Nue: The World’s Street Food

It’s the thing nowadays to have street food at restaurants. Many of us have gone traveling abroad that noshing on things foreign is not the hesitation it once was. International food is now within easy reach, a cookbook, restaurant or food truck away. These are exciting times if your palate runs far and wide. 

In Seattle, up until now, street food has been relegated to a specific national cuisine. Three years ago, Nue opened in the Capitol Hill neighborhood with a dedication to global street food, bites from all parts of the world, a result of the food finds of co-owners Chris Cvetkovich and Uyen Nguyen when they go traveling abroad. An ambitious agenda, to be sure. The name nue is based on a mythical Japanese chimera whose body is composed of different animals. One manifestation combines monkey, snake, tiger and tanuki, a metaphor for the culinary variety one should expect to find inside.

Take Filipino Tosilog for instance, a popular breakfast item in the Philippines. I personally like fried rice and eggs in the morning, so this combination along with tocino (cured pork meat) sounded like a winner. The meat is a marriage of sweet and savory from straightforward ingredients of salt, sugar, spices and lots of garlic and sticky from caramelization. The fried rice (sinangag) is prepared with nothing more than soy sauce, green onions and bits of fried garlic, served alongside two sunny-side-up eggs. I only wish Nue was closer to me for breakfast. 

Chengdu Chicken Wings Tower (top image) has quite the following. This is quite understandable. It can be ordered by themselves or paired with waffles. The presentation is spectacular, about a half dozen fried wings stacked vertically, pinned together by two bamboo skewers and underlain by a pool of bracing dipping sauce. Green Sichuan peppercorns give the batter their characteristic bite and numbing sensation. Dipped in the sauce of red bird’s-eye chiles, mint, basil, lime juice and fish sauce, the wings took me to heaven. 

Sunny Bunny is a curry dish based on bunny chow from South Africa. Truly street food, kind of like a bread bowl, it was a staple of East Indian laborers who worked in and around Durban but now popular all over South Africa. Nue uses a partial Pullman bread loaf hollowed out in the middle and filled with a thick, bold masala curry of chicken and vegetables and topped with a sunny-side-up egg. If the original bunny was made to be portable for migrant workers and the torn-off bread pieces used for dipping, Nue nixes all that by generously ladling the curry to overflowing, obliging you to use fork and knife. 

How do the chefs at Nue make those perfect fried eggs?

I’m usually indifferent to cornbread. This changed a bit when I had Nue’s based on a Caribbean recipe that includes pineapple and shredded coconut. It’s moist, slightly sweet and buttery, that competes with another terrific cornbread that I had at the Turquoise Room (La Posada Inn, Winslow, AZ). 

Others in my dining group had Puerto Rican Mofongo (plantain mash, smoked chicken and fried eggs) and Mexican Desayuno Michoacana (chorizo, sweet potato, pasilla pepper, avocado crema, fried tortillas and eggs). 

Nue’s plan is to change the menu periodically based on exciting culinary finds throughout the world. These have appeared in the past or are now on the menu: Israeli Shakshuka, Syrian salad, Dutch Patat Oorlog, Egyptian ‘Eggs Basyounadict,’ United Nations Fried Rice, East Indies Brussels Sprouts, Ecuadorian Biche de Pescado, Jamaican Jerk Chicken, and so on. With all this variety, there is one potential drawback. For sharing, an eclectic mix poses the risk of choosing food with no complementary flavors. In fact they can compete, as I and dining companions have found on two separate occasions. The Sunny Bunny fought the chicken wings and tosilog for dominance, for example. That’s not to say that the dishes in themselves weren’t good. The three just mentioned were outstanding, in fact. Don’t let that stop you from dropping in. Nowhere else in Seattle can you find such a culturally diverse menu of high quality. Like the Japanese monster, Nue boldly embodies its mixed bag of diverse elements.

Nue
1519 14th Ave
Seattle, WA 98122
(206) 257-0312