Wei Tchou
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writing about food and culture for @eater, @nytimes, etc. my memoir/book about ferns "little seed" is out now from @astrangeobject + @deepvellum! 🌿
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Articles by Wei Tchou
Spoiled Milk - Lux Magazine
Breastmilk is sweet and clean, less heavy on the tongue than cow’s milk, less, well, animal. When first produced, the consistency is watery, but as output continues, it becomes fuller in body, more caloric, like a fresh soy or almond milk. After sitting out, it develops a thick cream top that can be scooped with a fingertip and tastes like half-and-half.
The Best Memoirs: The 2025 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist
Thanks for talking us through the 2025 shortlist for the National Book Critics Circle Prize for Autobiography—has it been a good year for memoir and autobiography? It’s been one of the best years for memoir and autobiography in recent memory! It’s been a delight to read so many interesting, well-written, imaginatively constructed, and thought-provoking memoirs. What were the judges looking for, when they came to compile the shortlist? We weren’t looking for any one particular thing.
Peter Som's New Debut: A Cookbook
Entertaining With shows how a party came together, with expert advice on everything from menus to music. At a dinner party on the final evening of the Year of the Dragon, the fashion designer Peter Som was a charismatic host in his amber-lit West Village apartment, teasing guests, refreshing wine glasses and finishing several dishes in his galley kitchen. Friends, several of whom had known Som for decades, were put to work upon arrival.
How New Cantonese Restaurants Like Bonnie's and Cha Cha Tang Are Changing the Cuisine Original
Cantonese food for many American diners has long been associated with easy, comforting flavors: sesame chicken piled in a ring of steamed broccoli, creamy crab Rangoon dipped in sweet-and-sour sauce and moo shoo pork rolled into pancakes with tangy hoisin. But at New York's recently opened Cha Cha Tang restaurant, the menu is more adventurous. The pork chops are fried katsu style and come from pampered Kurobata pigs; afterward, guests can enjoy French toast stuffed with violet ube cream.
Little Seed
At the time of my brother’s first psychotic break, I knew nothing about ferns but that I had one and it was dying. I watched its seashell leaves wilt and drain. First they were jade, then chartreuse, then cream and sienna, like a stained pillowcase. I couldn’t let it go, bothering it with a spray bottle, even as its leaves fluttered away. All I knew about ferns was that they like humidity and light. My little studio, meanwhile, was dry and dingy.
Wei Tchou
I haven’t enjoyed being pregnant at all and now, six months in, I’m angry at how unprepared I was for the body horror and emotional isolation. Since November, I haven’t written a sentence (I am writing this thanks to Zofran, a prescription anti-nausea drug I got yesterday), haven’t been able to read a book, haven’t been able to cook, eat normally, pick up after myself, or see friends. I used to write to be in the world; I used to go into the world so I could write.
Little Seed
LANGUAGE LESSONS At the time of my brother’s first psychotic break, I knew nothing about ferns but that I had one and it was dying. I watched its seashell leaves wilt and drain. First they were jade, then chartreuse, then cream and sienna, like a stained pillowcase. I couldn’t let it go, bothering it with a spray bottle, even as its leaves fluttered away. All I knew about ferns was that they like humidity and light. My little studio, meanwhile, was dry and dingy.
Identity Bingo! - Lux Magazine
It’s a brightly colored, well-designed time for Asian-American cookbooks. I was at a bookshop in Manhattan the other week and pulled eight or nine. This bumper crop includes First Generation by Frankie Gaw, The Woks of Life by the Leung family (who writes a popular blog of the same title), My Shanghai by Betty Liu, and Korean American by Eric Kim.
In the Catskills, Seasonal Farmhouse Dinners With House-Made Beer
Step by Step The Designer Matilda Goad’s Beauty Regimen Left: Matilda Goad.
