Flavor Boulevard

Pretty is the right word. Hearsay, or “Heresy” as Aaron calls it for some reason, warms your senses with a large yellow glass chandelier dangling several meters above the bar. The old walls, now lined with artsy thin bricks, bring to mind the image of a mahogany cascade from the high ceiling; tiny specs of light from the chandelier reflect off them like a meteor shower. It feels like a church almost. The only thing that could be remotely heretic here, if you understand “heretic” in its broadest meaning of “being different”, is if you don’t drink and you’re dining with a group of alcohol-appreciating friends just five feet from an alcohol-sparkling bar. Which is exactly what I was doing.

But I found plenty of things to occupy myself with, taking pictures of food being one of them, which would not have been possible without the flash light from Harshita’s iPhone (there was practically no light beside the chandelier). Eating was another possible activity. Our group of odd number managed to share the even number of pieces in the Chef Nick’s Appetizer Plate without too much a fight: the beer-batter-fried asparagus is the easiest to share, one shrimp-and-chicken spring rolls is doable, two crawfish stuffed mushroom and three smoked salmon crostini looked impossible to divide, so we didn’t try.

Except for my cute little stuffed mushrooms having a hair too much salt, every entree tasted as good as it should. Another exception was Varun’s chicken breast stuffed with goat cheese and spinach, which looks exactly like a kolache (already a good point!). That one blew my mind. I won’t look down on all chicken breast anymore.

I don’t know how Varun found this little 123-year-old building-turn-restaurant in the middle of the Warehouse District, but I’m glad he did. It feels unlike any gastro pub I’ve been to, you’re crammed horizontally as people push through between you and the bar seats, but you can always look up and find yourself lost in the space under that super high ceiling. You can order a humongous hamburger with bacon and a fried egg, or go simple and fresh with a caprese salad. You can indulge in as much bread pudding with ice cream as you want, all alone in the dark.

Click to see more pictures from Hearsay.

Address: Hearsay Gastro Lounge
218 Travis Street
Houston, Texas 77002
(713) 225-8079

After four months at Teance on 4th Street and one morning at Imperial Tea Court on Shattuck, the stupid demanding tea snob novice in me revealed herself. I’m far from being the perfect judge on what constitutes a good tea house, but I know the basics. With that, I wouldn’t recommend Imperial to anyone who seriously wants to learn about tea. Click on the image if you want to know my reasons.

Movies are food for the eye (and ears, and brain, or whatever else you like). I watched Bread of Happiness on the plane ride from Houston back to SFO, and it made me happy that whole day. It also strengthened my resolve to study Japanese. The breads shown in this movie don’t seem particularly complicated, their presentation doesn’t sparkle, but they perfectly suit the gentle atmosphere that flows through the plot: looking at the steam rising as you break a fresh loaf in half, you can smell a sincere love.

Something that I learned from the main guy, a baker, in Bread of Happiness: do you know the literal meaning of “compagnon”?

Also designed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, the Korean drama Kimchi Family hits the spot on days when I feel down (and also when I’m eating my cup noodles). It’s another string of small stories of how food made with heart can touch people’s lives in positive ways. If you don’t watch it for the plot, watch it for the kimchi! So many kinds of kimchi that I haven’t thought of being possible before. You can watch it on Hulu.com.

Kimchi Family has a lovely song that I can’t find the lyrics anywhere: “Take a drink. This drink is not alcohol, this drink is our mother’s tears, this drink is our father’s sweat…” UPDATE: Thanks to the author of Following KPop, I now have the lyrics of the drinking song, printed below.

