Flavor Boulevard

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:

On my birthday, we went for drinks at Teance and then we got famished. Drinks for me are not alcohol but a few pots of tea. That’s the great thing about tea: it gives you an appetite. If you ever feel like you ought to eat something but just don’t feel hungry, drink some tea on an empty stomach, the next thing you know is that all you can think about is food. So we were famished, and we headed over to Cafe Rouge next door.

I should stress again that I was famished. Everything tastes better when you’re hungry, that’s a known fact. I could hardly wait to spread the velvety duck liver flan on my tongue and sink my teeth into a succulent slab of steak. The good thing is I didn’t have to wait too long. The problem, though, is that neither of my dreams came true. The duck liver flan was underseasoned and not smooth enough. The steak was so tough I thought I was chewing on a coil of rope.

Would a rare sear make it better? The full story goes like this: on the menu it said “Grilled bavette steak with sweet potatoes, broccoli, red wine cippolini onions and herb butter 24.” — I didn’t know what bavette steak was. The waitress asked me how I’d like my steak, I told her somewhere between medium and medium rare, she said let’s do the medium rare and if it’s too rare I can send it back to the kitchen for more sear. Turned out the cut was extremely sinewy. Even in the middle, where it’s still bright red. I told the waitress, and she said yeah well this is not like New York steak so hmm too bad…

So I gave up halfway and grudgingly waited for desserts.

We narrowed it down to 4 choices: vanilla panna cotta, chocolate streusel cake, granitas, and chocolate ice cream profiteroles, then we asked the waitress what she thought. She highly recommended the panna cotta, and said the following about the granitas: “it’s like a sorbet, if you’re into that kind of thing then it’s good”. We’re into sorbet, so we got the granitas. But granitas ain’t no sorbet, it’s water ice. Seven dollars for a tiny cup of water ice is too much. And not even very flavorful water ice at that. Huge disappointment.

So that’s my luck with Cafe Rouge. The seafood cioppino and the cassoulet that my friends chose turned out a little too seasoned for my taste, but a hundred times better than my steak.

I’ll file Cafe Rouge under “Won’t go out of my way to revisit”, although it’s really on the way every time I go to Teance.

The view from upstairs.

Here’s what I should think:

The restaurant is well-designed, I enjoyed looking from the upstairs at the people’s plates down below. My friends enjoyed their seafood and stew. Today Cafe Rouge’s dinner menu has “Grilled hanger steak with flageolet beans, radicchio and almond bread sauce”, so I wiki-ed “hanger steak”. This cut is “prized for its flavor”, which means its texture is tough. Then I clicked around and read about the other beef cuts. In the end, the steak taught me something new.

We should have listened to the waitress in the matter of desserts. Again, we went in not knowing what “granitas” was and went out knowing exactly what it was, so we got wiser by paying 7 dollars. That’s a cheap price for information.

Most customers around us ordered the burger ($14). While fancy burgers are like Rothko’s paintings to me, some people appreciate them. Maybe the rest of the menu also connects to people at such levels, which I simply couldn’t comprehend.

I probably won’t go out of my way to revisit Cafe Rouge, but its menu changes often and I go out of my way to Teance all the time anyway. When I have a more forgiving heart, and maybe a lot of hunger, I’ll stop by.

I prefer the mild, more positive view, although it’s like steamed rice. Next, I need to figure out how to make it funny. 😉

FOOTNOTE:
(*) Actually, I LOVE bittermelon! Bittermelon soup, bittermelon stir fried with egg, stuffed bittermelon. I love it so much that the first word I could think of that contains “bitter” was “bittermelon”.
(**) In high school health class, the teacher showed us a video about two anorexic twin sisters. When asked how they became anorexic, the surviving sister said that they were chubby when they were little, so one day they decided to lose weight and competed with each other to see who could lose more weight. The only detail that I remembered is that they would eat only 2 potato chips when they ate any chips at all. The interviewer asked her “How could you eat only TWO chips?!” With a lot of willpower.

Housemade charcuterie plate ($15) – rabbit pate: ok; duck liver flan: I’ve had better’s; air dried beef: well, it’s dried meat… Good pickled onion though.

Cafe Rouge bar ribs ($7) – Not fall-off-the-bone tender, but I liked the sauce.

Cioppino ($27) — dungeness crab, rock fish, mussels and clams in red wine tomato sauce. Good but too spicy for me.

Cassoulet of duck confit, garlic sausage, pork, baked beans and bread crumbs ($24) – good beans, tender duck, the sausage was too grainy (and doughy(?!)). Read more about it from Kristen’s point of view.

