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

This restaurant…

The plus: 1. their steamed dumplings, despite being stuffed with 95% tofu and 5% unidentifiable substance (probably also tofu, but Cheryl and Eric hoped it was pork, so let’s go with pork), were big and well seasoned; 2. their kimchi seems homemade and tastes fresh.

The minus: well… where should we start…

So, food-wise, things are pretty average (homemade level – neither in the “hole-in-the-wall heaven” kind of thing nor in the trendy meaning that restaurants advertise themselves as these days). We were disappointed, but this is not unusual – we’re so used to being disappointed with average food that we might just be disappointed (with ourselves) if we’re not disappointed. Now, the service is something else. They weren’t outwardly rude, they just maybe discriminated, a little bit.

We were the only non-Korean customers at the time. Cheryl asked for recommendation of a noodle dish, the lady said “we don’t have any noodle now, it’s a summer specialty only” (supposedly referring to the naeng myeon [냉면, cold noodle]). Okay. We ordered oxtail beef soup (꼬리곰탕, ggori gomtang), which came out as a few (I think 5?) pieces of oxtail helplessly drowning in an ocean of broth. Then we looked over at the neighboring tables to see cheerful Koreans (and some hard-to-please-looking old men, also Korean) slurping noodles from exactly the same type of hot stone bowls, containing most certainly also some kind of gomtang. We couldn’t help but wondering. Finally, when another hostess, a girl about our age, came to take our credit card, Cheryl asked what the other Koreans were having and included “so that one comes with noodle?”, the girl, somewhat reluctantly, replied:

– Well, you could have noodles too, if you had asked. We give them noodles so that they feel full.

Um… perhaps we like to feel full, too, don’t you think?

I won’t go over how they left us alone between the time the food arrived and the time we were ready for the check (and after we got the check), that would just be nitpicking. Actually, this isn’t the first time I feel a little discrepancy in service at Korean restaurants. One time at Kang Tong Degi, my non-Korean friend and I were completely ignored while the two Korean girls sitting across from us got all the attention. If you’re going to be nationalist or discriminative, or just have bad service in general, at least make sure that your food is so %^$&!#! good that I’d have to beg for it.

Address: Seoul Gomtang
3801 Telegraph Ave,
Oakland, CA 94609
(510) 597-9989
Dinner for 3: $54.37
[Seoul Gomtang specializes in soups (탕, tang), and if you’re lucky (or Korean), you’ll get some noodles in the soup too, a type of white, round and thick wheat noodle (곰국수, gomguksu). Kimchi juice or pepper paste should be added to the soup to taste, or you can eat the soup like I do  – not adding anything at all – and just taste an ABSOLUTELY bland but fatty broth, the way Korean tangs always are. (I come to appreciate that blandness after some time.) The banchan are limited to napa cabbage kimchi, radish kimchi and cucumber kimchi, all of which taste milder than they look.]

Partly because of my busy schedule, partly because of the lack of good Vietnamese food in Berkeley, I haven’t had Vietnamese food for months. I miss it, of course. Luckily, the neighboring cuisines share so much similarities that my “comfort food” category has steadily expanded to enclose most of East Asia. If for some reason America and I don’t get along, I think I can happily merge into Taiwan and Japan (not sure about Korea – their food is too spicy…).

So when I crave comfort food, if it’s Sunday or Monday and Musashi is closed, I go down University Avenue to the Taiwan Restaurant. It’s the purple building next to Anh Hong, and it’s another case of generic-names-hence-don’t-go-there type of restaurant. However, two Taiwanese told me that it was “good enough” – the owner of Asha Tea House across the street, and Kristen. As with any Asian eating establishment, you have to know what to get at the Taiwan Restaurant, otherwise you end up with oily overload. I haven’t strayed once out of the usuals. It’s comfort food, there’s no need to change it. In fact, I come here just for one type of soup: the pickled cabbage soup with tripe.

Currently, this is my favorite soup in the whole Bay Area (not counting noodle soups, of course!). Nowhere else serves it. (The second time I ordered it, the waiter skeptically asked me if I knew what it was.) The pickled cabbage (Chinese pickled cabbage, similar to Vietnamese dưa muối) makes the broth sour and clear, the pork tripe is chewy and smooth. I would drink it to the last drop, and it delights even a grumpy stomach.

I’ve never seen such a spoon before.