At This Vending Machine, Four Quarters Get You One Surprise Artwork
World News 21 Eylül 2023 - 17:07 Plus: Mohammed Sami’s paintings of displacement, a new omakase spot — and more recommendations from T Magazine. World News 21 Eylül 2023 - 17:07 Eat hereThe East Village Omakase Restaurant Serving Locally Sourced Fish, Rice, Even Sake Left: Bar Miller’s interior design, by the firm Polonsky & Friends, features oak and burl wood walls. Right: the Bar Miller salad consists of a rotating combination of local produce.Credit...Left: Nicole Franzen.
To Take a Risk, to Dream, to Have Faith: To Make Soy Sauce
We ran this piece four years ago, on Heated, and I think about it often, so I felt like it was worth bringing back. A long time ago, I got to work with Wei — like, in an office! — and she is such a joy to be with, and I think that joy and playfulness come out in her writing. I hope you love reading this. Team Bittman is off next week — many of us will be together (Holly is coming to visit!), and we’ll be cooking and putting together fun videos and content that we think you’ll really like.
Host Gift Guide: Fun Ferments, Cozy Quilts and More
T Magazine|Host Gift Guide: Fun Ferments, Cozy Quilts and More https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/24/t-magazine/host-gift-guide-summer.html Covetable Cutlery Surrealistic Servingware and Chefs’ Knives Clockwise from left: Bodman Blades Curly Myrtle and Damascus Steel chef knife, $970, abask.com; the Perfect Nothing Catalog can opener, price on request, instagram.com/theperfectnothingcatalog; Olga Bonne spoon, price on request, instagram.com/olgabonne_jwlry; and Alessandra Williams mismatched...
Host Gift Guide: Fun Ferments, Cozy Quilts and More
T Magazine|Host Gift Guide: Fun Ferments, Cozy Quilts and More https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/24/t-magazine/host-gift-guide-summer.html Covetable Cutlery Surrealistic Servingware and Chefs’ Knives Clockwise from left: Bodman Blades Curly Myrtle and Damascus Steel chef knife, $970, abask.com; the Perfect Nothing Catalog can opener, price on request, instagram.com/theperfectnothingcatalog; Olga Bonne spoon, price on request, instagram.com/olgabonne_jwlry; and Alessandra Williams mismatched...
A Hawaii Shop Turning Oahu’s Invasive Trees Into Surfboards
T Magazine|A Hawaii Shop Turning Oahu’s Invasive Trees Into Surfboards https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/t-magazine/hawaii-surfboards-bizia-oahu.html Eat Here A Hudson Valley Restaurant in a Vintage Airstream Westerly Canteen, a restaurant parked on a former farm in the Hudson Valley, serves a menu focused on local ingredients with dishes like the stuffed zucchini blossoms at right.Credit...Courtesy of Westerly Canteen By Wei Tchou This spring, the chef Molly Levine began serving seasonal...
The Very Last Dumpling Restaurant in the East Broadway Mall
Underneath the creaking blue and white trusses of the Manhattan Bridge in New York City is a beige building that spans a city block that contains a maze of shuttered storefronts. For decades, the East Broadway Mall, known as Yi Dong Lou in Chinese, was a bustling center of Chinatown, at 88 East Broadway — an auspicious address that was well-regarded as far away as mainland China.
A Photographer’s Romantic Black-and-White Landscapes
Step By Step Roxanne Assoulin’s Beauty Regimen Left: the jewelry designer Roxanne Assoulin.
A Tranquil Place to Stay in Northern Thailand
Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we share things we’re eating, wearing, listening to or coveting now. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday. And you can always reach us at tlist@nytimes.com. Visit This A Minimalist Retreat in Chiang Mai Left: at Kati, the restaurant of the Burirattana Hotel in Chiang Mai, the focus is on ingredients from northern Thailand.
6 things I learned from freezing my eggs
Freezing your eggs in the United States takes a lot of time and energy—simply researching the process can be overwhelming. There is a lot of information out there, some of it scary, some of it difficult to understand. Here are some things I’ve learned during my eggventure that may help you make a challenging process easier and maybe even enjoyable. 1.
