Category: Restaurants & Stores

Whilst downtown today, i walked by a little hole in the wall labeled “Pita Kebab” that had a newspaper review on the window that said it was Persian and had great kubideh.
Say no more.
I stopped in for lunch, and though that kubideh was perfectly fine, especially for wicked-fast takeout, it wasn’t all that. The clipping said it was richly spiced, delectable, etc., and frankly I didn’t detect much spice at all, and it desperately needed salt. Ditto on the rice: fragrant and tender, but a little bit bland, in dire need of some nice salted butter. The chopped salad, however, was top-shelf, super flavorful and lemony and minty, yum yum.

So Molana is better, though twice the price, and my own kitchen is better even than that, but if you work in the Downtown Crossing/Chinatown area, it’s a nice change of pace for lunch takeout.

oh. my. god. Best Burger Ever.

It may have been the fact that we’d been surfing all morning and were really really hungry, but even in retrospect the Local Girl burger at Duane’s is well into the top 5 burgers of all time, no question about it.

First of all, the burger itself is perfect — not too thick, just thin enough to balance with the toppings, and well-cooked. Then you factor in the usual lettuce-and-tomato being yummy because, well, you’re in Hawaii, and then things just get crazy: teriyaki sauce, pineapple, swiss cheese and mayo. These add up to one insanely good treat, but really it is the combo of mayo with teriyaki that makes my eyeballs roll back into my head with the sheer deliciousness of it all. I can hardly stand it just writing about it now. Yum.

tallasiandude revealed his California roots with his choice, a cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, sprouts, mayo, cheddar, and vast amounts of buttery Hawaii avocado. This too is a spectacular burger, perfectly executed.

The onion rings are some of the best we’ve had, super sweet, thick rings with ultra-crunchy batter, and the fries are great too. I loved my papaya-and-i-forget-what-else drink, smoothie-fied with blended ice to become cool, refreshing and energizing. The marionberry shake was the only disappointment — it was a perfectly fine shake, but not very berry-tasting, and its okayness suffered by comparison to the superlatives of everything else.

We went at about 3 in the afternoon, so the lines weren’t too bad. There’s a few tables with umbrellas, but if you go when it’s busy, you might want to get back in the car and head back to the beach for a picnic.

We ate a lot of good food in Hawaii, but this may rank as the single best meal of the whole trip. Viva Duane’s!

We take a break from our overdue Hawaii programming to bring you an update from Oakland, CA where i am visiting my pal R. Today we went to the farmer’s market and ate a bunch of free samples (especially the breads and spreads at the Afghani prepared foods booth, YUM), bought some gorgeously cheese-tastic pastry at Arizmendi, and went for a walk through the attractively early-20th-century architecture of R’s neighborhood, including a spur-of-the-moment visit to a house for sale that either of us would have bought on the spot if we had a spare $800,000.

By then we were hungry again, and we headed across town to Bakesale Betty’s. They have cookies and cakes, but we got fried chicken sandwiches. These somehow embody the city of Oakland to me: soul food fried chicken, on artisanal bread, with crispy crunchy fresh slaw and no mayo. They were so damn good. The chicken is boneless but otherwise strictly traditional, moist with thick, crisp, spicy crust. The slaw is full of parsley and jalapenos, giving it just a little kick and a crunchy cabbagey sweetness and a touch of vinegar. It doesn’t need mayo, and in my opinion, nearly everything could stand a little mayo. Mayo would push this sandwich over the edge into decadence, and somehow at the same time would make it more pedestrian.
We gobbled up every bite. Highly recommended.

aaah, saimin.

Ramen by any other name would not be served in such delightful weather — nor would it contain spam. The night we arrived in Kaua’i we went directly to Hamura’s Saimin, both because it sounded AWESOME in the guidebook and because it was about the only place still open at that time of night.

The place was jammed with locals, and we probably looked like the worst sort of fresh-off-the-plane tourists, pasty white and studying the menu with wide eyes. Well, maybe not the *worst* sort, but you get the idea. We got a regular and a wonton saimin, plus some BBQ chicken. (BBQ chicken is hawaii-speak for yakitori, a pleasant discovery.) The regular is in the back and the wonton is in the foreground, wonton being a bit of a superset of the regular, containing meaty wontons and roast pork slices in addition to the spam matchsticks, green onions, and fishcake shreds.

All this arrives on top of well-textured wheat noodles in a rich and savory pork broth. Tallasiandude eats his plain, but I found I prefer the addition of a bit of spicy chili vinegar, just as i prefer my pho with lots of lime. There’s also hot sauce, shoyu, and chinese mustard on offer, and we saw all of them used liberally, though the shoyu & mustard was primarily for dipping wontons & pork.

On our return trips, we ordered the special saimin, which comes with everything the wonton comes with, but with a few of the wontons swapped out for a hardcooked egg and some mustard greens. (We saw the guy next to us order this the first time, yummy.)

We had some other saimin on on our trip, and all were good, varying slightly in their toppings and broth but always containing rich pork soup with spam, kamaboko and noodles, a reliable comforting dish. But for pure pleasure, and with special style points for dive-ness and laconic waitresses, Hamura’s does take the prize. We can’t wait to go back.

