Flavor Boulevard

It happens on Broadway Street, Oakland. Dishes with names so hard to pronounce, ingredients and tastes so similar to Vietnamese food. I learn of the second largest city of Cambodia, smaller only than Phnom Penh. I share my first simple Cambodian dinner, complete with a salad, a meat, and a dessert.

Here’s a little language snippet: to Vietnamese people, salad is called “gỏi” |ghoy| in the South and “nộm” |nom| in the North. To my surprise, “nhorm” is its romanized name in Cambodia. Listening to the other customers at Battambang, Mudpie comments that Khmer and Vietnamese sound similar, to which I first protest, but perhaps it holds a grain of truth after all.

Here we have nhorm lahong. If there’s any salad that never goes wrong, it must be this green papaya salad of Southeast Asia. Delicate, raw, and soaking fruit shreds retain nothing but a tightening chew, the sweet lime dressing sends a quiet smell of fish extract. Battambang’s batch is a drop more watery than Dara’s som tum/tam mak hoong, on the plus side there’s plenty of sauce to make rice go quickly down the pipe.

To make rice go even quicker comes sach chrouk aing. I don’t think I’ll be able to handle a full Khmer sentence of words like these, but now that I’ve known pork is sach chrouk and grilled is aing, I can survive in Cambodia ;-). Long version: sliced pork marinated with lemongrass, charbroiled, served with sweet lime nuoc mam and boiled cabbage on the side. Short version: godly.

Like at most family operated Asian restaurants, the check will be brought out before you can order dessert, but we don’t let that stop us from ending our dinner on a sweet note. The dessert menu stands next to the salt, pepper, sweeteners, and a slender vase of real orchids.

I ask our hostess to recommend either amuk knor or chake ktiss, and with no delay she says “Amuk knor for sure”. I then ask if it’s whole jackfruit or just some kind of paste or flavoring, and I must sound pretty stupid, the whole jackfruit is huge, at least as big as a 30lb turkey, but she (and you?) knows what I mean. Amuk knor is a kind of coconut milk custard with jackfruit slices, all steamed in a banana leaf cup. It breathes tropical and countryside, warm and mild. We scrape every corner of the leaf.

(I can only guess that chake ktiss is similar to chè chuối chưng).

Address: Battambang Restaurant
850 Broadway Street,
Oakland, CA 94501
(510) 839-8815

Battambang’s menu online
Money matter: $24.70 a dinner for two.

Among the countable Vietnamese restaurant owners that ever bother to make their menus available on the web, Kim Châu and her husband put together quite a decent site for their Red Pier: black background, colorful foods, dazzling images of the bar and the walls, names and prices of 166 dishes minus dessert. Red Pier is a go-to when you work in the ‘hood, have an hour for lunch, and just want some normal noodle soup or vermicelli at a reasonable price. Or when you crave something sweet and cold and nutty, like a chè ba màu (trichromatic bean and tapioca ice).

Don’t drive too fast down the one-way Milam, you’d miss the restaurant for sure. It took us a few loops around until we pulled into the right parking lot, just across the street from the proprietors’ other business, Kim Châu Jewelers, on the left side. Also, don’t order Cơm Tôm Rim (rice with caramelized shrimp), unless you’re having salt-deficiency. If you must, Chè Ba Màu proves to be a comforting three-buck companion.

Do order #1: Gỏi Sứa Tôm Thịt (jellyfish salad with shrimp and pork), the only setback is its chilipepper overload, which I’m sure you can ask the cook to take it down a few notches. The thinly sliced  jellyfish blends rather too well with carrots and cucumber strings you’d have to look to notice its cold, clean elastic crunch. Gỏi Sứa Tôm Thịt is one of the house specials that Red Pier emphasizes on their TV advertisement, and combined with large shrimp crackers it’s certainly a better execution of jellyfish than duck tongue and jelly fish at Chinese dim sum halls.

