Diet for a Broke Planet

You can't take two steps these days without running into somebody who's been laid off — or is planning to be. Suddenly, we're all transformed from grasshoppers into ants, and the only markets we're betting on are the aisles at Costco. Some of us aren't quite old enough to remember those high school home-economics classes where girls learned how to sew a muumuu out of fabric scraps or bake a pie with a couple of dollars' worth of flour, lard, and sugar, but such quaint skills are feeling a lot more practical every day. My neighbors down the block have already traded in their hulking, flame-red Hummer for a tiny, lemon-colored Smart Car — I kid you not — and when they're not bitching about the price of gasoline, my friends are all bending my ear about the cuts they're planning to make in their out-of-control budgets.

I hear this kind of stuff, and it worries me. Not that, like our president, I think tough times call for supreme acts of patriotism: shopping for flat screens and Tiffany charm bracelets. But when I learn that fairly well-off couples who barely know what to do with a dust cloth, a rake, or a frying pan are canceling the weekly house cleaner and the monthly garden maintenance or have bravely decided to cook every meal at home, I can't help wondering how these resolutions are going to trickle down. Pretty soon, the folks at the bottom of the food chain are going to start feeling seriously pinched. And that includes our friends who sling burgers, roll sushi, and pan-fry pork dumplings.

I hope I can soothe some anxieties here. Just because you see a flurry of pink slips roiling around you like some late-summer tornado doesn't mean you need to head for your basement stockpile of canned weenies and beanies. You don't have to stop eating out. In fact, we can all — the temporarily employed, the unemployed, and the self-employed together — dine rather lavishly at some restaurants for a lot less than we'd spend cooking at home, especially once we factor in the dollars wasted when one's family politely declines to eat one's famous blackened broccolini hash with bruised catfish.

Asian-Americans might teach us a thing or two about dining on a budget. Steve Ellman and I recently sauntered away from a delicious dim sum for two at Grand Lake Chinese Restaurant that cost $17. Ellman is the worst sort of Manhattan-bred reverse food snob, the kind of guy who thinks that no dish will ever compare to the $2 noodles he's personally discovered in some filthy basement grotto run by undocumented Taiwanese. But he raved, as did I, over Grand Lake's tasty steamed spareribs ($2.35) and over its turnip cake ($2.75) and chive dumpling ($3.25), among many other dishes. A couple of days later, Brandon Thorp and I popped in to Heart Rock Sushi for another bellyful of scrumptiousness and got out for under $30, but not until I'd polished off my skewered mushrooms ($1) and agedashi tofu ($3.50). And Thorp, with the delicate persistence of a cat, had painstakingly extracted every blasted morsel of meat from a grilled yellowtail jaw ($10.95), leaving nothing but a gleaming pile of bones. Talk about economies of scale!

There's something surreally Depression Era about finding anything on a menu that costs one buck or even two bucks, seventy-five. Prices like these have something in common with drawers full of saved string, coffee grounds used to scour dinner pots, and cookie jars stuffed with S&H green stamps. At both Grand Lake and Heart Rock, rock-bottom prices are the norm, not the exception. Heart Rock's yakitori skewers of zucchini, chicken, chicken liver, shrimp, or scallops cost less than $5 each; soups like crab-spinach, mussel-miso, or mixed vegetable come in under $3. I didn't eat any of the sushi (who can afford sushi these days?) except for a $5 uni roll with raw quail egg, which was gooey-chewy and unctuous, almost a meal in itself. Anyway, I've heard mixed reviews about the quality of Heart Rock's sushi, ranging from raves to pans. I do highly recommend grazing through the appetizers: the superspicy yukhe, minced raw beef in kimchee sauce served with a raw quail egg on top ($6.50), is the Japanese version of steak tartare at about one-third what you'd pay at your local bistro, and it's quite a lot tastier than many. I liked the idea of crispy battered chicken livers with teriyaki ($3.95) better than their execution — the organs were a mite overcooked. Seaweed salad ($4.95) made Thorp wonder why anyone bothered to eat lettuce, ever. And our splurge, the grilled yellowtail jaw, at just over $10, made us both try to imagine what kind of prehistoric fish would yield a jawbone that barely fit on a dinner plate. It's not the prettiest presentation you'll ever see, but the meat inside that massive collar was exceedingly buttery and moist, worth the trouble of getting it out; it was flavored with smoke and dark lashings of sesame oil.