Flavor Boulevard

Tag: breakfast

  • Breakfast at Jodie’s

      jodies-with-a-y
      Friday. Nancy messaged Kristen and me that we should meet up early the next morning for breakfast at Jodie’s. We love breakfast. “How early, though?”, I asked.
      – I could pick you all up… Mai at 7:45, Kristen at 7:50 ish…
      – I have to say, this is insanely early, maybe I would just skip sleeping…
      – Well, it is a TINY place next to a salon, I believe. It only seats eight at a time. The shop opens at 8 AM… There is the possibility of going later – 10 ish – but we would have to wait for “turnover” and wouldn’t be sitting with each other…
      – …
      – They have a table outside… it might be cold… They said they can’t predict if there will be only a few people or a lot… so we could always go a little later, but then we might have to wait for the table, but at least when that happens, we could still all sit together… Shall we try for 8:30 then? A bit of a compromise 😉
      – 7:45 or 8:30 are the same to me, so let’s do 7:45. 🙂

      Now, I’m an astronomer and a student, those two types of creatures don’t wake up early in the morning, they stay up into the morning. Which is exactly what I did. I stayed all until 7:50 when Nancy and her husband Ken picked me up. Then we swung by Kristen’s apartment. Kristen looked wonderfully bright and lively in pink pants (it might have been a salmon color, but after working the whole night, my color perception has reduced to that of a guy). During the drive, the conversation in the car was actually quite lively too, at one point we talked about male favoritism in ancient Chinese culture, but I won’t dwell on that now. The point is, boy was it the right idea to meet at 7:45, because by the time we arrived at Jodie’s (a bit before 8:30), 4 seats appeared filled. We took the remaining 4 seats.

      jodie-talking-to-customers
      I felt somewhat bad for the folks who came minutes after us. They were regulars. In fact, everyone there that day was a regular except the four of us. But someone left to wait for someone, 2 seats freed up, they filled in, the conversations started. Nancy and Ken, being long time residents in the Berkeley – Albany area, had no trouble connecting with everyone through stories of local high school principals and colleagues that somehow everyone (but Kristen and me) knew, while Kristen studied the walls of menus and photographs, and I snapped photos of those walls.

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    • Morning at the observatory

        morning-at-observatory
        Facebook is hard. I don’t want to annoy people by posting personal things that nobody cares about, but I also want to connect with my friends. How long should a status or a comment be? How much of a political/cultural stand should I put out? Is a mellow status a sign of weakness, or even worse, boring-ness? Somehow Facebook has become a campaigning platform, where we are judged by what we say and what we don’t say and how many “Likes” and comments we get. I don’t know what to write on Facebook anymore, and I usually delete my status right before I hit “Enter”, but then I get these feelings that I want to write about. Like this week, I want to write about this surreal feeling I get sitting in the control room of a radio astronomy observatory.

        The observatory is southwest of the White Mountains. Outside is the desert, and the telescopes, which are moving slowly in sync to track several objects in space. The telescopes look like little big robot kids innocently gazing at the sky. Occasionally the birds catch the moths that flutter right next to the glass windows, making a small “thump” sound and fly off. (The chipmunks are smaller than a cheap hotdog sausage, so tiny!) There’s another observer on duty, but we both stare at our computers when we’re awake. Everything is silence except for the clock ticking.

        If you’ve watched “Contact”, chances are you remember the scene of Dr. Arroway (Judy Foster) sitting alone (in open air) at a radio observatory, the antenna in the background, listening to the transmission with her headphones. We actually do no such romanticism. We sit in a room with four computer screens, schedule and monitor projects (with our eyes, not ears), and hope that everything does what it’s supposed to so that we don’t have to physically touch the antennas or any of the other machines.

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      • Friday afternoon, Bistro 1491

          The sky is grey. The ipod plays Gustav Mahler’s piano quartet in A minor. One hand turns the page to Der Prokurator. The other hand maneuvers the fork into a stack of three pancakes. Oozing chocolate chips and a thick strip of bacon.


          Bistro 1491 sits, in fact, at 1491 Solano Avenue. Somehow I keep thinking that the name is 1941. It feels so. The burn orange walls, the abstract paintings, the white-haired ladies by the window.

          The pancakes are fluffy, soft, good at first, the bacon is at the right saltiness. The maple syrup errs on the watery side, or maybe it’s just overwhelmed by what’s supposed to be dark chocolate but turns out too sweet. About 60% dark. A heavy feel sets in after the pancakes are gone, what’s left on the plate are messy streaks of brown chocolate and faint yellow syrup. It could almost make a hasty painting. But hasty does not suit this scene.

