Flavor Boulevard

Tag: pizza

  • Sai the Izakaya

      sai-beef
      Izakayas in the Bay Area mostly target customers with a lot of money to spare (looking right at you, Ippuku!). Although there are merits to that (it costs to support local business and ethical ways of raising animals), a meal at these places is just not the same as sitting in a small neighborhood izakaya, talking to the chef who’s cooking 5 feet away from you, smelling the smoke from both the food and the tobacco of the nearby customer (who you may know by name), and inhaling your food, which comes in big bowls, to your heart’s content. I love neighborhood izakayas in Tokyo.

      sai-near-kameari-eki sai-menu
      Sai is one of them. This place jumps to mind when I think of izakayas nowadays. One big reason is that when I had a homestay in Japan, my host family took me there one night and it was a perfect family experience. If I had discovered the place myself (which I’m not sure is possible), I wouldn’t know what to order (the menu is 90% kanji @_@), I wouldn’t have had two parental figures to share the meal with (traveling alone makes you want to spend time with your parents more, doesn’t it?), nobody would have introduced me to the chef, and the chef wouldn’t have encouragingly complimented my mediocre Japanese.

      Another reason is that Sai has crazy good comfort foods, one of which is the chef’s homemade pizza.

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    • Slice of Happiness and Houston food truck events


        If you’re a student, you know the significance of frozen pizza. It comes only second to instant noodles, i.e., packaged ramen, and on some days I might even argue that it’s better than instant noodles in terms of efficiency. There are three sections that I always check when I go to the groceries: the noodles, the ice cream, and the frozen pizza. Yesterday when I first learned of Annie’s, I went to their website and found out that Berkeley Bowl carries their product, so I’ll be looking for it, but if you’re in Houston and got some time to kill this weekend, why not beat me to a slice of “the first-ever-certified organic rising crust frozen pizza”?

        Annie’s will hold their “Slice of Happiness” tour during lunch hours at four Whole Food locations from this Friday to next Monday: 4004 Bellaire Blvd – Friday, March 23 (11 am – 2 pm), 11145 Westheimer Road – Saturday, March 24 (10 am – 1 pm), 701 Waugh Drive – Sunday, March 25 (10 am – 1 pm), and 2955 Kirby Drive – Monday, March 26 (11 am – 2 pm).

        The tour will feature their recent February-launched pizzas in four flavors.

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      • Andiamo buonissimo and Jen’s new start


          Jen‘s been pushing me to push this post out of the drafts, just as I’ve been pushing her to publish her very first post on Where’s the Seitan?, her blooming, Chicago-based vegan food blog. Her lively, conversational writing draws you in, just as Jen herself. 🙂 When she reaches a million views per month, I hope she’ll still like to share a meal and talks about movies with the humble me.


          During lunch break on Tuesday, after a fantastic plate of fresh fruits and cucumbers at the cafeteria (if I eat at St. John cafeteria long enough I’d turn into a fruitarian), we could hardly wait until dinner to eat something real, so we dived into Yelp and Google Maps in search of a “good but inexpensive” place (Jen’s request) closed enough to the bus stop. Coins were tossed, rock-paper-scissor was played, phone calls were made, decisions were revised, and a reservation was confirmed: 7:15 pm at Andiamo.


          Our group has diversity: one strict vegan, one vegetarian who loves goat cheese, one omnivore who is allergic to all dairy except butter, one omnivore who doesn’t like goat cheese and doesn’t really care about any cheese, and one omnivore who loves potatoes. We start off sharing some Roasted Beet Salad ($7.75) and Caponata Bruschetta (eggplant bruschetta, $7.5). Cheese on the side.

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        • Sweet and spicy Zante’s Indian pizza


            I can eat rice for every meal every day without getting tired of it (with perhaps an occasional craving for noodle soups or a burger). Why? Because rice is a solid starch base upon which you can mount anything and they’d go together just like that. Meats, seafood, vegetables, fruits, other starchy stuff. The closest thing to rice that wheat can do is the pizza. I wouldn’t eat pizza everyday because it always makes me cry for water like a beached whale. But everything goes on pizzas, too. Even curry. Spot on, Zante.


            I don’t know how Mudpie knew of this cozy kitchen on Mission Street, but we went there right after I got off the plane from Puerto Vallarta. The combination of “Indian” and “pizza” sounds like comfort on a drizzling January night. Besides, I have a thing for old brick buildings, and the number 86.


            Though the printed menu is much easier to flip and read than the online menu, we still took a while looking for something new and appealing from the maze of flat breads and meaty dishes (and vegetarian dishes, but I won’t go there), mainly because we were looking for non-spicy food. The kabulinan (roti with raisins and nuts) was a sure bet, sweet, chewy, crusty at the edge, and filled with coconut shreds in and out. The chicken makanwala, though good, didn’t deliver much news. I couldn’t sense any difference between this thick orange sauce and the chicken tikka masala‘s thick orange sauce at Biryani House.

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          • From popadom to Bombay pizza

              – Guest post by Paul Simeon – The Indian meals following Cous Cous Cafe‘s takeouts and dinners at Oxford during his two weeks in England.


              Saturday night I went to Mirch Masala. It was an Indian/Pakistani place. I later found out from the servers that the owner was from Pakistan, and the wife was from India. While I was waiting, alone, the server offered to get me some popadom (it has multiple spellings, but this is how their menu says it).


              I didn’t know what it was or if it were complimentary, so I just said, “no, that’s alright.”  He brought it anyway, and it was quite nice.  It was a thin, crisp flatbread, like a cracker, and it had three toppings for it: chutney, chopped onions and coriander, and some green mint sauce.  The chutney was quite good.

              I didn’t finish all of the popadom by the time the main dish came, Murgh Makhani (Tandoori chicken off the bone cooked in butter, yoghurt, cream, cashew nuts, powder and masala sauces) with a side of paratha (rolled out Indian bread made on tawa, spread with ghee) to eat it with.

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            • Careful charging


                I’m suffocating myself with two large pizzas from West Coast. The one above is No. 7 The Godfather, with tomato sauce, pepperoni, salami, onion, mozzarella, olives (which I enjoy picking off), pepper rings (the yellow thing, very mild), and green bell pepper. No. 3 Pesto Chicken sounds excellent but turns out dry like hay in the shed, I never knew tomato sauce was so important at keeping it wet.


                West Coast is good pizza at moderate price in a moderate factory-looking store. There is no chair or table for dine-in, but there’s a wide unadorned counter for orders and pickups, where you can stand awkwardly watching the guys throwing and spreading cheese and sauce on your pies before swifting them into the ovens.

                There are two big fridges full of soft drinks, a delivery map of the area, a sign that says “Don’t put pizza boxes on the floor” in English and Portuguese, a few Brazilian magazines scattered in one forlorn corner. They only take credit card for purchases over 10 dollars, something I’m not so fond of at local stores around Berkeley.

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