese dish you will find only in America.

Next time I go to Lotus Cafe I will ask for a platter of fried fish, like the one served at today's staff meal.

One of the employees had a spicy noodle soup at the staff meal.

Portions are modest.

Lotus Cafe, 450 Hackensack Ave., in the Home Depot Shopping Center, Hackensack; 201-488-7070.

Open 7 days for lunch and dinner, BYO, large parking lot. Delivery ($12 minimum) within 3 miles. Reservations recommended on weekends.

'All you ever cook are fish and pasta'

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What's for dinner? Potato chips or mackerel in red-wine sauce?

My 13-year-old son came home around dinner time and lugged his book bag into his room.

While he was at the YMCA gym, I was shopping for fish to prepare for dinner. But when I went into his room to call him to the table, he was finishing off a large bag of potato chips.

"You're eating chips? What about dinner? I cooked mackerel (one of his favorites)."

"I don't want any," he said between bites of the chips. "All you ever cook are fish and pasta."

Even if that were true, he was the one who suggested more than 13 months ago that we stop eating meat and poultry, and he was the one who went back to being a carnivore when a hamburger was put in front of him on a flight several months after all of us took the pledge.

My wife also has returned to eating meat and poultry, but I've been happy eating only seafood, even as I cut down drastically on bread and pizza starting about six months ago to lose weight. I've shed 25 pounds.

I've added cheese to my diet, including the full-fat kind I used to avoid, pairing it with fruit or adding it to salads.

My son isn't being deprived of meat and poultry. This week, my wife prepared his favorite soup with chicken feet, and even added beef and ribs to it. I bought him uncured, preservative-free bacon from Trader Joe's.

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He raved about the macaroni with a sauce of olive oil, chicken broth, garlic and anchovies the first couple of times I made it, garnished with lots of fresh, wilted spinach and grated cheese, but now it's taken its place among the hated "pasta" dishes he avoids.

I bought organic ground beef at Costco in Hackensack for him, while stocking up on canned fish, vegetable stew, four-bean chili and other non-meat items for me, but once I took him to Smashburger, he refuses to eat a burger anyplace else.

I told my son that if he continued eating chips instead of the dinners I prepare, I won't return his PlayStation 3, which I hid because his school work suffered.

My wife didn't back me up. She said eating chips was no reason to deny him the video-game console. 

Image via Wikipedia

I've had to be inventive without meat, poultry, bread and pizza as part of the dining equation, both at home and eating out. 

My breakfasts often are salads with the same ingredients I once stuffed into sandwiches -- smoked fish, sardines, cheese, tomato and so forth. 

This morning, I fried four quail eggs -- sunny side up -- from the Korean supermarket, and ate them with leftover baby bok choy, Korean stewed tofu  and a cooked cabbage-and-sweet-pepper dish my wife made. 

I just prepared a canned fish salad -- tuna, pink salmon, sardines and anchovies -- with Dijon mustard, lemon juice, cumin and other Middle Eastern spices, and diced celery and onion, and wonder if my son will have a sandwich of it for breakfast tomorrow.

I love pasta and rice, but can't eat them to my heart's content while cutting down on carbohydrates.

Eating out, there are several meatless Korean dishes I like and others that can be prepared without meat, and they always come with vegetable, fish and tofu side dishes that are perfect for me.

Everywhere else, I choose fish or shrimp for my entree, such as the fried whole tilapia I shared the other night with my wife at a Colombian restaurant.

Three-minute meal. What's the catch?

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It looks like meat. It feels like meat in your mouth. But these "beefless tips" are made from wheat gluten and soy protein, and come with Burgundy-wine sauce and vegetables, and rice -- in pouches. Sold under the Gardein label (garden protein), this refrigerated meal from Canada weighs a total of 10.5 ounces.


I plated the contents of the box, managing to squirt sauce on my shirt, pants, shoes and the kitchen floor. I microwaved the tips, sauce, rice and some leftover broccoli, carrot and red pepper for close to four minutes, but the rice remained hard.


I ate everything but the rice and put it back in the microwave for two more minutes, cooking it. The tips had a nice texture, but they didn't taste like any meat I have ever had. I was filled after finishing everything, but only because I ate a big romaine lettuce salad with slivered almonds a couple of hours earlier. I found Gardein's Burgundy Trio at Whole Foods Market in Paramus.

Click on the link below to go to the company's Web site and see other meatless meals that resemble chicken breasts, pulled pork and kabobs.


Garden Protein International

(Photo: Wheat gluten flour.)

Gamasot Restaurant in Fort Lee

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One of our favorite meals is spicy Korean soft-tofu stew with steamed rice and side dishes. At $10 or less -- including tax -- soft tofu is not only delicious, it's good for you, too. And it's a welcome alternative during our meatless pledge.

On Saturday night, we tried the new kid on the block -- Gamasot (Korean for iron pot). The full price for a soft-tofu meal here is $9 -- $1 less than So Gong Dong, our favorite, in Palisades Park. When we've tried soft tofu elsewhere in the past, we couldn't get it as spicy as we wanted.

Gamasot offers a range of spiciness, as do most places, but didn't take us seriously and delivered three stews with seafood that fell a bit short on the heat scale. Yet, these stews were bubbling so furiously when brought to the table, the two fresh eggs I cracked into mine became hard boiled, rather than soft, which tastes great broken over the rice.

