There is Thai -- and then there is Wondee's

Tom Yum Soup at The Green Papaya in River Edge. The medium-size bowl contained mostly spicy broth, in addition to a couple of shrimp, okra and other vegetables.

Editor's note: Today, I discuss The Green Papaya, a Thai restaurant; the use of za'atar thyme mixture in tomato-and-egg dishes and lazy shoppers at Costco Wholesale in Hackensack.

My friend Stanley invited me to lunch the other day at The Green Papaya, a Thai restaurant in River Edge I had driven past many times before.

I had never eaten there, convinced as I am of the superiority of Wondee's Fine Thai Food and Noodles on Main Street in Hackensack.

My first -- and last -- meal at The Green Papaya started with Tom Yum Soup ($3). I also had Green Papaya Salad ($5). 

Neither compared to Wondee's versions. My friend had Pineapple Fried Rice with chicken ($8).

Pineapple Fried Rice with chicken at The Green Papaya.

A nice touch is a welcoming cup of tea and refills.

I met my friend at the restaurant a little before noon. By the time we left, the place was full, and over customers' conversations I could hear the stir-frying of food in woks from the open kitchen in the back.

My friend, who lives in River Edge, said he didn't know about Wondee's.

Compare the Green Papaya Salad served in River Edge to Wondee's salad, below.

Wondee's salad cost more, but is big enough to share with one or two others.

The Tom Yum Soup served at The Green Papaya contained a surprise -- a couple of pieces of pineapple -- but there was more broth than shrimp and vegetable.

My Green Papaya Salad had a nice crunch, though when I finished it, there was way too much dressing left in the bottom of the dish. 

It also was missing the fresh green beans in Wondee's salad, as well as lettuce leaves you could use for wrapping the green papaya.

When we lived in Englewood, we enjoyed many Thai dinners at Pawana, but after moving to Hackensack in 2007, Wondee's has been our go-to place for Thai food from an extensive menu, including whole fish and vegetarian dishes.

Now, Pawana is closed. 

The Green Papaya, 110 Kinderkamack Road, River Edge; 201-678-1888. BYO. Parking lot.

Wondee's Fine Thai Food and Noodles, 296 Main St., Hackensack; 201-883-1700. BYO. Parking in rear.

Organic eggs with za'atar, sun-dried tomato and cheese shavings.

Exploring za'atar 

The Middle Eastern thyme mixture called za'atar is usually found on chewy, fresh bread, moistened with olive oil.

You could roll it up and eat it, or toast it until the mixture's sesame seeds sizzled.

The mixture, sold in green and brown versions, contains dried thyme, wild sumac, sesame seeds and salt -- it's both sour from the sumac and crunchy from the seeds. 

Another version is to sprinkle lots of za'atar over fresh bread spread with yogurt cheese.

Since I pretty much gave up bread to lose weight, I've sprinkled za'atar over sliced tomato, and in the past, I used it on broiled chicken. 

Now, I'm adding it to egg-and-tomato dishes.

An open-face omelet with cheese, Campari tomatoes and za'atar.

You can buy za'atar at Fattal's Bakery, 975-77 Main St., Paterson; 973-742-7125. 

But don't come home without eating at Aleppo Restaurant (939 Main St.), and visiting Brothers Produce in the Paterson Farmers' Market and Corrado's Family Affair just over the border in Clifton.

At Costco Wholesale, the lines were short, but the parking lot was a zoo.

Lazy shoppers

Costco Wholesale members must be fairly fit to handle all of those very large economy sizes the warehouse store is famous for.

Shopping carts are oversized to accommodate enormous rolls of paper, cases of spring water and 50-pound bags of rice.

If you fill up your cart, it takes quite an effort to push it to the car.

So, I'm floored every time I go to the Hackenack Costco on a busy Saturday at the laziness of many shoppers, who insist on parking in the rows closest to the doors and who clog up the single entrance road.

That was the case on Saturday, when cars were backed up to River Street.

Inside the store, I mentioned the problem to one of the employees, and said Costco should hire someone to direct traffic, but she dismissed my suggestion, saying the store can't do anything about drivers who clog up the entrance road.

Two other employees were just about as helpful when I asked whether Costco had discontinued Della-brand Organic Long Grain Brown Rice, which was missing from its usual spot.

Both told me to go look in the rice aisle, where I had just been. One didn't even break stride or stop eating something.