Blood orange and grapefruit granitas with shortbread cookie ($7) – The flavor wasn’t there.

Today. Big glistening birds. Crimson cranberry sauce. Mashed sweet potato with a crusty marshmallow top. Green bean casseroles. Gravies. The all-American classic holiday dinner table that every grocery store has a picture of on their website. Once upon a time I was enticed by such beauty, much like how I engulfed a chunk of ham the first time I saw real ham after years of seeing ham in old American cartoons (Tom and Jerry I think?). To be fair, save for the turkey, I do like the marshmallow sweet potato, the green bean casserole, and sometimes the stuffing if the gravies’ done right. But the turkey… I don’t get it. In a bird, the best part is the brown meat: legs, thighs, wings, that’s all. (Ah yes, I love the offals too, but today I’ll speak from the American perspective for a change.) Yet, the turkey leg is a monstrosity of toughness that my weak 20-some-year-old bone-gnawing cartilage-grinding gizzard-and-heart-loving teeth have trouble handling. Were all the turkeys I sunk into Olympic weightlifters or something? Well they have to lift their 30lb+ body every minute anyway, so no wonder. Conclusion: I don’t like turkey(*).

I like duck.

And you know what drink duck goes well with? I can’t speak for Pinot Noir, Merlot or Rosé, but some oolong teas make great companies! The long awaited double duck dinner at Bay Wolf arrived (2 months ago) before I could really get in tune with this semester, but I still remember how the Tung Ting made the duck dumpling soup and duck gizzard bloom.

Although I started out drinking tea for the sole purpose of matching tea with food, most of my pairing experiments were at home with more sweet than savory stuff. I blame the busy schedule but in reality I just don’t buy the thermal bottles to store hot water nor do I grab anything but my wallet and camera when I go fooding. (I used to forget my wallet.) My friend Nancy Togami, on the other hand, pursues her hobbies with much more heart than I. When we embark on a tea date, she brings teapots, hot water, teas and a thermostat to check the water temperature. I love her.

Duck liver flan, rillettes, gizzards and grapes. The liver flan (basically, pâté): paired with Tung Ting for a light and floral whisper in the mouth, paired with High Mountain for depth. Neither Tung Ting nor High Mountain did anything good to the rillettes. Tung Ting with gizzards and grapes was better than High Mountain with gizzards and grapes, as the grapes amplified the floral note of the Tung Ting.

Head-to-feet duck soup with savory duck dumplings. Again, the Tung Ting is a good match, it brightened but not intensified the tomato in the broth. (Surprisingly, the only tea that doesn’t go well with any of these courses was the Royal Courtesan: a little plumy, a little sour, even after we steeped it for 2 minutes, it refused to give an impression on the food.)

Duck tagine with spiced couscous, preserved lemon, olives and coriander. Tung Ting and High Mountain with duck tagine and steak: all 4 pairings are good. With High Mountain, although the fatty part of the steak does not go too well, the duck fat sauce shines through. The Tung Ting and the duck tagine is best with the lemon sauce in the tagine, otherwise the meat dried out and became too fibrous.

Grilled rib eye steak with duck fat fried and Béarnaise sauce. Nancy also had an excellent pairing of a Merlot with the steak and the duck. The Merlot smells tangier but tastes softer (more berry-like) than the Pinot Noir, it also has a smooth finish that made the steak more “unctuous”, and several times she went from meat to merlot and finish with High Mountain, which seemed to make things really shine.

Duck egg mocha pot de crème. Both Phoenix Honey and Tieguanyin Medium Roast go exceedingly nicely with this dessert: the Phoenix adds a lychee flavor to it, the Tieguanyin complimented the mocha flavor and at the same time makes it more perfumy. Both lightens an otherwise too rich ending.

So for this Thanksgiving (and maybe the next), ditch the turkey. Dish the duck. With some tea. 😉

(*) I love the living turkeys as much as I love any other animals. 😉 Since their meat doesn’t taste that great, why don’t we make them pets like dogs and cats, and give turkey-eaters “the look“?(**)

(**) In case you’re wondering: No. I don’t eat dogs and cats. I also don’t eat ham. For different reasons, though…

P.S.: First time I was at Bay Wolf.

