Flavor Boulevard

Ramen is all hip now and if I were that into ramen, I probably would try a ramen shop everyday until I exhaust all options in Tokyo (it will take only a few lifetimes). But honestly, there’s SO MUCH MORE about noodles in Japan that I’m glad I didn’t spend all my time with ramen. I don’t regret one bit that I had only ONE bowl of ramen in Tokyo the entire stay. When I think about the spaghetti with boiled anchovy (you can also have it raw) or somen and rice with clam(*), I’m filled with joy. (I really am!)

Ziggy’s Pasta is an unassuming shop a stone’s throw away from Koutoku-in in Kamakura – the temple with the great copper statue of Buddha, where 60% of the tourists stick their hands out for a statue-carrying pose.

When we visited in Kamakura, my life goal was too eat shoujin ryouri (精進料理) – traditional Buddhist vegetarian meal, but that goal was quickly quenched because everybody and their grandma were lining up outside every restaurant during lunch time, and no shoujin ryouri restaurant was opened for dinner. So we walked along the street in dejection, and suddenly I saw Ziggy’s Pasta. If I can’t have what I want, I might as well eat the first thing I see – pasta.

This is their menu. The guy recommended the left page as their specialty: cold spaghetti in 3 different types of sauce topped with shirasu (which I didn’t understand but was in for the thrill anyway), which can be served either raw or boiled. I’m not into tomato sauce and I didn’t know what “sudachi” was (the first category), so that’s that. With “bajiru”, I just felt a chance of knowing what it meant, so I asked him what “bajiru” was. He thought and thought, and tilted his head, “bajiru desu ne…? sorewa, italy no …” (loosely mean “bajiru huh? It’s an Italian …”) and tilted his head some more. I tilted my head too, to search for an Italian thing that is green and starts with “b”. It took me a good minute. Can you guess?

Here is spaghetti with boiled shirasu (anchovy) in bajiru sauce. Admittedly it neither sounds nor looks too heart-warming – I had never had cold pasta with fish before, much less boiled fish, but this dish confirms that the Japanese knows how to work their fish into everything. The fish is not at all fishy, just a tiny bit salty, the pasta and the sauce work together splendidly, and the coolness from the plate to the silverware to the pasta lifts you up from the afternoon summer heat like no other. I was revived.

The sudachi option with raw anchovy has more zest, but I think I’m not quite there with the raw fish, they go down a little too… smooth? This dish was definitely going for the slimy smooth theme, considering the raw egg and ikura (salmon roe). The myoga (Japanese ginger flower buds) adds a much appreciated crunch, though.

Thinking back, the evening at Ziggy’s Pasta was one of the more memorable meals I had in Japan. It’s worth missing out on the traditional Buddhist meal. Sure, spaghetti is much less Japanese than shoujin ryouri, but where can you find spaghetti like this but in Japan?

Address: Kamakura Ziggy’s Pasta
神奈川県鎌倉市長谷1-16-25
Kamakura, Japan

(To be continued)

Foodnote:
(*) Somen and rice with clam will have to wait until Noodles Part 3. Originally I intended to do them with cold spaghetti, but as I wrote on, I realized that cold spaghetti deserves it own post, and so does somen. 🙂

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Guest blogged by C. from Katsushika, Tokyo.

None of the secondi struck our fancy, but we did order a substantial number of dishes. So substantial that instead of ordering by the names, I curled my index finger and thumb into a square bracket and pointed on the menu “we’ll take these four and these four, and the potato, and the asparagus please.”

That was 10 out of 25 “dishes” on the menu, if olives and salads could count as dishes at all.

Three years ago, I had a bite of pork belly sandwich from Corso. I remember nothing of it, except that it was memorably good. I vowed to come back, but my cravings are always either rice noodle or pancakes (although every time I get pancakes, their texture is gravely disappointing), so for these three years, the vow stayed as a vow and didn’t happen. I kept hearing from multiple sources near and far about how good Corso was, though, so my confidence for this Italian restaurant increased. When I picked Corso for dinner last Friday, I didn’t expect the restaurant to wow us, but I felt confident that the meal would be solid and comforting, that we would be well fed by the end.

The high note: the server replaced our plates and utensils after each course, yay for a clean platform to taste new dishes.

The low note: how low would you like to hear?

