Flavor Boulevard

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 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.

The salad with tomato, ham, cheese and a special dressing:

(Koichi san, my host dad, told me that at izakayas, you have to order a drink (non-alcoholic is okay), ordering water is rude because water is free and izakayas are drinking establishments. Hence the orange juice for me…)

And the bubbling hot seafood soup with a cute big shrimp:

The soup is reddened with tomato, not chili pepper, which makes it fully enjoyable for cat-tongue people like me and perfect for all weather.

I don’t know what these dishes are called in Japanese (my best bet is the pizza, but there are different types), and no way am I going to read that kanji-full menu in a tolerable amount of time before the chef thinks I’m just there to read the menu (T__T). When I come back to Sai, they won’t be the same dishes, but as long as the chef is the same, a hearty feast is guaranteed.

Address: Sai (彩)
About 0.5 mile south of Kameari station (Katsushika), in 2 Chome, near Welcia Katsushika Kameari Shop

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.

The most interesting thing of the tour, though, is the Truck Farm, an herb garden in the bed of a pickup truck. Finally, a good use of the space that’s hardly ever used but consumes a lot of energy. It actually seems quite feasible to implement in every household if the garden could be set on a removable platform, so you can leave it in your garage for a day in case you actually need the truck bed to move furniture or your garden hose.

Anyway, that got me thinking about the food truck trend in my neck of the wood, Houston. This May 12-13 will see the second annual Haute Wheels. From the list of participating trucks, it appears to have, as expected, a fair amount of mixing between Asian and Southern cooking, with lotsa meat (of course, that’s how Houston rolls), but pretty much everything is comfort food. Nothing too out there. I wouldn’t expect vanilla ice cream topped with mealworm. But that’s actually good: food trucks weren’t created to carry crazy foods or culinary inventions, they were meant for specific comfort food mastered by vendors to satiate the common people’s palate. They shouldn’t be strange. They just have to taste excellent.

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.

The soft but not mushy eggplant, sauteed and deeply seasoned with balsamic vinaigrette, offers a nice contrast with the toast. Nonetheless, it loses to the refreshing simplicity of the roasted beet.

Even more points for the beet salad is the tapenade on the accompanying focaccia slice, which reminds me of pâté, and anything that reminds me of pâté reminds me of joy.

I asked the vegetarian who loves goat cheese to rate her Chilled Gazpacho (vegetable soup, $5.5) from 1 to 5, with 5 being the best, and her response was a shrugging 3. I forgot to ask about her main course, but judging from her smile eating that slice of Pizza Margherita (mozzarella, parmesan, basil and tomato, $8.25), I think she would give it a 4.5.

The omnivore who loves potatoes ordered, surprisingly, the Chicken Marsala with roasted fingerling potatoes ($16.5). I would admit that for a second, I was wondering why an Italian place would serve Indian food, but the Marsala with an “r” is the name of the wine used to make a stark, rich wine reduction sauce for this braised chicken. The potatoes were good, of course.

The omnivore with dairy-‘cept-butter intolerance offered me to try a tentacle-full squid head in his Spaghetti Puttanesca with Calamari ($14). The tentacles are the best because they soak and store up so much sauce in their bundling-up state. I didn’t try the pasta, but you bet it was some tantalizing red sauce.

The omnivore with an indifference toward cheese treasures the Crispy Duck Leg. I went with the smaller order ($14.25 vs. $19.75), and it was plenty. The meat fell off the bone, the spinach sleek and sodden with a sweet sauce, the turnip al dente. If I had to complain, it would be about the unnecessary softness of the grilled polenta, it’s simply too homogeneous, like cheese.

The vegan customized herself a cheese-less pie with portabella (I like how the Italian name has a grander ring to it than “button mushroom”), arugula, roasted zucchini, roasted garlic, basil and olive oil. I can’t describe her pizza better than her, so I won’t even try. The most interesting thing is that she has found a combination on pizza that tastes “almost as good as cheese”.

And I’ve found a combination that makes Andiamo stand out in my mind when it comes to Italian food: steal potatoes and squid tentacles from the friends’ plates, eat out on the patio in the summer Santa Fe evening, watch the sun sink behind the adobe cake-like houses, and let out a sigh over the empty street, then good food becomes exceptional, and you really feel the lazing peacefulness of this town.

Address: Andiamo
322 Garfield Street
Santa Fe, NM 87501
(505) 995-9595

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.

We also got the special pie of course. Tandoori chicken and cilantro make up a mosaic of red and green dots; though the prawns are included in the menu listing, I can’t see any curled up in the pictures here. Well who really sits down and checks every ingredient on a slice anyway. Point is, spinach curry sauce finds its rightful place on a bed of baked dough, and the Indian pizza at Zante is at least as good as any artistic assortment from the Cheese Board that Berkeleyans always chirp about. If you ask me, I think Zante‘s are better, cuz they got meat and no hype.

