Flavor Boulevard

There’s China in Texas, so we shall eat Chinese as we cross the state line into Texas. In fact, Little Mom turns down barbecue and steak even before the words can leave my tongue. And it’s not because the occasional wind brings a subtle wisp of cow across the fields onto the streets of Amarillo. We’re Texans, there’s barbecue for birthdays, barbecue for spring, barbecue for summer, barbecue for picnic, barbecue for Fourth of July, barbecue for end of school. Barbecue for weddings wouldn’t surprise me. So she wants noodles. And her words are weighed a hundred times heavier than mine, even when I weigh more than her.

Pacific Rim looks more spacious and less greasy than most Chinese restaurants, and it’s not a buffet. The menu is large to suit its “asian fusion” strive, and I’m just thankful to see no Orange Chicken or Kung Pao Beef (they’re there, they’re just not spelled out). They also give us a basket of sweet rolls and butter to wet our appetite, not your usual Chinese ’round the block.

Nonetheless, the casual fried rice and stir fried rice noodle (pancit) appeal to our sleepy tummies more than “the specialties from land and sea”. Both are savory, not spicy, not too oily, not drowned in that typical thick brown sauce of Chinese stir fries.

And this is one of the very rare times you see me ordering a tuft of greens. The meat-eater finally hears the call of something crunchy, fresh, fruity, and leafy. The Hawaiian luau chicken salad ($8.50) arrives last at the table, as playfully chromatic as expected. The size of the plate appalls me, and the presentation confuses me. A big rice cracker toasted to crisp is placed between two layers of grilled chicken breast, frisee, pineapple, mango, macadamia nuts and bell pepper slices, I don’t know where or how to start tackling it. The kitchen calls the cracker a fried wonton (?) and glazes it with a yellow fruity syrup, while providing a tart vinaigrette to accompany the greens. I find the mango and pineapple cubes to be the best flavor enhancers in this whole salad.

Now, Pacific Rim of landlocked Amarillo does churn out good food, but the food isn’t as memorable as the food presenter here. Our host looks in his thirties, average height, a little stout, cheerfully friendly, and panting every time he appears, which is a bit far in between. The kitchen takes it time cooking our orders, the tables aren’t cleared after the guests, but our poor waiter is always in a hurry and his words almost lost between breaths. Mudpie jokes that he might be doing push-ups in the back. 😀

Talking bill-siness: dinner for 4 +tax: $36.67
Address: Pacific Rim – “The best food in Amarillo” (quoted from the receipt)
2061 Paramount Blvd
Amarillo, TX 79109
(806) 353-9179

Not barbecue.

That stuff is everywhere in the South. I’m talking about something that only Texas has. Something a little sweet, a little pillowy, a little chewy, a little cheesy, a little meaty. Something that after you eat one, you just have to get another. Something that 99.91% of the time is chosen over donuts (I made up the stats, but I’ve never met anyone who picks a donut when they’re given this). My Texas friends, I miss the kolaches.

If you haven’t had it, you’re gonna say “That’s a pig-in-the-blanket, Whole Foods has loads.” No, it is far from a pig-in-the-blanket. I repeat, kolaches is NOT pig-in-the-blanket (PitB).

The difference is in the bread. PitB bread is plain, flare it up with poppy seeds and oily butter or not, it’s plain and must not be eaten without the sausage. Kolaches bread is sweet, like a Hawaiian roll*. PitB bread is dry and flaky. Kolaches bread is pillowy, slightly chewy and moist. The sausage is there for protein surplus and does not really add fireworks to the flavor. If you insist on an either-or, I’d choose the bread and toss the sausage every time. Donut shops in Houston would ask if you want the kind with cheese, say yes. The very thin inner lining of cheese makes its salty-sweet.

Then you’re gonna laugh at me and try to crumble my Texan pride, “It’s a Czech thing, not a Texas thing” and tell me to read Wikipedia.  Well, look again, the Czech kolache (pronounced |koh-lash|) is a sweet pastry with fruit jam on top. The Texan kolaches (pronounced |koh-lah-chee|) is savory with a little sausage link inside. The Texas kolaches isn’t any more Czech than the hamburger is from Hamburg.

Originally, it is a variety of the Czech kolache, referred to as “klobasnek” or “klobasnik,” which comes from “klobasek,” Czech for “sausage,” similar to “kielbasa“. But the Czechs consider the Texas kolaches a joke too far removed from their fruit-topped dessert pastries, for it has cheap cocktail sausage links instead of the huge Polish dogs. The misnomer “kolache” is perhaps due to the Houstonian Kolache Factory‘s successful advertisement of this savory breakfast on the go.

