Flavor Boulevard

None of the secondi struck our fancy, but we did order a substantial number of dishes. So substantial that instead of ordering by the names, I curled my index finger and thumb into a square bracket and pointed on the menu “we’ll take these four and these four, and the potato, and the asparagus please.”

That was 10 out of 25 “dishes” on the menu, if olives and salads could count as dishes at all.

Three years ago, I had a bite of pork belly sandwich from Corso. I remember nothing of it, except that it was memorably good. I vowed to come back, but my cravings are always either rice noodle or pancakes (although every time I get pancakes, their texture is gravely disappointing), so for these three years, the vow stayed as a vow and didn’t happen. I kept hearing from multiple sources near and far about how good Corso was, though, so my confidence for this Italian restaurant increased. When I picked Corso for dinner last Friday, I didn’t expect the restaurant to wow us, but I felt confident that the meal would be solid and comforting, that we would be well fed by the end.

The high note: the server replaced our plates and utensils after each course, yay for a clean platform to taste new dishes.

The low note: how low would you like to hear?

In general, this Asian does not have paramount hope for Italian food (to me, Italian food is pasta and cheese, both of which I find to be comforting yet boring), but there’s a reason Italian food is comfort food: assuming that you start from boiling dried pasta and that you have any sense of taste at all, it’s easy to cook an edible plate of pasta. Not perfect, but edible. Guess what, the tagliatelle al sugo at Corso was NOT even edible: it was pungent, muddy and in dire need of more tomato sauce and minced carrots. Each of us took one single bite, then a drink of water and that was it. The plate looked untouched when the server later cleaned up the table.

As far as bad restaurant experiences go, Corso had set a new record the moment they managed to screw up pasta and ground meat.

Were we well fed by the end? Well, we were fed up for sure. Why am I not trying to be nice with this review? Because I decided on this restaurant for dinner. I feel responsible when my friends couldn’t enjoy the meal, thus a positive review would be akin to lame excuses to sugar coat my poor decision. In fact, Corso left such a disappointing taste that it doesn’t even deserve a longer title in this post.

Bonus story: the table next to us ordered the butter-roasted chicken. The lady, who appeared to be in her 70s, looked over when our pastas had just arrived and said to her husband, who was signing the bill, “Look, they got the tagliatelle and the cavatelli. It looks good”. So I turned around, smiled with her and asked how was her chicken. She said it was laden with so much butter and cooked perfectly. I replied “It looked ah-may-zing.” (Chicken breasts never excite me, but I figured the situation called for a diplomatic comment.) In hindsight, did we just order the wrong dishes? Nah, it’s much harder to make white meat succulent than to make pasta edible. But I’m glad that at least one customer was happy with her meal.

The APPETIZERS (antipasti)

Marinated carrots – $5
Tasty level: banal (in any decent banh mi can you find equivalent carrots, with less oil)

Tuscan chicken liver pate – $8 – with sage, anchovy and capers.
Tasty level: Mud (I blame it on the overtone of anchovy)

Crostini – $8 – mussel ragu on toast
Tasty level: Good.
Why is it yellow? Beat me.

Grilled shrimp – $11 – in chili oil and parsley
Tasty level: Horrid.
The shrimps taste metallic. Was it overgrilled on open gas flames?

Salumi – $14 – spicy coppa, sweet coppa, toscano, ciccioli on toast, finocchiona.
Tasty level: Meh.
There’s no difference between the spicy coppa and the sweet coppa, or anything on that plate for that matter.

The SIDES (contorni)

Asparagus – $6
Tasty level: banal
I like the asparagus and I would have ranked it higher, but the sauce… They call it “fontina-tartufo fonduta”, which sounds like a chant to me, is so pungent because of the truffle.

Fries – $6 – One of the few edible items.

The first MAIN COURSES (primi)

Cavatelli – $14 – pasta with garlic pork sausage, kale, olives and parmigiano
Tasty level: Good
It’s not all that different from your homemade macaroni and cheese, but we could eat it happily.

Funghi e polenta – $15 – wild mushroom and polenta.
Tasty level: Meh
The polenta seriously needs more salt. There’s no taste in this dish at all. (The mushroom was faintly sour actually.)