Another worker checked the computer, and said the Hackensack store no longer carries Della brown rice.

When I got home, I went online and ordered Lundberg Organic Brown Rice from Amazon.com -- six 2-pound packages for about $20.

This lunch made us forget about dinner

Woochon has a waterfall in the dining room and tanks of live seafood.

Editor's note: Today, I describe two great ethnic meals at restaurants in Palisades Park and Hackensack.

I came across a real eye-opener while looking over the lunch menu at Woochon, a new Korean restaurant in Palisades Park:

Hangover Stew with Clotted Ox Blood. 

We stuck with more conventional food during our lunch on Thursday -- my wife and I shared entrees of Grilled Spanish Mackerel ($13.99) and Soft Bean Curd Stew with Seafood ($9.99).

A large mackerel fillet comes with pickled ginger, watercress and a lemon wedge.

The bean-curd stew is served in an usually large stone bowl.

Menu prices include the side dishes of vegetables, fish and meat Korean restaurants are known for. 

On Thursday, we received 11 small dishes with fish cake, translucent noodles, spring-mix salad, peanuts, dark-green seaweed, mushrooms, kimchi  and other items, and several were replenished during the meal.

The restaurant serves summer water kimchi and white kimchi instead of the spicier mahk kimchi, which is made with a lot of red pepper and garlic.

The entrees came with brown or white rice, and with the side dishes, I was so full, I skipped dinner.


I was happy with tea, fruit and cheese until bedtime.

Some of the seafood in my bean-curd stew --baby octopus and squid -- was chewy, but a large shrimp in the shell couldn't have been more tender.

We also loved the juicy, skin-on mackerel fillet -- which came with a small bowl of soft-tofu stew -- and all the side dishes or panchan were delicious.   

When we walked it, we were greeted with shouts of welcome from the staff.

At the end of the meal, a male waiter bowed and presented the check on a small tray. 

Ten of the 11 side dishes we were served, above and below.

The restaurant, affiliated with another of the same name in the Flushing section of Queens, offers a full menu of sushi, tofu and barbecue.

Woochon customers also can sit at a sushi bar, rear.

An outside sign and a summer specials menu list dishes only in Korean. The restaurant is housed in an old corner bank building on the main street in Palisades Park.

Woochon Restaurant, 280 Broad Ave., Palisades Park; 201-242-9999.

Wondee's 

We had another wonderful dinner of seafood, tofu and vegetables at Wondee's in Hackensack on Saturday night, and the food looked as good as it tasted.

I remembered to grab a bottle of Mexican beer from the fridge, but forgot my iPhone and can't bring you photos of our meal.

Three of us had spicy shrimp-and-mushroom soup or wonton soup, an appetizer of fried tofu with a peanut dipping sauce, green papaya salad, large shrimp in a sweet chili sauce and stir-fried tofu with vegetables.

The shredded papaya is served over dark-green lettuce leaves you can use to wrap it, and the puddle of fish sauce-lemon juice dressing is terrific when eaten with a spoon. 

The wonderful shrimp came with a cabbage salad on the side. We ate white or brown rice.

We dined early, and three servers waited on us.

When we walked in, Chef Wandee Suwangbutra was having something to eat in the dining room before the expected rush of customers.

Wondee's Fine Thai Food and Noodles, 296 Main St., Hackensack; 201-883-1700 or 1715. Parking in rear, BYO.

Web site: Fine Thai Food


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Food gifts from Jamaica

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My wife returned from Jamaica on Saturday night with island specialties in her suitcase.

She unpacked a container of fried parrot fish, four plastic bags of fresh ackee from trees in the yard, breadfruit wrapped in aluminum foil, large avocados and two, 12-ounce bags of roasted Blue Mountain coffee beans ($19 for 12 ounces). 
 
But it wasn't Jamaican food she wanted before we drove home. With our son, we stopped at Wondee's Thai restaurant on Main Street in Hackensack for a wonderful dinner of vegetarian duck salad (made with tofu, not poultry), spicy Panang curry with large shrimp, a special of Chinese watercress and rice.

This morning, she prepared Jamaica's national dish: ackee and salt fish with sweet and hot peppers -- the bland fruit serving as a foil for salted codfish. On the side, she served the roasted breadfruit, which had been sliced and fried in canola oil. A great breakfast.
 

Why buy any other beef?