Saturday. The usual question comes up: what’s for dinner? It’s been well over three weeks since I last “slashed down a cow” (to quote Makiawa), so I feel just to insist on a chunky slab of red meat. The next question is where. Yelp’s list of steakhouse in Berkeley has six suggestions, but Hana Japan Steakhouse is not really a “steak house” with only two things of beef amidst a ton of chicken and seafood. Kincaid’s? Well, we’ll wait for an occasion to spend $33 on a petit filet mignon, which is already beside the point of tasty and cheap steak (that you can eat without feeling bitter in the mouth). So this week it is Prime Spot, just a few hundred feet north of The Alley.

Here’s my two cents guess: their thing is the prime rib, so they name it “Prime Spot”. Or maybe they’re just that confident about their stuff. We’ll see. We ask for one Grand Ave. Cut of Oven Roasted Prime Rib to share, and a side of steamed veggie to lessen the cheapskates’ guilt. Five minutes later, the 10 oz slab of pink velvet arrives luke warm and dripping wet. When I cut a piece, it feels like slicing cheesecake. The meat is unexpectedly tender. Garlic mashed potato bathed in steak juice, like ice cream, is expectedly yummy.

What surprises me is the amount of food. Ten ounces does not sound like a lot when I think of times I’ve eaten a pound of steak by myself (and felt like my tummy would burst and my back would break, but that’s not the point). It turns out two people can get pleasantly full on just ten ounces. Must be the potato and broccoli. Not having too much on our plate works out well because the meat gets kinda dull as it gets cold, and just when we can’t take it anymore, we don’t have anymore to take.

Previously on Berkeley Steak Search: Buckhorn Grill (Emeryville)

Address: Prime Spot Bar & Grill
3417 Grand Avenue
Oakland, CA 94610
(510) 268-1840

I do feel guilty for eating so much meat, though. With friends, movies, and my own empathy for animals rubbing it in everyday, I find the American steak less and less enjoyable (that is to say, bulgogi is still too good to give up :-D). So upon leaving Prime Spot, I redeem my conscience with a hot slice of strawberry rhubarb pie and a scoop of mud slide ice cream at the vegan Herbivore. Few things can be better.

Vegan strawberry rhubarb pie and mud slide ice cream at Herbivore (Oakland)

Not too long ago I came upon Monica Eng’s essay Morality Bites, and I vowed to cut down on meat. Well, I’ve been keeping my words, just not all of them: I cut meat. And eat it too. Two weeks ago I entrusted myself on an alphabetical quest for the best steak within ten miles of Berkeley, starting with The Alley. This week, Buckhorn is up to the chopping board.

Okay. So it is a chain. A meat-up version of Burger King. Bigger plates, bigger menu, bigger service (they offer catering), big customers. As of today, Buckhorn Grill has opened only seven locations in the Bay Area, so I think we can excuse myself for bucking off my no-chain rule to blog about them. Of course it’s not really that qualified to be in the steakhouse category, there ain’t no sirloin, T-bone, or filet mignon. All it has is tri-tip, or triangular steak, a boneless cut from the bottom sirloin, with charcoaled rim and lotsa salt.

Mudpie opted for the regular 6-oz platter at $12.95, while I headed down the 10-oz Dad’s Cut at $15.95. Talk about glutton embarrassment. The only difference is a slice of tri-tip. The Bay Area health-conscious trend shows up here in big chunks of grilled squash, carrot, and asparagus. Yes, if you’re gonna eat meat, make sure you doubly expand your tummy for a lot of veggie, too, then cement it with mashed potato and gravy. Actually the carrot is quite delicious, the dried skin and gummy inside  remind me  of a beautifully grilled sweet potato. Meanwhile, the black cup of meat dripping looks attractive, but it’s just too light to accentuate the airy bread.

And look at that knife! Its blade is as wide as the gravy pool. It could kill a bull, much less a tri-tip.

So is it the best tri-tip on the planet? It’s tasty, but I think I can get better at Sbisa, for a much cheaper price (all you can eat at $8.25). That said, next time I get a craving I’d order a 2-lb whole tri-tip for $20, and unbuckle the belt.

Address: Buckhorn Grill (in the Emeryville Bay Street Mall)
5614 Bay St (at Shellmound St)
Emeryville, CA 94608
(510) 654-2996

Previously on Steak Search: The Alley (Oakland)

Next on Steak Search: Prime Spot (Oakland)

Once a Texan, you’re always a Texan.
Earlier last week I exchanged a few words with my friend about our food logging endeavour, and I got reminded of steak. (Yes, Sarah, you’re responsible ;-)). I thought it was gone. That evil desire of eating an innocent cow who just a few days ago was wandering the meadow with dreamy eyes. It has resurfaced. Granted I recently enjoy the occasional meatballs from Ikea, a Whopper at the Burger King on San Pablo, and various Top Dog‘s sausages, I haven’t had a chunky slab of steak for months. Now that’s serious. When I’m in Houston, we go to Potatoe Patch almost every other week. When I’m in College Station, I can always rely on Sodolak’s for a hearty fill. Where can I go in Berkeley?

