Flavor Boulevard

Appetizers from Saigon Buffet

Today marks the 28th day of the 12th month of the Year of the Cat, and it’s not the Year of the Rabbit because I’m Vietnamese. This year started with a piping jeongol at Casserole House and will be ended with a cup of Tieguanyin in bed. This year my luck has brought me new friendships with some admirable people and bolstered old friendships that have last almost a decade. I’ve eaten more, and I’ve disliked more. But there are meals that I truly like. In this list of no particular order, the setting and the price are secondary to the taste, and not all of the dishes are breathtaking (but they’re good). These meals are the best because each of them either has something that I remember (most often the dessert :D) or was shared with someone that I like. 🙂

It would be unfair to include Little Mom’s meals in this list, they’d take up the whole list. 🙂

1. My first (and still only) Cambodian dinner at Battambang, Oakland. I’m not sure if I should continue exploring the Cambodian front. If I do, it’d be more for linguistic purpose than culinary adventure because the tastes are too similar to the typical Vietnamese menus. Regardless, what makes this meal standout was the dessert: jackfruit in warm coconut milk, simple but so satisfying.

2. A less typical taste of Huế at Hương Giang, Houston. Most Vietnamese shops in the States feature Southern Vietnamese cuisine, the most Central Vietnamese things one can get are bánh bèo and bún bò Huế. Hương Giang doesn’t have a strong outlook, but its food is memorable.

3. Dining with the culinary experts at To Hyang, San Francisco. I stayed quiet the entire night to listen to everyone’s stories and wondered when I’ll know as much as they do. An educational dinner with extra-rich braised oxtail and extra-fresh pork belly salad to boost.

4. Lunch at the Super H Mart food court, Houston. It’s fast and tasty. The jajangmyeon (Korean black bean sauce noddle) from Daddy & Daughter is the best jajangmyeon I’ve ever had. The food court doesn’t charge less than the restaurants, but you could say that the convenience makes up for the ambiance.

5. Lunch at Saigon Buffet, Houston. Sadly, this place has closed.

6. Dinner at the Belgian restaurant La Frite in San Antonio. The crowd was huge, the food was slow to come, but everything tasted as it should. Its expected perfection is memorable.

7. Probably the most cost-effective three-course lunch anywhere, at Il Piatto, Santa Fe. Another perfect meal where everything was delish. And the company was great. 😉 I would include in this list the windy afternoon when Yookyung, Jen, Hyunmi and I lazed out at the rooftop bar overlooking Santa Fe, but I don’t think margaritas and Coke count as a meal.

8. Dinner with Rau Om in Palo Alto. There’re too many memorable things here to list, so please just click on the link. Oh, and I would really like me some amazake now.

9. Dinner at the House of Prime Ribs, San Francisco. It was fun, the company was excellent, the food was hearty, the vegan bread stick was the best.

10. My first time at an izakaya: Kiraku in Berkeley. I can still feel the crunchy lotus root chips and corn fritters.

11. The gargantuan dinner at Myungdong Kalguksu, Houston. The atmosphere cannot get any more family-like. They don’t have a consistent opening hour, but they have the best pajeon (Korean pancake) in town.

12. Christmas Eve dinner at Kata Robata, Houston. Everything is good, but the sesame panna cotta was the best dessert of the year. 🙂

Thank you, Cat! And welcome, Dragon!

There’s nothing zen-like about cooking. It has fire, it involves knives and all sorts of dangerous weapons, it requires the death of plants and animals. It requires speed: bad timing means either a burnt cookie or lunch at 5 pm (if preparations started at 9). Its purpose is consumption. Cooking by nature is so active and outward that it’s the opposite of zen. But in today’s Western hemisphere, zen has become an attractive concept: something that every field could claim to have to romanticize itself: zen in skateboarding, zen in running, zen in pistol shooting (sure…), zen in the art of digital privacy (?!), and my personal favorite: zen of the alcohol stove. Naturally, why wouldn’t zen be in the culinary media?