Trippa alla Florentina – $9 – tripe stew with pancetta, spicy tomato, parmigiano and mint.
Tasty level: Okay. But it is too monotonic with the tomato sauce.

Tagliatelle al sugo – $15 – pasta with braised beef and pork.
Tasty level: Inedible.
What did they braise the meat with? Mud?

The DESSERTS (dolce)

Panna cotta – $6 – vanilla custard with spiced vino Lambrusco and Mission fig sauce.
Tasty level: Meh. (The custard is tasteless. The fig sauce is okay, though, it was neither too sweet nor too tangy)

Affogato – $6 – gelato with espresso
Tasty level: Good
If they had screwed up ice cream too, I don’t know what I would have done.

I like the vertical theme

Kristen studying Corso menu.

Kristen also reviewed Corso on her blog, Put It on Kristen’s Plate. We shared the same meal, and her review shows the same grave disappointment but with more thorough consideration than mine.

She also raised a good point: when the server approaches you with the question “Is everything okay?”, how do you respond when the food, in fact, is not okay? Do you say the common “yes” to just send the server away from the table? Do you explain what tastes bad? Do you ask to speak to the chef?

Address: Trattoria Corso
1788 Shattuck Ave
Berkeley, CA 94709
(510) 704-8003
Dinner for 4: $172.77
Reservation is advisable. Despite its surprisingly horrible food, Corso continues to thrive in North Berkeley. All tables later than 5:30 pm on Friday were booked.

A few years ago, things were rough at school and I was a bittermelon*. I got upset easily, turned people away from me, was critical of everything and mostly found faults in mankind. Long story short, I became a misanthrope and immersed myself in two things: anime and foreign language. Ironically, the former taught me to think more positively, and the latter brought me new friends. Then I realized that when I suppress my negative thoughts, eventually they dissipate on their own and I would feel so much better without bothering anyone with my complaints. In America, we are encouraged to express our negative feelings. People like to see and hear about problems (that’s why the daily news are mostly bad news and the reality shows are full of anger). Some people say that it’s good to let it out. That’s true, but it’s only temporary. Complaining is like eating chips, it’s impossible to stop**. Anger multiplies when it’s let loose. The more cynical I feel about a situation, the more depressing scenarios I envision, and it only goes downhill from there.

These days I try to appreciate everything more, and when some incident doesn’t seem so appreciable at first, I find it funny, which clears my mind and then I can see something to appreciate. But sometimes I lapse back into the critical mode, especially when it’s about food. It’s easy to lower my expectations and like everything. It’s also easy to write a very bad review. But it’s hard to find the good points while maintaining my high expectation. A bad review gives the temporary satisfaction of being in the position to judge. A good review for a not-so-good experience makes me appear goody-two-shoes and lose my credibility. One solution is that I only write about the good experiences. But I think that defeats the meaning of a blog. A diary doesn’t have only happy entries, why should a food blog talk only about the good food?

Every bad experience at a restaurant puts me into this dilemma. Cafe Rouge is the most recent one. Here’s my first draft when I sat down to write about it:

On my birthday, we went for drinks at Teance and then we got famished. Drinks for me are not alcohol but a few pots of tea. That’s the great thing about tea: it gives you an appetite. If you ever feel like you ought to eat something but just don’t feel hungry, drink some tea on an empty stomach, the next thing you know is that all you can think about is food. So we were famished, and we headed over to Cafe Rouge next door.

I should stress again that I was famished. Everything tastes better when you’re hungry, that’s a known fact. I could hardly wait to spread the velvety duck liver flan on my tongue and sink my teeth into a succulent slab of steak. The good thing is I didn’t have to wait too long. The problem, though, is that neither of my dreams came true. The duck liver flan was underseasoned and not smooth enough. The steak was so tough I thought I was chewing on a coil of rope.

Would a rare sear make it better? The full story goes like this: on the menu it said “Grilled bavette steak with sweet potatoes, broccoli, red wine cippolini onions and herb butter 24.” — I didn’t know what bavette steak was. The waitress asked me how I’d like my steak, I told her somewhere between medium and medium rare, she said let’s do the medium rare and if it’s too rare I can send it back to the kitchen for more sear. Turned out the cut was extremely sinewy. Even in the middle, where it’s still bright red. I told the waitress, and she said yeah well this is not like New York steak so hmm too bad…

So I gave up halfway and grudgingly waited for desserts.

