Pok Pok NY

Way back in April, I was invited to a dinner at Pok Pok NY, hosted by Pepcid and Ted Allen (the host of Chopped on The Food Network). I arrived a tad early and ended up going to the bar across the street, Whiskey Soda Lounge, owned by the Pok Pok NY fam, and ordered myself a cocktail before dinner:

The Hunny is a grapefruit concoction that is mixed with their signature drinking vinegar (the one mixed with this drink is honey-flavored). A little kombucha-like, but slightly sweeter. It’s mixed with tequila and is very refreshing. You don’t taste the tequila, which would have been very dangerous if I had more time there!

After finishing my drink at Whiskey Soda Lounge, I walked across the street to start the dinner at Pok Pok NY, where they were mixing signature cocktails:

One of the cocktails was a drinking vinegar mixed with gin, soda water and lemon. The other cocktail had a mint/fresh herb infusion. Both seamlessly incorporated the drinking vinegars and were dangerously tasty.

We started with some papaya salad with other various vegetables in a Thai fish sauce:

Which was served alongside a lot of coconut rice that was individually wrapped and could be eaten with your hands:

The sausages they served were very spicy and were also presented with some pickled veggies, kombocha squash, and fried pork skin:

The kombocha squash balanced the heat from the sausage (and the squash made another appearance at dessert later in the evening!)

The fried chicken wings are well known for good reason; they are spicy, garlicky, and have a great crunchy texture:

We were also served a chicken with different dipping sauces:

The chicken was tender and tasted similar to a Chinese chicken that is smoked with tea leaves.

A favorite dish of mine – water spinach – that was sauteed with lots of spicy peppers:

The star of the evening: a striped bass steamed with soy, ginger, mushrooms, and more hot peppers:

For dessert, we had kombocha squash that was cooked with a coconut-palm sugar custard that was served slightly warm:

Kombocha squash is already one of my favorite foods (especially in soups) because it’s slightly sweet, but I’ve only ever had it in savory dishes. Serving it with the coconut custard was the perfect combination that wasn’t too sweet but definitely satisfied my sweet tooth.

At the conclusion of dinner, Ted came by to talk to all of us about the meal (he had just done the same meal two hours earlier with different people but managed to eat it again during our dinner!) I enjoyed all of the dishes at Pok Pok NY and definitely want to return to the area; it’s right by the water in Brooklyn and it looks like a beautiful bike ride to the restaurant!