Just as I don’t appreciate the all-too-casual usage of “Buddha” in naming vegetarian concoctions, I don’t appreciate this “zen-ization” of everything from stove to pistol. The word is simply exploited. It’s become an eye-catcher. It’s commercialized. Most of the things with the title “Zen in the Art of [insert gerund]” have nothing to do with zen, which their authors also explain in the text. But zenization has its good points:

1. It can reflect the people’s true attempt to seek their peace of mind in whatever they’re doing, which could be a good thing as long as they’re also trying to minimize their activity’s damage to the world. So zen in martial arts is sensible. Zen in shooting? Only if your target is a board and your mind has no intention of damaging the board.

2. It can induce a (small) number of people to actually learn about zen before throwing the word around.

3. It boosts creativity. (See examples above.)

Right now, I’m practicing zen in cosmology, or should I say, zen in doing cosmology research. If you sit in front of a computer everyday for over 8 hours, it’s pretty close to meditating. If you battle with computer programs everyday, you learn patience (cuz you probably shouldn’t beat the computers to death). You also learn the zen in Googling and the zen in asking your advisor for help. The moment you start dreaming about your code signifies your becoming one with the digital nature. When you fix that segmentation fault, you’ve reached Nirvana.

Unfortunately I’m only between the next-to-last step and the last step, so Flavor Boulevard will continue its winter sleep. Meanwhile, let’s watch some zen in cooking.

P.S.: It’s not a bad episode. It’s just a little forced. And Elizabeth Andoh reminds me of Alice Waters.

P.P.S.: Dear Blog: I shall return after I make peace with the computer program. If I don’t survive, remember that I love you.

Okay so this is sort of interesting. Because it hasn’t happened to me before.

Oct 24: I received an email from YGNetWorldLTD.com informing me that company T (let’s call them T for now) in China has just registered “FlavorBoulevard” as their domain name in China and Asia (flavorboulevard.cn, flavorboulevard.com.cn, flavorboulevard.asia, etc.) and that I needed to contact them if I want to object this and secure my trademark. Okay.

Oct 25: Company T emailed me, saying “We hope your company will not object our application, because this name is very important for our products in Chinese and Asian market. We don’t want your company to use this name in China and Asia, we believe our company will become the legal owner of this name in China and Asia. Even though Mr. [YGNetWorldLTD.com Manager] advises us to change another name, we will persist in this name and permanent registration of this name.”

Now it’s not like my FlavorBoulevard has a huge Chinese market (for the time being? :-P), but:
1. I thought long and hard for this name too, and I’ve used it for 1 year 8 months and 25 days.
2. I don’t want my website to be associated with a Chinese company.
3. “We don’t want your company to use this name in China and Asia”. Doesn’t this sound kinda rude? Dear T Ltd., I don’t want you to steal my blog’s name in China and Asia.

Am I being absurdly greedy?

On second thought, would it be actually better for me and worse for T if they did have flavorboulevard.com.cn? I mean, all those people who forget to type the .cn part would end up on my page, right? So did they not think this through, or am I missing something?

UPDATE (Oct 26): Peter is right, they kindly suggest that I buy the .cn and .asia domains. You bet I won’t.

My Lucky Peach finally made it home. It took only one month from the time I placed the order, and just when school started and me getting buried beneath ten miles of homework. But I’ve taken a peek every now and then at its colorful albeit tiny pictures of ramen (this first issue is all about ramen) and gorged in the fourth article while waiting for the bus. This is the bad thing about food magazines (or anything serial and food related, except cookbooks): it’s so easy to read it’s addictive, I can’t even fall asleep reading it, then I get sleep deprived. So I never buy them. But Lucky Peach is different: it’s recommended by a friend, subsequently ordered by two other friends, all of whom have highly experienced and respectable tastes; what I can do? I haven’t finished the entire thing, but the fourth article is a good one. Good enough to console myself for surrendering to peer pressure. In hindsight, it’s one of the highlights of the lunch we shared at Namu. (Not that the magazine is in any way related to Namu, Rob just showed it to us while we were eating at Namu.)