Do order #2: Mì Xá Xíu (char siu egg noodle soup). This is a cheap (only $6.25) and satisfying deal. It’s slightly more involved than Wiki Wiki’s saimin bowl, with crispy green onions and a meaty sweet broth.

Do order #3: the classic cold rice vermicelli (Bún) with the not so classic grilled beef (Bò Nướng), certainly bathed in nước mắm and garnished with chopped green onion seasoned in lard (mỡ hành), crushed peanuts, fried shallots, pickled carrots and daikon. For the greens lovers there’s that hidden pile of bean sprouts and shredded cucumber at the bottom, whose texture matches that of neither bún nor beef. (Now that I think of it, bibim nangmyeon also has bean sprout and cucumber, so it must be a cold noodle thing.)

Overall, Little Mom found the place less than pristine as the stir-fry smell sweeps over the metallic kitchen counter into the dining area. Red Pier’s chefs also take a tad too much liberty with the seasonings. But not all Vietnamese restaurants have jellyfish salad and friendly service, and usually the ones with 166 items on their menu don’t execute any of them too well, so I’d give Red Pier a B if the red-and-ebony dining box were a student in my class.

Address: Red Pier Vietnamese Restaurant
2704 Milam St
Ste C
Houston, TX 77006
theredpier.com
(713) 807-7726
(information from der Miller: Red Pier and Les Givral’s Sandwiches are sister businesses, both on Milam St.)

Lunch for 3:
Medium jellyfish salad (9.95) + grilled beef vermicelli (6.95) + rice & caramelized shrimp (7.75) + char siu noodle soup (6.25) + bean & tapioca ice (3.00) + tax
= $36.70

If you’ve had Vietnamese hot pot and liked it, you’d like the Korean hot pot better. If you haven’t had Vietnamese hot pot, try it, and then try jeongol (전골 Korean hot pot), and then you’d like jeongol better. There goes my motherland loyalty, but Vietnam has bánh cuốn and gỏi cuốn, so I’m not too worried.

Lots of beef, lots of mushroom, green onion, bean sprout, tofu, cucumber, cabbage all snuggling in a pasty sunny broth. The pot is more like a deep tray on a gas stove, and the bubbling conglomeration is like a spoiled teenager threatening to run away from home. The bulgogi junggol comes to us wild and daring. We ladle right in.

Casserole House has these big bright pictures on the wall of beef, spam, vegetables, and seafood neatly arranged in a round dish or bobbing in broth. The real stuff in action also hides some tteokbokki (떡) for chew and dangmyeon (당면) for engtanglement with the enokitake that just wait to drip the broth between the plates or fling a fortunate dot onto your shirt. I don’t know why they would call jeongol “casserole”, the word brings to mind a square glass dish with crispy-top green beans swearing hot from the oven, which, as yummy as it is at Thanksgiving, is far less exciting than a hot pot. (As a guy said in a Super Bowl ad, “it’s where the action is”.)

Like true Americans, we didn’t get jeongol the first time we ate at Casserole House. It’s not a mistake per se, because the seafood bibimbap had quite some scrumptious crust and chewy squid for kicks, and if you scan over my favorite post list, you’d know I have a soft spot for pig feet.

But the pig feet at Casserole House aren’t very soft. Jokbal (족발) is a cross between boiled and roasted, the skin is taut, hardened to nearly a crunch, the meat takes every chance to get stuck in your teeth. I like it. I wrap one or two slices in a lettuce leaf and smear on a chopstick’s tip of doenjang. I lick a taste of saeu jeotkal (새우 젓갈), but objectively speaking, Vietnamese nước chấm is better :-D. And seriously, for $17.95 the plate has enough meat to feed five people, if they also clean out the banchan and order an extra pajeon.

Speaking of money, I haven’t seen jokbal on any other menu, so it’s a must-get here. But there are three reasons to get out of the bibimbap comfort zone and get the jeongol while you’re at Casserole House: 1. it’s in the name, 2. despite it costing a scary $29.95 each scary pot, it’s enough for 3-4 people to share, 3. it’s metal-chopstick-licking good.

