Flavor Boulevard

One of The Clog‘s editors said: “Let’s do a cafe crawl around campus.” I happened to have tried almost everything at UCafe and been going there forever these days, so I took up that part of the crawl. I sent a 466-word essay to the editor, right before  I saw her email from 5 minutes earlier: “hey guys, cuz we’ll do 5 cafes total, let’s make it 100-150 words each”. Haha oops. Cutting time. Here’s the finished product.

Here’s my original 466 words. With pictures. 😉

“Since its grand opening last fall, UCafe on the South side has proved to be a reliable supplier of the Spanish bun (ham, cheese and sausage in a roll), the perfect $1.95 filler for those 10 minutes between classes.

Convenience:

It takes 1 minute to walk from Hearst Gym to UCafe, which is next to the post office at the Durant-Bowditch corner (yes, the post office with the most terrible customer service ever!). In UCafe, most of the pastries are placed in glass cabinets, you walk in, grab a tray at the front, a sheet of bakery paper and a pair of tongs, and start choosing. Even during the lunch rush, it doesn’t take more than 5 minutes to walk in and out of UCafe with your lunch if you already know what you want from the cabinets. If you have more time, a banh mi is worth the wait, and watching the kitchen staff rolling the dough into batches of ready-to-bake sausage rolls or the pâté getting spread inside your sandwich makes time go by faster.

There is enough seating for three by the window ledge, but almost nobody ever sits there.

Variety:

Clockwise from top left: pork bun, mango mousse, pork-and-green-onion roll, macadamia black devil (basically, rectangular chocolate muffin with nuts)

Clockwise from top left: patechaud (brioche with minced pork, $1.50), mini chocolate mousse ($3.95), cold cut banh mi ($3.25), lychee green tea (with lychee jelly, $3.50)

For the moment, only two kinds of banh mi are available: cold cuts ($3.25) and grilled pork ($2.75). However, the pastry selection is huge: several kinds of bread loaves, savory buns with sausage, beef, pork and chicken fillings, sweet buns with bean paste, berry and pineapple fillings, mooncakes, shortcakes, cookies, chocolate-muffin-like “butter bread”, etc. They also have a colorful assortment of macaroons, $1.25 each and “buy 4 get 1 free”.

To add to the young, chic but casual look of the café, the cake assortment and a multitude of milk tea and smoothie flavors are pleasing to the eyes and affordable for a student budget.

Price:

The cabinet pastries are all under $3, the mini cakes and regular-size drinks are under $4. One time they only accepted credit card for purchase over $15, I struggled to get up to $14.95 and the guy took pity on me and swiped my card anyway. Thank goodness they have no credit card limit now.

Taste:

Of course, you get what you pay for. Their cakes tend to be too sweet, the macaroons don’t appear with the best texture, and the banh mi is not made with the correct type of airy, scrumptious Vietnamese bread it’s supposed to be. But the overall taste is satisfactory, at least with the savory sausage buns.

To sum it up, UCafe is not a café where you sit and study while stylishly savoring your croissant with a cup of latte-art cappuccino. You can’t meet someone there for coffee either. But from there you can pick up a satisfying 2-minute lunch to go. It’s honest and no frills.”

Address: UCafe
2550 Durant Ave (between Bowditch St & Telegraph Ave)
Berkeley, CA 94704
(510) 981-1853

Isn’t there always some restaurant that you pass by a thousand times, think about trying it every of those thousand times, and just never do? For me, that restaurant is Bistro Liaison. Its rustic red awning shines brightly at the corner of Shattuck and Hearst, draws my attention enough to remember that from there I’ve sampled a cup of quenelle souffle – salmon and scallop mousse in a shrimp sauce (think clam chowder but fishier and cheesier, and surprisingly good!) – almost three years ago during a North Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto event. But the timing was just never right for an all-out dinner, until a few weeks ago.

