Flavor Boulevard

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.

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.

This is probably the first and only time I use my blender because cleaning a blender is not my favorite activity, and because I prefer smashed avocado than blended avocado (the ice dilutes the taste). Still, who knows when the blender might be handy again.

Recipe for avocado smoothie: (1 serving)
– 8 cubes of ice
– 1 large avocado
– 2 teaspoons of sugar
Blend and serve.

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. 😉

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.

Convenience:

It takes 1 minute to walk from Hearst Gym to UCafe, which is next to the post office at the Durant-Bowditch corner (yes, the post office with the most terrible customer service ever!). In UCafe, most of the pastries are placed in glass cabinets, you walk in, grab a tray at the front, a sheet of bakery paper and a pair of tongs, and start choosing. Even during the lunch rush, it doesn’t take more than 5 minutes to walk in and out of UCafe with your lunch if you already know what you want from the cabinets. If you have more time, a banh mi is worth the wait, and watching the kitchen staff rolling the dough into batches of ready-to-bake sausage rolls or the pâté getting spread inside your sandwich makes time go by faster.

There is enough seating for three by the window ledge, but almost nobody ever sits there.

Variety:

Clockwise from top left: pork bun, mango mousse, pork-and-green-onion roll, macadamia black devil (basically, rectangular chocolate muffin with nuts)

Clockwise from top left: patechaud (brioche with minced pork, $1.50), mini chocolate mousse ($3.95), cold cut banh mi ($3.25), lychee green tea (with lychee jelly, $3.50)

For the moment, only two kinds of banh mi are available: cold cuts ($3.25) and grilled pork ($2.75). However, the pastry selection is huge: several kinds of bread loaves, savory buns with sausage, beef, pork and chicken fillings, sweet buns with bean paste, berry and pineapple fillings, mooncakes, shortcakes, cookies, chocolate-muffin-like “butter bread”, etc. They also have a colorful assortment of macaroons, $1.25 each and “buy 4 get 1 free”.

To add to the young, chic but casual look of the café, the cake assortment and a multitude of milk tea and smoothie flavors are pleasing to the eyes and affordable for a student budget.

Price:

The cabinet pastries are all under $3, the mini cakes and regular-size drinks are under $4. One time they only accepted credit card for purchase over $15, I struggled to get up to $14.95 and the guy took pity on me and swiped my card anyway. Thank goodness they have no credit card limit now.

Taste:

Of course, you get what you pay for. Their cakes tend to be too sweet, the macaroons don’t appear with the best texture, and the banh mi is not made with the correct type of airy, scrumptious Vietnamese bread it’s supposed to be. But the overall taste is satisfactory, at least with the savory sausage buns.

To sum it up, UCafe is not a café where you sit and study while stylishly savoring your croissant with a cup of latte-art cappuccino. You can’t meet someone there for coffee either. But from there you can pick up a satisfying 2-minute lunch to go. It’s honest and no frills.”

Address: UCafe
2550 Durant Ave (between Bowditch St & Telegraph Ave)
Berkeley, CA 94704
(510) 981-1853