          Address: Bistro 1491
          1491 Solano Ave
          (between Santa Fe Ave & Curtis St)
          Albany, CA 94706
          (510) 526-9601
          Breakfast at noon: dark chocolate & bacon pancakes – $8.65

        • What you should eat when you’re in Texas

            Not barbecue.

            That stuff is everywhere in the South. I’m talking about something that only Texas has. Something a little sweet, a little pillowy, a little chewy, a little cheesy, a little meaty. Something that after you eat one, you just have to get another. Something that 99.91% of the time is chosen over donuts (I made up the stats, but I’ve never met anyone who picks a donut when they’re given this). My Texas friends, I miss the kolaches.


            If you haven’t had it, you’re gonna say “That’s a pig-in-the-blanket, Whole Foods has loads.” No, it is far from a pig-in-the-blanket. I repeat, kolaches is NOT pig-in-the-blanket (PitB).

            The difference is in the bread. PitB bread is plain, flare it up with poppy seeds and oily butter or not, it’s plain and must not be eaten without the sausage. Kolaches bread is sweet, like a Hawaiian roll*. PitB bread is dry and flaky. Kolaches bread is pillowy, slightly chewy and moist. The sausage is there for protein surplus and does not really add fireworks to the flavor. If you insist on an either-or, I’d choose the bread and toss the sausage every time. Donut shops in Houston would ask if you want the kind with cheese, say yes. The very thin inner lining of cheese makes its salty-sweet.

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          • Venus and the Casual-Cali dining trend

              In foodie talk, Berkeley is synonymous with Chez Panisse: there’s hardly a writing of Bay Area cuisine without the mentioning of Alice Waters and her propriety. But as attractive as the local and sustainable idea sounds, places like Chez Panisse are clearly not in the accessible range for everyone’s weekly, or even monthly, savour. If it’s not what the locals regularly eat, how can it represent the local cuisine? The common Berkelers don’t make one month reservation to eat at a cafe, they instead would rather make a line on the sidewalk, waiting to be seated in 25 minutes or so-told by waiters with tattoos and spiky hair. Such casualness, though paired with obvious reduce in taste innovation and price, defines the Berkeley dining spectrum, with the holes in the wall like Razan’s Organic Kitchen and Gregoire at the cheaper end, to more comfortable sit-downs like Herbivore and Venus at the other.


              I call it a sit-down because Venus is barely bigger than a classroom, and diners are spaced more snugly than students on exam day. Its rectangular base holds a kitchen-cashier combination and roughly 40 seats – an ok amount for lunch and dinner but not enough for the mornings. I’ve seen lines, and been in one myself, standing outside the door even on weekdays. The mornings here are cold, but Venus’s breakfasts are good.

              Venus's scramble eggs with calabrese sausage , spinach and mushroom, with roasted potato and toasts – $11.00

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            • Millbrae Pancake House – Old country breakfast with a berry good twist


                The most irresistible American meal is the full country breakfast. I know it’s derived from the full English breakfast and all, and it’s probably so irresistible just because who in their right mind would refuse food after a long night with an empty stomach (hence the word “fast” – not eating, in “breakfast”). And yes, there’s nothing speedy about the old country breakfast. Making pancakes, scrambling eggs, frying sausages takes a good hour off your morning, not to mention scrubbing the skillets afterwards. I probably will never make a full country breakfast at home until I have nothing better to do, but thank God for blessing America with countless roadside brick houses opened up just to serve breakfast. And may those like Millbrae Pancake House flourish despite the swamping force of IHOP and the likes, because they serve freaking good breakfast.


                I said freaking good because I happened to order the one dish that, it turns out for the first time, everyone on Yelp seems to agree to be MPH’s best. The Swedish pancake with lingonberry butter. Have no idea how Swedish this really is, but the pancake is not the fluffy butter kind IHOP is known for, instead it’s a small flat crepe. It’s dense and has a slight sweet chew. And the lingonberry butter is butter mixed with lingonberry bits. And I spread a ton of it on my pancake. And I ate it by itself, like eating chocolate. Americans, maybe it’s time to mix raspberry, blueberry, strawberry, gooseberry, and maybe other fruits too into your butter. It kills. Just sayin’.

                The rest of the breakfast was really just so so. Hash brown, two runny eggs, and four sausage links were as good as they could(should) be, but nothing unexpected. That’s ok, the Swedish deal wowed me enough.

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