Make tempeh, not despair
Sunday, March 13 8:23 p.m. I have a biological clock for ferments, and in the icy pre-spring, tempeh is always on my mind. Tempeh, which originated in Indonesia, where it is fermented in tropical heat between banana leaves, is essentially a mushroom that grows on beans—the fungi Rhizopus oryzæ prefers growing on soy, but really it will do fine on most legumes and even on seeds. I always recommend tempeh as a gateway mold for the fermentation-curious, for a few reasons.
A peek at a handful of dining rooms we're missing
Restrictions on dining in New York have devastated an industry that defines the city. According to the New York State Department of Labor, the city lost more than 11,000 restaurant and bar jobs, in December 2020 alone. Hundreds of these businesses have closed, with little economic respite on the horizon. Restaurant owners and workers have had to contend with mostly empty dining rooms, a dystopian challenge for a city used to full books and bars filled elbow-to-elbow.
Trash From All Over the Country Winds Up in Uniontown
Deacon Samuel Woods lives near a sewage-treatment lagoon that has been spilling waste into Uniontown's waterways for over a decade. In Uniontown, Alabama, a hamlet of Perry County, there are glamorous pastors' lunches, with congregants dressed nattily in plumed hats and tailored suits. There are seven churches in this community of around 2,000. At sunset, young people gather on outdoor basketball courts to scrimmage and socialize.
Summer 2020 Travel: Camping as Social Distancing
For my immigrant family, outdoor recreation was not part of our usual vacation plans. Could learning to camp be the pandemic escape I needed? by Wei Tchou Aug 19, 2020, 9:45am EDT Photography by Wei Tchou Wei Tchou is a Brooklyn-based writer and former non-camper working on a book about her family and the cultural history of ferns. “I know you can do it,” said Salem, smiling at me with encouraging eyes, even though I didn’t know the first thing about building a campfire.
What Is Lost
On New Year’s Day in 2019, in a parking lot of a strip mall in Atlanta, a crowd composed mostly of Taiwanese Americans gathered to observe the annual raising of the Taiwanese flag. Stark against a gray-white sky, the vermilion red and royal blue colors fluttered in wind and light rain as they ascended the flagpole.
City Malaise, Cured by a Cloud Forest?
I liked Oaxaca as soon as I learned to say its name, all those airy vowels, each subsequent “a” a little fuller in my mouth. Last year, I was in the throes of a deep depression. But reading “Oaxaca Journal,” Oliver Sacks’s account of traveling that Mexican state to study its flora with the New York Fern Society, made me feel dreamy and brave.
How a Laotian-Thai Chef Ended up Specializing in Montreal-Style Bagels
Dianna Daoheung on why she doesn’t cook Thai food and rebuilding her first shop after a fire All photos by Black Seed Bagels Instagram Dianna Daoheung wasn’t necessarily angling for bagel dominance when she set out to create Black Seed’s unique recipe. Her bagel combines the qualities of New York and Montreal varieties, retaining the crisp, glutinous chew of city bagels, while simultaneously exhibiting the honeyed sweetness and petite size of their north country rivals.
You’ve Probably Never Had Real Soy Sauce
I realized I hadn’t, so I set out to ferment my own Sumayya Ansari illustrations I’d never even wondered what soy sauce was, really, until last summer, when I listened to Shunan Wang, the owner of Tea Drunk, wax rhapsodic about the complexities of the stuff, swooning over its citric notes as if it were a fine wine or whiskey.
When you see an iceberg, everything else feels small
A very good place to see icebergs is in Newfoundland, the easternmost island of Canada, 2000-something miles south of Greenland. I was sent there last minute on assignment, for a branded content shoot in May, just as the weather had begun to turn. I felt sorry for myself on the way to the airport, leaving spring in New York to go… look at ice. On the coast of Newfoundland, sea ice washes up on black sand beaches in formations that recall surreal chess pieces.
Green Mole
A tarot card reader suggested I go to the coast, to shake myself of a crushing depression. So I did. The Pacific Coast of Mexico, to be exact, to a tiny beach town called Mazunte, in the state of Oaxaca. The town was once a center for processing sea turtle meat, before those majestic creatures became protected under law.
