Flavor Boulevard

These days I keep craving noodle soups. There’s just no end to it. Plus, it rained this morning. If I were in Houston, I would go downtown to get this: a crab noodle hotpot (lẩu riêu cua đồng).

The crabs are tiny freshwater paddy crabs, pounded into a paste and strained to make the broth. Throw in some crab meat and fried tofu, some light seasoning, and you get a bubbling soup to dunk your noodles and vegetables. The size of the hotpot in this shop is enough for two, you have to pay a few dollars extra for some chrysanthemum greens (cải cúc or tần ô) and some thin rice vermicelli (they absorb the broth better than the flat kind), but the package doesn’t taste complete without them.

What does this hotpot taste like? Imagine yourself in a remote area on a mildly hot day (not blazing though), sitting on a low chair under the shade, looking out to some green rice paddy in Can Tho, a canal in Giethoorn, or some other kind of open field with flowing water. You’re hungry but not famished, it’s hot enough that you just want something light and sweet but not ice cream. Something that goes down with no effort on your end (and requires little effort on your stomach later too). That’s what this hotpot tastes like.

To spice things up a little, there are skewers. Organ meats and grilled fish. A brief trip to the countryside for $35.67. Slightly overpriced compared to other Houston restaurants, but worth it.

Now where can I get something like this in the Oakland-Berkeley area though…

Address: One Hot Pot and Grill
12148 Bellaire Blvd, Suite 111
Houston, TX 77072
(281) 564-4063
Light dinner for 3: 1 crab hotpot ($15.99) + 1 saffron grilled goby fish (cá kèo, $4.99) + 1 lemongrass grilled pig heart and kidney ($4.99) + 1 chrysanthemum greens ($3.99) + 1 rice vermicelli ($2.99) + tax = $35.67
The service is also nice.

Sometimes things just refuse to go the way you plan.

I’ve been looking forward to the fried chicken at this place called Number 1 Chicken Rice & Seafood for half a year. It’s in Houston, so I have two time windows each year, each a couple of weeks long, to plan my voyage. Last winter we hit the place less than an hour after they closed (which was like 8 pm, I think), this June we were even more determined. According to Aaron’s sources, they open on Sunday between 6 and 7 pm. Strange, but okay. We camped out at the museum for over an hour because the museum is relatively near Number 1 Chicken, and we didn’t want to take any chances. At 6 we drove into its parking lot. The OPEN sign wasn’t lit up. Aaron checked the schedule posted on the door: they’re closed on Sunday. Fine. I’m not meant to eat Number 1 Chicken’s fried chicken. Surely there must be other fried chickens somewhere along Alameda. Following Varun’s advanced GPS system that didn’t allow us to type in anything unless the car is stopped (for safety reason, even though the one who punched the buttons wasn’t the driver), we drove to a few more possible-blogging-material spots, one of them no longer exists. And all of them were closed. We weren’t even meant to eat on Alameda?!

Accepting fate, we gave up on Alameda and headed back to the Rice Village, Aaron’s “hunting ground”. Between Picky Varun and Picky Mai, we settled into El Meson. Cuban.

Here we were in this pretty good-looking Latin American place with frescos of flamboyant girls in flamboyant flamenco dresses and a generous bowl of Andes Mint at the front desk, from which we took (quite) a few as we walked in. The guys were wondering if they have free chips and salsa here (you know, like at the usual Tex-Mex resto in your neighborhood strip mall). We were hungry. Well, they do. The chips and salsa came out after we ordered. I was a bit sad that I couldn’t get the paella (minimum order of 2 people, and yet another thing that didn’t go my way that day), so I got two tapas plates.

If you have a sweet tooth like me, and I don’t mean just a liking for dessert but a liking for sweetness in everything from meat to noodle soup(*), El Meson is for you. The plantains are one thing, but the cinnamon pineapple that goes with the crab cakes ($9.95) and the honey-glazed pork belly ($9.95) are sweet enough to be desserts. The crackling skin offered a nice textural contrast, but slices of poached apple didn’t help toning down the sugar.

I liked the plantains in Varun’s Pollo Salteado ($15.95, grilled chicken sauteed with onion and pepper in sherry sauce, served on rice and black beans with a side of grilled plantains), but Varun found them too sweet.

For dessert, we took “some” more Andes Mint. 😉

Address: El Meson
2425 University Blvd.
Houston, TX 77005
(713) 522-9306
Dinner for 3: $65 – For more pictures of our food, see Photon Flavors.

(*) There are many noodle soups with a sweet broth. Not sweet like your banana cream pie but when you taste the first spoon, you’d go “wow this broth is sweet!” Examples are Lao and Cambodian noodle soups (such as hu tiu). One of my favorite ingredients in the Korean mul naengmyun (cold buckwheat noodle soup) is the Asian pear, which is sweet. But it’s nothing new really, all broths need some kind of sweetness, either from bone marrow or from mushroom.

Bob’s and Dang’s comments on my Kiraku post prompted me to wiki “octopus”. In a way, I needed to remind myself that computers are wonderful creatures that don’t always give me incomprehensible error messages. Then I got reminded of my most memorable experience with octopus on a plate. It was in Santa Fe this past summer.

When there are good news and bad news, I prefer to hear the bad news first, so that’s how I’ll start describing La Boca. Their octopus was terrible. Octopuses are chewy things, and I have never had any octopus as opposite from chewy as this one. Pulpo, as called on the menu, sliced and dressed in pimenton, olive oil, lemon juice and seasalt, sounds like a wonderful refreshment after touring Santa Fe under the flamboyant sun. Well, if you give this octopus to a green octopus-looking alien who hasn’t the slightest preconception of what octopus tastes like, he would most likely go home defining octopus as beans. Yes, it was dense and grainy like bean.

Blame no one but ourselves for ordering raw seafood in the middle of the desert. The rest of the meal, here comes the good news, was tasty.

Spinach salad with roasted beets, goat cheese, red onion, pomegranate vinaigrette. I’ve never had bad roasted beets (I would say the same thing for octopus prior to this day), and pomegranate vinaigrette sounds just right.

Grilled artichoke salad with jamon Serrano, arugula and aged cherry vinaigrette. Grilled artichoke is nutty, the right kind of nutty. And again, how I like fruity vinaigrettes!

Tapas trio: hummus, red pepper-almond spread, goat cheese, spinach, raisin, capers, and flatbread to scoop. Me most impressed with the spinach dip while the girl friends fell for the spicy almond spread.

Pincho de puerco: free range pork skewer with apricot honey and green olives. It would have been a great one had the pork not been so chewy. The wrong kind of chewy.

Cantimpalitos: grilled mini chorizos, garlic aioli, and potatoes. Hyunmi liked the potatoes, and that’s all that matters. 🙂

It’s one of those meals that makes me consider going vegan: the pasture was indeed greener there.

Dinner for four: ~$70 (We had to run for the last bus so we couldn’t even wait for the check…)
Address: La Boca
72 W Marcy St
Santa Fe, NM 87503
(505) 982-3433