Black sheep to the Czechs or not, the Texas kolaches are extremely popular in Texas. Most donut shops have them, usually twice or three times more expensive than donuts, and all are sold out before noon. Sometimes 9 am. No kolaches left behind.

But you won’t be able to find it outside the Lone Star State. You probably will not even hear about it outside the Lone Star State. People just will not know what you’re talking about when you say “kolaches” (pronounced |koh-lah-chee|), unless they’re from Texas. Believe me, I asked my students here, in Berkeley-San Francisco, they gave me the confused eyes and directed me to Whole Foods for pigs-in-the-blanket. I’ve searched every donut shop in town, no luck. I’ve used Google Maps, AM Kolaches in Hayward is the only hit, but it’s the Czech version with fruits and cream cheese.

O Texas Kolaches, how I miss thee!

*Notes on the Hawaiian rolls: Get them! They make awesome sandwiches. Or spread pâté in the middle.

How do you write about a place you haven’t been to for ages?

The consensus is that fresh memories, like fresh ingredients, are best for blogging. I often find myself writing effortlessly about a meal I just finish or an event from which I just depart, when the details have yet to sneak out the back door. If I wait two weeks, the tastes are still there, the ambiance is still there, but the minute corner-of-the-eye observations are gone. If I wait a month, expectations creep in to fill the fuzzy spots: I write what I think should be true as pictures trigger the taste buds, but reality can certainly outplay expectation anytime. When I wait a year, even the ambiance is nothing but a flimsy strain of smoke. Notes may take care of facts, but when memory fades, so does the flow to glue the facts together into a comprehensible piece. I’m now in such affair with Cenare.

I remember Cenare as the cozy white-table-clothed Italian restaurant with affordable under-fifteen-dollar plates where I had my twenty-first birthday dinner. I remember that they didn’t mind pulling together extra chairs when we had more guests than we reserved. There were salads for my vegetarian friends, pizzas and calzones for those who don’t mind getting their hands oily, chickens for my Hindu friends, red meats for those like me, all in portions big enough for twenty-year-old boys.

I also remember Cenare as the crowded yet orderly place where I had my graduation dinner. With plenty of parking, less than ten minutes away from campus and no turns, Cenare offers nothing but convenience for the non-locals visiting their kids in caps and gowns. They had a special graduation menu condensed with the best pastas, meat and seafood for the occasion. There were plenty of fresh crisp bread to appease the hunger, wine and coffee to keep the conversations warm, crème caramel, triple chocolate silk cake, and tiramisu to reward us after the long drive and many hours of sitting.

So even if I can’t remember the exact tastes of the tortellini, the lobster ravioli, the fish, the chicken, the lasagna, the decor on a quiet late winter evening and a hectic early summer afternoon, it doesn’t really matter as long as I remember my friends and families who dined there and enjoyed it with me. It was a good restaurant because I was in good company.

Address: Cenare Italian Cuisine
404 University Drive East
College Station, TX 77840
(979) 696-7311

Chain means reliability. Berkeley’s snobbish take against big franchise and corporations plays to my blogging advantage, but there always lies the uncertainty. It could be a very good looking, cozy little restaurant with quaint menus, and mediocre food. They could have a long line of people waiting in the cold to be seated, and mediocre food. Somehow people sitting about you are all hyped up by the new raw or vegan order, but you just can’t enjoy yours because it’s mediocre food. When a business is the only of its name, there’s just no guarantee that it’s palatable to everyone, no matter how many stars it gets on Yelp or votes by the locals. Franchise takes care of that. I don’t know how. But I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t objectively like Burger King, Subway, Yogurt Land, KFC, et cetera (I say “objectively” because taste buds can be clouded by health conscience, religious reasons and who knows what). Some Vietnamese businesses, though still in much smaller scale, have also established their chain names. For banh mi, we almost always go to Lee’s Sandwiches or Huong Lan. For cha lua, we trust Gio Cha Duc Huong. When we’re in Houston, we go to Phở Danh to slurp noodle soups.

All three locations in Houston have the same silvery ambiance: white walls, glass door, formica tables, simple chairs, bright lights, white melamine dishware. We always get the same things here: pho bo tai for Dad, pho bo chin for Mom and me.

Mom always asks for extra giá trụng, blanched bean sprouts. And Dad always asks for hành dấm, pickled onion. Both are free.

He never asks for hành dấm anywhere else, making me wonder if it’s some special thing of Pho Danh. Vinegar and sugar soften the onion’s pungent flares, but keep it crisp and clean. I submerge it into the steaming broth. Dad savors it alone, one ring at a time.