The other two highlights were some kind of pickled onion and the gochujang (고추장) for the bibimbap. The pickled onion, the best of the four kimchi/pickle varieties, tasted crisp, thorough, and to the point; the gochujang was nutty with a light fruity hint. Namu also had the presentation going for it: from the sparsely spaced tables tucked along the walls to the petite tea cups and blue-and-white serving bowls, the whole place uttered cuteness. The main courses, however, sparked more discussion than compliments among us four, mainly surrounding authenticity.

Of course, Namu is not about “authentic”. It is Chef Dennis Lee’s “cutting edge new California” interpretation with a Korean influence, evident by the appearance of english muffins and tortilla alongside kimchi relish. Depending on your definition of authenticity, authentic Korean food may be hard to come by 8000 miles from Korea, but the authentics can evolve (as they have always been), and I’m all for fusing ingredients to spread the scope of an ethnic cuisine. In fact, I wish Namu had fused more ingredients together. It’s not the english muffin, the tortilla or the chorizo that made me skeptical looking at the menu, it’s the lonely and repetitive incorporation of kimchi in almost every single dish.

There is a whole lot more to Korean food than kimchi, and baechu kimchi at that. Simply adding the fermented cabbage on a hamburger bun or laying it next to the steak doesn’t give the dish any more Korean background than adding sausage making it German. Namu would be more accurately described as “cutting edge new California with kimchi”.

The other unsettling point for me was the available choices. We went as Korean as we could, which was easy because there were only two Korean dishes on the menu, and got kimchi fried rice, dolsot bibimbap and two sizzling okonomiyaki, not because it sounded the most interesting but because Japan is right next to Korea. Now, bibimbap, although loved by many non-Koreans and as representative of Korean menus in America as McDonalds representative of America outside America, seems a bit lackluster as a “restaurant” item. It’s not wild enough to be “California”, and it’s not complicated enough to be “Korean”. Not to mention that our hostess mixed the rice so much for so long that there was barely any time left for the rice crust to form, or perhaps the dolsot wasn’t hot enough. The kimchi fried rice didn’t convince me. The okonomiyaki, made Korean by the kimchi touch, erred on the salty side but was arguably the best piece of the three.

Would we have had more excitement had we tossed the Korean concept and gotten the loco moco or the egg sandwich? But without the Korean concept, what makes the Namu brunch different from the other hundreds one could get in the Inner Richmond? I’m not sure.

“Have you been to the Italian place?”, I keep hearing from the other conference attendees. I once tried to look for Portofino but the confusing arrows led me to the livelihood of El Patio instead. Another time I managed to find the door, which was locked, and two hotel workers tried to tell me in lightning fast Spanish that behind those glass panels was indeed Portofino and that I should just pull them open, or at least that’s what I gathered. The simple truth is they don’t open for lunch.

Undeterred, I returned to those doors to get my last Dreams dinner that evening. The place was dark, my heart sank thinking of unborn pictures with blurry details, when I ran into three other conference attendees from CINVESTAV and the National University of Mexico. It became the most memorable dinner I had the entire trip.

The menu came in two versions, English for me and Spanish for my new acquaintances, both with long fancy Italian names and description in the according language. I was hungry for some vegetables, so after Abril translated to me the waiter’s explanation of a few words on the list, the appetizer was an easy pick: a small endive and arugula salad dressed in a fruity vinaigrette, accompanied by four paper-thin slices of sweetened pear that tasted most like chewy brown sugar.

It boiled down to two choices for entrée: linguine with quail or beef with foie gras. I asked the waiter for advice and he chose the beef in less than one hundredth of a second. The filet mignon, itself topping a mash potato bed, was topped with mushroom sauce and a sliver of foie gras the size of my pinky’s top digit. Everything was soft, lustrous, soothing, and melting into one another. You bet I cleaned the plate.