We walked in without reservation, half worried that there wouldn’t be a table for us, and half worried that there would be a table for us, which might imply that the restaurant wasn’t good enough to fill up on a Friday night. But we were a party of two, perfect to squeeze in a table at the end of the room. When the hostess at the front desk offered to take my friend’s coat, we began feeling the warmth of old-fashioned restaurant service. And it only got warmer[…]

Read the rest of the review here. Starting from this post, I’ve joined the staff at the Daily Californian. Some of my posts are still in the editing tube. My editor seems easy-going at first but no sloppy writing goes unnoticed. He keeps things quite professional. And my new food-loving friends are so much more knowledgeable than me in the food news area. I hope to learn a lot (^.^)

A short note on Bistro Liaison that I didn’t include in my Daily Cal post: so I liked their seared pork loin a lot, and I emailed them to ask about it in details (what’s in the sauce, what’s the mini pasta thing, etc.). They NEVER replied! Such is the treatment you get when you’re just a blogger. I’m slightly, very slightly, vexed.

Address: Bistro Liaison
1849 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA
(510) 849-2155
liaisonbistro.com

In Europe the royalty and the aristocracy used to eat a lot better than the peasants – they weren’t eating the same things at all. It was either partridge or porridge, and each class stuck to its own food. But when Queen Elizabeth came here and President Eisenhower bought her a hot dog I’m sure he felt confident that she couldn’t have had delivered to Buckingham Palace a better hot dog than that one he bought for her for maybe twenty cents at the ballpark. Because there is no better hot dog than a ballpark hot dog. Not for a dollar, not for ten dollars, not for a hundred thousand dollars could she get a better hot dog. She could get one for twenty cents and so could anybody else.
– Andy Warhol

Why is that ballpark hot dog the best hot dog? Because the ballpark hot dog seller sells nothing but hot dogs. You can’t beat someone who does it day in and day out, a thousand times and another thousand times more often than you.

Every time I look at Nancy Togami’s collection of hundreds of kokeshi, I’m reminded of this championship of experience. Each kokeshi artist carves the same shape, paints the same eyebrows, creates the same facial expression for one doll after another. After each doll, he’s one step closer to perfecting it.

After each oden, Nancy is one step closer to perfecting her oden. And umeboshi. And seared tuna with avocado, frisée, enoki, daikon and tobiko.

Three yixing teapots for three kinds of tea.
We started off with Buddha’s Hand and Tung Ting Cold Summit, then finished with Medium Roast Tieguanyin. The Tung Ting was surprisingly long-lasting even after the fifth infusion.

Seaweed salad and Nancy’s homemade umeboshi in the middle. Tsukemono (clockwise from the pink ginger): pickled ginger, pickled cucumber, lotus root, takuan, miso-pickled garlic, and salt-cured garlic (also pink).

More side dishes. “Red and White” carrot and daikon (salted and seasoned with sweet rice vinegar), abalone salad with tobiko, burdock root and carrot kimpira, and black beans.
The Buddha’s Hand oolong made a nice pairing with the pickled vegetables, as it emphasizes the vegetal freshness and floralized the aroma.

Seared tuna salad, with frisee, enoki, avocado, daikon, yuzu tobiko (yellow) and wasabi tobiko (green)

Oden – with spiral kamaboko and satsuma age (balls and rectangles), shrimp, chicken thighs, quail eggs, lotus roots, green onions, carrots, kombu, tofu, konnyaku, and Nancy’s years of making oden.
Among the three teas that we tried, Tung Ting was the best match with this soup. “Comforting” sums up everything.

Rice by Kenji san, i.e., Mr. Togami. Perfect with a sprinkle of furikake.

Lychee gelato, mango and ginger cookie to pair with anonymous but delicious oolong.

Cheesecake from La Farine, Fiorello’s raspberry gelato and balsamic caramel ice cream. Paired with the dry Medium Roast Tieguanyin, this dessert combination gives an intense finish that Nancy describes as citrus like grapefruit, while I find it more nutty and cocoa-y. 
Per Nancy’s advice, we sprinkled our balsamic caramel ice cream with some Iburi Jyo cherry-wood-smoked sea salt from Oga Peninsula of the Akita Prefecture, Japan.
The salt’s aroma is smoky yet sweet. It tastes as expensive as it costs.

The pictures speak for themselves better than I can. This American lady embraces Japanese tradition, cuisine and visual art and incorporates them into her daily lifestyle with so much fine details that humble my experience at any Japanese restaurant I have tried in America. Because they are restaurants. Nancy’s homemade oden is the ballpark hot dog that triumphs over any other hot dog, in the same way that our mothers’ homemade dinners are the best ballpark hot dogs, except they’re the hot dogs that only a handful of lucky people can get. 😉

The meal was so inspiring I felt like I could speak Japanese afterwards.

