Flavor Boulevard

Category: The more interesting

  • Miso Omakase at Nojo


      Is it miso season? (Miso has a season?) Berkeley Bowl puts out about 10 different kinds of miso in their “international” aisle, and Nojo advertises a seasonal 5-course miso omakase menu on Black Board Eats. Usually the Black Board Eats emails go straight into the trash, which I kinda feel bad about because I signed up for their newsletter after all, but thank goodness I did read it that morning. That night I got the code, called my friend, and we went to Nojo.

      We were seated at the counter, but not the one facing the chefs, that would have been nice, this was a small counter facing the wall near the door. The wall looks pretty cool but we felt kinda weird at first, what with the other customers crowding the tables and here the three of us facing a wall next to a middle-aged man. We felt outcast. But Nojo doesn’t take reservation for party under 6, only a phone call an hour before you arrive to put your name on the waiting list, guess I should have called more than an hour earlier, what was I thinking following the rules? But the servers, inked and all, are really nice, the water was clear and sweet, the sunflowers smelled good, and the middle-aged man left minutes after we sat down.

      And the food.

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    • FIVE and a Flavor Giveaway


        Dressed in black and white patterns from walls to chairs, FIVE spots a slightly older, more refined atmosphere for casual hotel dining just above the Berkeley BART station. I meant to go here after someone said that he finally understood the rave behind “chicken and waffle” after he had it during FIVE’s After Hour Happy Hour. If that dry white meat and cake-like bread at FIVE was that good, then surely the other things wouldn’t disappoint. Now nothing on the regular dinner menu costs 5 bucks like the Happy Hour (7-9 pm) nosh, but I got hungry before 7 pm, so I dashed in on what seemed to be a busy night. The hotel is hosting some conference. Nobody wanted to eat with me today, but one beauty of going alone is that you can always get a table.

        That said, if you have a party of 4 or less and would like to raid FIVE, which you should, I have a FIVE Vip Card “valid for a 20% discount in FIVE” to give you. Here’s how to get it:

        Leave me a comment below by midnight March 31, and if the number of comments is more than 1, which would make me ecstatic :D, then the winner will be chosen by a random number generator. The card is valid until July 31st, 2012. The winner will receive the card by mail or in person.

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      • The night before Christmas at Kata Robata


          Last night I was reading this manga, Oishii Kankei (“Delicious Relationship”), and two things there reminded me of my family: a family of three who love to eat out and explore new restaurants, and the girl who can’t cook (but she has a better sense of taste than me, it’s a story after all ;-)). I also got reminded of a ton of Japanese food, although the main plot revolves around French cuisine and a fictional restaurant in Tokyo called Petit Lapin (“Little Rabbit”). I’ve been in the mood for something comforting, and Little Mom wants to have some Japanese food that isn’t sushi, so we decided on Kata Robata for our Christmas Eve. Actually Oanh recommended this place to me just before my flight to Houston, and I trust her when it comes to the Land of the Rising Sun. My dad’s opinion today? He had to come whether he wanted to or not. That’s Beauty #27 of a family of three: odd number makes decisions come easy. 😉

          Thank goodness, he liked it here. Or should I say, he *loved* the kakuni don.


          The rice, wet with the runny yolk of a 60-degree soft-boiled, was aptly seasoned by the rich sauce of the sweetly soy-braised slow-cooked pork belly (kakuni). The kakuni was a tad too fatty, but the seasoning strikes home just right. Little Mom fancied the juicy shiitake, and Mai the crunchy pickled radish. A little something for everyone makes the don truly comfort food.

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        • Tofu misozuke – the vegan cheese

            Tofu misozuke. Image courtesy of Rau Om

            Every Saturday in Sunnyvale and every Sunday in Palo Alto, Oanh sets up the tables. She hangs a white banner with a simplified lavender elephant and the word “Rau Om” in calligraphic green, and a poster featuring a little mouse prancing with a block of tofu on his back, with the word “Mice eat Rau Om’s Tofu Misozuke” below. Then she arranges dozens of little bamboo and plastic wrap packets on the table, each containing a block of tofu in beige paper, about as big as a match box. Then she’s ready for the Farmers Market. And the tofu is ready to be sold out, every last one of them.

            Over two years of experimenting, Oanh says, including lots of PubMed searching, an 18th century manuscript in old Japanese, and who knows how many pounds of firm tofu. It all started with an accidental find in Tokyo’s night food scene in 2009, and here they are, at a Californian Farmers Market, offering a Japanese elder a taste that brings her decades back home. It’s like the tofu has achieved its American dream.

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          • All-natural nem by Rau Om – Rediscovering the Vietnamese meat curing art


              My most vivid memory nem happened one summer afternoon at a fishing park in the suburbs of Saigon. Nem is one of those more favored snacks to accompany conversations among friends, and while the adults were toasting away the sunlit hours grilling their freshly caught fish, the ten-year-old Mai made friends with this tiny black-haired guy with her share of nem. He enjoyed the nem so very much that he kept reaching out to her and holding her finger. Oh it was such joy watching him nimbly bite into the succulent pink pieces of meat, smiling innocuously. It’s been fifteen years. I wonder how that little pet monkey is doing now. His hair is probably all white, if he’s alive.