Tonight I actually cried watching its 8th episode. But at least I was at home. For Bread of Happiness, aish, I had to sink into my seat so that the guy sitting next to me didn’t see my eyes turning all red…

발효가족 권주가 가사 (Fermentation Family – Drink Offering song lyrics from Daum Music)
Listen to the song on YouTube and sing along 🙂

Thank you, Kristen Sun, my dear friend who has shared many great meals with me in Berkeley and definitely many more in the future, for sharing a post here with us today 🙂

Halfway through our meal, Mai and I turned to each other and we agreed, “I’m not that full yet” and “I can still eat more.” This was after a small plate of charcuterie (which wasn’t that small) and two small plates, which again, were not that small. It solved, however, the main question that had been bugging us since we arrived at the restaurant: which entrees should we get? And if we get more than one entree, could we still do dessert? Turns out indecision works very well at this restaurant; sampling the diverse offerings of the menu is definitely the way to go! Eating with Mai is always a treat – for the mind and for the stomach! Thank you Mai for the great honor of being a guest blogger for Flavor Bouvelard!

Simply put, Revival Bar & Kitchen, located right in the middle of Downtown Berkeley, is gorgeous. The tall ceiling, the rustic decor, the feeling of open space, and best of all, a bookshelf tucked away in the corner, give Revival a unique feel. The tables were just the appropriate width apart when it comes to having good conversation with two women who bonded with Mai over their travels to Vietnam, and perhaps a tad bit too close when we overheard a man speaking unkindly about his (absent) girlfriend to another friend. But let’s speak of the food…

When we received our menus, right away our eyes landed on the charcuterie section, which consisted of fresh ham, duck liver mousse, coppa di testa (headcheese), and smoked duck breast ($8 for an individual plate, $18 for a small plate of all charcuterie, and $26 for a large plate of all charcuterie). The fresh ham and the smoked duck, while delicious, were not particularly unique in any way. The coppa di testa… now this is something interesting. It was my first taste of headcheese, so I went in without any expectations. It’s sour and leaves a slight fizzy aftertaste like a soda. It also is very fragile; it is not quite a cold cut but not quite a pate either… it had a very weird “saucy” consistency, which Mai found to be weird as well compared to the headcheese that she is accustomed to! The duck liver mousse was our favorite meat on the plate; the texture is rich and smooth and the taste just strong enough without being overpowering. This plate was definitely fun, as we could combine all the different meats with the sides (raspberry jelly, pickles, and mustard) in as many different combinations as we wished, each bite yielding a new combination of flavors. We both agreed that the real standout on the plate, however, was the raspberry marmalade. In fact, as we would soon discover, the one thing that Revival really excels
at are its fruit jellies.

Next on our list are the two small plates: tempura fried squash blossoms ($13) and bone marrow ($11). The tempura fried squash blossoms, stuffed with ricotta and goat cheese, were delicious and light and the pieces of fried zucchini that garnish the plate were also good. Mai, however, found that the squash blossoms had a stronger goat cheese flavor than she would have liked. The sauce, a cilantro mint coulis, paired well with the fried vegetables, but was forgettable.

For me, the standout dish of the night is the bone marrow. Rich and fatty, this first taste of bone marrow was just perfect. Best of all, we were allowed to season the meat ourselves, as the dish comes with a side of sea salt. The crunchy baguette, the flavorful meat, the salt, and best of all, the kumquat marmalade worked perfectly together. This dish, for me, was one of the perfect bites of the night. And once again, we were blown away by the fruit – the kumquat marmalade, which really is a standout on its own, tied the flavors of the dish together perfectly.

Despite all of this food, it was at this point that Mai and I decided to go for it and ordered both of the larger plates that we were looking at, which our waitress recommended as the two best as well. The risotto cakes ($21), however, were just okay. The cakes themselves were a bit dry and bland. The porcini mushrooms, while not having the typical “musty” mushroom taste as Mai explains, really did not add any unique flavor to the dish. However, I loved the porcini jus and could not stop dipping into the sauce. I love thick almost puree-like textures and this was no exception. Mai and I both agreed that the vegetables that came on the side were delicious and outshone the risotto cakes.

The pork chop ($25) was good and very well-cooked – juicy, full of flavor, and not dry in the slightest. Both Mai and I found the bourbon butter to be a bit too strong and overpowering of the meat; we ended up scraping most of the butter off. The potatoes and artichokes were well-cooked and flavorful, but not particularly unique.