We narrowed it down to 4 choices: vanilla panna cotta, chocolate streusel cake, granitas, and chocolate ice cream profiteroles, then we asked the waitress what she thought. She highly recommended the panna cotta, and said the following about the granitas: “it’s like a sorbet, if you’re into that kind of thing then it’s good”. We’re into sorbet, so we got the granitas. But granitas ain’t no sorbet, it’s water ice. Seven dollars for a tiny cup of water ice is too much. And not even very flavorful water ice at that. Huge disappointment.

So that’s my luck with Cafe Rouge. The seafood cioppino and the cassoulet that my friends chose turned out a little too seasoned for my taste, but a hundred times better than my steak.

I’ll file Cafe Rouge under “Won’t go out of my way to revisit”, although it’s really on the way every time I go to Teance.

The view from upstairs.

Here’s what I should think:

The restaurant is well-designed, I enjoyed looking from the upstairs at the people’s plates down below. My friends enjoyed their seafood and stew. Today Cafe Rouge’s dinner menu has “Grilled hanger steak with flageolet beans, radicchio and almond bread sauce”, so I wiki-ed “hanger steak”. This cut is “prized for its flavor”, which means its texture is tough. Then I clicked around and read about the other beef cuts. In the end, the steak taught me something new.

We should have listened to the waitress in the matter of desserts. Again, we went in not knowing what “granitas” was and went out knowing exactly what it was, so we got wiser by paying 7 dollars. That’s a cheap price for information.

Most customers around us ordered the burger ($14). While fancy burgers are like Rothko’s paintings to me, some people appreciate them. Maybe the rest of the menu also connects to people at such levels, which I simply couldn’t comprehend.

I probably won’t go out of my way to revisit Cafe Rouge, but its menu changes often and I go out of my way to Teance all the time anyway. When I have a more forgiving heart, and maybe a lot of hunger, I’ll stop by.

I prefer the mild, more positive view, although it’s like steamed rice. Next, I need to figure out how to make it funny. 😉

FOOTNOTE:
(*) Actually, I LOVE bittermelon! Bittermelon soup, bittermelon stir fried with egg, stuffed bittermelon. I love it so much that the first word I could think of that contains “bitter” was “bittermelon”.
(**) In high school health class, the teacher showed us a video about two anorexic twin sisters. When asked how they became anorexic, the surviving sister said that they were chubby when they were little, so one day they decided to lose weight and competed with each other to see who could lose more weight. The only detail that I remembered is that they would eat only 2 potato chips when they ate any chips at all. The interviewer asked her “How could you eat only TWO chips?!” With a lot of willpower.

Housemade charcuterie plate ($15) – rabbit pate: ok; duck liver flan: I’ve had better’s; air dried beef: well, it’s dried meat… Good pickled onion though.

Cafe Rouge bar ribs ($7) – Not fall-off-the-bone tender, but I liked the sauce.

Cioppino ($27) — dungeness crab, rock fish, mussels and clams in red wine tomato sauce. Good but too spicy for me.

Cassoulet of duck confit, garlic sausage, pork, baked beans and bread crumbs ($24) – good beans, tender duck, the sausage was too grainy (and doughy(?!)). Read more about it from Kristen’s point of view.

Blood orange and grapefruit granitas with shortbread cookie ($7) – The flavor wasn’t there.

So Flavor Boulevard went out of existence for about 10 days. It just disappeared. First of all (it wasn’t my fault but I will apologize because that’s how my culture works), my apologies to anyone who tried to visit Flavor Boulevard (and thank you for checking back to read this now 🙂 ). Secondly, I’ll explain. Thirdly, I’ll complain. And finally (I haven’t decided between devil Mai and angelic Mai yet, so maybe there’s no “finally”), I’ll make a voodoo doll of whoever caused this to happen.

My site got DDoS.