Pho Danh in Texas

3 locations in Houston:
– 11209 Bellaire Blvd – (281) 879-9940
– 13480 Veterans Memorial Drive‎ – (832) 484-9449
– 11049 FM 1960 Rd‎ – (281) 890-4011

1 location in Austin:
– 11220 North Lamar Boulevard, Austin, TX‎ – (512) 837-7800‎

Do you have those times when you keep craving something sweet, even after you wiped clean a cereal bowl worth of Double Fudge Brownie, exterminated many prunes, and skillfully chewed up four pirouette cookies like a mafia boss smoking cigars? I’ve started to see such danger of staying up late, but sweet stuff is always easier to eat than savory stuff in those wee hours. To avoid having my belly exceed my face, I started going through pictures of food (it helps more than studying and thinking about food), and found some munchtastic  sweet treats I meant to but never got around to blog about.

1. Chè khoai môn (taro che)

One of the few country treats without mung bean paste. Depending on each root and how long it’s cooked, the purplish pale taro cubes can be grainy, nutty, a little chewy, or al dente, like scallop potato minus the butter. However they are, they serve as a textural contrast to the gooey pudding-like sticky rice base. I’m particularly charmed by the vibrant green color in this Lee’s Sandwiches‘ rendition, hopefully from pandan leaf extract. You know it’s a skilled cook when the sticky rice grains are still visible, yet so soft you don’t need to chew. Taro che is less sweet than other kinds of che, as coconut milk alone gives much of its sugary taste.

2. Chè bắp (corn che)

Another rare sticky rice concoction without mung bean intervention. Another pair of contrasting textures: crisp and firm kernels versus luscious goo. Another mild pudding sweetened by coconut milk. Bellaire Kim Son’s kitchen strayed from the common recipes that call for shaving the kernels off the cob, and used whole kernel sweet corn straight out of the cans. A simple, cheap, inhomogeneous toothsome mess.

More than 18 months ago: chè đậu trắng, chè bột báng, chè trôi nước

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is the only pediatric cancer research center where families never pay for treatment not covered by insurance.

In the first week of June, from May 30 to June 5, all 25 locations of RA Sushi in Southern California, Arizona, East Texas, Florida, and five other states will host a fundraiser for St. Jude. Diners can choose any item on the Nicky’s Week Special menu, such as Shrimp Nigiri, Chicken Yakitori, the signature plates Tuna Tataki and Tootsy Maki. All sale profits from the Nicky’s Week menu will be donated to St. Jude.

If you’re in Houston or planning on driving by Houston, RA Sushi is opened for lunch 11a.m.-3p.m. daily, and dinner from 3p.m. to midnight at the Highland Village location, and 3p.m.-11p.m. at the CityCentre location. Last year RA Sushi in Highland Village alone raised nearly $10,000 during the week long event. This year RA Sushi in CityCentre will participate in the event for the first time.

On the Southern California front, there are six locations in San Diego, Tustin, Corona, Torrance, Chino Hills, and Huntington Beach.

The fundraiser started in 2005, in memory of the 13-year-old Nicholas “Nicky” Mailliard, shortly after his unsuccessful battle with brain cancer. Mr. Rich Howland, Nicky’s uncle and one of RA Sushi’s original founders, started the annual Nicky’s Week fundraising event to help fulfilling Nicky’s wish of finding a cure for cancer. Since 2005, the event has raised nearly $500,000 for St. Jude, and the goal this year is to add another $125,000 to that sum.

The cost of cancer treatment is on the order of $10,000 per year on the low end, and hundreds of thousands can be spent on each additional year of treatment.

So if you’re going to spend money on food and drinks during the first week of June, why not make your dollar more meaningful as well?

The 6th Annual Nicky’s Week – May 30 to June 5
RA Sushi Texas

• 3908 Westheimer, Houston, TX 77027 (at Highland Village above West Elm)
• 12860 Queensbury, Houston, TX 77024 (in CityCentre)
• 701 Lone Star Dr., Plano, TX 75024

RA Sushi California

• 13925 City Center Dr., Chino Hills, CA 91709
• 2785 Cabot Dr., St 101, Corona, CA 92883
• 3525 Carson St., St 161, Torrance, CA 90503
• 155 5th Sreet, St 183, Huntington Beach, CA 92648
• 2401 Park Avenue, Tustin, CA 92782
• 474 Broadway, San Diego, CA 92101

*All images are courtesy of RA Sushi Bar & Restaurant. With special thanks to RA Sushi’s PR & Marketing Coordinator Stacia Schacherer for providing me with all information to complete this post.

