Actually, I was glad we ordered the onions, because I might have overlooked the oil problem in the more strongly flavored Kobe tartar (or tartare, to you and me) tempura ($19), and the crispy tuna sashimi roll ($15).īoth of them were really pretty good and I’d order them again, stale oil and an aversion to fried foods notwithstanding. There was the sweet onion tempura ($4), characterized by a very heavy flavor of stale oil, which meant that it either was not fresh enough or not hot enough or both. The Tao-hito cocktail, for example, which our waiter said was "our take on a mojito," and which was nice and refreshing and adorned with a section of sugar cane, but which was pretty much yeah, your basic mojito, "our take" or not. But that was the way with many things during our dinner at Tao: They sounded good, but didn’t quite measure up. Which would be OK except that braised chives taste a lot like grass. Just a lot of braised chives in a very attractive nestlike arrangement around the shrimp and the rice on which they rested. Except that there weren’t any of those, either. And so I thought, well, maybe they really meant the flowers of Chinese chives, which are not fluffy or lavender but white and sort of streamlined. More on that later.) Except that there were no chive flowers. And so I was pretty excited when I saw on Tao’s menu Braised Spicy Shrimp with Chive Flowers ($28). Well they are, of course, and are quite useful in vinegars and salads and so forth. As I’d discard those beautiful fluffy lavender-colored flowers, I always wondered if they were edible.
When I was a little girl, both my mother and my grandmother would send me out to their respective herb gardens to pluck the flowers from the chives so they wouldn’t "go to seed," according to the conventional wisdom of the time.
One of my earliest memories connecting food to the garden regards chive flowers.
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