Overall, the smaller plates succeeded more than the larger plates and the size of the small plates comes at a overall better bargain, as there is not much difference in portion sizes.

Of course, our meal cannot end without dessert. And were we ever glad because the desserts here are amazing! We settled on an apricot mousse ($8), but after asking what the ice cream du jour ($7) was, we had to order that as well. The flavor is apricot pit, which we of course, had to try. Our waiter informed us that it has an almond-like taste, which we agreed on; the flavor is much lighter, however. The nuttiness and creaminess of the ice cream, along with the crunchiness of the pecans, were a perfect combination!

The apricot mousse, likewise, was also delicious. While we couldn’t make out the flavor of the green tea cake at the bottom, the light fluffiness of the apricot mixed with the sourness of the blood orange reduction and the crunch of the bruléed bottom was quite pleasing texturally. As for that blood orange reduction…it had a marmalade texture but it was chilled so it was almost like a sorbet. A clear stand-out!

Overall, Revival made for a great dinner and we had lovely neighbors to chat with as well near the end of our meal. The real standouts here – the raspberry jelly, the kumquat marmalade, and the blood orange reduction – were unexpected but elevated what could have been ordinary or boring dishes into something special. When I think of a perfect dining experience, eating at Revival definitely ranks high: great friends, new acquaintances, and delicious food at a relaxed and leisurely pace.

Address: Revival
2102 Shattuck Ave
Berkeley, CA 94704
(510) 549-9950

Sometimes things just refuse to go the way you plan.

I’ve been looking forward to the fried chicken at this place called Number 1 Chicken Rice & Seafood for half a year. It’s in Houston, so I have two time windows each year, each a couple of weeks long, to plan my voyage. Last winter we hit the place less than an hour after they closed (which was like 8 pm, I think), this June we were even more determined. According to Aaron’s sources, they open on Sunday between 6 and 7 pm. Strange, but okay. We camped out at the museum for over an hour because the museum is relatively near Number 1 Chicken, and we didn’t want to take any chances. At 6 we drove into its parking lot. The OPEN sign wasn’t lit up. Aaron checked the schedule posted on the door: they’re closed on Sunday. Fine. I’m not meant to eat Number 1 Chicken’s fried chicken. Surely there must be other fried chickens somewhere along Alameda. Following Varun’s advanced GPS system that didn’t allow us to type in anything unless the car is stopped (for safety reason, even though the one who punched the buttons wasn’t the driver), we drove to a few more possible-blogging-material spots, one of them no longer exists. And all of them were closed. We weren’t even meant to eat on Alameda?!

Accepting fate, we gave up on Alameda and headed back to the Rice Village, Aaron’s “hunting ground”. Between Picky Varun and Picky Mai, we settled into El Meson. Cuban.

Here we were in this pretty good-looking Latin American place with frescos of flamboyant girls in flamboyant flamenco dresses and a generous bowl of Andes Mint at the front desk, from which we took (quite) a few as we walked in. The guys were wondering if they have free chips and salsa here (you know, like at the usual Tex-Mex resto in your neighborhood strip mall). We were hungry. Well, they do. The chips and salsa came out after we ordered. I was a bit sad that I couldn’t get the paella (minimum order of 2 people, and yet another thing that didn’t go my way that day), so I got two tapas plates.

If you have a sweet tooth like me, and I don’t mean just a liking for dessert but a liking for sweetness in everything from meat to noodle soup(*), El Meson is for you. The plantains are one thing, but the cinnamon pineapple that goes with the crab cakes ($9.95) and the honey-glazed pork belly ($9.95) are sweet enough to be desserts. The crackling skin offered a nice textural contrast, but slices of poached apple didn’t help toning down the sugar.

