 Going to the Waterbar on a nice-weathered Saturday afternoon is a silly idea: everybody and their twice-removed cousins are also hawking for the same precious seats around the bar to get the 1-dollar featured oysters. It’s crowded. Very crowded. It’s like parking in San Francisco. Mr. Global Eats recommended the place during the weekdays, I heeded not his advice and here we were, standing fidgetily, looking awkwardly at people eating oysters, hoping to stare them out of their seats. A couple finished their lunch date; we three hopped in before the server could even wipe the table clean. Today’s featured victim was the Cove Miyagi, a California native with a “clean lettuce flavor”. The first time I was ever fooled by the juicy appearance of a raw bivalve (an oyster) to eat one, I had to gather every ounce of self control in me to swallow it down. The second time was a raw clam, and it wasn’t a whole lot better, but I knew what to expect. Today was actually the third time, and I had more than one oyster, so I’m proud of myself. Something […]
Continue reading At the Waterbar
 I’m trying to think of the reasons I keep confusing myself between Mifune (San Francisco) and Miyuki (North Berkeley) when I tell people about them. Admittedly they share some obvious similarities, as much as any Japanese restaurant would be similar to another Japanese restaurant. Miyuki is for donburi, and Mifune is for udon and soba. Not only that they’re totally unrelated, I also remember them for different reasons. But that in itself is another similarity: what makes me remember them is not the focus of their menus. When I think of Miyuki, I think of its eggroll and mango icecream dessert. When I think of Mifune, I think of its green tea rice. Ochazuke (green tea rice) is not uncommon among Japanese and those who know Japanese food, but it’s uncommon in Japanese restaurants in America. In fact, I just now looked at every available menu in San Fran Japantown, and found no ochazuke. Mifune doesn’t have its menu online. Like kimchi fried rice (and really, any kind of fried rice), ochazuke makes good use of leftover rice. Unlike fried rice, ochazuke is not fried. It’s […]
Continue reading Mifune’s uniqueness
 Recently, someone asked me how often I cook, I said not often at all, I spend most of my time at school trying either to speak some foreign language or to tell the computer to understand my version of its language. I cook maybe once a week, very simple stuff, like boiled bok choy. He then questioned the credibility of my taste. “Can you taste as well as someone who cooks a lot?” I believe so. I might not have the knowledge to make the dish or to fix its shortcomings, but fermenting the grapes doesn’t help an oenophile judge his wine. However, that got me thinking about what I would do if I had time to cook. I would like to work in a restaurant kitchen. It’s okay if I have to peel shrimps all day, I simply would like to look and learn from the inside. I’ve even picked out the place I want to work at: To Hyang. Because I’d like to learn how to make kimchi, soybean paste, pickled bellflower, fried dry anchovies, and maybe infused soju from a Korean lady. Of course there are recipes online, which I tend not to […]
Continue reading To Hyang – The flavors of earth
 … to my skinniness. If there’s a place I should frequent to quickly improve my willow look and strengthen my Texas tie, it’d be the House of Prime Ribs on Van Ness Avenue. I might have lived in the Bay for too long and hung out with too many vegetarian, environmentally conscious, ethical-eater friends that sometimes the thought crosses my mind; except I always feel extremely hungry on my vegan days so I don’t think I can give up cookies and ice cream. Thankfully, I also have a number of fleischliebend friends who keep me from straying by putting me face to face with a slab of tender, juicy red meat. All ethical thoughts begone, I helplessly grabbed the knife and fork. I actually got a gasp, a deep sigh and a disapproving look from my company when I asked that my prime rib be medium. The men asked for “as raw as possible” because they wanted to “taste the meat”. Men… I could taste my medium meat just fine. The second difference between their dinner and mine is the size. There are four sizes (and a kid size with milk and ice cream, which kinda sounds attractive to […]
Continue reading House of Prime Ribs is the solution…