ShopRite has another sale on Nature's Reserve-brand beef, a product of Australia that is free range and grass fed. There is a minimum purchase of four pounds at $4.99 a pound with a Price Plus store card. 


The cut is whole beef tenderloin for filet mignon, which I've sliced thin for Korean barbecue or served as small steaks. When I bought this in the past, it required some trimming of fat.




The sale starts today and runs through Sept. 4. With such a low price for Australian beef , it doesn't make sense to buy beef raised conventionally with antibiotics and growth hormones, and fed who knows what.

Our son chickens out

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Nearly three months ago, we pledged to stop eating meat -- chicken, pork, beef and lamb. I've lost a little weight and spend less time and money in food stores. But our 13-year-old son is tiring of fish and really misses meat.

Awakening from an afternoon nap Monday, I smelled something unfamiliar and couldn't imagine what my wife cooked for dinner. When I got downstairs, I found out: jerk chicken legs for our son and mahi-mahi with onion and tomato for us, along with rice and salad. The Readington Farms antibiotic-free chicken (ShopRite) didn't tempt me at all, but our son loved his meal, bones and all.


It was the third time he broke the pledge. When he was served a hamburger on a flight to Jamaica in March, he ate it instead of asking for something else. A couple of weekends ago, he ordered his favorite version of won ton soup with roast pork at Wondee's in Hackensack.

Tonight, I'll serve a "meatloaf" made from wheat gluten and soy in barbecue sauce and ask my wife to make potato salad with hard-boiled egg and mixed vegetables.

(Photo: Dolphin fish, or mahi-mahi, caught off the coast of Jamaica.)

Another great (meatless) meal at Wondee's

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We didn't get to Wondee's until 8:45 or so Saturday night, but we were lucky to get the last vacant table. My wife and I ate only seafood or vegetarian dishes at the Thai restaurant in Hackensack, where we pledged to go meatless on Feb. 28. But our 13-year-old son, celebrating his birthday, ordered wonton soup with sliced pork (he says it's the best he's ever had).

It was another great meal at one of our all-time favorites and we didn't miss meat. The value is outstanding. Wondee's is one of the few restaurants in North Jersey where a whole fish is priced at $16.95 (up recently from $14.95).


We ordered fried shrimp dumplings with a tasty plum sauce, mock duck salad (with crispy tofu instead of crispy duck), soft-shell crabs in Panang curry (a special) and pineapple fried rice with shrimp.


Everything was terrific, but we especially like the two big crabs (cut in four pieces) in the spicy curry, which was flecked with red pepper ($16.95). The dish included some crisp green beans and sweet pepper.


The fried rice dish is so much bolder than Chinese fried rice, which often is made from leftovers. Wondee's version includes big chunks of canned pineapple and three or four crunchy shrimp.


Our son didn't eat all of the sliced pork in his soup -- only the second or third time he has had meat in the two and a half months since we decided to give up meat and eat seafood.

Wondee's has a vegetarian menu and offers vegetarian versions of dishes with meat. For example, another special was a Thai summer roll with or without sweet sausage in tamarind sauce. But we got there too late; the kitchen was out of the meatless version.




Wondee's Fine Thai Food & Noodles, 
296 Main St., 201-883-1700;  parking in rear
http://www.wondeenj.com/ 

Looking for a big bowl of noodle soup

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As dinner time drew near Monday evening, I felt like driving over to Wondee's in Hackensack and ordering its biggest bowl of noodle soup. Of course, when we got there, we remembered our favorite Thai restaurant is closed on Mondays.

So we just turned toward the shopping center near Route 4 and the best Chinese restaurant in North Jersey -- Lotus Cafe, which is open seven days a week.

And there it was on the menu: seafood soup noodles ($11.95). In truth, the bowl isn't that big, but there is enough broth, homemade noodles, shrimp, scallop, squid, fish cake and spinach for two to three people as an appetizer.

The fat, toothsome noodles appear in other dishes, notably zar jiang mein, the Chinese version of spaghetti Bolognese, with a hearty meat sauce that will have you coming back for more.

Following the soup, we really enjoyed the house special, pan-fried tofu ($9.95) with white rice. The soft, eggy tofu is dipped in a light batter before stir frying with meaty black mushrooms and vegetables. Another nice dinner.


Lotus Cafe, 450 Hackensack Ave., Hackensack; 201-488-7070.
Open seven days, BYO, free delivery within 3 miles ($12 minimum).