That sounds like a disease, doesn’t it? It happened like that too. One beautiful night after work I decided to update my blog, and dah dee dee dee dah I typed in the url and “Oops Google could not find flavorboulevard.com”. This had happened from time to time and usually it came back on within the hour, so I waited a bit… nothing changed… I started to worry… I emailed Web Hosting Pad (WHP) who was my webhost at the time and they said, in so many words about violation of terms and whatnot, that my account has been suspended. That explained why my primary site pmaitruong.com and the two subdomains disappeared too. I said okay why and what can I do to get the suspension off. They said your site has DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack and I’m forever suspended.

What?!

It’s like you went for a regular checkup and bam you’re told that you got Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, and the doctor basically kicked you and your confused face and your whatever-name disease out of his office with a Wikipedia link to your whatever-name disease. (That’s exactly what the tech support person at WHP did by the way, they gave me the Wikipedia link to DDoS when I asked them what to do…)

I scrambled. Then from a couple of panic and confused hours searching the internet and message exchanging with friends (thank you for all of the messages! They were helpful in many ways! 😉 ), I gathered two things:

1. DDoS is caused by blockheads who weren’t love by the parents and simply take it out on other people for absolutely no good reason. Bullies. Sites that get DDoS get floods of fake traffic that exceeds the limit your webhost gives you, this is damaging to the host because it slows down their whole system, so their solution is to block your account. Nobody benefits from this, not even the attacker. Only the site gets hurt.
2. There’s no simple solution once you get DDoS and your site is on a shared server (which is what most amateur blogs like mine are on). The only solution is to change host.

So I did. As my friend Tyler put it, the problem was cyber-bullying, and the solution was to move your house to a better, hopefully more gated neighborhood and hope for the best. Pretty passive I know, but there was nothing else I could do on my end when I couldn’t access my cpanel, and WHP tech support insisted on upgrading to VPS hosting (which is for e-business: dedicated IP address, more bandwidth, all that jazz that costs a lot).

With that we move on to Part III: The Complaint

Switching host is a pain.

There are companies that will do it for $160/site, and I can understand why after 9 days doing it myself. Getting the files from WHP was the first problem: the guy said that I have 4GB of files so I’d need to delete either my gt-cache or my uploads in the content if I want the backup to be generated without problem. Another “what!” moment. Deleting gt-cache will cause 404 errors. Deleting uploads means no more pictures on Flavor Boulevard. Yeah.. I don’t think so 😐 . I insisted on giving me the full backup. He said you might get corrupted file. I said whatev, just do the backup please. I got the backup. It’s fine.

Then I spent 4 days uploading the files to the new host. FTP-ing was SO SLOW. But there was a very nice tech support guy at the new host that made things a bit more pleasant.

I asked specifically for his help every time I went to chat support. Unfortunately the guy’s weekend started just as my files finished uploading, so I went through the rest of the process with other people. Some were friendlier than others, but in general I got what I needed. I’ll spare you the details here (yeah like I haven’t said enough jargons already, thank you for reading this far down by the way! 😉 ).

Part IV: The Voodoo Doll

Devil Mai wants to say many nasty things here but Little Mom has taught me to be nice and proper and not to wish bad things to people, so I’ll refrain.

To be honest I’m not that angry actually. Mishaps happen. I doubt anybody targeted me specifically. (I don’t think I made enemies with any tech-savvy people, did I 😛 ). I was first scared of losing my blogs. They mean a lot to me. They hold memories and made me friendships. Well, mostly memories because I have a pretty poor memory, I need this space to store the feelings and names and bits of culture I’ve encountered in the past 4 years.

Somewhat exaggerated, but I felt at a loss like a parent with a sick child. I now somewhat understand why my mom didn’t sleep for 10 days to watch me when I had a bad fever.

And then I learned A LOT from this. All those web jargons. The proper procedure to host switching. Things that webhosts don’t always tell you unless you ask. The different places that have a hand on your domains. Tech support is much nicer when you transfer to them than when you leave them (of course!).

So… you DDoS attacker:  I’ll make you a voodoo doll and smear THICK GOOEY WARM DARK chocolate sauce ALL OVER its face and wish you bon appetit.

Dear Flavor Boulevard, I’ll take more proper care of you from now on. Don’t get sick again. Love, Mai.