And when you’re there next year on Jan 22-25, make sure you wish the ladies a happy new year. They’re sweet, like the sikhye (식혜) they give us for dessert. I drank Mudpie’s cup, too.

Address: Casserole House (right next to Sahn Maru)
4301 Telegraph Ave
(between 43rd St & 44th St)
Oakland, CA 94609

Every once in a while when the planets align the right way with the constellations, I get into cooking mode. Then I ask my mom how to make certain things, usually easy stuff, spend at least an hour at the grocery, another half a day in front of either the sink or the stove, washing, churning, tasting, sprinkling, and tasting again. Saying that I like to cook would be like saying students hate holidays, but somehow the little accomplishment at the end of a cooking session always makes me glee, partly because I wouldn’t have to worry about dinner in the few days after. (Since the first day I had a kitchen(ette), I’ve only made savory dishes.) This time is special: I didn’t spend half a day in the kitchen, and the little accomplishment is a dessert.

Now this might actually means I have che instead of rice for dinner in the next few days :-P, but all is well as my banana che is not in the least coyingly sweet like che from sandwich shops.

Recipe adapted from Mom’s instruction:

Chè chuối chưng (banana tapioca pudding) (“chưng” means “display”, in this case to indicate the type of banana one would use for this dessert, not “tapioca”)

Ingredients:
– About 3 lbs of just-ripe banana (~6 big Cavendish bananas, or 12-15 chuoi su if you can find them).
– 1 can of coconut milk
– 100-150g tapioca pearl (bột báng), the small kind (packaged as dry white dots ~1.5mm in diameter). I got a 400g package from 99 Ranch Market in El Cerrito, so I’d imagine every Asian market has a few packs tucked on their shelves.
– water, sugar, salt
– roasted peanuts (the plain, unflavored kind)

Preparation:
– Gently wash and rinse the bot bang with cold water once, then leave it soak in water.
– Cut the bananas into 2-3 inch long sections, soak in salt water (2 tsp salt for roughly half a big pot of water, the same pot you’re going to cook che in) for 5-10 minutes. This step is to get rid of, or at least reduce, the clinging underripe aftertaste of Cavendish banana in Vietnamese desserts; you can skip this step if you use chuoi su.
– Shell peanuts if necessary, then crush ’em up. (Mudpie puts them in a ziploc bag and pounds on them with an ice cream scoop, it works well :D)
– Take out the bananas, drain water, wash pot, put bananas back in. Pour 1 can of coconut milk into pot, then use the same can to measure and add 2 cans of water.

Cooking
– Wait for banana, coconut milk and water to boil, add a pinch of salt and a lot of sugar to taste. (I added about 10 tbs sugar when Mudpie expresses some concern, tastes, and stops me.)
– When the mixture boils, add bot bang (after draining them, of course), gently stir once or twice to spread them out evenly in the pot.
– Bot bang will expand, at least quadruple in size. Do not stir too much or you’d burst the pearls and get tapioca porridge. Let the pot bubble until the bot bang all turn completely translucent (if you see a tiny needle-point size dot of white in the center, it’s not cooked yet).
– Turn off the heat. The pudding will be quite fluid when it’s still hot, and will thicken as it cools down.

Serving
It can be served either hot or chilled, with or without some crushed roasted peanuts on top. Mudpie prefers it warm fresh from the pot, my mom prefers it refrigerated.

A small variation of che chuoi chung is chè bà ba, where you add taro (or cassava), cubed and cooked in coconut milk and water before the bananas. My mom says che chuoi chung is the simplest kind of che to make. As long as the bananas are soft and sweet, the tapioca pearls chewy and fully puffed, the coconut milk gives just a shy squeeze of fruity richness, and the pudding smells like a ripe summer afternoon, you know someone will come back for a second bowl of your chè chuối chưng.