A very small part of Nancy’s kokeshi collection. Click on the image to see better details.

Mother said “you shall not eat meat on the first day of Tet“. And I said “yes, Mom.”

It has been our family tradition that the first day of the lunar year is a vegan day. It’s not unique to our family of course, most Vietnamese Buddhists eat vegan on certain days of the lunar calendar, the number of days depend on the amount of devotion to practice the precept of not killing. To refrain from all of the festive food is also a step to train the mind against the worldly temptations. Normally, that would be difficult if I were at home, given the excess of pork sausage loaves, braised pork and eggs, banh chung banh tet, roast chicken, fried spring rolls, dumplings, et cetera. But I’m here by myself, it’s like expatriation on top of expatriation. To refrain from meat has never been so easy. 😉

My quick and simple vegan lunch: steamed rice with muối mè (a mix of sesame, salt and sugar, similar to furikake but Vietnamese 😉 ), steamed bok choy, shisozuke umeboshi (salted plum with pickled shiso leaf) and pickled cucumber (a kind of tsukemono), an orange, a cup of mung bean milk from Banh Mi Ba Le and a cup of rose water. (In my recent San Jose trip, I found out that Chinese people take a particular liking to the bok choy outside the food realm. They make huge glass (or plastic?) bok choy that resembles chubby gold fish, except green and white, to put on pedestals for house decorations. Pretty cute, actually!)

Rose water is the simplest way to healthily flavor your water that I learned from a friend: pour dried rosebuds (easily found as an herbal tea at any tea shop) into cold water, let the water be for a while, drink, refill the water. I use a small sieve to filter the rose petals when I pour my glasses and to keep the rose in the water pitcher, but eating a few petals wouldn’t hurt. I thought about making little temaki (rice cone wrapped in toasted seaweed) but that might taste too salty with all the pickles and muối mè.

Snacks: vegan Biscoff cookie given to us by Abbot Thich Huyen Viet at the Lien Hoa Buddhist temple in Houston (these are surprisingly tasty!), a Pink Lady apple, Miyaki Komedawara okoshi (basically, peanut and rice sweets) and a pot of Vietnamese lotus green tea.

For dinner, I’ll probably have a few bánh u tro (sticky rice ash dumpling with red bean filling) and a packet of Vifon Vietnamese vegan instant noodle, then wait until 00:01 am to have a bowl of Dreyer’s double fudge brownie ice cream. 😉 (That’s right, refraining from ice cream is still difficult…) Happy Lunar New Year!

Yesterday was Flavor Boulevard’s 3rd birthday. Today is my nth birthday. Back in 2010, a good friend of mine used to give me a ride to San Jose at least once every other month, sometimes more, when I got cravings for Vietnamese food, and especially when the Lunar New Year approached. When Flavor Boulevard was about one year old, things got complicated. Long story short, I hadn’t been back to San Jose for two years. – Why? You couldn’t rent a car? – Well… you know the stereotype that Asian girls can’t drive? It’s true for this one. It’s embarrassing. People, even those who don’t like driving, feel much more relaxed when they drive me than when I drive them. I’m also used to driving in Houston, where signs are helpful and people are friendly. Driving in California scares me. I’ve been here for 4 years, driven here twice, and both times reaffirmed my scare. So Vietnamese food cravings are satiated with the places in Oakland, where I can reach by bus. I don’t remember what I did for the 2012 Tet (Vietnamese lunar new year), and there seems to be no record of it on Flavor Boulevard.

Then one day Mom decided: “Rent a car and go with Kristen to San Jose. It’ll be good for you to drive, and I wouldn’t worry as much as if you drive alone.” I asked Kristen, she agreed to join me (brave girl). I felt nervous and excited. I reserved a car. Step 1 complete.

I signed the paperwork and got the key. I turned on the engine. Yes! Step 2 complete.

I drove from Enterprise to Kristen‘s house. Minus the two times people honked at me and one strange male voice “where are you going baby?” that came from nowhere (there was no green light to turn left, I got confused and stopped at the intersection for god knows how long), I’d say it went smoothly. I parked across the street from her place. The phone call “I’m here” to her was the most accomplishing moment I felt last week. Step 3 complete.