Yelp reveals a gargantuan list of six “steak” locations in the area (for comparison, Humble (TX) has twelve, and Humble is half the area of Berkeley). So starting today I will eat at and blog about every steak house East of the Bay, alphabetically. First stop: The Alley.

It’s the shadiest little hole in the wall I’ve ever been to. The inside is dark and frumpy like the sluggish voice of old black men at the bar counter sharing stories about job and children. The walls are blackish wooden planks, covered in thousands of staples and business cards, like a flaky fish deep fried with scales on and forgotten until it turns ivory with mildew dots. How do they say it, this place got character.

Whatever, I just want my steak. The Alley Special comes with a small bundle of iceberg lettuce, a slice of cucumber, and one cherry tomato. The typical salad of guilt that always comes with cheap steaks and dressed in crocodile’s tears of vinaigrette. For 11.75 we get a 12 oz slab, some half cooked vegetable, garlic bread, and a baked potato.

We ask for no sour cream on our potato, but I’m not sure if that was necessary, as the potato comes simple and spare. No cheese, no chives, no bacon bits, two butter packets still wrapped and melting on the hot steak. We are also given one skimpy knife and one fork each, the knife blade is narrow like a snake’s tongue.

We slice and chew, industriously. This is steak that you can make into mattresses, springy and resilient, and taste like hard work. The steak juice flavors well the half cooked onion, broccoli, and carrots. The garlic bread feels hasty. The bare baked potato fits stupendously beautiful with butter and generous shakings of salt, as it should. Its burnt skin, soaked with steak juice, is something I’ve learned to eat and enjoy, but this time it easily peels off to reveal the tastiest part of a perfect baked potato: the dry, hard shell between the skin and the moist flesh. It’s like pie crust without gooey sugar mess.

So that’s it. The Alley lives true to its name: a dark hangout that only accepts cash in exchange for a recharge reeking of grill smoke, cigarette smoke, beer, old men’s stories, and our backstreet side.

Address: The Alley
3325 Grand Avenue (between Elwood and Lake Park)
Oakland, CA 94610
(510) 444-8505
(parking on the street)

Next on Steak Search: Buckhorn Grill (Emeryville)

Before you say hey dummy foreigner, learn how to spell, no, I did not come up with “potatoe”. Potatoe Patch did. And I think it’s pretty cute.
These days it’s been hard to find wholesome meat within walking distance and spending measure (for a frugal grad student). The best one can afford around Berkeley is little slivers of chicken in a *huge* bundle of pad thai, or minced pork in cheap dim sum. I can’t help but posting about this now to ease the carnivore’s mind.

I would flat out say that this is our most-frequently-visited American restaurant. Great food. Good price. Excellent service. A serving here would freak out the health-conscious, nitpicking nimble diner, but who cares. We’re here for the hearty, generous embrace of baked potatoes in melting cheese and sour cream, of thick gravy, of sizzling steak, of tingling barbecue sauce, of a full rack of ribs so tender it falls of the bone.

Forget fork and knife. Ribs are sweeter and better with fingers, and so is a philly cheese, that which should be called philly meat not philly cheese. Gooey, mushroomy, beefy. Good fries, too.

But forget all that. Potatoe Patch is home of throw’d rolls. The best rolls I have ever had. It’s crusty outside, fluffy inside, the dough is so gently sweet. It’s warm. A guy goes around with a tray of freshly baked rolls, you raise you hand, and he throws it to you, sometimes from across the room. And you know it’s a good catch. I would go on TV and do a commercial for this even if they only pay me with unlimited fresh rolls. If it’s not a very busy time for the roll thrower, he’d be happy to throw you as many as you want, make sure you stock up on them. We do every time we come here. Makes perfect breakfast piece for the morrows.

I should be fair and say that they also have great muffins, which usually aren’t throw’d. But nothing, I repeat, nothing, beats the rolls. Even the meat.

Each serving of philly cheese or sirloin steak sets you back by roughly 9 dollars. A full rack of ribs costs 17.95. Total (including tax): $38.59

Address: The Potatoe Patch #1
2504 FM 1960 East
Houston, TX 77073
281-443-3530