The Unreliable Reader
Aditya Chinchure / Unsplash, Collage by Katie Kosma Wei Tchou | Longreads | April 2019 | 11 minutes (2,983 words) “I write this while experiencing a strain of psychosis known as Cotard’s delusion, in which the patient believes that they are dead,” the novelist Esmé Weijun Wang writes at the beginning of “Perdition Days,” an essay from her new book, The Collected Schizophrenias.
Kamala Harris Gets Personal in ‘The Truths We Hold’
Kamala Harris. Photo: Courtesy of Kamala Harris Senator Kamala Harris’s second book, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, is out today from Penguin Press, and unlike her previous, more policy-focused book, in this one the possible 2020 contender gets personal.
The good tidings of solidarity
The day The New Yorker staff announced its decision to unionize with the NewsGuild of New York, I sat in the good summer sun drinking an iced coffee with my best friend, whom I’d met five years ago at the magazine when he was a fact-checker and I was an assistant.
'God Created Everything. Testicles Too': Inside Ashland, Nebraska's Testicle Festival
. Let’s get it out of the way: No, testicles do not taste like chicken. Nor, when battered thickly with flour and tossed into searing oil, do they taste like chicken-fried steak.
About EastMeetEast's Controversial Billboard Ad
GQ - Dec 3 - Last year, a billboard advertising dating app for Asian-Americans called East Meet East went up in LA. "Asian4Asian," the billboard read, in an oversized font: "That's not Racist." When asked EastMeetEast's CEO Mariko Tokioka and co-founder Kenji Yamazaki about the "That's not Racist" billboard, they explained that it was meant to be a response to their online critics, whom they described as non-Asians who call the app racist, for catering exclusively to Asians.
Inside EastMeetEast, the Controversial Dating App for Asians That Raises Thorny Questions About Identity
Photo Illustration by Alicia Tatone What's the point of an "Asian4Asian" matchmaking service in 2018? Last year, a billboard advertising a dating app for Asian-Americans called EastMeetEast went up in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles.
New York’s First Sake Brewery Considers the Art of American Rice Wine
Sake bottles at Brooklyn KuraPhoto: Bess Adler “We’re not trying to pretend that we’re making traditional Japanese sake,” Brandon Doughan, the co-founder of Brooklyn Kura, the first sake brewery in New York, told me on a recent Friday morning, as soft light diffused through the elegant tasting room. “We’re using American ingredients. We’re using Brooklyn water.
How to Tell Your Parents You're Seeing a Shrink
It's hard to tell your parents you're in therapy. It's especially hard if your parents are Chinese immigrants. When I mentioned to my mother I'd started seeing a therapist, she looked at me skeptically, then deadpanned, “You know we don't believe in that.” It didn't matter that by my late 20s I was so depressed I had all but stopped sleeping.
A Starter Guide to Becoming Mentally Healthier
Masculinity—a coarse and not particularly helpful term—doesn't exactly lend itself to introspection, discussing feelings, or even feeling those feelings. At least not traditionally. But it's time we changed that.
‘As a Grown Woman, I Still Have To Continuously Learn To Say No’
MirageC / Getty Images Wei Tchou | Longreads | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,646 words) We’re certainly living in a time of revolution. I feel a great deal of wonder when I reflect on the fact that we’ve witnessed our society’s cultural norms regarding sexual assault and consent shift in real time, on the most public of stages: Washington, Hollywood. Yet I’m perhaps less attuned to the shifts happening within myself, in light of the national conversation.
Eddie Huang’s ‘Single Asiatic Male Seeks Ride or Die Chick’ uses the Chinese-American perspective to explore something universal about love.
It’s hard not to be charmed, reading an account of an Asian-American man who is so anxiously in love with a girl that his dick won’t get hard. “I like you,” he’s forced to confess, as his date skeptically examines his softer side.