– Submission to Delicious Vietnam 10, a monthly blogging event created by Anh of A Food Lover’s Journey and Hong & Kim from Ravenous Couple – This February edition is hosted by me, so send your delicious writings (your name, your blog’s name, post title, and a brilliant image of the dish) to mai [at] flavorboulevard [dot] com by Sunday February 13. 🙂

*Guest post in Vietnamese by my Mom, translated by me*

There are two places with the name Thanh Đa in Bellaire. One is Bún Măng Vịt Thanh Đa (Thanh Đa vermicelli soup with bamboo shoot and duck), and the other is Thanh Đa Quán. We happen to choose Thanh Đa Quán for lunch today, partly because they have the family dining option, which is rare in the States. The reason, I can only guess, is that most people who eat out like to pick their own items, or go to buffets if they don’t know what to pick. Family style lies between these two options, where the restaurant decides for the diners a fix menu (for example, Thanh Da Quan gives 4 dishes for 2 people, 5 dishes for 4 people, or 6 dishes for 6 people). The total bill for family dining usually comes out higher than a buffet ticket but lower than a combination of single plates.

Today, it is boiled duck with ginger dipping sauce, lotus stem salad with pork and shrimp, sour catfish soup, and claypot catfish, all for $21.6 (after tax, with rice included).

The diner is small but neatly organized, the seating arrangement is comfortable, and they have but four TV screens in the four corners. Two of them are tuned to American news and shows, the other two Vietnamese documentaries and movies, always a plus for me. (I’m not so fond of places that make the customers watch boring football games or unlaughable comedies.) Another thing I like about this particular joint is its staff’s friendliness, not a common thing at Vietnamese eateries. The waiting boys and girls, all small in age and size, have this casually gentle and respectful way toward even customers like me, who order to-gos and don’t give tips. The boy who brought out my order also apologizes profusely for the long wait, though I’ve actually enjoyed watching TV in those brief 20 minutes. 🙂 (The kitchen, he says, would gladly prepare the order for a speedy pickup if I call ahead.)

The good feeling from Thanh Đa Quán follows us home as we open the styrofoam boxes. There are a bit too few pieces of boiled duck, but all are tender and the accompanying not-so-spicy ginger mixed nuoc mam makes up in taste.

The lotus stem salad, a crunch-chewy bundle of lotus stems, shredded cucumber, celery, shrimp and boiled pork, is also not as spicy as its cousins from other restaurants. The apparent touch of lime gives the salad a refreshing boost, dusted with crushed roasted peanuts for occasional unconformities. It’s sour, but nowhere near as sour as the sour soup, which the chefs at Thanh Đa Quán must have made an effort to keep it true to its name. The fish slices are subtly luscious, the night-scented lily stems (doc mung) are airy and brightly green (I wonder how they get these so fresh in this icy winter weather), but nothing can hide the unforgiving, piercing acidity. I retreat to the pot and the stove: a re-seasoning is in order. Fortunately, sugar helps. It’s still the same fish, same pineapple, same tomato, same doc mung, same okra, but a few spoonfuls of sugar transform the soup from a duckling to a swan.

On the other hand, the clay pot fish is flawless. Two light golden catfish steaks shine in a thick bronze sauce, scenting off a homely wisp of nuoc mam and a caring embrace of caramelized sugar. Not overtly fatty, salty, or peppery, this clay pot fish is the epiphany of the Vietnamese marinating and simmering art. My daughter doesn’t like fish, but I’ll make sure to make her try this one next time she’s in town. It warms my heart realizing that even in this very American state of Texas, such simple yet articulate, inexpensive but valuable taste of my faraway homeland is still perfectly tuned.

Address: Thanh Đa Quán (Alief)
13090 Bellaire Blvd
Houston, TX 77407

(281) 988-9089

We dive into the briskets and ribs at Martin’s Place for my birthday in 2011. That’s their 86th year. I was born in ’86. I like to think Martin’s and I share some common destiny to cross path, beside the appreciation of good ribs.

