Flavor Boulevard

Tag: ucafe

  • One shot: Avocado smoothie

      avocado-smoothie
      This post is for the Vietnamese expats in particular and anyone who thinks of the avocado as a fruit (to be eaten as a fruit, not a vegetable). In America, people tend to think of avocado in guacamole terms or as a meat substitute in sandwiches. If you think avocado for dessert is weird, shall we talk about your pumpkin pie? 😉

      Ever since the day I saw the option of “avocado smoothie” at UCafe, I’ve had 3-5 avocado smoothies every week. Drinking each smoothie with boba was like looking through old photographs and reliving the beautiful days. The avocado is healthy, but that’s not why I like it. It’s the best option when I’m too tired to chew, want something mildly sweet and cold, and when the weather is too hot for meat and carbs. It replenishes my soul and keeps me alive through the summer humidity that accumulates in my tin-roof office building. I regret that I had not eaten more avocados in Vietnam, where the fruit is as big as my whole hand from wrist to middle finger tip and as luscious as molten chocolate cake.

      ucafe-avocado-smoothie
      I love the avocado smoothie at UCafe, but after a while it proves too expensive: a regular 12-oz cup, which costs nearly $4, contains only half an avocado. Berkeley Bowl sells palm-sized avocados (which they label as “extra-large”) for $1.69 each. So I bought a blender to make my own smoothie.

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    • One bite: patechaud at UCafe

        patechaud-ucafe-berkeley
        In 2008, nobody knew what I talked about when I said “pate chaud“ (pronounced |pah-teh-sho|), unless that person was Vietnamese. Not even Wikipedia. But it’s French, how can wikipedia not know about a french pastry, I felt desperate. Now Wikipedia has a page for it, first created on Nov 3, 2011. So it came from an obsolete French word for hot (chaud) meat pie (pâté), but the pastry itself is far from obsolete.

        Until now, the only place where I can get patechaud has been Vietnamese sandwich shops, which Berkeley doesn’t have. Then UCafe opened, and one day, I saw the patechauds at the counter. UCafe also has banh mi. Although I’ve been to the new Sheng Kee Bakery on Telegraph that everybody raves about, although Sheng Kee does have an artificial-tasting but really satisfying taro bubble tea, and although UCafe doesn’t have taro bubble tea (yet), I’ll be loyal to UCafe.

        The nitty gritty: UCafe labels it “puff chicken” on the receipt. I don’t know what they call it per se because they’re not Vietnamese and I do the classic point-and-get thing. The filling: pretty different from the normal Vietnamese ground pork meatball filling, this one has chicken, woodear mushroom and some kind of fatty yellow mush that my best guest is something of plant origin (potato or bean paste?) soaked in gravy, or maybe it’s just gravy. But it’s satisfying, like all things with salt and fat. Worth its $1.50 and I don’t remember getting sick last time I ate it, so I got it again today. 😉

      • My regular lunch stop these days

          chicken bun, spicy sausage roll, and pineapple bread from UCafe
          One of The Clog‘s editors said: “Let’s do a cafe crawl around campus.” I happened to have tried almost everything at UCafe and been going there forever these days, so I took up that part of the crawl. I sent a 466-word essay to the editor, right before  I saw her email from 5 minutes earlier: “hey guys, cuz we’ll do 5 cafes total, let’s make it 100-150 words each”. Haha oops. Cutting time. Here’s the finished product.

          Here’s my original 466 words. With pictures. 😉

          “Since its grand opening last fall, UCafe on the South side has proved to be a reliable supplier of the Spanish bun (ham, cheese and sausage in a roll), the perfect $1.95 filler for those 10 minutes between classes.

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