The stone bowl with the steamed rice seemed a little smaller than at So Gong Dong, but we liked the side dishes -- cabbage kimchi brought to the table in a special bowl and cut with scissors, and cucumber and radish kimchis, plus bean sprouts and sliced hot peppers in a sweetish sauce. The entire meal was terrific and we plan to return. (Photo: Typical Korean side dishes.)

Another specialty at Gamasot is milky ox-bone soup, which the greeter said is cooked for 24 hours and served a number of ways. Korean barbecue also is available. The restaurant is housed in an enclosed, two-level  shopping mall with parking underneath, but some stores are vacant, and Korean restaurants have come and gone over the years.

Gamasot Restaurant, 1550 Lemoine Ave., 
First Level, Fort Lee; 201-242-1155


So Gong Dong, 118 Broad Ave., Second Floor,
Palisades Park; 201-313-5550.

Why are these tortillas green?

Image by Hagens_world via Flickr

I had lunch with a friend yesterday at La Batalla, a small, colorful Mexican restaurant with groceries in Bergenfield. Non-meat offerings were limited, but I enjoyed two soft tacos with small shrimp, served with refried beans and yellow rice.

After we paid, I noticed stacks of tortillas, including green ones I had never seen before (Mi Pueblito brand from Passaic city, where thousands of Mexicans live). A customer and the woman who worked there didn't know why they were green. My friend looked at the label and said "green corn." Was that a statement or a question, because when I got home I saw only "corn flour" listed. (Photo: Produce store in Mexico.)

I wanted to use the tortillas for dinner last night, so I heated three of them on my stove-top griddle, topped them with sliced provolone cheese and stacked them on a plate. I made three sunny-side-up eggs in extra-virgin olive oil with salt and coarse Aleppo red pepper and put them over the tortillas and melted cheese, which were delicious soaked in the broken yolks.


I had mixed vegetables on the side and drank pinot grigio from Italy.


La Batalla, 83 N. Washington Ave., Bergenfield; 
201-385-0303. Credit cards accepted. Web site:
La Batalla

With food like this, who needs meat?

The crunch of spicy cabbage and cucumber slices. The bubbling broth cooking a freshly cracked egg. The simply steamed rice, a foil for a stew of soft tofu and red pepper.

These are the elements in a meal of Korean comfort  food that is loved by people of all ages. It's also one of my favorite alternatives to meat. Last night, we enjoyed soft-tofu stews and kimchi side dishes at So Gong Dong in Palisades Park after realizing a Korean fried chicken place we had our hearts set on was takeout only.

"It's good for you and it tastes so good," my 12-year-old son Roshane says. "I wouldn't mind eating tofu every day."

We had set out for another North Jersey branch of BBQ Chicken after getting fed up with the slow service the last time we visited BBQ Chicken & Beer in Cliffside Park, where we love the spicy, twice-fried  chicken wings and drumsticks, and the broiled roasted-pepper thighs. But when we saw that it was takeout, we immediately drove over to the second-floor tofu restaurant.

I ordered the oyster tofu stew "more spicy" from the scale listed on the place-mat menu. One of the things I love about the meal is breaking the soft-boiled egg yolk over the steamed rice and eating them together. The complete meal is $10, including tax. When I started eating it a decade ago, it cost $7.

Before we left, my wife ordered another meal to go, so she can take it for lunch next week.

Restaurant So Gong Dong, 118 Broad Ave.,
Palisades Park; 201-313-5550.

BBQ Chicken (takeout), 10 E. Edsall Blvd.,
Palisades Park; 201-461-0201.

Tasting and shopping notes

I sliced six or seven pieces of giant bluefin-tuna sashimi as part of my dinner last night and wasn't disappointed. Veined with fat, the raw fish just melted away in my mouth with a minimum

of chewing. Heavenly. I also had small, green obah leaves (wrap for the sashimi), seasoned fish eggs, cooked eel sushi and roll, and a triangle of seaweed-wrapped cooked rice stuffed with spicy cod roe, all from Mitsuwa Marketplace in Edgewater, where I bought the tuna Sunday ($62.99 a pound). See earlier posts.


Clementines from Spain and black figs grown in the U.S. have begun appearing in markets, but at higher prices than I remember from last year. I haven't seen clementines for less than $9.99 for a 5-pound box. My wife bought domestic clementines for half that at ShopRite in Englewood, but they are sour and full of pits. An employee of H Mart in Englewood said the price of the imported clementines will fall next month.


I bought a box of 24 black figs at H Mart in Little Ferry yesterday for $9.99. I saw then for 99 cents each at Mitsuwa Marketplace that morning as I gathered items for my sashimi and trimmings dinner. The figs I bought were ripe and sweet, and I'm storing them in the fridge. I want to try them with Manchego sheep milk's cheese and almonds for dessert one night or split open and drizzled with honey.

I have been buying California rice for two or three years now to avoid rice from the South, where it is sometimes grown on old cotton fields laced with arsenic, which was used to kill the boll weevil, a beetle, according to Consumer Reports. The problem is many bags of rice don't specify where it is grown. That's not the case at H Mart in Little Ferry, which has a large selection of California rice in all sizes, but it can be expensive, especially after a price spike last year.

Yesterday, I picked up a 20-pound bag of Kokuho yellow rice that was over a price sign of $19.99, one of the lowest I saw, and it rang up as $12.99 (it was on sale). The reference to yellow rice may have something to do with the yellow seal on the bag. The rice looked the same as other brands when we prepared it.