There seems to be a new trend in the East Bay restaurant business: it has to be hidden and/or without a sign. First it was embarrassing walking up and down the street to find Commis, and now the same thing happens with Plum. Is this some kind of scavenger hunt joke?

Plum‘s menu is short and sweet like its name. However, the same thing can’t be said about the majority of its dishes, which either tip a bit over to the salty side (pate ciccioli and bacon) or stay way back in plaindom (crispy pig ears and trout). There are bright notes, too. The turnip soup with yuzu kosho, pear and cilantro is a light, heart-warming start. The short ribs with peanuts and sweet potato has a deep Asian flavor. The caramelized brioche with coffee ice cream makes a comforting finish.

Ironically, the yummy dishes didn’t have good pictures. But here’s a small album to get a taste of Plum.

Address: Plum
2214 Broadway
Oakland, California
(510) 444.7586

A Facebook ad reminded me of this place. Words of mouth from the previous conference attendants say it’s *the* place to go to in Santa Fe if you like “real” margaritas. It’s also the place where I first learned that tequila is made from the blue agave plant, which is *not* a cactus, and that there’s a spirit called mezcal, which is not as popular as tequila but seems to taste better. When you sit next to someone you just met for the first time but feel like having a meaningful conversation, food and drink makes an educational topic.

Because Little Mom would be scolding me as soon as she reads this (for good reasons), I should tell her now to rest assured that the highest quantity of alcohol I’ve ever had and will ever have is in her red wine pineapple dessert. Although I don’t drink, I do feel like I should know something about the alcohols, just the way I did my high school research projects on psilocybin mushrooms and corundum. Information is fun.

And so was the trio that played music for us at Maria’s that night.
—- Unfortunately, the food was bad —-
Like Little Mom says, drunk people can’t tell what they’re eating, so it makes perfect sense that the sober taste buds wouldn’t tolerate pub food. I ordered half a chicken and it was dry enough to make into yarn, but it was July, just a bit too early for a sweater.

Now for the bookkeeping part:

1. Pictured is the flight of three 90-proof-or-higher mezcals ($14): Del Maguay Chichicapa, Sombra, and Los Nahules. The acrid smell increases in that order, but so does the “good” taste, described as “smokey with a fruity hint” by Amol.
2. The yarn chicken was called Galisteo Chicken ($14.95), “a Maria’s exclusive,” parboiled, deep fried, and smothered in fresh chile salsa. One thing I’ve learned in Santa Fe: the vegan dishes taste better than the meats here.

The difference between a bowl of ramyeon at Gomnaru and a six-course dinner at Commis is the ratio of satisfaction to expectation. This is how I rank my foods, which allows me to enjoy a Cheetos just as much as any prime ribs done well, perhaps even more. There are certain extremes, like the cafeteria at Berkeley and LBL, no matter how low I set my bar, they manage to wow me with their ability to ruin everything, including fried rice. Anyhow, I figured that it’s only respectful to the chefs that I go to a well applauded, top ranking restaurant with high expectation. But for Commis, I think my expectation was a bit too high.

The ingredients: fresh, interesting, nothing to complain about. The techniques: nothing I know enough to comment about. The combinations: hmm… An hour after dinner, Rob asked me: “How would you describe your dinner tonight in four sentences?” “Four?” “Three. Ask me again and I’ll say two.” The truth is I would rather sum it up in one: “I don’t remember”.

I can remember vividly the banh mi a vendor sold in front of my high school ten years back, the way its charred meatballs melted in my mouth, its yellow mayonnaise, its crumbs broke free into the motobike-exhaust-filled air. I can remember equally vividly the chicken crepe I bought a rainy night in Seattle four years back, the running warmth of its cheese, its springy softness, my frozen fingers. Just how was the poached egg, or the soup, or the dessert at Commis last Wednesday night? I can’t even remember what’s in the soup.