Several years ago, a restaurant opened in Teele Square in Somerville called Sabur. It had the cheesiest looking sign, with the worst sort of self-conscious faux-ethnic font, and claimed to be “mediterranean cuisine.” All of which added up in my mind to an overpriced mediocrity catering to trend-happy yuppies with timid palates. I never went in.
But then over the last year or so, I’ve heard from several people that the food is delicious. And today, we met up for brunch there to celebrate a friend’s birthday — she lives in the neighborhood and also vouched for the place. And i am thrilled to report that the food is indeed yummy, and though it has flashes of various mediterranean flavors, it is primarily a Balkan restaurant with lots of yogurt, fried breads, ajvar and sausages.
Online reviews mention crappy service, and i will say that our server, though pleasant, was a little spacy — but certainly not rude, and we didn’t wait overlong for anything. The decor is not entirely my cup of tea, but it is warm, richly colored, faintly exotic and has lots of pillows, and suits the place. The patio is rather nice too, if it happens to be warm.
But the reason I will go back is the food. Perfectly crunchy potato pancakes with sour cream and spiced pears. French toast with fresh-fig jam and maple syrup and lots of butter. Spiced meat patties on puffy flatbread with ajvar and feta. Stubby little grilled sausages with yogurt sauce and onions. Flaky tender borek stuffed with crumbly creamy farmer cheese. This food hews closely to the traditional flavor profiles, but busts out a few surprises like the pear compote with the potato pancakes (unless that’s a traditional thing i just don’t know about). And everything is well executed, if perhaps a little overzealously dusted with chopped parsley. (A pox on THAT particular restaurant trend.)
It wasn’t seriously busy despite our arrival at 11am on a Sunday, prime brunching hour on a gorgeous sunny weekend. They are reputed to have very good cocktails in their lounge. Someone might need to have a word with management about the Gypsy Kings CD on perpetual repeat… but I am willing to overlook that for a steady supply of delicious potato pancakes and farmer cheese pastries.

On the way to a friend’s house some months ago, we drove down Rt 117 through Weston, and passed a fabulously retro-looking drive-in called Dairy Joy, with a sign out front saying “fried clams & hamburgers.”
Say no more.

We never got a chance to try it, though, until tonight. It was a perfect evening for it, warm and sunny with a bit of a breeze. We ordered a full fried clam plate with onion rings, a half-plate of fried clams with french fries, a crab cake sandwich, lemonade, diet coke, and a raspberry lime rickey.
This turned out to be a mixed bag. The drinks were horrible — the fountain coke was nasty, and the rickey was so overpoweringly sweet i couldn’t touch it. The crab cake sandwich was a naked cake on a naked bun, without sauce or lettuce or anything, which for $8.95 seems a little stingy.
But the fried clams were *top shelf*, the equal of any I’ve had — fresh and sweet and briny, no sand, with a lastingly crisp coating.
The onion rings were coated in the same light batter, which isn’t my preferred style for o-rings, but they were fine enough, as were the fries. Sitting on the plate with those gorgeous clams, dipped into tartar sauce or cocktail sauce (both very tasty renditions), they do just fine. The full plate is the better deal, so if you aren’t overly-hungry, just get a full plate and share it instead of buying two halves.
Of course, at a place called Dairy Joy, you more or less have to get ice cream for dessert. It’s soft-serve only, which is all kinds of old-skool for me, having grown up on the stuff. They have some interesting flavors, and are apparently known for their creamsicle twist and their “javaberry,” another twist of raspberry sherbert and coffee ice cream. We tried the javaberry, since my mom & I both love raspberry and coffee flavored stuff. This is actually pretty good, even though the raspberry is a touch too sweet for my taste, because you get flashes of both flavors as you lick your way through that cone, sometimes sweet raspberry, sometimes creamy coffee, sometimes a li’l of both. Next time, though, i think i am going for straight up coffee soft-serve. That stuff’s killer.

So before you pack the car and drag your ass to the North Shore or Narragansett Bay to get decent fried clams, consider the Dairy Joy, just down the street on Rt. 117… just bring your own beverages.

So the caterer had a list of cheeses they were going to serve, which was fine, but some of them were kind of boring. So i suggested Nevat & Etorki, which are two of our favoritest cheeses in the whole wide world. Fine and dandy.
Except that Formaggio didn’t have them. And then Whole Foods (multiple locations) didn’t have them, and couldn’t order them in less than a week.
At which point, I did what any of you foodwhorish people would do: I googled.
And this brought me the miracle of igourmet.com. How did i remain in ignorance of this genius website for so long? These nice people (and they were nice when i spoke to them on the phone) are sending me an entire wheel of Nevat and a half wheel of Etorki (they had at least a dozen of each in stock) along with 2 pounds of an exciting-sounding thing called Marygold, an aged dutch goat cheese flavored with marigold petals. And they are sending this direct to the caterer via Fedex, with a promise to overnight replacement cheeses if anything should be wrong with our order.
THAT is awesome.