There is a huge difference between driving alone and driving with another person. It’s more huge than the difference between I-880 from Oakland to San Jose and US-59 in Houston. We arrived at the Lion Supermarket. Step 4 complete.

We ate.

Cold-cuts bánh mì (silk sausage and pate).
Grilled pork bánh mì (also with pate).
A wider-than-my-hand ice cream bar with frozen banana, jackfruit, coconut shavings and peanuts that sent both of us back into the car to rest. (While resting, we sipped on sugar cane juice (with a salted kumquat) and tried to figure out the flavors of two frozen treats that tasted durian one minute, passion fruit the next, and jackfruit the next next. Those were weird.)
A giganmongous plate of bánh cuốn (steamed rice roll), where the rolls (quite a few of them too) were completely buried underneath a thousand other things: an eggroll, an infinite amount of chả lụa (silk sausage), fried shrimp sausage on sugar cane stick, bánh cống (fried mung bean bread), and a shrimp wafer. (We couldn’t finish this plate. A mere $10, not the best banh cuon I’ve ever had, but the leftover was enough for my dinner.)

We bought.

Bánh chưng for Tet.
Chewy sesame candy (mè xửng) and candied coconut strips, also for Tet.
Cha lua.
Pickled mustard greens.
Banana bread pudding.
Bánh xu xê.
Some fermented tofu cookies (I haven’t tried them yet, but Kristen said she likes them, so I think I’d like them too…)
Eleven green waffles at the Century Bakery, because when you buy 10 you get 1 free.
And other food things…

We drove back.

Minus one tiny tiny incident where stupid me forgot the key inside the car, locked us out, had to call Roadside Assistance and waited 30 minutes for the rescue, I’d say Step 5 was wildly successful.

I dropped Kristen off. Refilled the tank. Drove to Enterprise. Tried to park between a gargantuan 12-seat van (or maybe 17?) and a car. Got myself halfway into the spot and literally one inch away from the van before realizing that I could either stop or crash into the van. This was 7 pm, dark enough that the pedestrians who were pointing and laughing at my ridiculous situation couldn’t really see my face (I hope). Step 6 very far from complete. I called Kristen for rescue. She and her boyfriend rushed over. It was one of those moments when your friends seem to appear with a shining halo and white wings. I felt forever indebted to them.

When that car got into the spot (Kristen‘s boyfriend moved it like nothing at all), I sighed in relief, and strangely, my fear of driving in California also evaporated. The last barrier between me and food removed. I thought about the next trip to San Jose with ease. Now I can go there any time I want. Now I can have banh chung for Tet again. Now I can go everywhere.

Step 7 complete.

Step 8: learn how to park.

Happy Lunar New Year! Happy birthday to me. 🙂

Addresses:
Kim’s Sandwiches
1816 Tully Rd, San Jose, CA 95122
(408) 270-8903
CD Bakery
1816 Tully Road, Store #198, San Jose, CA 95122
(408) 238-1484
Thien Huong Banh Cuon Trang Hoi
1818 Tully Rd, San Jose, CA 95122
(408) 238-8485
Century Bakery (inside Grand Century Mall)
1111 Story Rd, San Jose, CA 95122
(408) 287-9188

P.S. Check out Kristen’s post about our adventure on her blog, she described the food in details. 😉

Been one measly week since I got back to the West Coast, and my stomach is already shifting in discomfort with the regular irregular dining pattern of a student, or perhaps of just someone living alone.

At home, on weekdays, we have dinner at 5 while watching TV. For lunch there are banh bao that Mom made, each as big as a small fist with a pork ball and a half an egg inside, refrigerated. I just need to microwave it for 1 minute. On Saturday or Sunday, I’m in charge of choosing a restaurant for lunch, preferably somewhere near Bellaire, where Mom buys a couple of banh gio, which I can also have for lunch during the week, and a pound of cha lua. For dinner, usually something small, since we are already too full from lunch. This time home, my favorite dinner has been toasted french bread with pâté and cha lua. (Mom tucked 2 cans of pâté into my backpack before the flight. Airport security didn’t like the look of them on screen so they had to do a bag check. The lady asked me, “what is this?” I said, “pâté”. “What is it?” “Pâté…” Her quizzical look… “Um… you know… like… a paste?” “When you open it, is it liquid or a chunk?” “It’s a chunk” – well, this is liver pâté, it’s not exactly a chunk, but I know what answer would give me my pâté in tact – “Ok… cuz if it’s like guacamole then we can’t let it pass…” “No no it’s not like guacamole.” I got to keep my cans. I’m still not entirely sure if pâté is like guacamole.)