When I was three or four, my mom once asked me what relationship was the most important in life. I said friendship. She wasn’t happy. She wanted to hear that the mother-and-child love was the most important, to which I explained that mother and child should treat each other like friends, with respect and trust and so on, thereby making the relationship a friendship. For all these years, my mom has been my best friend, but I’ve had other amazing friendships too. Some last, some don’t. Some fade, some strengthen. Some are built over the world wide web, some are formed through sleepless nights struggling over assignments. You know what the best thing about non-family friends is? You get to choose them. You get to hang out with people who are different from you, but mix so well with you, like salt and lemon. Or how about this, like yogurt and meat?

What are you smoking, Mai, yogurt and meat? Yep. Yogurt and thin slices of döner (beef and lamb), blanketing a bed of dice butter-roasted pide bread (the Turkish name of pita bread). It is carnivore festival. If you ever feel like you are ready to chow down a cow in two minutes, Middle Eastern restaurants are the place to roll. They beat Texas BBQ houses by miles in the blunder of sheer meat.  BBQ houses at least try to give you a salad (with dressing, but still), a few starchy objects like toasts and buns, a side or two of cole slaw, green bean, corn, or whatever skimmishly healthy. The Persians smirk at such disguise. If you want meat, you get meat, either in a giant ball or in a giant mount. The doner overwhelms any trace of pide bread there might have been. Then the refreshingly sour yogurt overwhelms the doner, turning the fibrous meaty texture into a shivering juicy touch. The combination is like a racist joke among friends, you know it isn’t right, but you laugh anyway because it’s wickedly funny.

Anyhow, to temper the protein surplus, our group order a veggie appetizer plate to share. The meze tabagi (mixed meze) has seven constituents, clockwise from the lemon wedge: Tabuli (a mix of diced green onion, tomatoes and herbs), Ezme (minced tomatoes, red pepper, walnuts and herbs), dolma (spiced rice wrapped in grape leaves), Patlican Salata (smashed eggplant salad with onion and bell pepper), Pirasa (leeks, carrots, rice and onion), Taze Fasulye (green beans), and Humus (mashed chickpeas and sesame paste). All seven mixes except the humus are seasoned with olive oil and lemon juice. All are amazingly tasty on pide bread, especially the eggplant.

All we have up to this point is, literally, a sour meal. Lemon juice in the appetizer, yogurt in the entree. Then we order baklava for dessert. You know how a cookie tastes after you suck on a lemon wedge, right? Extra sweet. Like eating a brick of brown sugar. So my friend damps the sucrose flood by some bitter black coffee. A strong, nice mix.

Address: Istanbul Grill (in the Village area around Rice University)
5613 Morningside Drive
Houston, TX 77005
(713) 526-2800
(Double parking is allowed/necessary, so don’t be surprised when a waiter asks to move your car to let another customer drive out of the lot.)

Other Persian restaurants I’ve visited:
1. Cafe Renaissance downtown Palo Alto
2. Alborz restaurant on Center Street, Berkeley
3. Azerbaijan Cuisine on Fulton Street, Berkeley

Mini steam buns, as big as a clementine, stuffed with interesting fillings, sold like hotcakes at a mini store inside the Bellaire Hong Kong Mall. Well, they are essentially hot cakes after all.

TP Banh Bao have many kinds of banh bao, but most were sold out by midday when we got there. We were lucky enough to get 3 different kinds: seafood (đồ biển), taro and pork (khoai môn thịt), and original, i.e. pork and chinese sausage (thập cẩm). However, we couldn’t tell which was which. They put them in the same box, no marking, the bun skin and the innards looked the same for all three kinds. They also tasted the same. Good, but indistinguishable.

On the door is an exciting advertisement of their specials: deep fried banh bao and deboned chicken wings, but few seem to come here for those. I’d imagine even fewer would come here for bun bo Hue, mi Quang, chao long (offal porridge) and chao ca (fish porridge). It’d be just as funny if McDonald serves spaghetti.

A box of 9 banh bao sets back your bank anywhere between $7 -14. Although a little pricey, these bite-size buns make a reasonable, savory but not so fatty snack, maybe breakfast if you eat three or four.  I’m curious about the sweet kinds, with mung bean paste and either coconut or durian.

Address: T.P. Banh Bao (inside HongKong Mall, near Banh Cuon Tay Ho #18)
11209 Bellaire Blvd
Houston, TX 77072
(281) 988-7667

While you’re in the Hong Kong Mall area, check out the butter-fried soft shell crab at Tay Do restaurant.