For every course, like at any fine restaurant, our hostess arrived with a gently toned, slurred-together string of ingredients, of which I could hear the first and the last words and consonants in between. I am not skilled enough to detect a sprinkle of tarragon just by tasting, so I base my judgement on the harmony. Scallop-like monkfish paired with grainy beans was the most discordant in texture, and its accompanying sauce was a bit too fishy and too salty. The opening cookie excited us in its rock-like appearance but hit a dry tune, I suspect a pebble size would be more palatable. The ending nectarine jelly invited little attention and tasted too sweet. Intermittently flared a few high notes, such as the dill weed‘s tanginess in a cauliflower-potato-salad combo, or the pistachio sauce tightened with a radish zest of horsegrass (one of these days I will find it on Google).

The most memorable piece of the night was a cucumber, green apple, and eucalyptus palate-cleanser. It was what it sounds like: a sorbet. The cucumber made a profound impression. I would trade the whole dinner for another shot glass of this. But the sorbet alone does not make the meal worth its hundred dollar value or make it stand out.

It was neither too good nor too bad. It was like a landscape painting with excruciating details and no focus. There could be a better night, but tonight’s impression was not enough to prompt a revisit, so there won’t be a better night. The next time I pass by Commis‘ signless glass door, I’ll just pass by.

Bob’s and Dang’s comments on my Kiraku post prompted me to wiki “octopus”. In a way, I needed to remind myself that computers are wonderful creatures that don’t always give me incomprehensible error messages. Then I got reminded of my most memorable experience with octopus on a plate. It was in Santa Fe this past summer.

When there are good news and bad news, I prefer to hear the bad news first, so that’s how I’ll start describing La Boca. Their octopus was terrible. Octopuses are chewy things, and I have never had any octopus as opposite from chewy as this one. Pulpo, as called on the menu, sliced and dressed in pimenton, olive oil, lemon juice and seasalt, sounds like a wonderful refreshment after touring Santa Fe under the flamboyant sun. Well, if you give this octopus to a green octopus-looking alien who hasn’t the slightest preconception of what octopus tastes like, he would most likely go home defining octopus as beans. Yes, it was dense and grainy like bean.

Blame no one but ourselves for ordering raw seafood in the middle of the desert. The rest of the meal, here comes the good news, was tasty.

Spinach salad with roasted beets, goat cheese, red onion, pomegranate vinaigrette. I’ve never had bad roasted beets (I would say the same thing for octopus prior to this day), and pomegranate vinaigrette sounds just right.

Grilled artichoke salad with jamon Serrano, arugula and aged cherry vinaigrette. Grilled artichoke is nutty, the right kind of nutty. And again, how I like fruity vinaigrettes!

Tapas trio: hummus, red pepper-almond spread, goat cheese, spinach, raisin, capers, and flatbread to scoop. Me most impressed with the spinach dip while the girl friends fell for the spicy almond spread.

Pincho de puerco: free range pork skewer with apricot honey and green olives. It would have been a great one had the pork not been so chewy. The wrong kind of chewy.

Cantimpalitos: grilled mini chorizos, garlic aioli, and potatoes. Hyunmi liked the potatoes, and that’s all that matters. 🙂

It’s one of those meals that makes me consider going vegan: the pasture was indeed greener there.

Dinner for four: ~$70 (We had to run for the last bus so we couldn’t even wait for the check…)
Address: La Boca
72 W Marcy St
Santa Fe, NM 87503
(505) 982-3433

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.

“When in New Mexico, eat chile,” that’s what I’ve been told before my trip to Santa Fe this week. I’m not particularly crazy about chile, but I’ve also been told by a reliable source that the New Mexican chile is a whole different game from the Texan chile (which the reliable source is not particularly crazy about either), implying that the New Mexican chile is something worth looking for. And so be it: the first time my girl friends and I descended from the St. John’s College cafeteria to downtown Santa Fe, we joined everyone else at the Bumble Bee’s for burritos and tacos.

Of course, I got the only thing on the menu that has “chile” in its name: the Red Chile Chicken Burrito ($10.81 with tax).

It was huge. It was chubbier than my arm, stuffed with exceedingly tender chicken and smothered in pico de gallo, queso cotija, and red chile. The chicken was no doubt tasty, but the raw onion overpowered everything else in bitterness, which didn’t help the monotonic spicy chile, either. I stopped short after a third of the way.

Hyunmi and Eric clearly made the better (and more efficient) choice: pork and fish soft tacos. Not only did the tacos look delicious, they were also finished. As Eric put it, “despite their little size, they’re surprisingly filling”.

