Flavor Boulevard

…1. The kumquat branches bear their multitudes of gold baubles, the tangerines and pomelos swell and shine, the dragon fruits and rambutans are happily sought for because of their festive shapes and colors;

…2. The white grey front patio of Grand Century Mall and its adjacents is blushed with firecracker remnants, and if you’re there at the right moment, your ears would be blasted by the continuous loud popping of an ignited long Chinese squib, its color matched only by the ruby peach blossoms in full bloom;

…3. The usually dormant stores that sell Vietnamese beef jerkies and dried plums awakens in a sudden selling frenzy: tasting, weighing, packaging, paying, people queuing…

… mostly for the dried candied fruits known as mứt Tết.

…4. It takes 30 minutes to get in and out of the mall and market parking lots in San Jose and then park on the neighborhood street, because parts of the lot are reserved for Chinese chess, fruit stalls, music stalls, peach blossom trees,…

… cotton candy and green waffles, sunshine orchid corners, still, everybody is in a good mood;

…5. The Buddhist nuns and pious pagoda goers gather to wrap and steam hundreds of banh chung banh tet, pickle jars of cucumber, carrot, củ kiệu, cabbage, daikon…

… all of which are vegetarian, in small quantity, usually tasty, and always more expensive than anywhere else.

As independent of religions and politics as the mark of spring is, you know it’s Tet where the flag still flies.

“Have you been to the Italian place?”, I keep hearing from the other conference attendees. I once tried to look for Portofino but the confusing arrows led me to the livelihood of El Patio instead. Another time I managed to find the door, which was locked, and two hotel workers tried to tell me in lightning fast Spanish that behind those glass panels was indeed Portofino and that I should just pull them open, or at least that’s what I gathered. The simple truth is they don’t open for lunch.

Undeterred, I returned to those doors to get my last Dreams dinner that evening. The place was dark, my heart sank thinking of unborn pictures with blurry details, when I ran into three other conference attendees from CINVESTAV and the National University of Mexico. It became the most memorable dinner I had the entire trip.

The menu came in two versions, English for me and Spanish for my new acquaintances, both with long fancy Italian names and description in the according language. I was hungry for some vegetables, so after Abril translated to me the waiter’s explanation of a few words on the list, the appetizer was an easy pick: a small endive and arugula salad dressed in a fruity vinaigrette, accompanied by four paper-thin slices of sweetened pear that tasted most like chewy brown sugar.

It boiled down to two choices for entrée: linguine with quail or beef with foie gras. I asked the waiter for advice and he chose the beef in less than one hundredth of a second. The filet mignon, itself topping a mash potato bed, was topped with mushroom sauce and a sliver of foie gras the size of my pinky’s top digit. Everything was soft, lustrous, soothing, and melting into one another. You bet I cleaned the plate.

Dessert, too, was nothing short of an allurement. More precisely, it was a lava cake nostalgia, harmoniously paired with a lime sorbet and coyly tarted up by a sliced strawberry. Under the magenta candle light and our reflections from the glass ceiling, three Mexicans and a Vietnamese talked the night away about the American education system, the economy, the train from Mexico City to Puerto Vallarta, about esquites, tamarind, and mango. It was the first time I’d felt like a foreigner at a dinner table, not being able to understand the others’ conversation in their mother tongue. But strangely, I also felt very much included in this courteous town, among these courteous people.

More Puerto Vallarta:
Dreams & Conference – Day 1, dinner at Oceana
Dreams & Conference – Day 2, World Cafe and El Patio
Dreams & Conference – Day 3, Seaside Grill and Room service
Crepa y Esquites

On Wednesday night we get off from the boat after some whale(‘s top of the back) watching and feel compelled to scavenge the streets for some sights. We spot a couple of street food stalls alternating between the jewelries and hats along Ignacio L. Vallarta. Being reminded of the warm luscious crepe I once had on Pike Street near the Washington State Convention Center, I bid farewell to my 40 pesos in exchange for a “crepa con chocolate, fresa, lechera y nuez” (chocolate, strawberry, condensed milk and nuts).

Also 40-pesos-and-5-minutes worth is Hayato‘s “cajeta, platano, nuez y kalhua” choice (caramel, banana, nuts, and kahlua), pictured on the right. The chocolate one is densely sweet with a sandy texture, possibly due to the ground nuts.

