With Weeds And Machetes, Bun Lai Makes Dinner

Miya’s chef Bun Lai stood before a group of friends in the backyard of his house on Thursday night. Behind him was a table, ready to have sushi made on it. Behind the table were a couple cameras.

The group was there to forage for food that they’d then make for dinner. The cameras were there to record it all for an episode of Vice TV’s Munchies.

“Everything that you do with food is about people,” Lai said to the group before him. He also laid out another idea that resonated throughout the evening: The way you change how people eat is to have fun doing it.

Hot off the success of his pop-up restaurant in Miami Beach, Bun Lai continues to make waves well beyond New Haven with his heady mixture of joyful, nutritious, and adventurous eating, even as Lai has returned to the kitchen at Miya’s on Howe Street. The Miami place was featured in the New York Times in April. In addition to Vice TV, Lai will be featured in Popular Mechanics in September, and will be the subject of a feature-length documentary about the future of food.

It’s not surprising. In the past decade, the ideas about food that Lai has pursued for years at Miya’s are looking less idiosyncratic and more just ahead of the curve.

Before we could eat dinner Thursday night, we had to find it. Lai handed out baskets and machetes to the group and led us down the road from his house. After negotiating with a police officer to let the group continue along a state road (in single file), Lai led us to a quieter byway, and to a stand of Japanese knotweed growing along the road’s shoulder.

“It’s one of the most invasive species on the planet,” Lai said, doing damage to crops and even infrastructure due to its near-indestructibility. A new plant can grow from very small piece of an existing plant. Once taking root, knotweed can grow through pavement, and has proven extremely resistant to herbicides.

Lai held one of the leaves in his hand. ​“The bugs can’t even get to it,” he said. ​“But what you’re looking at here is a nutritious food. It’s the perfect crop, and it’s growing all over the place.”

There was just a question of harvesting it. Which was where the machetes came in.

Lai and several others in the group hacked away at the plants. They then shouldered the severed stalks and hoofed them back to Lai’s house.

Neighbors in a car pulled alongside us.

“What are you doing?” they asked.

“Come join us!” Lai said, giving them directions to his house and inviting them to dinner.

Back at the house, Lai explained that much of what was growing in the pasture behind it is edible. Not all of it, of course; you have to know what to look for.

“If the plant has fuzzy leaves,” he said, ​“it’s not what we want.”

Nestled among the fuzzy leaves were strains of wild lettuce, sorrel, and mustard, which the group set to picking, enough to feed everyone there.

Returning to the knotweed, the group stripped off the leaves and carted them into the kitchen to be prepared. (Overheard conversation: ​“What is this again?” ​“Knotweed.” ​“Is weed?” ​“Knotweed!”)

It was now time to make sushi — and time for a short history lesson. ​“Nigiri,” Lai explained, means ​“ball.” Before the more modern version of sushi that we are usually presented with was developed, sushi was precisely that: a ball of rice with something inside it, whether fish or vegetables.

“I’m going to take a piece of lettuce and stick it in a ball of rice, and that’s sushi from 20,000 years ago,” Lai said. Rather than eating bluefin tuna — a threatened species that, as an apex predator, might also be loaded with chemicals — we could choose foods that were far more nutritious, possibly tastier, and bursting with serotonin.

“We are literally eating the kind of food that will make us happy,” Lai said.

The group then took turns at the long table, now lit with torches, making our own sushi out of the assembled ingredients before us. Miya’s firecracker sake helped wash it down.

What really drew all the flavors together, though, was a soy sauce substitute that Lai had made from seaweed he dived for the day before. Salty and tart, it brought out the flavors in each piece of sushi, making for a meal that was filling, delicious, and yes, fun.

If this is the future of food, there’s not much to fear.