Ruth Tobias

There’s this flick I utterly adore & would never recommend to anyone called Frownland. In a bitter, frankly ill-fitting nutshell: it’s the post-slacker-era American übernebbish’s answer to Haneke’s godforsaken The Piano Teacher, whereby a hopelessly despicable anti-protagonist—if that; some would just say antagonist in the lead—lives a relentlessly miserable life, The End. Somehow, though, Frownland’s funny, if agonizingly so, & moving, if impossibly so.

My point is this: King’s Land’s no Frownland!

If it’s comparable to any other Land, it might be the Land of Dairy Queen (where there must have been a coup, as it’s now called DQtopia—I wonder if strawberry topping ran red through the streets)—except here streams of chili sauce dotted with stuffed-shrimp skiffs replace the hot-fudge rivers bobbing with banana boats, & the soft-serve spires give way to thatched taro huts:

Going in a clockwise spiral from top right, we had ourselves a slew of taro puffs; lollipops of fried shrimp ball with sugar-cane sticks; some soupy sort of siu mai; steamed banana-leaf packets stuffed with rice & sausage & such; saucy mushroom slabs; less soupy siu mai; shrimp dumplings; a different type of shrimp dumpling; bone-in pork ribs; more shrimp dumplings; more less-soupy siu mai; & stuffed shrimp that I’m seeing for the 1st time in this picture—damn! Gotta move quick among the crew I was with, I guess. Not pictured is a plate of roast-duck chunks—indeed just ducky—or bowls of congee that, being congee, pretty much looked like this:

Of course, all that was just the beginning. Someone counted & said we had 31 dishes total, for which we each paid a little over $15. What’s that, 50 cents a pop? Jaw-dropping. Button-popping.

Among the other savory tidbits:

still more dumplings, these fried & filled with pork

still more dumplings, these made with spinach

turnip cakes, whose gelatinous texture isn’t for everyone but whose earthy-creamy flavor is

salt-&-pepper shrimp—perfect, really, lightly crispy & greaseless

As for the sweets:

yolk-custard tarts & sesame balls—again, crunchy-gooey perfection

candied-pineapple pastry

turnovers filled with a crumbly sort of sugared-egg mixture & coconut gelatin cubes

In sum, there’s not much I can say that the photos don’t about the excellence of the dim sum at King’s Land—except to quote Captain Beefheart, from whom the smartie who directed Frownland, Ronald Bronstein, apparently swiped his title: My smile is stuck!

There are bricks. There are woodplanks. There are blackboards. There’s a communal table. There are two-tops and four-tops, not too many, spaced just so. Voices rise & fall; things clink & other things rustle. The familiar charms of Table 6 are so simple they’re almost caricature. There’s an open kitchen; when I glanced in, I saw the perfect chef, a bit plump, a bit scruffy, grinning, a salmon-colored ascot set jauntily about his neck. No, wait. It was a handtowel draped over his shoulder. Damn. Still, it was pink; it might as well have been a cravat. He might as well have been drawn that way.
He certainly cooks that way, the way you’d expect a cartoon chef to cook—with warmth & humor on the one hand, seasoned judgment & precision on the other. He cooks like he’s cranky & jolly by turns, like
+ ,
only more French. His cooking shows he knows where humble meets haute. While, given bad directions, so many of his peers speed right through the intersection, he hangs out on its corners. That’s his turf, more than that of any chef I’ve encountered of late.
A case in point: the signature tater tots.

Where everybody else just keeps on adding truffle ad nauseum, he—Scott Parker, according to the website—studs his little cutie-patooties (yeah, I said it—see, I’m a softie when you get to know me & don’t serve me crap) with Marcona almonds, giving them at once extra crunch & suaver savor. Though I thought them slightly undersalted, they were otherwise perfect, right down to that smoky, slightly tart tomato jam—a jam to give that other jam I mentioned recently no mere black eye but a total Klitschkovian ocular meltdown:

Considering them along with the other cases in point, I’d go so far as to say Parker’s a master of texture. Everything balances the crispy with the creamy, the succulent with the firm until you’re just about to kiss your fingers and go, “mmmwwahhh!”, except then you’d have to admit this place was turning you from a secret softie into an open, running sap.
That goes, speaking of schmaltz, for the pot pie—sure enough “blitzed,” per the menu, with chicken fat & topped, per the Director, with a nugget of dark meat, “very juicy, very well-fried…a very nice touch” (hey, who’s writing this?)—

as well as my grilled striped bass atop a pool of malt-vinegar-infused mayo below a cylinder of celery-root kugel below a how-the-hell-do-you-like-that surprise piece of frisée tempura:

Between the two was enough technique to play a piano & paint a picture simultaneously from another room without eyes or hands. The pastry crust was rose-petal tender; the deep-fry batter was delicate enough to dip a feather in; the sauce had body & tang; the silky browned skin on the fish made me want to take it off & wear it, like the Ed Gein of piscivores.
Not having room for white-chocolate crumpets with blackcurrant jam (well, & not having trouble comparing myself to a screaming psychokiller), I went home a broken woman.
But I may be made whole again; salvation’s nigh. On March 16, Table 6 starts serving brunch. The biscuits come with lamb gravy. Pray they serve mine in a baptismal font.