My Special Dinner at Momofuku

I've been trying to go to Momofuku Noodle Bar, the much-hyped noodle place in the East Village, for at least three times. On Fridays and Saturdays, even at 9:30pm, the wait is impossible, like about 10 hours. I actually don't understand how people even go there on those days. There's not really a bar (although you can stand around near the door and drink a beer with your jacket still on), and they don't take reservations, so if you want to go on an exciting day at a cool time, you're going to wait at least an hour, no joke. Who does that? Who plans to do that? Why?

But I wanted to go, so we planned to go on a Tuesday at 8:30pm, at which point there was only a 20 minute wait for a party of two. (I will point out that by 9:30pm there wasn't any wait a-tall.) They recently expanded from their original location a few storefronts down, but it's still pretty small and very crowded and chattery, and caters best to couples. We sat on stools at the back bar, which flanked an open kitchen. It was fun watching them make food. Two French people (maybe they weren't French) sat next to us and asked one of the chefs what kind of fish he was making. The guy stared at him and said, "Fish?" and the French man said, "Yes, what's that fish what you pressing on this stove," and the guy said, "It's a chicken wing." NOW I'VE HEARD EVERYTHING!!!!

Anyway, there's plenty of sake, but there's only a few beers. The cool one was the Hitachino White Ale, which was mysteriously $11 for a 11.5 oz bottle. What? I don't get it. Then there were Budweisers for $5 and a couple others in beers between.

Great waiter. We asked him what he recommended and we got all (most) of it. We started with the Steamed Pork Buns ($9), which looked like little white Pac-Mans whose mouths were painted with a sweet-AND-savory brown sauce, embedded with specially pickled cucumbers and scallions, and stuffed with slabs of salty, rich, fatty PORK. SO GOOD!!! When that was gone, we had the Fried Veal Sweetbreads ($13, I think?), which were crunchy chicken nugget-sized thymus glands/pancreases that came in a tin bucket and with a side of sliced, pickled cucumbers and a dish of mysterious and sweet-tangy, lumpy delicious red sauce. We ate those with the Roasted Brussels Sprouts ($11), which came slathered in an embarrassment of kimchee puree and unbelievable cubes of FAT BACON. Things were going great. Then we split the Momofuku Pork Ramen Noodles ($14? pictured above in someone else's slightly different version), a giant white bowl filled with curly noodles and a variety of shredded Berkshire pork, a collard-greens-type sauteed vegetable, a poached egg, BROTH, and again, the slabs of phenomenal and deeply unforgettable PORK.

We did it! We ate at Momofuku, hooray!