I liked the plantains in Varun’s Pollo Salteado ($15.95, grilled chicken sauteed with onion and pepper in sherry sauce, served on rice and black beans with a side of grilled plantains), but Varun found them too sweet.

For dessert, we took “some” more Andes Mint. 😉

Address: El Meson
2425 University Blvd.
Houston, TX 77005
(713) 522-9306
Dinner for 3: $65 – For more pictures of our food, see Photon Flavors.

(*) There are many noodle soups with a sweet broth. Not sweet like your banana cream pie but when you taste the first spoon, you’d go “wow this broth is sweet!” Examples are Lao and Cambodian noodle soups (such as hu tiu). One of my favorite ingredients in the Korean mul naengmyun (cold buckwheat noodle soup) is the Asian pear, which is sweet. But it’s nothing new really, all broths need some kind of sweetness, either from bone marrow or from mushroom.

Ever wonder why Banh Cuon Tay Ho has the best steamed roll of all places? Thin like a veil, never too chewy or oily, the flour never tastes sour, and the mixed fish sauce never has the bitter hint of lime. Their secrets are mysteries to me. By chance, the Lưu family who operates Tay Ho 18 in Houston stumbled on my blog post of 4 years ago and invited me to the opening week after the relocation early April, which would feature a new item: crawfish banh cuon. I couldn’t come then due to a minor distraction called school, but a month later the place is stilled packed to the rim like an Apple store the day of a new iPhone release. I managed to snatch Mr. James Lưu aside for a brief chat during lunch rush, wonder if his staff liked me or hated me for it.

Leaving Vietnam in ’79, getting attacked by pirates, rescued ashore but later tricked and stranded by the natives in the Malaysian jungle, rescued by an American helicpopter after a month in the jungle, immigrated to the US as an orphan (Mr. Lưu was then 16 years old, any child refugee under 18 without parent supervision was categorized as an orphan in US immigration rules), living with foster parents in New York until the age of 18, moving out to California to be independent, studying and later working as a legal administrator for many years, Mr. Lưu’s life journey had all the drama to constitute a movie. In 2007, the Lưu family moved from Southern California to Houston, and after surveying the restaurant scene, Mr. Lưu set up his steamed roll business as part of the Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ franchise.

Last time I came, the restaurant stood inside the Hong Kong Market (HKM) complex, but according to Mr. Lưu, because the main patronage was customers of the market, the number peaked at lunch time and on the weekends but stayed flaccid otherwise, they closed at 7 pm, parking was difficult (the HKM parking lot is always crowded), and “it didn’t really feel like a restaurant”. At the end of the 3-year contract, he moved out next to Kim Son this spring, and business takes off.

The new crawfish banh cuon, accompanied by a special terracotta butter sauce with a zing, receives warm attention, but the Number 1 special combo, bánh cuốn đặc biệt, remains the most popular choice among the patrons because it has a bit of everything: some porky rolls (bánh cuốn nhân thịt), some flat rolls with shrimp flakes (bánh cuốn tôm chấy), some old-styled Thanh Trì sheet noodle (bánh ướt) to eat with the sausage, a hefty shrimp-and-sweet-potato deep-fried. But just between you and me, I told Mr. Lưu that I’m loyal to Number 7 – bánh cuốn nhân thịt, that has everything Number 1 has except the banh uot, and he laughed in agreement.