In general, this Asian does not have paramount hope for Italian food (to me, Italian food is pasta and cheese, both of which I find to be comforting yet boring), but there’s a reason Italian food is comfort food: assuming that you start from boiling dried pasta and that you have any sense of taste at all, it’s easy to cook an edible plate of pasta. Not perfect, but edible. Guess what, the tagliatelle al sugo at Corso was NOT even edible: it was pungent, muddy and in dire need of more tomato sauce and minced carrots. Each of us took one single bite, then a drink of water and that was it. The plate looked untouched when the server later cleaned up the table.

As far as bad restaurant experiences go, Corso had set a new record the moment they managed to screw up pasta and ground meat.

Were we well fed by the end? Well, we were fed up for sure. Why am I not trying to be nice with this review? Because I decided on this restaurant for dinner. I feel responsible when my friends couldn’t enjoy the meal, thus a positive review would be akin to lame excuses to sugar coat my poor decision. In fact, Corso left such a disappointing taste that it doesn’t even deserve a longer title in this post.

Bonus story: the table next to us ordered the butter-roasted chicken. The lady, who appeared to be in her 70s, looked over when our pastas had just arrived and said to her husband, who was signing the bill, “Look, they got the tagliatelle and the cavatelli. It looks good”. So I turned around, smiled with her and asked how was her chicken. She said it was laden with so much butter and cooked perfectly. I replied “It looked ah-may-zing.” (Chicken breasts never excite me, but I figured the situation called for a diplomatic comment.) In hindsight, did we just order the wrong dishes? Nah, it’s much harder to make white meat succulent than to make pasta edible. But I’m glad that at least one customer was happy with her meal.

The APPETIZERS (antipasti)

Marinated carrots – $5
Tasty level: banal (in any decent banh mi can you find equivalent carrots, with less oil)

Tuscan chicken liver pate – $8 – with sage, anchovy and capers.
Tasty level: Mud (I blame it on the overtone of anchovy)

Crostini – $8 – mussel ragu on toast
Tasty level: Good.
Why is it yellow? Beat me.

Grilled shrimp – $11 – in chili oil and parsley
Tasty level: Horrid.
The shrimps taste metallic. Was it overgrilled on open gas flames?

Salumi – $14 – spicy coppa, sweet coppa, toscano, ciccioli on toast, finocchiona.
Tasty level: Meh.
There’s no difference between the spicy coppa and the sweet coppa, or anything on that plate for that matter.

The SIDES (contorni)

Asparagus – $6
Tasty level: banal
I like the asparagus and I would have ranked it higher, but the sauce… They call it “fontina-tartufo fonduta”, which sounds like a chant to me, is so pungent because of the truffle.

Fries – $6 – One of the few edible items.

The first MAIN COURSES (primi)

Cavatelli – $14 – pasta with garlic pork sausage, kale, olives and parmigiano
Tasty level: Good
It’s not all that different from your homemade macaroni and cheese, but we could eat it happily.

Funghi e polenta – $15 – wild mushroom and polenta.
Tasty level: Meh
The polenta seriously needs more salt. There’s no taste in this dish at all. (The mushroom was faintly sour actually.)

Trippa alla Florentina – $9 – tripe stew with pancetta, spicy tomato, parmigiano and mint.
Tasty level: Okay. But it is too monotonic with the tomato sauce.

Tagliatelle al sugo – $15 – pasta with braised beef and pork.
Tasty level: Inedible.
What did they braise the meat with? Mud?

The DESSERTS (dolce)

Panna cotta – $6 – vanilla custard with spiced vino Lambrusco and Mission fig sauce.
Tasty level: Meh. (The custard is tasteless. The fig sauce is okay, though, it was neither too sweet nor too tangy)

Affogato – $6 – gelato with espresso
Tasty level: Good
If they had screwed up ice cream too, I don’t know what I would have done.

I like the vertical theme

Kristen studying Corso menu.

Kristen also reviewed Corso on her blog, Put It on Kristen’s Plate. We shared the same meal, and her review shows the same grave disappointment but with more thorough consideration than mine.

She also raised a good point: when the server approaches you with the question “Is everything okay?”, how do you respond when the food, in fact, is not okay? Do you say the common “yes” to just send the server away from the table? Do you explain what tastes bad? Do you ask to speak to the chef?