 My Lucky Peach finally made it home. It took only one month from the time I placed the order, and just when school started and me getting buried beneath ten miles of homework. But I’ve taken a peek every now and then at its colorful albeit tiny pictures of ramen (this first issue is all about ramen) and gorged in the fourth article while waiting for the bus. This is the bad thing about food magazines (or anything serial and food related, except cookbooks): it’s so easy to read it’s addictive, I can’t even fall asleep reading it, then I get sleep deprived. So I never buy them. But Lucky Peach is different: it’s recommended by a friend, subsequently ordered by two other friends, all of whom have highly experienced and respectable tastes; what I can do? I haven’t finished the entire thing, but the fourth article is a good one. Good enough to console myself for surrendering to peer pressure. In hindsight, it’s one of the highlights of the lunch we shared at Namu. (Not that the magazine is in any way related to Namu, Rob just showed it to us […]
Continue reading Namu and Authenticity
 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 […]
Continue reading Sweet and spicy Zante’s Indian pizza
 What’s with this time of the year that festivals keep popping up every weekend? Just two weeks ago my friends and I were strolling among some 60 food trucks at Jack London Square; then last week we had some awesome grilled chicken at Martin Luther King Park; and this past Sunday we wound up queuing in the shivering bay wind for some artisan desserts at Ghirardelli Square. If we keep this up(*) I will become quite athletic, all that walking and standing in (long) line build muscles, you know. 😛 So here’s the deal with the 15th annual Ghirardelli Chocolate Festival: you get a $20 ticket to try 15 samples (there are 31 total, some of them are chocolate favored alcoholic drinks); supposedly the booths started giving samples at noon, but lots of people got there earlier and lined up in front of the booths. Kara’s Cupcakes is one of those booths with a 100 feet line before it even opened. I’m not crazy about cupcakes (yeah… you can tell I’m not American) so I didn’t contribute to that line’s ridiculous […]
Continue reading Chocolate festival at Ghirardelli Square
 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 […]
Continue reading Millbrae Pancake House – Old country breakfast with a berry good twist
 Don’t know about you, but after I empty out my bank shopping in Union Square, it doesn’t sound right to pick up an $80 tab at one of those restaurants with a uniformed man at the door greeting every passerby and making us feel bad for not dining with them. So as much as I wanted to have frog legs and duck tongues or something not-so-homey of sort, we ducked into this rabbit hole in the wall called Bangkok Noodles & Thai BBQ, under Hotel Union Square and next to some equally tiny sport clothing shop. It is truly, truly, a hole in the wall. But nobody seemed to mind. We had to walk sideway to weave pass the single line of sitting and standing people from the door through a short hall (if the thing between the wall and the divider to the kitchen can be called a hall) to get a table for two. This cookery is the epitome of land conservation. There’s just enough space for one foot at a time between the rows of tables. When the place is packed, like the time I was there, strangers practically sit together, […]
Continue reading Bangkok Noodles & Thai BBQ – The cheapest deal near Union Square
 The laminated page has Goi Cuon next to Fritures de Calmars, Bo Luc Lac between Rossini style Tournedos and Agneau. Funny interlingual names like “Ap Chow Bo” and “Ap Chow Hai San” precede English descriptions of stir fries. Don’t bother google “ap chow”. Such innovative term doesn’t exist outside the menu of Bodega Bistro. Just like the dialogues between Jim and Huckleberry Finn, names like these can’t be understood unless you speak it out loud in your head. Ap chow is áp chảo, “press against the pan”, a Vietnamese way of saying pan fry. Why did the chef phonetically transform it into Chinese, while keeping Goi Cuon and Bo Luc Lac true to their original spellings? I don’t know, but I got a chuckle out of it. The menu alone, however, didn’t strike me as anything unusual. This wasn’t the first time I had to decode a strange name for a familiar dish. Vietnamese menus tend to have such mix between trying to keep the Vietnamese name and (mis)translating it into some other language. The unusual thing was that our thought-to-be-Vietnamese waiter didn’t understand me when I said the dishes’ names […]
Continue reading Bodega Bistro – Defining authenticity
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