The one who was the happiest with her food was most likely Jen. She also got an (unsurprisingly) chubby burrito that was bursting with bean, rice, grilled pepper and onion, lettuce, and guacamole.

Perhaps the kitchen had put so much effort into Jen’s vegan burrito that it took forever to arrive at the table. Perhaps the gods just found her deserving of a good meal after she had been patiently filling her empty stomach with Bumble Bee’s delicious lemon-infused water. Either way, I’m glad that I was the only one who wasn’t thrilled about her food. Bumble Bee’s has 3 locations (two in Santa Fe and one in Albuquerque) and it’s the only drive-thru down-this-artsy-town, a sign of establishment in its craft: the easy-to-eat crossbreeds of Southern and Mexican cuisines, spiced up by fresh ingredients in a lively, if not childlike, setting. Shouldn’t judge a baja grill by one burrito, I guess.

Being the open-minded eater I am (sarcasm, maybe?), I’ll also give the New Mexican chile another try for sure.

Address: Bumble Bee’s Baja Grill #1
301 Jefferson
Santa Fe, NM 87501
(505) 820-2862

Three times. Aaron and I drove up and down Westheimer three times to look for this little bitty sign of a black-and-white pig and a one-syllable name: Feast. The restaurant with over 150 glittering reviews on Yelp and several listings of Best New Restaurants appears humbly a residential-looking house, which faces a brick box called the Crabell Building and is a stone’s throw away from Hollywood Food & Cigars if you’re coming from the east. Hollywood Food & Cigars, you say? Well that was part of Varun’s instruction for us, the last two man standing as the GPS is taking over the world. (Or one man and Mai, but that’s not the point).

Varun had been here before on one of his food expeditions, and heaven knows why he did not veto my call when I suggested Feast for our rendezvous. I know why I suggested it: it has a daily changing menu that happened to have interesting wild games on the day I looked it up online. The day we came has more of a porky theme, presented in somewhat interesting combinations (click to see Feast Menu on Jun 3).

Aaron and Varun each decided on two appetizers for flexibility. If the listed price could initially throw off some shy college students, the good thing about Feast is that this is Texas we’re talking about: each appetizer is hefty enough to be a full course and the entree makes two meals. The content for us is heavy too, partly because we stayed macho and away from the salads, partly because the Scallop St. Jacques and the Potato and Leek Vichyssoise were loaded with enough cream and cheese they should just call them cheese bowls.

Normally, scallop has a chew to it, but the scallops tonight melted in my mouth almost indistinguishably from the cream sauce coating them. That wouldn’t be a bad thing if you are into drinking your food, but once you take away the texture from the scallop, it’s nothing but a blob as flavorful as it is colorful.

On the bright side, Feast makes stuff soft. My pork cheeks with red pepper and Rioja also melted in my mouth, its accompanying omelet-like rice tortitas (“pancakes”) were decent, although the seasoning reminded me too much of the veal mixiote I had in Puerto Vallarta. That veal was too salty, this pork was too bland, but both of them reflect a lacking attention to taste.

The Spiced Pork and Dried Fruit Chili was also both too seasoned and unimpressively plain at the same time, although with rare highlights of raisins. Aaron’s choice of Pork Rillettes served on toasts was arguably the most harmonic piece of the night, and the only dish that was finished.

Because Little Mom wouldn’t like me criticizing anything too much, I would rank Feast in the same category with Harry Potter and Las Vegas: stuff I don’t regret trying just so that I can tell anyone who would recommend them to me that I’ve tried them. (The night we went there, Feast was also crowded and noisy like Las Vegas.) Will I try Feast again? When I have dentures, maybe. Or when my heart can’t take any more salt.

Or when I want to be cool like Varun: order two appetizers, try one spoon from each, and eat bread with butter for the rest of the hour.

Although we felt bad about asking the waitress to describe a couple of dessert items and not ordering any, we felt great about filling up on frozen yogurt and hot fudge minutes later at Aaron’s favorite: Swirll (right next to, and I think cuter than, The Chocolate Bar).

Address: Feast
219 Westheimer
Houston, TX 77006
(713) 529-7788