FB: Your menu spans all popular dishes of the 3 regions, with rice, bun, and noodle soups. Why don’t you limit it to only the rolls, the way specialty eating establishments in Vietnam limit to one or two dishes and their names become practically synonymous with the dish? After all, Tây Hồ is known for bánh cuốn like Ánh Hồng for 7-course beef or 46A Đinh Công Tráng St. for sizzling crepes…
Mr. Lưu: It’s precisely because we’re known for banh cuon that we have to have other dishes too. If we had only banh cuon, it’d be sold out by 2, then we’d have to apologize to the later customers and people would ask how come a banh cuon place doesn’t have banh cuon. Besides, everyone in a family would like something different and we’d want to accomodate that.
FB: So you make your batter fresh everyday? You don’t have some in storage in case of sold-outs?
Mr. Lưu: Yes and no. The batter is made daily and processed for a few days before it’s ready, so it’s not like we can make it on the spot.
FB: Is that the secret to your quality? Can you reveal a little more? *puppy eyes of Puss-in-Boots*
Mr. Lưu: Well, I can’t tell you the exact proportion, but the water for the mixed flour is changed daily in a fermentation period. Tay Ho standard requires the batter to be used between 3-7 days after the first mix.
FB: So that’s why the rolls taste a bit sour at some places, they left their batter sit too long?
Mr. Lưu: Yes, longer than 7 days would result in a sour batter. But shorter than 3 days and your rolls would fall apart, you need the fermentation to give the sheet its elasticity. Actually here we only use 5- to 6-day-old batter to render the right chew.
FB: What about the fish sauce?
Mr. Lưu: Can’t tell you that. *grin* The two deciding factors in a plate of steamed rolls are the fish sauce and the batter, and I make them both myself everyday. There’s a lot to balance between taste and cost, the quality of pure fish sauce you put in, the kind of water to mix. You want it to taste sweet and fresh, and you don’t want the bitterness from the lime. We also avoid using MSG.
FB: So I just have to buy your fish sauce then *grin*
Mr. Lưu: *grin* Yes, we do have mixed fish sauce for sale, and it stays good for a month in the fridge.

Between fragments of our conversation, Mr. Lưu was also waving at customers, directing his staff, printing the checks and exchanging handshakes with the regulars. The lunch rush was a spectacular sight. I thanked him for the meal and the conversation; had I lived closer, I’d relive my middle school dream: a plate of porky steamed rolls everyday for breakfast.

Address: Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ 18
10613 Bellaire Blvd. #A168
Houston, TX 77072
(281) 495-8346

Aside from opening a little bit late on Sunday (11:30 am), the Tokyo One at Westchase is a lovely place. Three things that I have now associated with Tokyo One, although I probably shouldn’t, since they kinda belong to the ukiyo (floating world) more than to the permanents:
1. A beautiful peach-colored water lily in the mini pond creek artificial water thing surrounding the building
2. Perfect silky chawanmushi (pictured)
3. The gentle (the gentlest I’ve ever heard) but persistent recommendation of Sean, our server, for ice cream. We were full to the brim, but I gave in after he asked us for the second time if we would like some ice cream (as if I could ever turn down icecream 8)). I’m happy that he insisted, the plum ice cream with plum bits was great, and green tea ice cream is always good. We finished two scoops, Sean came back and asked if we’d like some more. Honest to goodness, I wanted to say yes.

Address: Tokyo One at Westchase
2938 W Sam Houston Pkwy South
Houston, TX 77042
(713) 785-8899
Buffet lunch for three: $51.93
Ah, food-wise? Good tempura, good gyoza, good fish, good rice, etc.

There’s a Vietnamese song that starts like this: “Ten years pass by without seeing each other, I thought love had grown old/ Like the clouds that have flown by so many years, I thought we had forgotten.”(*) It then went on to say, as you might expect, that the narrator still yearns for that love like ten years ago. An even more dramatic thing happens to me: I still crave xôi khúc with the same passion of the last time I had it, which was twenty years ago.

The lady who sold xôi khúc (xôi cúc if you’re from the South)(*) near our elementary school was old. In her sixties at least. She was clean, so Little Mom bought xôi from her. We never had xôi khúc from anyone else, and I don’t remember seeing anyone else selling it. Loosely wrapped in banana leaves like all other xôi(*), her xôi khúc beamed with the smell of ground black pepper in the bean paste and the cool, herbal flavor of the steamy sticky rice. After the lady stopped showing up in the mornings with her basket, we stopped having xôi khúc for breakfast.