With another 10 pesos (about 83 US cents) one can get a hot fold with meat and cheese, but the sweet crepes in our hand, all fluffy and brown within 5-6 minutes, already hit the spot like a breeze on a Texas summer day.

Meanwhile, Victoria is drawn to something else with more local aesthetics: a wok of corn kernels above hot pink coals.

The guy deftly swoops a full scoop of maize into a tiny white plastic cup, the type sandwich shops in the States usually hand customers who ask for water, and through some mix of Spanish and English he explains to Victoria that he will cover it with sour cream, sprinkle some powdery cheese, and if she’d like, which she does, squeeze in some fresh lime juice too. All for 20 pesos.

‘Tis a swirl of hot and cold, chilipeppery burning and limey zing. Victoria finds it exhilarating. Abril, my new Mexican friend from the conference, says that it should be mayonnaise and not sour cream, but who knows. I’m not even sure about its name, because when I tell my taxi driver that we try “esquites” on the street, he has no idea what I’m smoking. A few descriptions later he oh’s cheerfully and corrects me: “It’s ‘elote‘!” Well, Wikipedia makes a distinction between the one in a cup and the one on a cob, is it perhaps just a colloquial thing?

That said, in a tourist town like Puerto Vallarta, where a man selling crepes is bilingual but a candy store owner knows zero English, it doesn’t really matter what they call corn in a cup, as long as the corn keeps its flavor like the streets keep their cobblestones.

More Puerto Vallarta:
Dreams & Conference – Day 1, dinner at Oceana
Dreams & Conference – Day 2, World Cafe and El Patio
Dreams & Conference – Day 3, Seaside Grill and Room service

Reading in your room with music is one thing, reading in a restaurant by the sea with romantic golden oldies and the wind is simply indescribable.

Because I am not a fan of the sun, the waitress seats me in the shade in the middle of Seaside Grill, where I can look out to the parachute rising up from the beach but not the beach itself, and I can see Engelbert Humperdinck’s Spanish Eyes in the 70s music sweetness floating in the wind, but not directly feel the sticky salty wind itself. How can you read there? Well, when you sit alone in a restaurant (or anywhere), the best way to naturally observe your surrounding is by having a book in front of you. Also, being busy as they are at peak lunch hour, the waiters wouldn’t feel as bad leaving you unattended if they know you can get through the second chapter of Dodelson‘s Cosmology while waiting for the orders’ arrival.

So the wait is not at all unpleasant, in fact I even hope for a longer wait just to be more productive; after all, I’m here for a conference and not a vacation. That said, as soon as the food comes, the book is cast aside.

You don’t want to let these plump shrimps wait. They are cooled and gently coated in a coconut and lime juice, while their calamari partners are oddly tender. The Dreams ceviche gives you freshness without the cringe of rawness, it is succulent but not watery, bountiful but not overfilling, sweet but not sugary. Five stars.

Then comes the steak, as big as my two hands put together, and a lot fattier. On top of it melts a scoop of pink butter and lies a slice of grilled onion, to the side scatters a handful of fries half soaked in brown grease.

Barely finishing that monstrous prime rib, I grab a waiter as soon as he comes near to ask for the key lime cheesecake I saw earlier at the bottom of the menu. This makes me feel like a bear but I still need to stock up for the Berkeley winter. Thankfully, the slice is moderate, accompanied by one teaspoon scoop of key lime sorbet and three strawberry quarters. Creamy but light, this is definitely the best dessert I’ve had at Dreams so far.

Another (unsurprising) thing I discover during my 5 days stay is that once you eat a lot, you keep eating a lot. After lunch I think I must have gained 10 pounds and would go lie down like a python for a month, but no, a few hours later I call Room Service for dinner. I order…

Chicken fajita. It’s not as hot as it would be on a sizzling plate, but the temperature is easily overlooked as the melted Swiss cheese engages so harmoniously with the chargrilled white meat chicken.

A rainbow fruit salad as they name it: papaya, watermelon, canteloupe, orange, pineapple, and half a strawberry.

A mango pie (labelled “mango cheesecake” in the menu), remarkably similar to the key lime cheesecake at Seaside Grill, aside from the whip cream mount on top.

