Flavor Boulevard

Tag: blogging

  • Two scientists take on all Indian restaurants in Berkeley

      Hull and Surendranath examine the inscription on a spoon at Bombay Cuisine.
      Hull and Surendranath examine the inscription on a spoon at Bombay Cuisine.

      What do grad students do? Some of us write, some of us teach, most of us don’t sleep, all of us eat. For Astronomy PhD student Chat Hull and his friend Yogesh Surendranath, a Chemistry postdoctoral fellow, eating at every single Indian restaurant in Berkeley and writing about it is high on the priority list.

      Berkeley has no shortage of Indian restaurants for the duo to review. “We stay within the city limit”, said Surendranath. Their blog, Masala Chaat, has been regularly updated for roughly a year. When I meet them in the office, they seem like the normal physicists: friendly, calm and full of physics. When I joined them in a trip to Bombay Cuisine, the restaurant-reviewing mode was turned on full-force. The inner comedians were revealed.

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    • 9 tips to make your food post interesting

        Recently I’ve received an increasing number of requests to guest-post on my site, which makes me ecstatic, but it also sets me in a difficult position to evaluate what is interesting. Of the millions of food blogs out there, what makes yours interesting? It’s you. Your voice, your emotions and your own experience with the food can set your post miles above a recipe that I can find just 0.2 seconds after I google its name. I’m no professional blogger, but I’ve read a fair share of food blogs, and from the ones that I keep returning to, I’ve learned and formed my own set of guidelines on how to write a post (which I try to follow, sometimes more successful than others).

        In general, recipe posts have more room for personal stories, and they also comprise the most common type of food blogs (small sample: of the top 50 food blogs on Delish, 43 are recipes), so these guidelines are more geared toward recipe blogging than reviews. I’m gonna skip the photos, although they’re important, they’re the varnish and the writing is the wood.

        1. Write statements with specific details, geographically and historically. Let’s say you want to write about grilled catfish. You need an opening sentence. Your first thought is “When it comes to catfish, there are many American dishes. They are mouthwatering and delicious.” These two sentences sound choppy and unimpressive, so you can remodel them into “Our American cuisine has no shortage of mouth-watering dishes with catfish, such as Catfish Tuscany and Catfish Gumbo.” Then you give more background details to it: in which regions in America are these dishes most common, who usually like them; or give a more personal touch: do you have a childhood story related to one of these catfish dishes, how did you come to like catfish or fish in general, etc.

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      • Recipe versus Review


          Today I make a list to re-evaluate my blogging life.

          Recipe posts:
          Pros:

          • A lot of room for personal story
          • A lot of control with pictures: position, setting (decoration, utensil, plating), lighting, time (time of the day, amount of time for taking picture), camera equipment (unless you’re brazen and bring a tripod into the restaurant, some people do that, and I know some people who dislike people who do that)
          • Single product – cost efficiency
          • No partner necessary, although a helpless victim test subject friend might be useful
          • Almost always a good result
          • Experiment: you can do things a thousand times, talking about your experiments also makes a good story (example: tofu misozuke experiment by Oanh and Linh-Dang at Rau Om)
          • Relevance to readers: high – almost everyone can follow a recipe if they want to

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        • The new kid in the block


            Introducing a new site I’m working on: Tea and Mai. 🙂

            Now that I’m regularly attending a tea class and seriously inspired to learn about tea, I figure that I should write down what I learn instead of trying to memorize everything in vain. Consider it also my little contribution to the environment by going paperless. 😉 Why make a new site? Because I don’t want to turn Flavor Boulevard into chock-fulls of yellow-tinted drinks. On relevant occasions there will be posts shared on both sites though, such as this one in the picture above: a post on a few Blooming Teas.

          • My twelve best meals in the Year of the Cat

              Appetizers from Saigon Buffet

              Today marks the 28th day of the 12th month of the Year of the Cat, and it’s not the Year of the Rabbit because I’m Vietnamese. This year started with a piping jeongol at Casserole House and will be ended with a cup of Tieguanyin in bed. This year my luck has brought me new friendships with some admirable people and bolstered old friendships that have last almost a decade. I’ve eaten more, and I’ve disliked more. But there are meals that I truly like. In this list of no particular order, the setting and the price are secondary to the taste, and not all of the dishes are breathtaking (but they’re good). These meals are the best because each of them either has something that I remember (most often the dessert :D) or was shared with someone that I like. 🙂

              It would be unfair to include Little Mom’s meals in this list, they’d take up the whole list. 🙂

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            • The zen in cooking

                There’s nothing zen-like about cooking. It has fire, it involves knives and all sorts of dangerous weapons, it requires the death of plants and animals. It requires speed: bad timing means either a burnt cookie or lunch at 5 pm (if preparations started at 9). Its purpose is consumption. Cooking by nature is so active and outward that it’s the opposite of zen. But in today’s Western hemisphere, zen has become an attractive concept: something that every field could claim to have to romanticize itself: zen in skateboarding, zen in running, zen in pistol shooting (sure…), zen in the art of digital privacy (?!), and my personal favorite: zen of the alcohol stove. Naturally, why wouldn’t zen be in the culinary media?

                Just as I don’t appreciate the all-too-casual usage of “Buddha” in naming vegetarian concoctions, I don’t appreciate this “zen-ization” of everything from stove to pistol. The word is simply exploited. It’s become an eye-catcher. It’s commercialized. Most of the things with the title “Zen in the Art of [insert gerund]” have nothing to do with zen, which their authors also explain in the text. But zenization has its good points:

                1. It can reflect the people’s true attempt to seek their peace of mind in whatever they’re doing, which could be a good thing as long as they’re also trying to minimize their activity’s damage to the world. So zen in martial arts is sensible. Zen in shooting? Only if your target is a board and your mind has no intention of damaging the board.

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              • Domain fight?

                  Okay so this is sort of interesting. Because it hasn’t happened to me before.

                  Oct 24: I received an email from YGNetWorldLTD.com informing me that company T (let’s call them T for now) in China has just registered “FlavorBoulevard” as their domain name in China and Asia (flavorboulevard.cn, flavorboulevard.com.cn, flavorboulevard.asia, etc.) and that I needed to contact them if I want to object this and secure my trademark. Okay.

                  Oct 25: Company T emailed me, saying “We hope your company will not object our application, because this name is very important for our products in Chinese and Asian market. We don’t want your company to use this name in China and Asia, we believe our company will become the legal owner of this name in China and Asia. Even though Mr. [YGNetWorldLTD.com Manager] advises us to change another name, we will persist in this name and permanent registration of this name.”

                  Now it’s not like my FlavorBoulevard has a huge Chinese market (for the time being? :-P), but:
                  1. I thought long and hard for this name too, and I’ve used it for 1 year 8 months and 25 days.
                  2. I don’t want my website to be associated with a Chinese company.
                  3. “We don’t want your company to use this name in China and Asia”. Doesn’t this sound kinda rude? Dear T Ltd., I don’t want you to steal my blog’s name in China and Asia.

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