Xôi khúc is too much of a hassle for living-alone home cooks. First of all, you need the leaves that make xôi khúc xôi khúc: the not-so-popular-and rau khúc (“rau” is greens)(***) whose English name I could find only after I found out its Japanese name from the blog of a Vietnamese expat in Japan, and I don’t even know Japanese. The Japanese use this grass in their kusa mochi, a category of grass mochi to which the yomogi daifuku belongs. De javu. The Vietnamese grind it up and use the juice to knead sticky rice flour into a dough and make xôi khúc. The dough coats a ball of savory mung bean paste, the whole thing is laid between thin layers of sticky rice and steamed. In the end, you get a handful of something with grains of sticky rice on the outside, so its appearance is like xôi, and a ball of grassy sticky rice dough with bean paste filling on the inside, so its construction is like bánh (anything made of dough). Hence its name varies: bánh khúc, xôi khúc, xôi cúc (the Southerners’ simplified pronunciation).

Today, I’ve reunited with xôi khúc. This small store in Bellaire, packed with xôi, chè, savory foods and customers at 9 on a Sunday morning, sells xôi khúc, 1 đồng 1 viên ($1/ball), each ball as big as a lemon, two of them fit snuggly in a white styrofoam box. The rice scoop digs into the tray. A slight bounce and the soft sticky rice separates. A familiar peppery smell infiltrates my veins. The guy asked if I’d like to top them with a few spoonfuls of fried shallots. Yes, please!

Address: Đức Phương Thạch Chè
11360 Bellaire Blvd
Houston, TX 77072
(281) 498-1838
(also in the Vietnamese Veteran Memorial area, near Giò Chả Đức Hương where Little Mom buys silk sausage)

Previously on Sandwich Shop Goodies: sesame beignet (bánh tiêu)

(*): Vietnamese lyrics: “Mười năm không gặp tưởng tình đã cũ/ Mây bay bao năm tưởng mình đã quên”. The song is titled Mười Năm Tình Cũ (“love dated ten years”). You can listen to it here.
(**): xôi is steamed sticky rice, either mixed with beans (sweet xôi) or eaten with meat (savory xôi). I’ve written about xôi bắp (corn xôi) and xôi đậu (peanut xôi) before.
(***): Gnaphallium affine, Jersey cudweed in English, hahakogusa (ハハコグサ in Katakana or “母子草” in Kanji) in Japanese. My inner linguistics savvy especially likes the Japanese name: 母 (haha) is Kanji for mother, 子 (ko) child, and 草 (gusa) grass: so rau khúc is Mother [and] Child Grass (mẫu tử thảo).

Rice porridge was my enemy.

In elementary years, I got a fever about once every month. Aside from feeling tired and having weird dreams when the fever got high, I didn’t really mind that, but my mom did. She was so worried she wouldn’t sleep for days, not until my temperature went back to normal. And she made sure that I ate my rice porridge. She made rice porridge with ground pork and rice porridge with fish, she added vegetable, she seasoned it perfectly, and I still hated every spoon of it. I hated the texture of rice porridge: mushy and textureless. I hated both thick porridge and watery porridge(*). Every porridge meal was a battle between Mom and me, and I always lost, which deepened my aversion to porridge even more. But there were happy days when I actually liked my fever porridge and didn’t need my mom to prod: it was mung bean porridge on those days.

Actually, there’s rice in mung bean porridge, too, but the mung bean skin makes the porridge all nuttier and better. Then it’s a sweet porridge (just rice, mung bean and sugar, no meat), so that’s doubly better. Health-wise, mung bean is a cooling food(*), which would help alleviating the fever and digesting. Little Mom says that the Central Vietnamese eat mung bean porridge with cá kho tiêu (small caramelized pepper braised fish) instead of sugar, I can see that being tasty, and I can imagine substituting the fish with myulchi bokkum (멸치 볶음, dried fried anchovies) for availability. But I’ve found another way to heighten the mung bean porridge experience while keeping it vegan:

I dip toasted rice cracker into the porridge. We had leftover rice crackers from a lunch of rice cracker and pork rolls. There I was sitting, slurping and chewing my porridge, and staring at the stack of crackers, and it just came. Now you get crunchy, airy, nutty, sweet, sesame-y, toasty, liquidy, all in one bite. 😉

(*) These days I can tolerate watery porridge, but I still avoid the thick kind.
(**) I wrote a brief section on the cooling vs. heating effect of food in the post Benefits of Tea.