Spleen really wanted to go to Upstairs on the Square for restaurant week, so we made reservations for the four of us: spleen, littlelee, tallasiandude and me. It is the foofiest damn restaurant space i have EVER seen, all pink patchwork and gold frippery and mirrors and swoopy couches, but I have to concede, the food is very good.
We did a 7-course tasting menu, one with wine pairing, and tallasiandude did some a la carte ordering which was awesome because then we could try even more dishes. Heh heh.
The raw oysters were very very good; i don’t have the menu for those in front of me, but i seem to recall an asian pear garnish and yuzu mignonette. Yum.
The tasting menu started with roasted beets & arugula salad with horseradish panna cotta and passionfruit. This was the dish i most wanted to try, because it was going to either be insanely awesome or a horrific trainwreck. Happily it was even more awesome than I dared hope, and the sweetness of the passionfruit was perfect with the beets and against the sharp creamy-soft horseradish. Hubba hubba. (I believe I may have used those exact words to the waiter when he asked how things were.) For the wine nerds out there (hi, C!) I can actually report on the wines, since they are written down right here on the menu. 2005 Sauvignon Blanc, Hall (Napa); we liked it.
Then there was a ravioli of sweet english pea, with a few scraps of smithfield ham, pecorino romano & mint, which was delicious, but the peas decorating it were distinctly starchy. This is why I usually don’t eat peas unless I have grown them, which makes me sad, because I absolutely love fresh peas. 2004 Dafni, Lyrarakis (Crete); this was awesome, and rather unusual — i don’t remember exactly how, but it would be cool to find this wine in a shop.
Somewhere in there tallasiandude had a bowl of wild mushroom tea, which was really a soup, but did I mention? FOOFY. The broth was just a hair salty, which di’nt bother me none, and really intriguing with lots of thyme and a solid punch of hot chile pepper.
Then we got a seared giant Nantucket sea scallop, with marinated grapefruit, crispy fried rounds of fingerling potato, and tarragon. The pictures all came out terrible because of the flattering (ie, barely-there) lighting, but this one i have to post, because it just barely almost conveys the insane electric-green hue of the sauce this dish arrived in.

This neon pool was dotted with electric orange droplets, and the whole thing was completely bizarre and wonderful. The grapefruit and the tarragon and the rich buttery potato and the clean scallop flesh all worked together in a deranged harmony. 2005 Trebbiano, Masciarelli (Abruzzo); this was also extremely tasty.
Then there was a pomegranate lacquered duck breast, with a high-concept schmear of potato puree spiked with nutmeg, and a black truffle jus, which was as lovely as you might expect it to be. 2004 Merlot, Alexander Valley Vineyards. This was when we really started to notice the one main flaw with service: wine accompaniments were arriving well after the dishes, and though I couldn’t give two shits, spleen really wanted to try the wines with the foods, go figure, and so things would be starting to get cold before she could really go to town. Does it not seem like the wine should always show up BEFORE, or at least with, a dish, and never after? Once is just shit happening, but this was every course, and therefore irksome.
Tallasiandude had a deconstructed beef wellington, which was really sliced steak with a bit of pastry and some duxelles paste underneath. Very tasty but mildly silly.

Then there was a foie gras brul&eacute on toast with a cranberry compote and a fantastic fresh-mint soda. I could have happily drank a whole glass of that minty soda, and it was swell with the ridiculous fattiness of the foie gras. 2000 Semillon, Chateau Coutet (Barsac) — this may not have been the wine we had; one of them was swapped out and i can’t remember which one.
There was a selection of artisanal cheeses, several of them Greek — someone in that kitchen has a Greek fetish at the moment — served with a 2000 Kotsifali, Mandilari, Lidakis Archanes (Crete).
And then for dessert there was a rhubarb compote (*swoon*) with a side ramekin of brown butter foam (bizarre but tasty variant on whipped cream) and a soft floury sweet shortbread. I prefer crispy shortbread, but whatever. This came with the longest-named wine ever, i get tired just reading it: 2004 Grenache blend with Carignan, Cinsaut & Syrah, Madeloc Banyuls (Roussillon, France)

Run, do not walk, to Rendezvous in Central Square and order yourself a curry-leaf cocktail before they are rotated off the menu.
The cocktails at Rendezvous are generally quite good, but this one is really great. Curry-leaf-infused gin, with lime and celery juice. You get that fresh, vegetal hit of celery and lime, and then the finish is the floral fragrance of the curry leaf. Dreamy, and great for spring.
(While you’re there, get the gnocchi. Pillowy-light and perfect every time. Yum.)

MissLudmillla & I had a fantastic dinner at Manka’s Inverness Lodge in early December, during our much-needed Marin weekend escape, and now I am very glad indeed that we had the chance, as it has burned to the ground in what seems to be a freak wind accident.
It was very beautiful inside, all old dark wood, battered pewter and old California money — it was too dark for us to see much outside — and the food, very nearly all extremely local, was amazing and delicious.
I am sad. I hope they reopen… it won’t be the same, but perhaps it can still be lovely.
For the news story on the fire: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/12/28/MNGQ8N95T91.DTL