Address: Trattoria Corso
1788 Shattuck Ave
Berkeley, CA 94709
(510) 704-8003
Dinner for 4: $172.77
Reservation is advisable. Despite its surprisingly horrible food, Corso continues to thrive in North Berkeley. All tables later than 5:30 pm on Friday were booked.

Little Mom likes Houston because it’s big, I’ve grown to like Berkeley because it’s so tiny I can get around without a car. Little Mom likes our big garden where she can grow 20 trees and who knows how many rose bushes, I’m content with my little dried-plum-container-turned-flower-pot in which I grow my onion. Point is, Little Mom likes big things, and I, well, sometimes like and most of the time don’t mind small things. But as often as she likes big restaurants, Little Mom likes little Cafe Du Bois in Kingwood.

It makes me feel better than if I had liked Cafe Du Bois myself. The joy when you pick out a place and your company likes it, the more important the company to you the bigger the joy, and to top that with a company of people with sensitive, rarely pleased tastebuds, it feels like winning the lottery. And here my mom suggested that we should go to Cafe Du Bois again.

She likes it for the roasted red snapper on rice with a light cream and tomato basil sauce, for being a mere 10 minutes from our house, for the slow, peaceful air of a little French restaurant way in the back of Kingwood Town Center – two old men finished eating before us, us, and another old man who was about to get his order after sipping wine for 30 minutes as we were waiting for our check seemed to be the only customers at lunch that Sunday. The carrot sauce was not too impressive, but she likes the fried yucca. She likes some of many paintings for sale on the walls. The bread was great. She likes the peach carnations on the white table cloths. She loves the creme brulee.

I remember the spinach and strawberry salad being a hair too sweet, the crab cake sandwich a bit dry, the shrimp primavera pretty cheesy. But you know what, Little Mom’s red snapper was good. So I like Cafe Du Bois.

Address: Cafe Du Bois
2845A Town Center Circle West
(Kingwood Town Center)
Kingwood, Texas 77339
(281) 360-2530

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

The 7-year-old Antica Osteria is much too young to be one of “the nurseries of our legislators”, but it sure feels like one: warm brick walls, dark wood work, an old house nested in the green, sleepy residential area northwest of Rice University, and a patronage mainly composed of old white men. The smell of books might have been replaced by the smell of pasta and cheese (this place was previously a bookstore), but Chef Velio Deplano and his partner Ray Memari have kept Antica Osteria in that hidden, rustic, peaceful feeling of a bookstore. The gentle orange light made me excited like a drifting sailor seeing a lighthouse.

Normal bread and butter, not bread, vinegar and oil, accompanied our post-ordering conversation, followed by some airy garlic bread. A tiny voice in some little corner in my mind whispered that the garlic bread was waiting for the salad to travel down the pipe, but who could resist such beautiful orange color. We made sure that the garlic bread’s presence on the table was as fleeting as its texture. 😉

The insalata campagnola was great by itself anyway. The buffalo mozzarella, plain with a nutty lightness of marshmallow, deems superior to mozzarella from cow milk. I grew up hearing that water buffalo meat is leaner and “whiter” than beef (as in white meat vs. red meat, no racist joke here), so I was appalled to learn that water buffalo milk is much richer (higher levels of protein, fat, and minerals) than cow milk. (To produce 1 kg of cheese, 5 kg of water buffalo milk is needed versus 8 kg of cow milk.) The richness really doesn’t show in this cheese ball though, it’s like eating air.

I guess Varun didn’t feel particularly adventurous that day, as if one could ever be adventurous in an Italian restaurant, seeing that he got grilled salmon. As long as he’s happy…

I got petto d’anatra al pepe nero (black pepper pan-fried duck). It’s good, but again, not adventurous either.

The most exciting thing of the night was Aaron’s choice, also a special del giorno: cappellini aragosta, or angel hair pasta with lobster. Not that it was anything few people dare to eat, but the battle between Aaron and the lobster tail was captivating. Battle Aragosta. I can imagine directing a dinner date scene where the heroine of my movie has such trouble eating lobster and the guy finds it both uncouth and endearing at the same time. 😀 That said, I never order lobster.

Address: Antica Osteria
2311 Bissonnet
Houston, TX 77005
(713) 521-1155

Dinner for three: $95.26