Dessert, too, was nothing short of an allurement. More precisely, it was a lava cake nostalgia, harmoniously paired with a lime sorbet and coyly tarted up by a sliced strawberry. Under the magenta candle light and our reflections from the glass ceiling, three Mexicans and a Vietnamese talked the night away about the American education system, the economy, the train from Mexico City to Puerto Vallarta, about esquites, tamarind, and mango. It was the first time I’d felt like a foreigner at a dinner table, not being able to understand the others’ conversation in their mother tongue. But strangely, I also felt very much included in this courteous town, among these courteous people.

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
Crepa y Esquites

Usually people go to church on Christmas Eve, but we (kind of) do on Christmas Day. At 9, we leave the hotel and beat the traffic to St. Charles Avenue, a historically elite thoroughfare delineated with mansions and century old oak trees, themselves decorated by dangling Mardi Gras beads from last seasons. Hardly any traffic presents, except for a streetcar chugging up and down the cable lines. If not for these black lines, the scenery would have resembled Tự Do Street (now labelled Đồng Khởi) in Saigon, especially with the Holy Name of Jesus Church looking out to Audubon Park, like the Saigon Notre-Dame Basilica and the greenery to its left front side.

Parting from the arches of oak branch weaving across the road, we head to the French Quarter. Hardly any trees now, but many more colorful skinny houses adorn the sidewalks. A flimsily dressed, green-shoed man jumps rope on Canal Street, in the mist and sprinkle of Christmas Morning, disturbed by neither cars driving by nor the onlooking of another man, black-jacketed and huddling to himself in the corner.

A mule pulls a carriage.

We loop back for dinner at Mudpie’s Aunt Mamee and Uncle Mike’s residence, starting with some melting-cheese-veiled etouffee in mini pastry shells, chips and dips, and trouts on bread that go faster than hot cakes.

We are seated in the dining room, surrounded by Nativity sets (some inside Christmas tree ornaments), a collection of pine trees and white chinas, and pampered with velvety mashed sweet potato and crispy browned marsh mallow, brown sugar glazed carrots,

crumbly dirty rice, stuffing, gentle and buttery red fish,

juicy turkey, and Little Mom’s crunchy chicken cabbage salad dressed with tempered lemon juice. We all come back for seconds, and would have come back for thirds if not to save room for Mamee’s scrumptious chewy chocolate chip cookies. 🙂

So I just learned this cool thing you can do with a banana finger and your finger. It works better with not-so-ripe bananas of course. Three way split all the times. Credit to Mudpie.

Then I told my mom about it. She said “Duh. You just now know?” 😀

For comeback, I told her (again, credit to Mudpie for telling me) that banana is used as a unit in measuring radioactivity. Like all foods (and living things, including you), banana radiates. It just happens that banana contains the radioactive isotope Potassium-40 (19 protons and 21 neutrons, 1 neutron more than stable Potassium) which makes it radiate a little bit more than other things. Fortunately for us the half life of Potassium-40 is over a billion years, so the amount of radiation a banana produces is less than 1/365 times the increase in cancer risk caused by 40 tablespoons of peanut butter.

In short, bananas may cause false alarm on nuclear radiation sensors at US ports, but it’s perfectly safe to eat one or two of them per day. 🙂 Or, if you’d like a stronger radiation dose, smoke one cigarette per year.

Direction: Montclair. Shattuck & Durant. The man sits at the first row, holding a bouquet of lilies and chrysanthemums wrapped in brown paper, whose wrinkles almost blend in with his hand. He asks if anyone knows what time it is. I say “Twelve” a few times, he just gazes at me half blankly, half confused. The bus driver says “Twelve o’clock”. He nods, then mumbles something about hoping that “she will be there”. When the bus turns onto Martin Luther King Jr., he gets off, thanking the driver four or five times, looking lost.