How far would you go out of your way for a meal? A fairly casual common meal? One that you can whip out at home in less than two hours? How long of a drive would be worth the stead of cooking? How scenic is the route? Sometimes it’s not so much the food that draws one back to a restaurant, given that the food is lovely of course. Sometimes it’s that craving for a bit of simple nature and not artifice, a bit of old fashion and not modernity, just a bit of the familiar unknown. The longer my family lives in the city, the more often we get those cravings. Almost every year now we would make a two-hour drive to the Heritage Village in Woodville for a bowl of chicken and dumpling. And it’s best on a cloudy day of January, when the young pine trees along Highway 190 are at their greenest and fuzziest.

We never learned the name of this restaurant. We know where it is, we call it “the chicken and dumpling place”, and that’s enough. But it’s not just chicken and dumpling. It’s an all-you-can-eat country style with fried chicken, mashed potato and gravy, some kind of greens, beans, and corn bread. The chicken and dumpling is the best though. It’s thick but not too creamy or buttery. The partially dissolved dumplings have this lovely chewy feel to distinguish themselves from shredded chicken bits. With the right amount of salt and pepper I’d imagine it’d still be great without the chicken.

When I first came to Pickett House in 2002, they were still serving sassafras tea. That’s just my good luck and mishaps at the same time: it is the best sweet tea I’ve ever had, and that was the last time I had it. They say they couldn’t find any more sassafras root in the area. I don’t care if it has safrole and can cause liver cancer, it tastes good. (Hey people are still drinking those bitter, vinegar-like liquids that kill both brain cells and liver cells, aren’t they?)

On the sweet side, they’re still serving peach cobbler, so remember not to stuff too much dumpling and fried chicken down your pipe and save room for dessert. But if you don’t, like us, it’s ok to roll out happily with a tummy of southern Santa Claus. Or linger around, take a glance at the old school oil lamp on the wooden piano near the cashier, or the circus posters – some are dated before 1952. Or laugh along with the joke at the other table, friendliness makes a good meal taste like home. Or come outside, breathe in that fresh, brisk, unadulterated air, and feel revitalized.

Address: Pickett House Restaurant (in Heritage Village)
Highway 190 W
Woodville, TX 75979

Lunch for three will set you back by $32 pre-tip. Driving eastward along the highway from US-59, we’re bound to miss the left turn into the Heritage Village and its kitchen. So when you see a church, a parking lot, a gas station and other signs of human occupation, make a U-turn.The exit to awesome chicken and dumpling will be on the right.

Can’t find Pickett House? Another 15 minutes down the road into downtown Woodville is Z’s Fillin Station with more choices for the southern cravings.

If you insist on staying home, here’s a recipe from Christy Jordan’s Southern Plate.

It’s just a white bun made from sticky rice, loosely wrapped in banana leaf so that it doesn’t attach indefinitely to your fingers, ready to sandwich a thick cut of cha lua. The purpose of the bun is purely a textural enjoyment, it has neither taste nor smell. All flavors come from the sausage. Eating the bun alone would be like chewing an incredibly huge piece of gum, the only difference is you can swallow the bun. Come to think of it, we can make a bunch of bite size sticky rice “gum” for American school kids, they can chew until they’re bored, and swallow it, no unfortunate mess under the desks and your shoes. Cool, innit?

Because of either its simplicity or its antiqueness, the bánh dầy is not quite a favorable snack among the young Vietnamese these days. Or perhaps because it is a treat from the North? Southerners have a sweet tooth and are attracted to fatty, rich, flavor-compact concoctions. Bánh dầy is none of that. When I was in Saigon I knew of bánh dầy through three sources: the extremely common tale of bánh chưng bánh dầy, the book “Hanoi 36 streets” by Thạch Lam, and the tiny buns filled with bean paste (bánh dầy đậu) Little Mother got for me from Ngọc Sáng bakery in District 1. Another case of cross cultural similarity: compare the banh day dau with the Japanese daifuku: the sticky rice coat is exactly like mochi, the mung bean filling is salty while daifuku’s filling is sweetened.

For something the size of a can bottom, banh day makes a dense snack (just like its pyramid shape cousin, banh it). We got both at Giò Chả Đức Hương in Houston, but banh day is not always there. The reason might be the good amount of work in making those simple looking buns. An authentic banh day is supposed to be made by pounding cooked sticky rice to a goo, although the packages of sticky rice flour in stores would do the job. I’m not sure which method  Đức Hương used. I also wrongfully microwaved it once, the result was a plain thick blob that could possibly rival superglue. Yep, banh day is supposed to be eaten at room temperature (not for folks who want a warm meal).

Address: Đức Hương Giò Chả (Houston)
11369 Bellaire Blvd, Ste 950
Houston, TX 77072