And finally, a coconut flan, the better of the two desserts. It’s not as caramelized as expected, it’s a tad watery and plain, but I adore its simple, Hangul-like presentation. 🙂

More Puerto Vallarta:
Dreams & Conference – Day 1, dinner at Oceana
Dreams & Conference – Day 2, World Cafe and El Patio

In all honesty, most of us go to Cosmology on the Beach (CotB) for the cosmology part, but one may seriously wonder how the participating number would change if the organizers took out the beach part. (And I said “most” because a few of the conference attenders here bring along children, who will definitely become cosmologists one day if they play at CotB today. ;-)) Now I certainly can live without the beach, the waves are alluring but the sand is not, but I might just punch a baby seal if the free dining were taken out of the package. Yesterday we took full advantage of the room service and Oceana. Today… well the nice thing about eating is that everyday you can start anew.

Four hours of lecture begin at 8:30 am, with plenty of soft drinks, milk, coffee, sweet pastries, no meat however, and bottled water on the tables. When the clock ticks near 1 pm, the brain is saturated with graphs and equations, some of which are secretly disposed in lieu of thoughts for food. Less than 15 minutes after Oliver Zahn gives his concluding line on CMB lensing, the crowd has shifted from Conference Room A to World Cafe.

Supposedly it’s a buffet of international cuisines, but few things are not associated with Mexican food: stir fried noodle, stir fried vegetable in brown sauce, macaroni and cheese, and California rolls. The rest is primarily meat: grilled pork chop, flank steak, fried chicken, et cetera.

The more interesting selection is rather limited, but every one of it is worth the bite. The chicken on a corn flour tortilla-like shell is messy and filling; the simple-looking pastry square tastes like cheese pizza but flaky like a patechaud and has shrimp bits for surprise; a batter-fried bundle made of thin sheets of crab meat is refreshingly succulent; and the flank steak roll with cabbage in the middle is the savoriest of all.

The colorful dessert array has very handsome chunks of chocolate Swiss roll, which I resist in order to try a chocolate chip cupcake-like kolache adorned with a kiwi slice…

… along with a gigantic cream puff that quickly gets too sweet, a milky jello, and some juicy fleshy fruits to clear the load of animal fat excess I’ve consumed in this buffet lunch.

“We’ll get some veggie at dinner,” I tell myself. Wishful thinking. I wander alone trying to find the Italian restaurant Portofino, but end up in front of El Patio, a casual dinner spot for Mexican specialties. Two months ago I would have continued on my quest for Portofino, but the scrumptious tacos at Tacubaya have changed Mai; besides, how can I be a proper foodie without trying Mexican food while staying in Mexico?

The opening of the night is two beef and pork tacos, deadly messy (my poor purse gets a share of sauce) but undeniably tasty.

Likewise, the three authentic grandma’s recipe basket tacos, each with a different filling: chicken, beef, and mash potato, prove themselves worthy of being in the authentic section at a tourist resort. The chicken, sweetened by a chocolate sauce, ranks the best, and the potato comes close in second if you wait until it cools.

The entree, guaranteed by our friendly waiter as “not at all spicy,” jumps out to me as the most authentic and exotic on the menu: veal mixiote – a pit barbecued chunk soaked in Guajillo chile sauce and wrapped in blue agave cactus leaf.

Unfortunately, the veal is rather too salty and the bare meat dish does not match my expectation. feeling bad about leaving half of the veal on plate, I sheepishly ask our waiter to recommend a dessert.

He says with utmost immediacy and certainty: “Creme brulee.” So be it, a creme brulee with lychee and passion fruit. There is no visible passion fruit, but the burn caramel bits give a wonderful accent to the creamy bowl, and like always, I save the lychee for last. 🙂

More Puerto Vallarta:
Dreams & Conference – Day 1, dinner at Oceana

Dear diary, I am sitting in bed, listening to the waves crashing into the rocky hill and the sand, and thinking back on how Puerto Vallarta confuses and amuses us.