Address: Zante Pizza
3489 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110-5438
(415) 821-3949

Money matter: $32.55 a dinner for two.

– 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.

Murgh Makhani was the first on the list of house specialties, and I’m inclined to pick from the house special list.  I decided to try paratha instead of the more familiar naan.  They’re both good.  Paratha is just grilled in a skillet rather than baked like naan.  It works just as well as the naan at scooping up the main dish, and they are both better than the popadom.

The highlight of the night was the main dish, though.  It was simply perfect.  It was sweet, spicy, savory all at once, and just the right level of spice (for me) where one doesn’t notice it.  It had lots of grilled chicken pieces in it.  It was good quality chicken with little charred bits on it.

I barely had enough room to finish it all, except a little bit of popadom. The bill was 9 pounds, and the popadom was indeed complimentary, but perhaps just in my case. Tax is already included in the bill in England, which makes it easier to split the bill with multiple people. The servers noticed I was taking pictures of my food and suggested I should take a picture of the murals on two walls in the place. He said they were specially painted for them.  I thought the lights that had shining on them would mess up the picture, but it turned out to be the best picture of the night.  The lighting was too low for good pictures with my camera.

My last day in Oxford was spent in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.  It was a pretty good museum, with the first dinosaur bones ever identified as a prehistoric reptile.  It was also the site of the famous 1860 evolution debate between Huxley and Wilberforce.  When it closed at 5, I roamed the tourist-filled streets of Oxford for a place to eat.  There wasn’t much by the museum, but I eventually found an area with some more options.

I settled on a place called Fire & Stone. Its theme was international pizza, with their menu divided by continent and filled with bizarre pizzas made from the cuisines of the continent. For example, Africa offers the Marrakech (£8.95 cumin spiced ground lamb, mozzarella, mint yoghurt sauce, green olives, raisins & sliced red onion drizzled with chilli oil) and the Cairo (£7.95 (v) Fire roasted red & yellow peppers, courgettes, aubergines, balsamic roasted red onions, mozzarella and Fire & Stone’s tomato sauce topped with crumbled goat’s cheese & pine nuts).  In some cases, it was pretty much insert-your-cuisine fusion food baked onto a pizza. They had a few vegetarian options, but I just got the impression that they didn’t offer as many vegetarian options in England as in the Bay Area, not surprisingly, and there was never a mention of vegan options.

I chose the Bombay (£8.95 Roast tandoori marinated chicken breast, spiced tandoori yoghurt base, broccoli, sliced red onion, mozzarella, spiced mango chutney and cucumber & mint yoghurt) since Indian food is rare on this blog. This was good, but it would be a let-down if you’re expecting good Indian food, especially after eating at Mirch Masala. The chicken was not grilled or very flavorful, and the yoghurt and broccoli didn’t seem to go well with the rest. It was a nice change to have a tandoori base instead of normal pizza sauce. The pizza was 9 inches wide, a decent portion. I ate the whole thing without feeling too stuffed, which is just the right amount, I think. American restaurants tend to give a lot more food, which is good if you want to take home leftovers, but it often causes people to overeat or waste food. 9 pounds (roughly $14) is a little high, but I guess it’s normal (or even reasonable) for eating out in the middle of Oxford. They didn’t cut the pizza. Why not?

The restaurant was pretty big. It was a little early for the dinner crowd, so it was a bit empty. They had many big sliding windows open to air the place out. They also offer pasta, but I saw at least one table leave when the server informed them that the oven just broke, and they wouldn’t have pasta for about 30 minutes.

They had a hand-held credit card reader (as many places in England did) so that she could scan my card right at my table. Then she passed it to me to enter the percentage to add on as tip. I thought it was convenient compared to estimating it by hand, but I could see how some might find that awkward.

Addresses:
Mirch Masala
137-139, Cowley Rd
Oxford, Oxfordshire OX4 1HU
Telephone: 01865 728581

Fire & Stone Pizza Restaurant
Threeways House, 28-38 George Street
Oxford OX1 2BJ

Other bites in England:
– Oxford dinners – part I and II
– Cous Cous Cafe in Oxford
– Pie and mash at the Ship Inn Upavon and Pieminister
– England’s healthy fastfood chain: Pret A Manger

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.

There’s really nothing spectacular about this recently opened pizza shack, but what makes me call them time and again is their special deal with cheese sticks: roughly $4 off for one huge crusty cheese pizza when ordered with any other baked pie. And I’m crazy about cheese sticks :-D. I eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Really, the other pizza is just an excuse.

Note: if paying with credit card, show the delivery man your credit card. They’re so careful with charging you they need to get a carbon copy of the card number. First time I’ve encountered this in my years with food-to-your-door. Is it a common thing?