Posted by Anita on 02.03.06 5:07 PM
I haven’t had time to download all the photos from our trip, but a couple of people have asked me about our experience with the Tsukiji fish market tour.
Nakamura-san and Yoshino-san speak fluent English, and they’re incredibly well-versed in the ins and outs of the market. They both used to work in Tsukiji for different wholesalers, and Yoshino-san lived in San Francisco years ago. I am sure that we saw things (like the uni showroom) that we would never have found on our own. Their explanations helped us understand the things we saw, rather than just being amused by the visual experience. If our guides didn’t know the answers to a question, they would ask the vendors and show genuine interest in the answers themselves.
The tour costs 7,500 yen (approximately $63/£35) per person. The only tricky part of the operation was the reservation, and even that isn’t hard. They’ve got major spam-blockers running on their email account, so you need to post their message board with your preferred date, and they will email you back.
The first morning, we ate at Sushi-sei, a traditional sushi bar in the outer market. We ordered the middle of the three set menus, and enjoyed everything very much. Nobody spoke any english, but it wasn’t a major problem… it just meant that we couldn’t chat with the sushi chefs! The second morning, Cameron went to Sushi-zanmai, a more-modern, casual sushi-place a couple of streets over. He said both were very good, but Sushi-sei was measurably better. (I, on the other hand, went to Yoshinoya!)
breakfast, restaurants, shopping, travel
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Posted by Anita on 01.25.06 7:50 AM
As promised, a wrapup of yesterdays trip to the House of Chicken and Waffles.
I’m about to commit blasphemy, but I think I actually like this place better than Roscoe’s. Cute decor with an air of space-age diner; bright colors and clean as a whistle.
I opted for the Angie’s Delight: 1 chicken breast, 1 waffle, plus grits.
The waffle was tasty, with a hint of spice; the chicken was nicely fried, then ‘smothered’ (actually dipped) in spicy chicken gravy. At first I thought I was going to have to ask for butter for my grits, but found a huge pool of butter lurking near the middle of the bowl… righteous!
Service was super-friendly, although it took more than 30 minutes to get my food (at 2pm… not exactly the lunch rush). And it’s not cheap: With a soft drink, my bill came to $11.
House of Chicken and Waffles
510.836.4446
444 Embarcadero West (near Jack London Square)
Oakland, CA
breakfast, East Bay, restaurants
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Posted by Anita on 01.21.06 10:29 AM
Thep Phanom used to be one of our favorites when we lived in the lower Haight. Even once we moved to another part of town, we kept coming back because the food was head and shoulders above the ordinary.
A few years ago, they started sliding. It seemed that the drop in quality coincided with the removal of the specials boards from above the windows. Although it paled in comparison, the food was still very good, and we kept coming back, kept recommending it as our favorite Thai place, kept ugring people to go…
So you can imagine our sadness after eating there twice in the last 6 weeks, and having two mediocre experiences. In December, we ordered a pair of our old favorites — tom yum goong and crispy basil chicken — plus salt-and-pepper beef, a new one for us. The soup was bland and unbalanced; the chicken, formerly blessed with a wispy crispy coating, now had a blatant battering; and the beef was interesting but not terribly Thai-flavored, and unpleasantly chewy. We chalked it up to a bad night, and didn’t give it much thought.
Last weekend, we went back with a couple of friends. We shared everything, so I had a chance to grasp the breadth of the problem:
Som tam — green papaya salad — is typically blazingly hot and pungently tart. Thep Phanom’s version was neither. The rather small portion was served in a cocktail glass.
Tom yum goong was dished out tableside into flat soup plates, rather than bowls. The broth was almost clear, not even a hint of redness from steeped shrimp shells or chiles. It tasted almost as bland as it looked: no hot, barely any sour, a paltry 4 shrimp for 4 people.
Larb ped featured tasty grilled, chopped duck meat, but the rest of the dish was bizarre. There were hardly any greens –typically you eat larb by rolling up the meat and seasonings in leaves of lettuce or other leafy veggies — and, again, the spice was almost non-existant. Larb is supposed to be HOT!
Basil chicken with crispy basil (gai kprow tod) suffered from the same problems as we noted on our last visit. Very sad… this dish used to be a true standout, a modern riff on a beloved thai classic. Now it wouldn’t be out of place at a cheap chinese takeout joint.
Panaeng beef curry was unspicy, badly balanced (sweet flavors completely overwhelmed the salty, spicy tastes) and oversauced.
Thep Phanom is still OK, but it’s no longer great. It may not even be better than average.