Direction: Montclair. Martin Luther King Jr. & 46th Street. A woman in her thirties waddles on, asking how much the fare is. Two dollars. She reaches in her grey windbreaker’s pocket for a handful of coins. Missing a quarter. She waddles to a seat, searches her purse, asks if anyone has change for a dollar. Silence. Silence. For 20 seconds. Finally another woman searches her purse and find some coins. Just enough time for the first woman to drop the last quarter into the slot, then she gets off. Her steps heavy, torpid, and somewhat lost.

The bus is unusually light today. Its four passengers glue their eyes on the window as it glides pass old houses covered in fading blue and orange paints. Tilting fences. Barb wires. Old couches in tiny gardens full of weeds and pots. Graffiti. Empty parking lots. Porches without people because of the chilly winds. A few overweight black men crouching in their coats, waiting for a bus. A few black boys languidly crossing the streets.

Direction: Albany. 12th & Webster. 1:40 pm. The wind isn’t so bad like in the morning.  The bus has nine or ten passengers. One man with dirt on fingers and gloves in pocket loudly voices his disapprovals at construction work condition to another. One man quietly cleans his glasses. The rest stares out the window. Everyone travels alone.

But, everyone receives a softly “Happy Thaksgiving” from the driver as they get off. Somehow, that makes the bus feel warmer. 🙂

*As far as I’ve riden Bus 18 connects downtown Oakland with North Berkeley. Usually it’s overpacked with people in suits and in rags, stale air, the smell of homelessness… But yesterday it seems to transport only lonely lives. – 25. November 2010

This past weekend I found out that my favorite sushi house has replaced their usual corn tea with green tea, and my favorite Korean restaurant has changed name.

Berkel Berkel is now Cho Korean B.B.Q. The Berkel Berkel sign is still outside, the wooden door is still there, the paper lanterns are still there. But the old man is not. The familiar homey vibe is lost, drown in the blasting music and the attentive service of the hosts. I appreciate the smiles and the banchan and drinks brought to the table and the frequent check-ins for refills, but I miss getting my own kimchi and pouring my own tea from the kettle. I miss the old man behind the counter with his strong accent.

The kimchi selection is still the same: baechu, cucumber, and kongjaban (콩자반). Mudpie got bulgogi ddukbaegi (불고기 뚝배기 beef stew clay pot) with green onion, mushroom, and potato noodle in sweet broth. I got ramyeon (ramen) with dumplings. Being a tad spicy, once again my choice was less savory than Mudpie’s choice. Objectively, the food is still good for its price, but I wonder how my feelings for Cho would be different if I had not been to Berkel Berkel before. I do hope that Cho will flourish, just like our favorite Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ in Oakland has changed for the better.

Things change. Feelings change. I change. I just wish that the things I hold dear will change with me so that together, we remain the same.

Dinner for two: ddukbul ($6.95) + ramyeon ($5.25) + tax = $13.00
They do take out orders, and open daily 10:30am-10:00pm, whereas Berkel Berkel closed on Sunday. 🙂

Address: Cho Korean B.B.Q. (former Berkel Berkel)
2428 Telegraph Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94704
(510) 981-1388

No more flan. Giovanni on Shattuck has closed its door after 25 years in business. I’d been there once when I suddenly had a craving for Italian pastas. Not that it had amazing Italian, but it certainly was unique. Anything old is unique. There was the bar in the front. In the back there was a big warm brick fireplace around which tables were set, the old school fireplace with a real log burning and real fire sparkles you know. And it’s also the only place in Downtown Berkeley that actually had flan. Not amazing flan, but any flan was better than none. UPDATE: Giovanni is back!

Not sure if it’s the economic downtime or just the common evolution of restaurants that is turning certain dishes into forlorn memories. Phở Hòa has been replaced by PunToh Fresh Thai Food, and of course that means no more bò kho (beef stew), something that’s really hard to come across even in San Jose. Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ #9 in Oakland has a new owner, Duyên – the niece of the old owner, who schicked up the place with a young, modern, Westernized vibe. Their business takes off, but so is bún mộc from the menu. People only order it once or twice every two weeks, said Duyên, and she finds no point in straining the pot for something so unpopular.