1. At custom they tell you to push a button, if it’s green, you go through, if it’s red, you gotta do some checking, and from what we can tell it’s completely random. But it seems there’s more green than red.
2. As soon as we walk out of custom with our luggage trailing behind, we enter the “shark tank”: forty or more men line up on both sides calling “senoritas” to hook us up with their taxi service, and we do what we know best (from months of practice with the homeless people on Shattuck): keep our eyes straight ahead and walk like we know where we’re going (even when we don’t).
3. The taxi driver will get you to the hotel by hook or by crook, even if it means squeezing between a stopping bus and the curb, or weaving in and out between a bus and another car. I swear I heard a “thump” once, but I didn’t check to see if there’s any dent to our left side. Now there are probably too many already to recognize, seeing that the streets have no lane and the drivers have no fear. And it was a manual car.
4. There’s a Walmart, and according to our fellow conference attenders, it sells no beef jerky.
5. The moment we step off the taxi in front of the hotel lobby at Dreams Puerto Vallarta, a man comes with wet lemongrass infused towels and champagne glasses for each guest. However, someone in our group came walking on foot with a backpack and received neither towel nor champagne.

6. For $140 per night per person (conference rate), you get a hotel room with ocean view, free room service, free food (all meals at all restaurants in the Dreams Resort and ordered to your room), free minibar in the fridge, however internet costs extra, and to really make a question mark pop, the bottle opener is a little steel thing built in to the counter near the bathroom sink.

By the time we finish checking in and waddling up to our room, there’s only 3 minutes left to the end of lunch, so we order a Vallarta pizza featuring shrimp with dapples of garlic, olive oil, basil and tomato sauce. When your stomach is hungry for hours, anything would hit the spot. But the shrimps, so juicy and plump and just slightly salty, kinda hold a special place in my mind, whether I’m full or not.

A few hours after sundown we meet up at seafood-specialized Oceana for the first (and last) proper meal of the day, and we go all out on three courses, starting with a shrimp spring roll served with a tangle of crunchy airy fried rice noodle, an ample drizzle of sweet mango sauce, and on the side stands endive and sesame sprout in nori wrap.

Victoria opts for a Saint Jacques scallop served in creamy cheesy sauce on a half shell.

The entrees come fluidly after: a generous portion of sea bass for Victoria and a salmon and scallop wellington for me. The fluff pastry is a bit too oily and chewy I can hardly saw off a polite bite with the knife, but the scallop cubes on the side and the mash potato under it all have just the right charred amount that helps retaining the suppleness of a calm, seasoned sea.

The banana tartine for dessert is a little sweeter than my expectation, although I don’t know why I would expect fried and caramelized banana mounted on a sugary brioche to be moderately plain. It must be the pristine night wind that numbs my senses. Bsides, when you cast your eyes out to the silver reflection of the moon on the ocean waves, the sea has captured you.

Oceana Seafood Restaurant –
Dreams Puerto Vallarta Resort & Spa
Playa Las Estacas S/N
Carretera Barra de Navidad Km. 3.5
Puerto Vallarta, Jal. 48300 Mexico

You can hardly ever go wrong with a cheeseburger. When the cheeseburger also comes with a blue lake, a blue sky, a few palm trees too tall to shade off the daring sun, some chilly wind here and there, and extra good company, then you simply cannot go wrong.

Talk about mood lifting food (read it both ways).

Gwyn takes Aaron and me for a ride through the tree-lined roads somewhere in Magnolia to Papa’s on the Lake, right off 105. After an hour long horseback riding in the sun, or more precisely speaking, an hour long sitting on the horse and having him walk around the block, the breeze from Lake Conroe is so inviting I daydream about jumping into the rippling waves. First time riding, what can I say, the old man kept wanting to eat his grass and I kept having to pull his heavy head up to match Aaron’s pace. But as much as my hands get scratched by the leather reins and saddle horn, I’d sit on that horse forever if I could. We hadn’t had lunch and I was full on enjoyment.

Until the blond waitress comes with a laminated hot pink 3-page menu that looks like a folded A4 paper, the entries being country appetizers and sandwiches whose prices are in the single digit range. When Aaron orders some potato skins and I get my first ever bite of those burnt shells covered with chewy dried melted cheese and too generous a drizzle of sour cream, then hunger really kicks in.

While waiting, we also nibble on some stuffed jalapenos, breaded and fried, just as mild as a warm bath.

By the time we wipe our fingers clean of grease with the hastily torn brown paper towel, the sandwiches arrive. Gwyn doesn’t make any comment on his fried chicken strip sandwich, but from its blazing orange look and Gwyn’s speedy finishing, I can only assume it’s a tasty deal.