Thep Phanom
400 Waller Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
415.431.2526
Lower Haight, restaurants, Thai
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Posted by Anita on 12.07.05 5:35 PM
Tonight, Cameron and I are going to COCO500, one of SF’s hot new restros, so I peeked at the menu.
I’m sending it straight to the editorial penalty box for the following infractions:
1) Pretentiousness:
You’ll find items in all the categories that could be starters, but there’s also a “small starts” category. The listings are sort-of organized by cooking method, but sort-of not. The word “dirt” has no place on a menu. And seriously, how can a dessert be noncommital? Is it sort of a brownie, but not really? Sort of dessert, but more like a kick in the ass?
2) Confusion:
Some of the items have dollars and cents, some don’t (why “6.0” but “11”, for example?). it’s like someone decreed: “all prices must have 2 digits”, or maybe or maybe they thought that if they didn’t add the “.0” it would look like “6 fried green beans” (which would be a pretty scrawny appetizer). Of course, all of this would be moot if they put the price AFTER the item, instead of before it. The way it reads now, it looks like an essay outline written by someone with poor counting skills.
3) Narcissism:
Any time the word “coco(a)” is used in a menu-item name (which, in and of itself, is a minor infraction) it is rendered in ALLCAPS. And, for the love of Pete, what the hell is a ‘ COCOmole “taco” ‘ ?
4) Ignorance:
Among the choice typos…
– seasame tuile
– balsalmic
Hello, get a dictionary. Or, better yet, an editor.
downtown SF, restaurants
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Posted by Anita on 11.11.05 5:45 PM
Rocky and I had a little too much fun visiting Murray last night.
The good news is that I am staying at the Ändra, so the best damned room-service hangover cure ever was only a speed-dial call away: Two eggs (scrambled), housemade pork-maple sausage, smashed garlic-fried potatoes, rustic Dahlia Bakery toast, figs… courtesy of Mr. Douglas at Lola.
breakfast, drinks, restaurants, Seattle, travel
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Posted by Anita on 09.10.05 10:12 AM
Another unfortunate instance of a Top 50 restaurant that isn’t even close to hitting the mark: Town Hall.
Our server was nowhere to be found for the first 15 minutes we were seated. We weren’t even offered water or drinks. When he finally did appear, he brought the cocktail list (oh, so they do have one! why wasn’t it left with the menus?) that listed some pretty bizarre combinations, including a gin-based drink called The Big Easy — um, gin? New Orleans? — and a margarita-like tequila concotion made with cointreau, lime juice, and Falernum. They all sounded so poorly conceived that we stuck with wines by the glass.
My starter was Smithfield ham and cheese toast with jalapeno cream…. which really tasted like something you’d get at TGI Friday’s. It was positively sodden with pepper-infused bechamel (interesting but about 10 times the amount needed) and sprinkled with cold, flabby rings of jalapenos that had been breaded in the style of fried green tomatoes. Cameron’s appetizer, billed as “barbeque shrimp” was also served on toast, also with a drenching of sauce. He definitely got the worse end of the deal: his pool of brown sauce tasted of nothing except salt and worcestershire. Ew.
My main was a peanut-and-tasso-crusted Niman Ranch pork chop. The chop itself was brined to within an inch of its life… it was overcooked but still eerily moist…. spongy, salty, blech. The elements of the crust were so large that they fell off as soon as I cut into the chop. The accompanying mashed potatoes were good, but such a small serving that I literally had to lift up the pork chop to see if they’d been forgotten.
Cameron had a a trio of rabbit: hilariously tiny frenched rack of ribs, roulade of breast with unidentifiable stuffing, and another roulade of leg wrapped in bacon. What was billed as mustard spaetzle were scattered across the top as garnish. The vegetable was lightly-mashed peas and a celeriac puree. All of the meat was completely unsalted and basically tasteless, and the breast roulade was utterly overcooked and dry. Needless to say, neither of us ate much of our mains aside from the vegetables.
Since we were still hungry at this point, we split a butterscotch-chocolate pot de creme, garnished with buttercrunch. Sadly, this as the highlight of our meal, and it wasn’t even good. The “pot” was actually a two-layered cereal-size bowl of pudding (nothing creme-y about it) and the top layer tasted exactly like butterscotch pudding from a box.
Service never improved from the early missteps: Plates were dropped off uncerimoniously — it might have been nice to have an explanation of what the trio of rabbit included, for example — and we got the distinct impression that our server would have rather been somewhere else for the evening. At least we had that in common.