There is one flimsy door to the side of the red brick building, facing the supposed parking lot, which is just a flat pebble-and-dust land free to park wherever convenient. Crack open the flimsy door, we turn the knob of another, more solid door to the interior, and with it being our first time, we awkwardly stand there looking at the few customers who are in for an early lunch, not sure whether we should wait or just pick a table ourselves. The only hostess of Martin’s Place points us to a table next to a window with broken blinds.

The menus stand ready by the side of sugar, salt, and hot sauce. At first she seems a bit indifferent to us, the opposite of her cheerful friendliness to the likely long-term acquainted patrons at the other tables, but as I tell her that it is our first time here and I would like her to recommend a dish among their various delicious sounding options, she starts smiling more. Somehow I get the feeling that Asian families don’t often visit this family-owned beef stop between Bryan and College Station.

The BBQ dinners with choice of beef, pork, or sausage, and two sides cost $7.25, pickles and bread available upon request, but the bread is simply two white slices. A bigger appetite for meat would be met by the BBQ plate alone, ranging from 1/4 ($4.25) to 1 pound ($10.50) each.

Like at most Southerners’ country cooking joints, vegetable sides are not exactly vegetables, and it all comes down to picking fried (onion ring, okra, tots, corn, fries) or non-fried (cole slaw, beans, potato salad, sliced jalapeno, cheese). I go both ways: a house (German) potatoes and a fried corn nuggets.

The house mashed potato is sweet and creamy, highly recommended. The ribs, not as falling-off-the-bone tender as those from Potatoe Patch, are much more filling than they look. Two ribs out of three and I find my hand rubbing my belly.

How does a place so underkempt and lacking of attentive and giggling service stay in business for 86 years, when its beef does not quite give the most tongue-catching experience? The only answer must be its small town charm, fostered by its loyal patronage of the locals that does not need any advertisement about supporting local business. Maybe it’s my Texas self taking over, but I like it beyond reasons, like any other little country sites in the middle of nowheres.

Happy First Birthday to Flavor Boulevard! 🙂

Address: Martin’s Place
3403 South College Avenue
Bryan, TX 77801
(979) 822-2031

On Wednesday night we get off from the boat after some whale(‘s top of the back) watching and feel compelled to scavenge the streets for some sights. We spot a couple of street food stalls alternating between the jewelries and hats along Ignacio L. Vallarta. Being reminded of the warm luscious crepe I once had on Pike Street near the Washington State Convention Center, I bid farewell to my 40 pesos in exchange for a “crepa con chocolate, fresa, lechera y nuez” (chocolate, strawberry, condensed milk and nuts).

Also 40-pesos-and-5-minutes worth is Hayato‘s “cajeta, platano, nuez y kalhua” choice (caramel, banana, nuts, and kahlua), pictured on the right. The chocolate one is densely sweet with a sandy texture, possibly due to the ground nuts.

With another 10 pesos (about 83 US cents) one can get a hot fold with meat and cheese, but the sweet crepes in our hand, all fluffy and brown within 5-6 minutes, already hit the spot like a breeze on a Texas summer day.

Meanwhile, Victoria is drawn to something else with more local aesthetics: a wok of corn kernels above hot pink coals.

The guy deftly swoops a full scoop of maize into a tiny white plastic cup, the type sandwich shops in the States usually hand customers who ask for water, and through some mix of Spanish and English he explains to Victoria that he will cover it with sour cream, sprinkle some powdery cheese, and if she’d like, which she does, squeeze in some fresh lime juice too. All for 20 pesos.

‘Tis a swirl of hot and cold, chilipeppery burning and limey zing. Victoria finds it exhilarating. Abril, my new Mexican friend from the conference, says that it should be mayonnaise and not sour cream, but who knows. I’m not even sure about its name, because when I tell my taxi driver that we try “esquites” on the street, he has no idea what I’m smoking. A few descriptions later he oh’s cheerfully and corrects me: “It’s ‘elote‘!” Well, Wikipedia makes a distinction between the one in a cup and the one on a cob, is it perhaps just a colloquial thing?