My cajun shrimp poboy hits the spot. But since I don’t squeeze in any mayo or mustard, the scruffy shrimps and the airy loaf make one dry bundle that’s not much to write home about. Good fries, lots of water, and good chatting end the lunch on a high note. 🙂 Everything together for a bit over $40, and I don’t know if I’m still high from riding the horses or what, but I like this place.

Address: Papa’s on the Lake (a hot pink building by Lake Conroe)
14632 Highway 105 W
Montgomery, TX 77356
(936) 447-2500

Forget the champagne, these tiny balls, each as big as a champagne grape, set off some pretty flavorful firework on the tongue.

We’ve driven by this Orange Leaf many a time but always when we’re heading for some green waffle at Century Bakery. For some reason reasonable only to the designer’s aesthetics, there is a fence encompassing the vicinity of Orange Leaf and Lemon Grass, separating the two from the Grand Century Mall, even though they’re practically in the same block. Needless to say, the fence inconveniences anyone who parks in Grand Century lot and wants to go to Orange Leaf, or vice versa, because you gotta walk all around and out to the street and back in again on the other side of the fence. Nobody has attempted to climb. A lot more, like myself I’d imagine, have said the heck with it and gone to only one or the other. For us the 50/50 odds has disproportionately favored Grand Century in the past. Then one day Mudpie pouts and says “I want waffles and yogurt”.

The setup at Orange Leaf is what you would expect at any frozen yogurt corner: clean dispenser stalls, small tables, light chairs, you make one leisure trip from the cups, passing the yogurt reservoirs, winding by the topping trays, stop at the scale to weigh your sweet snowy load and pay 30 cents for every ounce, then you take a cheap-colored plastic spoon and thank the cashier who has patiently (and likely out of boredom) observed you from the start. The yogurt selection has what I always go for: chocolate, coconut, and taro. (My number one, unwavered rule for fro-yo: no taro, no Mai. No exception.)

The toppings are for the most part the same as everywhere else: fresh fruits, cheesecake bite, brownie bite, coconut flake, cereal, gummy bear, chocolate chip, etc. But at the forefront something new catches my eyes: tiny, shiny, bouncy-looking perfect balls in yellow and white. Mudpie comes up as I scoop spoonfuls into my cup, “what are those?”

Fruity “popping boba” as they call them. They are so slightly smaller than the tapioca pearls (“boba” 波霸) in bubble tea, and certainly not made of tapioca. Not more than a couple of droplets are contained, with some leeway, inside a thin but chewy pouch. Like popping bubble wrap? How about popping one with your tongue and feeling a mini explosion of orange juice sweep over the fleshy terrain? It is pure joy that goes with any yogurt flavor. Color aside they look like ikura, but they taste better, hands down.

Where to find them: Orange Leaf (near Grand Century mall)
1143 Story Rd. Suite 190,
San Jose, CA 95122
(408) 289-8123

Two dollars for every three of them. A square, fluffy pillow of dough deep fried to flakiness and powder-sugared. Gripping each donut with two fingertips, I bend as close to the tiny plate as I can and hold my breath, the anticipation mounts as to not blow away the sweet white dust (and to avoid unwanted makeup powder on my face).

We confectioner the year end with beignets from Cafe Du Monde in Metairie, Louisiana.

And the six-hour drive just spirals off in the invisible gust of some unjustifiable self-indulgent joy. We’ve had beignets before, but these strike us differently: refreshing, comfortable, and better. They offer nothing more than a combination of leavened, fried and sweetened, but also nothing less than an immersion into the food itself, skillfully and quickly enough to make you forget your whereabouts.

With all that said, they’re products of a chain. Eight Cafe Du Monde’s spread both sides of Lake Ponchartrain, the first in 1862 on Decatur Street (formerly Camino Real in 1762-1803, just FYI for no apparent reason) down at the French Quarter, and the second in 1985 in the now Kenner. There is nothing bistroesque or vaguely French about the modern shiny seats in the cafe, the only reminiscence of old days is that they take cash only. But it’s charming, like all simplicity done well.

Just as the donut has many ways to savor, the beignet, according to Blake, is best without sugar and dipped in coffee.

So here, a Happily Sugar-coated New Year to all and an Aromatic Coffee-soaked one to Blake!

Address: Cafe Du Monde
4700 Veterans Blvd
(504) 888-9770

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

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

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

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

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

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