Anyway, the meals at home…

It goes without saying that the meals at “home” home were Vietnamese. Rice, rice paper rolls with slow-cooked pork and pickles, mung bean xoi with sesame mix, pho, mi Quang, homemade jam from fruits in the garden. But when we went out, somehow it all turned to Japanese(*). Hibachi in Port Arthur, shabu on Christmas Eve, and sort-of-izakaya on the Sunday before I flew out because Red Lantern, a Vietnamese restaurant downtown, closes on Sundays. (I don’t understand restaurants that close on Sundays.)

At Shabu House, we asked for desserts. The girl pulled out a pot from under the bar counter where we sat, a fading aluminum pot that looks like something you would see grandma uses to boil eggs. She ladled a soupy mung-bean-and-rice pudding into three bowls.

– Oh? Is this Japanese?! We have something just like this too.
*Smile*
– No, it’s Taiwanese…
– Oh… are you… Taiwanese?
– No, I’m Korean. *grin*

The dessert was too bland in Mom’s and Dad’s standard. Actually, yeah, it was bland, maybe 10 sugar grains per bowl or something. But I thought it was the perfect cooling end to a hot pot lunch. I also like that pot. So homey.

Or maybe it’s just because I was eating with my parents that I was more forgiving of the food. Company matters. 😉

(*) Ach no, I lied. There was one Korean lunch. The mandu was too oily, the grilled fish too charred, the seafood jeongol too spicy. But there was one very good thing about Seoul House: the banchan cart next to the wall where you can get as much and whatever kind of kimchi and other side dishes as you want. And I like their sweet soy sauce potato (gamja jorim). In fact, I like all gamja jorim. 😉

Addresses:
Shabu House
9889 Bellaire Blvd
Houston, TX 77036
(713) 995-5428
Lunch for three with dessert: $33.51

Seoul House
10603 Bellaire #107
Houston, TX 77072
(281) 575-8077
Lunch for three: $51.80

The latest addition to my dream house: a wooden platform to put in the garden where we can sit cross-legged, eat, drink tea, lie down while listening to the birds and wind chime. That platform, we call it phảng |fang|, but I don’t know the Japanese or English word for it :-/

It came about when Kristen and I sat on that wooden thing outside Ippuku tonight. It was outside outside, not a patio sitting, no chairs, no tables, just a platform like a wide bench. We came for their goma ice cream, and the wait for a table was super long so ordering at the bar was the best idea. You’d think it’d be cold, but there was the heater lamp hanging off the roof to warm us. My face was so warm I thought I was gonna get sunburn at 9 pm.

It was so relaxing. Sit cross-legged, savor sesame ice cream, sesame cracker and a mochi, watch the street and the boys goofing off on it, and be watched by people waiting for a table. Come to think of it, we weren’t any less goofy than those boys. 😀

Address: Ippuku
2130 Center Street #101
Berkeley, CA 94704
(510) 665-1969

I wrote about twenty different Ippuku dishes before. Every time I came here it feels nicer and nicer. The guy at the bar was also so kind, he gave us water and wet towels (one of which is visible in the picture to the right) although we only ordered one bowl of ice cream…

*Photo courtesy of Kristen Sun*

UPDATE: As of November 2013, this dessert is no more. The machine broke down and would cost too much to be fixed, mostly Asians like this dessert while non-Asians don’t, and management doesn’t consider Asians the target audience. I weep (with rage).

Curry rice with tonkatsu – $10.95 – a bit more peppery than the curry rice at Musashi in Berkeley, but still mild enough to my taste, pretty good.