That said, in a tourist town like Puerto Vallarta, where a man selling crepes is bilingual but a candy store owner knows zero English, it doesn’t really matter what they call corn in a cup, as long as the corn keeps its flavor like the streets keep their cobblestones.

More Puerto Vallarta:
Dreams & Conference – Day 1, dinner at Oceana
Dreams & Conference – Day 2, World Cafe and El Patio
Dreams & Conference – Day 3, Seaside Grill and Room service

Dear diary, I am sitting in bed, listening to the waves crashing into the rocky hill and the sand, and thinking back on how Puerto Vallarta confuses and amuses us.

1. At custom they tell you to push a button, if it’s green, you go through, if it’s red, you gotta do some checking, and from what we can tell it’s completely random. But it seems there’s more green than red.
2. As soon as we walk out of custom with our luggage trailing behind, we enter the “shark tank”: forty or more men line up on both sides calling “senoritas” to hook us up with their taxi service, and we do what we know best (from months of practice with the homeless people on Shattuck): keep our eyes straight ahead and walk like we know where we’re going (even when we don’t).
3. The taxi driver will get you to the hotel by hook or by crook, even if it means squeezing between a stopping bus and the curb, or weaving in and out between a bus and another car. I swear I heard a “thump” once, but I didn’t check to see if there’s any dent to our left side. Now there are probably too many already to recognize, seeing that the streets have no lane and the drivers have no fear. And it was a manual car.
4. There’s a Walmart, and according to our fellow conference attenders, it sells no beef jerky.
5. The moment we step off the taxi in front of the hotel lobby at Dreams Puerto Vallarta, a man comes with wet lemongrass infused towels and champagne glasses for each guest. However, someone in our group came walking on foot with a backpack and received neither towel nor champagne.

6. For $140 per night per person (conference rate), you get a hotel room with ocean view, free room service, free food (all meals at all restaurants in the Dreams Resort and ordered to your room), free minibar in the fridge, however internet costs extra, and to really make a question mark pop, the bottle opener is a little steel thing built in to the counter near the bathroom sink.

By the time we finish checking in and waddling up to our room, there’s only 3 minutes left to the end of lunch, so we order a Vallarta pizza featuring shrimp with dapples of garlic, olive oil, basil and tomato sauce. When your stomach is hungry for hours, anything would hit the spot. But the shrimps, so juicy and plump and just slightly salty, kinda hold a special place in my mind, whether I’m full or not.

A few hours after sundown we meet up at seafood-specialized Oceana for the first (and last) proper meal of the day, and we go all out on three courses, starting with a shrimp spring roll served with a tangle of crunchy airy fried rice noodle, an ample drizzle of sweet mango sauce, and on the side stands endive and sesame sprout in nori wrap.

Victoria opts for a Saint Jacques scallop served in creamy cheesy sauce on a half shell.

The entrees come fluidly after: a generous portion of sea bass for Victoria and a salmon and scallop wellington for me. The fluff pastry is a bit too oily and chewy I can hardly saw off a polite bite with the knife, but the scallop cubes on the side and the mash potato under it all have just the right charred amount that helps retaining the suppleness of a calm, seasoned sea.

The banana tartine for dessert is a little sweeter than my expectation, although I don’t know why I would expect fried and caramelized banana mounted on a sugary brioche to be moderately plain. It must be the pristine night wind that numbs my senses. Bsides, when you cast your eyes out to the silver reflection of the moon on the ocean waves, the sea has captured you.

Oceana Seafood Restaurant –
Dreams Puerto Vallarta Resort & Spa
Playa Las Estacas S/N
Carretera Barra de Navidad Km. 3.5
Puerto Vallarta, Jal. 48300 Mexico

You can hardly ever go wrong with a cheeseburger. When the cheeseburger also comes with a blue lake, a blue sky, a few palm trees too tall to shade off the daring sun, some chilly wind here and there, and extra good company, then you simply cannot go wrong.

Talk about mood lifting food (read it both ways).