              I didn’t have much nem to give him, maybe two or three pieces, each the size of half a thumb. Little Mom had no idea that I was giving them to the monkey, she probably would have given me more if she did, because she’s very hesitant to let me eat nem. First, it’s uncooked meat. Second, ambiguous chemicals are involved in the curing process to make nem. So aside from that happy memory of nem and monkey, Mai grew up indifferent toward those pink meat snacks wrapped in banana leaves. But one day, the twenty-five-year-old Mai, while reading Rau Om, saw that her blogger friends have discovered an all-natural, chemical-free way to make the meat snacks, and the interest arose.

              Oanh of RauOm.com at San Francisco Street Food Fest, August 2011

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            • Taro and I

                Taro and sticky rice pudding with coconut milk

                If you don’t like taro, I don’t know if we can be friends.

                I used to be aghast when people asked me what taro was. It’s a root, like potato, you know? Then slowly I realized that I was the obnoxious one for not realizing that not everyone is Vietnamese. But when you grew up with something so abundant, don’t you get the feeling that everyone else must have grown up with it too? Next time someone says “What, you haven’t seen Star Trek?!”, I’m gonna ask “have you eaten taro?”. (Just my luck, they’d say yes and I’d have to go to Blockbusters. :D)

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              • Hương Giang – Savour Huế in Houston


                  I lost my memory card. If you’re a food blogger too you’d know how devastated I felt: the first advice to a food blogger these days is “good pictures”. Well, the pictures I took at Hương Giang are amazing, they just no longer exist. But, pictures or not, as my professor Lawrence Hall would say in his British tongue, “you can’t stop me,” or in this case, I can’t stop myself from blogging about the restaurant.

                  Is their food that good? Hương Giang takes a shy, small square in the parking lot at the corner of Bellaire and Boone. If you drive westward on Bellaire Blvd, you’ll see its sign on the left before you reach Hong Kong Market. It’s really a tucked-away place for scoffers, the outlook unimpressive, the sign blue and white like a tired worker shirt. The inside is similar to any average pho joints you’ve seen, wiped clean and plastic cheap. I knew my mom wouldn’t come here if not for blogging’s sake, but in this city it’d be hard to get a menu more Huế than this one.

                  There are pictures in the menu and printouts taped to the wall to tell you what the specials are. For us it’s a matter of getting what we’ve heard of but not had: gỏi mít tôm thịt, bánh ít ram, cơm hến, and bún suông.

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                • Candied cà-na (white canarium or Chinese olive)


                    It’s not the black stuff they throw on your pizzas or the green thing they toothpick on your sandwich. How many of us city kids have tasted the tartness with a tiny sweet afterpunch of this Mekong delta fruit? It’s addictive like fresh squeezed orange juice on a summer day. Speaking street tongue, it’s nature’s crack in oblong shape.

                    Eat ’em fresh with chilipepper salt, or candy them with sugar and heat, it’s how kids down South do it with the cà na they shake off from bushes on the riverbanks. And argue if you may, kids know tasty food. The shape is really the only link cà na has with the Western olive (Olea europaea), though it’s at least two times bigger. Does the name “cà na” mean anything?

                    “Cà” is tomato, and “na” is the northern word for sweetsop, two totally unrelated species to this ovoid fruit. So “cà na” is not a compound noun. I’m no etymologist but here’s my best guess: “cà na” |kah nah| is a shortened vietnamization of the Thai word “kanachai”, from which cultigen taxonomists derive the the scientific name “canarium”, a genus with about 75 species native to the tropics. The cà na we eat and love from those riverbank bushes belongs to the species Canarium nigrum (black canarium) and Canarium album (white canarium), or “trám đen” and “trám trắng” in pure Vietnamese. Another delta variety is Canarium subulatum, pointy at both ends and sappy like green bananas.

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                  • Dreams & Conference – Day 5, Portofino at last


                      “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.

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                    • From popadom to Bombay pizza

                        – Guest post by Paul Simeon – The Indian meals following Cous Cous Cafe‘s takeouts and dinners at Oxford during his two weeks in England.


                        Saturday night I went to Mirch Masala. It was an Indian/Pakistani place. I later found out from the servers that the owner was from Pakistan, and the wife was from India. While I was waiting, alone, the server offered to get me some popadom (it has multiple spellings, but this is how their menu says it).


                        I didn’t know what it was or if it were complimentary, so I just said, “no, that’s alright.”  He brought it anyway, and it was quite nice.  It was a thin, crisp flatbread, like a cracker, and it had three toppings for it: chutney, chopped onions and coriander, and some green mint sauce.  The chutney was quite good.

                        I didn’t finish all of the popadom by the time the main dish came, Murgh Makhani (Tandoori chicken off the bone cooked in butter, yoghurt, cream, cashew nuts, powder and masala sauces) with a side of paratha (rolled out Indian bread made on tawa, spread with ghee) to eat it with.

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