The Recipe: Childhood Love Mung Bean Porridge (8 servings)

— 250 g mung bean (halved but not shelled)
— 1/2 cup rice
— 1.2 l (42 fl oz) water (less water for thicker porridge)
— 1 can coconut milk
— sugar (as much as you want)
— toasted sesame rice cracker (as much as you want)
Soak the mung bean overnight to soften it. In a pot, cook rice, mung bean and water until the grains turn mushy. Add coconut milk and bring it to a boil. Serve warm with toasted rice crackers.

Nothing in the Rosemary Garden compound quite fits the name “Bistro”, there’s a chapel, a few stores across the parking lot with signs too far for me to read, a bakery that only takes order for wedding cakes, birthday cakes and Christmas cakes, and a restaurant big enough to host a small wedding banquet. Little Mom saw its ad in the local Vietnamese newspapers, and grilled alligator sounds good enough to make a trip across town.

My vegan intention was quickly thwarted, as expected in any Vietnamese or Korean restaurant, the few non-meat things available are all related to stir-fried bokchoy or eggplant. Little Mom eyed a few courses in the 9-course fish ($29.95), but you can’t get one without getting all nine, and she’s against fish spring roll while I’m against fish congee, so we flipped to the next page. Since Rosemary Garden is a làng nướng (grill village), it’s only appropriate that we meat-out and ignore the rice/noodles altogether (they don’t grill tofu). Besides, rice comes with alligator. Lots of rice, which took me by surprise for a split second. Guess I’ve been in the Bay for too long…

My friends said alligator tastes like chicken, and the important-looking lady who came out to greet us said the same thing, but I’m not convinced. It has more chew than chicken. It’s more like pork. We asked for no pepper in our “stir-fried alligator with pepper and lemongrass” (cá sấu xào sả ớt, $18.95), the pieces came out nicely seasoned, not spicy and evenly browned.

Although a bit on a the scrawny side (like me :D), the eel stir-fried in a coconut curry sauce with woodear mushroom and thin cellophane noodle, topped with Limnophila aromatica (rice paddy herb) and crushed peanuts, is a winner. All conversations come to a happy halt as one breaks a piece of toasted rice cracker (bánh đa) to scoop up that sauce and the soggy noodle in it.

Opposing the airy rice cracker are the oil-streaming, deep-fried sticky rice patties that accompany the grilled rabbit topped with white sesame seeds. Instruction says dip the rabbit in the fermented tofu sauce (chao), and drizzle the sticky rice patties with a sticky sugared soy sauce, but the other way around made more sense to me: dried, charred rabbit needs something sweet, and oily patties need spice. Dad likes them either way.

Despite the original difficulty of choosing something interesting from a standard list, if we ignore the outdated plate styling with limp slices of red bellpepper laid around the meat like an ancient picture of the sun, and if we rank a restaurant solely on taste, Rosemary Garden deserves 7 out of 10. Then again I’m soft, and our hosts were nice (they also gave us three pieces of coffee cream cake, in which both of my parents claimed to detect some wine flavoring but I couldn’t sense anything bitter), so let’s say 8/10. We’d come here more often and order some cakes if it hadn’t been all the way across Highway 6. Do come here if you get married.

Address: Rosemary Garden Bistro
14639 Bellaire Blvd
Houston, TX 77083
(281) 568-9151

Dinner for three: $56.13 (I’ve got to comment on this because I’m still not used to it: this is way too reasonable in North Cali standard and perhaps a bit high in Houston standard, but with so much leftover it’s still reasonable.)