On the western edge of Yosemite National Park is a little town called Sonora. In Sonora there is Koto, the only Japanese restaurant in a 38-mile radius. In Koto, I had saba shio for the first time. It’s a grilled mackerel seasoned with salt, squeeze on some lemon juice if you like. I love homey things like that, especially when it’s so good I wanted it again the next day, but Koto was closed on Sundays. We left on Monday, with a hole in my heart.

Now before I go to any Japanese restaurant, I check if it has saba shio.

Not many do, but Kaneyama does. Only as an appetizer (which means half a mackerel instead of the whole fish) but better than nothing. A delicious crunching sound broke the air as Little Mom broke the skin with her chopsticks. We knew at that instant that the saba shio was the best dish of the day.

Saba shio – $6.25 – Grilled mackerel with salt. So simple and the best of the bunch.

Gindala – $10.95 – Black cod marinated in sweet miso glaze, and they weren’t kidding, it was really sweet. Nice and plump.

The gindala appeared fancier, took longer time to prepare, and I liked the moist, dense, almost doughy flesh of the black cod, but the miso glaze was too sweet. The spinach goma ae, another common Japanese sidedish that I was only recently introduced to and was eager to show Little Mom, didn’t impress her too much because the sesame sauce could also use more salt and less sugar.

Spinach goma ae – $5.50 – a bit expensive for some boiled spinach with black sesame sauce, and not as good as expected. The sesame sauce could use less sugar and more salt.

I was surprised to see okonomiyaki on the menu, however described as a seafood pancake. Feeling demanding for no good reason, I asked the waitress if they could add pork belly, but no luck. 🙁 I was even more surprised when the okonomiyaki was brought to me: instead of the usual round shape I’m used to, this one is two quarters of dough on an oval hot plate, the kind you see with dak bokkeum at Korean restaurants, with copious amount of mayonnaise and katsuobushi (at least this part is familiar). I don’t know where the seafood in “seafood pancake” was. Even the cabbage was scarce. Final verdict: I make better okonomiyaki. 😉

Luckily, Little Mom’s udon with shrimp tempura and Dad’s curry rice with tonkatsu, looking unassuming as they were, actually tasted good. I’m glad, you know, cuz I actually wanted to like this restaurant. Sure, its food needed some fixing to live up to its posh setting, and the saba shio was not as good as the one I had at Koto in that little town Sonora. But I did order things off the beaten path (should have gotten sushi maybe?), and the waitress was cute.

For dessert, I tried my luck again and asked for black sesame ice cream, although it’s not listed on the menu. But Kaneyama is no In ‘n Out with a hidden menu, the manager said no, adding “That was the first time I got this question. Not many people know about it.” Guys, next time you’re at a Japanese restaurant, ask for sesame ice cream.

Okonomiyaki – $8.95 – strange looking and too doughy. I make better.

Udon with shrimp tempura – $10.50 – The noodle soup looks pretty barren (seriously, just kamaboko and spinach?), but the broth is good. The tempura is also good, “not oily” always scores in my book.

Red bean, plum and green tea ice cream – $2.50 each scoop – Too expensive, not good enough, casual pho restaurants have better green tea ice cream than this, but the plum ice cream is good.

Speaking of ice cream, today I realized that I have become a sea urchin of a customer. I asked questions, and returned the wrong scoop of ice cream to the kitchen, although Little Mom said it was fine. (The right scoop turned out to be her favorite and the best flavor. I did something right, Mom 😉 ) In another year will I be sending back a medium well steak when I had asked for medium? (On a few occasions, I thought of sending back pork sausages that weren’t properly defrosted and still a bit pink inside. But I just didn’t eat the sausage.) What will I be then… a durian?

Address: Kaneyama
9527 Westheimer Suite D
Houston, TX 77063
(713) 784-5168
www.kaneyama-houston.us

Lunch for three: $67.76

Bánh bía from Tường Ký Fast Food. Filling: taro paste with salted egg yolk, would have been perfect without bits of candied winter melon. $13 per box of 4.

I’m having writer’s block. Don’t know if that’s true (I once met an Ivy League law school professor who said, as diplomatically as she could, that scientists can’t write), but that’s how my friend put it when I told him that I’ve been sitting around all day producing nothing worth mentioning and munching Vietnamese snacks. As incredibly lazy as that sounds, I think of myself as savoring the cultural assets of my people. (Somehow that sounds even worse…) There’s this Taiwanese movie, Eat Drink Man Woman, I found it a little indelicate and got weirded out (the food looks great though!), but one line from the second sister in the movie stuck in my head: “Dad said that for a person who lives up to 80, he would have consumed 80 tons of food. People who enjoy food and people who eat without savoring it don’t experience the same level of happiness.”