Much to Mom’s chargrin, I pay no heed to the cleanliness behind the scene when I order at restaurants. Pig ears are crunchy and not so fatty – good enough for me (^_^).

Kristen introduced me to this dish – fried pork cutlet on rice with sweet pickled greens. It’s actually pretty oily, but the rice is soaked with the sweet and savory pork sauce… I intended to save half for the next day but in the end I cleaned up the bowl.

The last time I went, I paid a little more attention to the decoration (because the server forgot to bring me my pork, and I was just sitting there nibbling on the pig ears pretending to be cool). It looks rather classically Chinese – red lanterns and red table-clothed tables, all faded into a shade of cerise – hinting at some forgotten intention of being on the higher end. At the very least, it was set up to be a restaurant, not a simple food shack. Yet the food is cheap (these 3 dishes plus tip cost a meager $20.66), the atmosphere is utterly casual, and customers like me don’t ever think of its food as more than comfort food. The Taiwan Restaurant is, as its website claims, “the first restaurant in this country to serve Taiwan’s version of China’s epicurean delights”. I felt somewhat sad thinking that it has lost the glory that it might have once had.

The most pleasant surprise that prompted me to write about it was actually its tea. You know how all Chinese restaurants serve some kind of watered down “tea”, usually jasmine-flavored? The Taiwan restaurant actually serves Baochong. Watered down, but it’s still a legitimate Taiwanese oolong. I don’t know why I didn’t notice this before, but now that I have, I have enough reasons to recommend this restaurant to everyone. It is indeed “good enough”.

Address: Taiwan Restaurant
2071 University Avenue,
Berkeley, California
(510) 845-1456

My junior year of high school was my first year ever in America, and I was still learning the rope of living here, high school dance among other things. A friend invited me to Homecoming. For the pre-dance dinner, he talked about going to a Vietnamese restaurant named Mai in Houston. I didn’t know exactly where it was or what it was (this was 2002, Google Maps and Yelp didn’t exist), but I thought that was considerate of him. In the end, we went to a steakhouse instead, I thought it was because Mai was a bit too far away, and I was left wondering what Mai was like.

A few years later, my host parents mentioned Mai again in passing conversation, and suggested we went together sometime. The place, dated back to 1978, is known as the very first Vietnamese restaurant in Houston, and pretty much every Houstonian knows at least its name. My parents and I were interested, but again, days passed and we forgot. One day in early 2010, news came that the restaurant had been destroyed by a fire. We sighed, somewhat regretful.

Luckily, it reopened. I forget how and when we came to know of its re-opening, but this summer, we decided that as Houstonians, it’s about time we should check this off the list.

As usual, my mom told me to order anything I want, and I did. But I overdid myself, and we struggled to finish a few plates fast enough to have room on the table for the next plate. It was a marathon. The portion was dinosaur-mongous. The three of us packed half of the food home.

APPETIZERS:

Fried shrimp with garlic butter sauce

This plate was the first to be move out of the way. Guess what I poured on my dress? The garlic butter sauce. I smelled “good” for the rest of the day.

Chao long – rice porridge with “dau chao quay” (youtiao) and pork offals.

Yes, this is an appetizer, although the bowl can probably fit me in it.

ENTREES:

Breaded fried catfish steaks – Crunchy and not too oily, but I wish they were not breaded and simply pan fried.

Canh chua – sour soup with fish, tomato, pineapple, okra and celery. So refreshing for the summer!

Banh hoi – thin rice noodle mesh with lemongrass grilled beef

This one is to be wrapped in rice paper, which my mom artfully put on her bowl like a mini table cloth (the first picture).

DESSERTS:

Green tea ice cream

Banana tapioca pudding

One of those extremely common desserts in Vietnam that you never see in American Vietnamese restaurants. This one is good (but I like my version better ^_^).

Mai’s menu has a lot of stuff, but nothing strayed from the usuals that you would see at any Vietnamese restaurant in town. Although few things jump out at me, anything that we ordered tastes exactly how we want them to. They make traditional Vietnamese food in the honest, straightforward traditional manner, with abundance to boost, which is also characteristic of Vietnamese food. Their home-styled comfort delivered, and we wouldn’t ask for anything better.

Mai’s Restaurant is at 3403 Milam Street, Houston, TX 77002 – (713) 520-5300