The Expedition-Inspired Cocktails of Banzarbar
It can be disorienting to slip down the familiar, twinkling alleyway that, since 2004, has led to Freeman’s Restaurant, a woodsy-chic standard-bearer for hipness in the aughts (beards, mounted antlers, taxidermy), and be whisked up two flights of unfamiliar stairs, down a dim hallway, through two sets of doors, into a low-lit room filled with oil paintings and trendy young professionals.
Keep Your Resolutions Intact with 29B Teahouse
The city can be tough on extroverts who have made it into February with their healthful resolutions more or less intact: if you’re still attempting to cut back on booze, going out with friends is risky—one drink inevitably leads to another.
Chic and Cozy at La Compagnie des Vins Surnaturels
Fear not, Duolingo delinquents! This cozy Nolita wine bar’s intimidating mouthful of a nom belies its unpretentiousness and approachability. Though La Compagnie, opened by the team behind Experimental Cocktail Club, boasts a head-spinning list of around six hundred bottles, an infectious lightness pervades the elegant setting, where the staff wears brightly patterned tracksuits on Tuesdays and aloha shirts on Fridays, to honor the Hawaiian heritage of the head bartender.
The revolution will not be proofread
In late June, hundreds of employees of The New York Times staged a walk out to protest the imminent and aggressive layoffs that would disproportionately affect copy-editors at the publication. During the action, staffers carried signs (“Who do you think makes sure it’s fit to print?,” “This sign wsa not edited,” “Invest in us,” ), chanted (“No editors, no piece”), and marched through the iconic red-paneled newsroom and once around the block.
The Best Bars That I Escaped to in 2017
I got a little defensive reading a recent New Yorker essay about Ulysses S. Grant , the famously boozy former U.S. President, in which Adam Gopnik defined the American style of tippling as “hard-edged, solitary drunkenness in search of oblivion.” No way, I thought, casting back to cheerier years when having a glass of wine or a cocktail seemed like a way to accentuate time, not to forget it.
Tokyo Record Bar’s Riff on the Speakeasy
It can be hard to just shut up and have a good time in New York, where there’s always the chance that a “better” version of whatever you’re doing is right around the corner. So it might be tempting to dismiss this new riff on the Japanese speakeasy, which is situated in the basement of Airs, a bar that primarily serves champagne.
Celestial Scenes at Mood Ring
Wong Kar-wai’s films inspired the feeling of this new bar in Bushwick, where, inside, muted lighting casts magenta shadows across faces, conjuring the dreamy intensity of classics like “In the Mood for Love” or—as a neon-pink sign suggests—“Happy Together.” The dramatic setting turns even the simple gesture of raising an emerald bottle of Tsingtao to one’s lips into something cinematic, but it also makes the cocktail menu awfully hard to read.
The Magical Mead of Honey’s
The mead served at this thoughtful Bushwick cocktail bar is dry and floral, more like natural wine than the cloyingly sweet stuff one imagines swilling in a land of dungeons and dragons. This is not to say that you’ll want for magic.
A Hidden Mezcal Bar for Audiophiles
The idea of a secret mezcal spot may, at first, just seem like a reflection of the city’s ongoing zeal for speakeasies and smoky Mexican spirits, but la Milagrosa is a unique delight. It is worth it, in other words, to call ahead for a seat at the reservations-only establishment, which is hidden behind a refrigerator door in the back of an unassuming Mexican deli.
Elsa Moves to Brownstone Brooklyn
Walking into the reincarnation of the beloved Alphabet City bar Elsa, which closed in 2014 and reopened this spring, in Cobble Hill, is like having a lucid dream: the space feels familiar and, then again, not at all. The new layout is nearly identical to that of the original, but its mostly white interior is now punched up with mirrors, marble, and burgundy leather.
A New England Clam Shack in Bushwick
This riff on a New England clam shack has a cheery coastal décor and a vast range of warm-weather amenities—a spacious patio lined with wooden picnic tables, draft cocktails available frozen by request, and littlenecks on the half shell, at a clam a pop. “We just wanted a place to hang outside and smoke, really,” the bartender Wes Badrigian said, on a recent Sunday evening.
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