The high-ceilinged space is decorated in an eclectic vein that feels historic without degenerating into old-timey kitsch. The light fixtures in particular — including a Rube Goldberg-esque chandelier over the bar — are particularly striking. The entry area was jammed with people waiting for tables and having drinks at the ill-placed bar, but the restaurant tables were only a little bit crowded. On the downside, the lack of booths and window coverings combined with brick walls makes for a very loud space with unforgiving acoustics — there’s no prayer of ignoring the coversations of the people on either side of you. Still, it managed to feel warm and urban and inviting… I only wish the food had been the equal of the space.
Town Hall
342 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
415.908.3900
downtown SF, restaurants
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Posted by Anita on 07.03.05 2:05 PM
All of these from the same table last night, sitting next to us at Blue Plate:
Diner: “What’s this guanciale stuff?” [fair question, so far]
Server: “It’s the cured jowl of the pig.”
Diner: “Ew, OK, I’m gonna not let that freak me out.”
He proceeded to order the dish in question, then muttered through the whole meal how he didn’t know his dish was going to have BACON in it.
Two other gems:
“Tuna loin?! How can a fish have a loin?” (while smirking and gesturing to his crotch)
“Halibut cheeks? Who would want to eat cheeks. And, aren’t they kinda small?”
And then at the very end of the meal, he pronounced his dinner “the absolute best meal I have ever eaten.” Uh, dude, you need to get out more often.
levity, restaurants
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Posted by Anita on 03.26.05 11:04 PM
Originally posted on Mouthfuls’ Perfect Seattle Food Day thread
My perfect day would have to be a weekday (Tue-Fri) because it would involve lunch at Salumi. But if we’re talking about weekend-days, here are two itineraries we’ve done numerous times:
Down to the market, brunch at Cafe Campagne. Spend the middle of the day shopping for dinner fixings, then return to the car and stash the perishables in the cooler (or the chilly car, in winter). Wander around Belltown and the Market area — sorry, I just can’t type ‘West Edge’ with a straight face — browsing and grazing as we go. Perhaps stop by Beecher’s for some mac-n-cheese for late lunch. Wind up for an aperitif at Zig Zag right when they open, then back to the car and home to cook. If we’re having too much fun, they we end up hanging out for another drink (or two), and thn taking a taxi to Palace or walking to a nearby restaurant, and leaving the foraged items for Sunday dinner.
Another variation on this theme: We go to Essential for a great latte and something from the pastry case for a light breakfast, then back home for menu planning, with the entire dining room table buried by cookbooks and magazines. Then we spend mid-day shopping for dinner stuff, and ingredients for the rest of the week’s meals. In the right season, the first stop would be the U District farmers’ market to get the majority of the produce and anything else we can get find there; this time of year, it’s either Whole Paycheck, Uwajimaya, or Central Market, depending on what else we need to get — WF has good cheese, CM has better deli meats, etc. Lunch is grabbed when we start to feel peckish; a recent favorite has been splitting a cheesesteak and an order of fries at Philadelphia Fevre, or each of us going our own way at the Uwajimaya food court. A new find I’m looking forward to adding to this plan: If we’ve got a Mutual Fish (aka ‘Smoochable Fish’) stop planned, I’ll agitate for lunch at the taco bus, El Asadero on Rainier, before heading home to prep dinner.
There’s usually a cheese plate or some other nibbles on the counter while we’re chopping, dicing, fileting, etc. Lately our weekend meals have been big, multi-hour projects: the latest mexican cooking project from the Mexico forum, Cam’s newfound love of wok-frying whole fish on the turkey-fryer burner outside, etc. It’s comforting to me to have a homey project to fill a winter afternoon. I know when summer comes, the meals will be simpler, less constructed… which I am also looking forward to, in its own way.
There aren’t any particularly surprising finds in these ideas, I’m afraid. Still, reading them over pleases me. We’re actually going to do an abridged version of #1 today, so it was fresh in my mind.
bar culture, drinks, farmers markets, restaurants, Seattle, shopping, travel
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Posted by Anita on 02.25.05 8:33 PM
Last weekend, a group of us with ties to the Seattle area trucked ourselves down — or up, in the case of our lone Angeleño — to Yountville to visit Mr. Keller’s establishment, which you might have heard a bit about. I’ve put a few of our photos up here, in case you’re curious. (You can bypass the login by clicking on the photo.)
We were touched that they’d obviously taken some pains to include nods to the PacNW area in our menu; even our head waiter was a former Seattleite. A glorious time was had by all.
In the words of the Prophet Bueller: “It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend it.”
restaurants
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