Flavor Boulevard

Tag: seafood

  • 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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    • Dungeness crab by the bay

        Thanh-Long-SF-roasted-crab
        Dungeness crab season is on. It was delayed twice in the Pacific Northwest because the crabs there weren’t big enough, but not here in the Bay Area. What my companions and I got a few weeks ago were 2-pound crabs, roughly one-fourth of which were meat, tossed in garlic and butter to perfection. More on that in a second.

        First, what defines good crab? It has to be fresh. Its flesh should be tender and sweet, which are also defining characteristics of Dungeness crab. You also want the flesh to be firm, somewhat springy, and easily pulled off from the shell. If the meat sticks to the shell and if the shell is too hard, the crab is old. Dungeness crab is best enjoyed steamed then tossed in garlic, butter, salt and pepper, as to maximally preserve the sweetness of its meat. It’s not hard to turn a good fresh crab into a good cooked crab, but it can be messy to cook, eat and clean up after. So if you dislike cleaning as much as I do, the place to satisfy your Dungeness craving is Thanh Long in San Francisco.

        The restaurant is three blocks away from the waterfront in the Sunset District. Be sure to make a reservation because the line gets long, and waiting outside in a cold foggy evening while entranced by the smell of butter and garlic is torture. Even with a reservation, it still takes roughly 30 minutes to be seated. And forget about sending half of your party to the restaurant first to place an order. The restaurant is so packed that they refuse to seat you unless the whole party is there.

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      • Cafe Rouge – two different ways to think about a bad experience

          cafe-rouge-bavette-steak
          A few years ago, things were rough at school and I was a bittermelon*. I got upset easily, turned people away from me, was critical of everything and mostly found faults in mankind. Long story short, I became a misanthrope and immersed myself in two things: anime and foreign language. Ironically, the former taught me to think more positively, and the latter brought me new friends. Then I realized that when I suppress my negative thoughts, eventually they dissipate on their own and I would feel so much better without bothering anyone with my complaints. In America, we are encouraged to express our negative feelings. People like to see and hear about problems (that’s why the daily news are mostly bad news and the reality shows are full of anger). Some people say that it’s good to let it out. That’s true, but it’s only temporary. Complaining is like eating chips, it’s impossible to stop**. Anger multiplies when it’s let loose. The more cynical I feel about a situation, the more depressing scenarios I envision, and it only goes downhill from there.

          These days I try to appreciate everything more, and when some incident doesn’t seem so appreciable at first, I find it funny, which clears my mind and then I can see something to appreciate. But sometimes I lapse back into the critical mode, especially when it’s about food. It’s easy to lower my expectations and like everything. It’s also easy to write a very bad review. But it’s hard to find the good points while maintaining my high expectation. A bad review gives the temporary satisfaction of being in the position to judge. A good review for a not-so-good experience makes me appear goody-two-shoes and lose my credibility. One solution is that I only write about the good experiences. But I think that defeats the meaning of a blog. A diary doesn’t have only happy entries, why should a food blog talk only about the good food?

          Every bad experience at a restaurant puts me into this dilemma. Cafe Rouge is the most recent one. Here’s my first draft when I sat down to write about it: (more…)

        • Little Cafe Du Bois in Kingwood


            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.

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          • Indulge in the dark


              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.

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            • At the Waterbar


                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 about that brackish smell and taste melded with the cocktail sauce, the lemon, and the green onion is romantic.

                That said, I almost died from the radish cream sauce. I was in the middle of chatting with the girls and the surprise attack brought me to tears. Such innocent whiteness, such strength punching the nose from the inside.

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              • ‘Cross country Day 1 – Down the West Coast


                  For the past few days we’ve been behind the wheels from dawn to dust, making our way across three time zones. In the first, we happen to stumble upon the best seafood restaurant in Salinas, or so they claim.


                  Sitting on a corner lot on Main Street in a peaceful little hometown of John Steinbeck and fewer than 150000 people, Salinas Valley Fish House looks homely attractive with an old-fashioned bistro touch. Little Mom instantly gives an approval nod as she walks into the spacious dining room, seeing fresh flowers on white cloth tables, and Santa hats on the fishes. It opens for lunch only during the week, good thing we drive by on a Friday.


                  Despite being in a seafood restaurant in a seaside town, Little Mom fixates on an order of pork chop ($13.95), oak grilled, medium, no condiments. First time I see her liking a pork chop other than her (awesome) own. 🙂

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