I used to think for sure that what he meant was the people who enjoy food experience more happiness than people who eat without savoring it. But today I thought again.

I’m eating this bánh bía from Tường Ký Fast Food. I can’t help but notice the tiny tiny bits of candied winter melon (mứt bí) in my bánh bía, and I know I like my bánh bía with only taro paste and salted egg yolk, so I’m a bit turned off. When I don’t update Flavor Blvd, I’m happy with teriyaki pork chops from the Chinese family downstairs for weeks. More examples of “ignorance is bliss”: I can’t tell the difference between HDTV and normal TV, so I enjoy any TV with colors. I don’t know shrimps about music, so my friends may think that the drum work of some musician I like is a total fluke, but I still like it all the same. Then again, knowing teas makes me appreciate high-quality teas on a whole different level, and I can still enjoy tea bags with the right company. So I don’t know. The two types of people may not experience the same level of happiness, but that doesn’t mean one level is higher than the other.

Physically speaking, the two types of people probably don’t obtain the same level of energy either. Savoring food means analyzing food. Before I really buckled down and recorded everything I ate, I just ate. Now I think about ingredients. What did they put in there? How did they make it? What could be changed? Why do I prefer my mom’s bánh bao (and Vietnamese bánh bao in general) to jibaozi, family relation aside?

So, food savoring is a brain workout(*), unlikely on the same level as debugging my code, but I think now I have a reply to my mom’s question: “Why can everyone gain weight but you? Eat more!” 😀

Address: Tường Ký Fast Food
8200 Wilcrest Dr., Suite 14
Houston, TX 77072
(281) 988-4888

(*) I typed “how much energy does thinking require” into Google, and the answers seem inconclusive at best, but at least computer work burns 41 calories in 30 minutes for a 125-lb person, and blogging requires computer. Surely more thinking wouldn’t make you gain weight. 😉

Happy New Year from Port Arthur, TX. 🙂 Just when I thought El Sombrero Taqueria in Berkeley was interesting for combining Mexican, Indian and Pakistani food under one roof (not in one dish, thank goodness), or I Squared in Oakland for Italian and Iranian, we stumbled onto a Japanese restaurant that also dishes out Chinese, Thai, Indian, and Indonesian.

The lady who greeted us at the door is South Asian, probably Indian, but I can’t tell the difference between the Indian accent and those from the surrounding countries. We were seated as far as possible from the sushi bar and the kitchen, so we couldn’t tell who did the cooking, and our waitress was American. Instead of miso soup to wet our appetite, we were given a stock that tasted similar to hu tieu broth. We were asked if we would prefer normal edamame or spicy edamame. The vegetable that came with the shrimp teriyaki and the grilled steak were mixed baby corn-carrot-bell pepper-snap pea in a stir fry sauce, something that you would find at any Asian diner that gives you the option of 2 sides with a scoop of rice for seven fifty. And the rice that came with the shrimp teriyaki and the steak were Chinese fried rice. Not the most Japanese you can get on this side of the pond.

But it sure did surprise me that even in this town of little more than fifty thousand people, three hours driving eastward from the nearest big Asian community, you can get a taste of ayam kalasan and beef rendang.

Closewise from top left: Ichiban Cajun roll (tempura shrimp, avocado, spicy mayonnaise and unagi sauce) and edamame, soup, shrimp teriyaki, beef rendang, hibachi grilled steak

There were a fair amount of Japanese dishes on the menu (salmon teriyaki, unagi don, soba…) plus the real sushi (nigiri) that we’ll try the next time we visit the Buddhist temple in Port Arthur. They may not be Japanese enough, but what we got were tasty enough.

Maybe not the mochi ice cream, though. But we didn’t tell the southerner-sweet waitress that, she was just too sweet. 🙂

Address: Ichiban Hibachi & Sushi Bar
3437 N Twin City Hwy
Port Arthur, TX 77642
(409) 962-7300
Lunch for three: ~ $60