Gwyn takes Aaron and me for a ride through the tree-lined roads somewhere in Magnolia to Papa’s on the Lake, right off 105. After an hour long horseback riding in the sun, or more precisely speaking, an hour long sitting on the horse and having him walk around the block, the breeze from Lake Conroe is so inviting I daydream about jumping into the rippling waves. First time riding, what can I say, the old man kept wanting to eat his grass and I kept having to pull his heavy head up to match Aaron’s pace. But as much as my hands get scratched by the leather reins and saddle horn, I’d sit on that horse forever if I could. We hadn’t had lunch and I was full on enjoyment.

Until the blond waitress comes with a laminated hot pink 3-page menu that looks like a folded A4 paper, the entries being country appetizers and sandwiches whose prices are in the single digit range. When Aaron orders some potato skins and I get my first ever bite of those burnt shells covered with chewy dried melted cheese and too generous a drizzle of sour cream, then hunger really kicks in.

While waiting, we also nibble on some stuffed jalapenos, breaded and fried, just as mild as a warm bath.

By the time we wipe our fingers clean of grease with the hastily torn brown paper towel, the sandwiches arrive. Gwyn doesn’t make any comment on his fried chicken strip sandwich, but from its blazing orange look and Gwyn’s speedy finishing, I can only assume it’s a tasty deal.

My cajun shrimp poboy hits the spot. But since I don’t squeeze in any mayo or mustard, the scruffy shrimps and the airy loaf make one dry bundle that’s not much to write home about. Good fries, lots of water, and good chatting end the lunch on a high note. 🙂 Everything together for a bit over $40, and I don’t know if I’m still high from riding the horses or what, but I like this place.

Address: Papa’s on the Lake (a hot pink building by Lake Conroe)
14632 Highway 105 W
Montgomery, TX 77356
(936) 447-2500

It takes us six years and a cross country drive to set foot into one of the Cracker Barrel, thanks to Mudpie waking up right as a sign comes into view to show which exit to take from I40. (In my defense, Cracker Barrel doesn’t show up in the Bay.)

There are as many people in the store as antique candies on the tables and shelves near the cashier. We put our name on the list, then quickly merge into the buzzing about knick knacks and candles, preparing for a thirty minute wait. A mere ten minutes later our name echoes on the microphone, we get seated near the dining hall entrance, four menus swatted onto the wooden table, the waitress is a little disappointed that we aren’t ready to order yet.

Then it comes our turn to wait for the food, and we play games.

We get the usual Southern flavors: chicken fried chicken with brown gravy, mashed potatoes, fried okras and green beans,…

… and the creamy chicken and dumpling with two side “vegetables“, choosing among cabbage, turnip greens, beans, corn, fried okras, macaroni ‘n cheese, cole slaw, fried apples, and a few others. The fried apples (pictured), almost crystal clear and melting like butter on hot pan, taste like wedges of soft brown sugar, but Little Mom and Mudpie love ’em.

They even say that it’s better than the glazed apples in my cider-braised roast pork shoulder. Mai disagrees. But they can’t deny that the supertender, honey-like pork triumphs today, accented with dried cranberries and pecan bits. Deservingly being an in-store special, it is so good I forget all about my backache and fork right in.

We could consider a fruit cobbler for dessert, however the check comes just as quickly as the food got served. They rush us out for the waiting patrons, which is understandable but makes Cracker Barrel’s atmosphere less countrily charming than Pickett House in Woodville. It turns out there’s a CB ten minutes drive from my parents, busy like a beehive even on Monday, and when it comes to chicken and dumpling, Little Mom decides she prefers CB’s to Pickett House’s. But if it’s country food, I prefer a little country style (and space).

Or perhaps a Goo Goo, “a nourishing lunch”? 😉

Money talk:
1 chicken fried chicken ($8.99) + 2 chicken ‘n dumplings ($7.39/each) + 1 pork roast ($8.99) + tax = $35.05
Address: Cracker Barrel Store #617 (I never saw it before, now I see it everywhere)
5700 Redlands Road N.W.
Albuquerque, NM 87120
(505) 352-5430
Exit 155 from I40