Category: Restaurants & Stores

I really wish I lived near a Porridge Place, because the one that I’ve been eating at here in Cupertino is so awesome. Good Chinese food, fast and cheap, and intensely satisfying. You walk in, pick from the steam trays and platters behind the glass counter, and the waitresses bring you your tasty bits along with hot tea and a big tub of steaming rice porridge with cubes of sweet potato floating in it. I will post pictures once I am back home, because I think I managed to forget my download cable. Duh.
I ate there last night, because I’d been in bed all day with a head cold (three cheers for exhaustion!) and really wanted hot comfort food. I got some ground pork in a thin juicy sauce with slivers of mushroom, tasting faintly of ginger & soy, and a pile of mildly garlicky greens, and an extremely savory tea egg. This turned out to be particularly excellent because the liquid from the pork thinned out the rather thick congee and made it just the way I like it, and the greens gave the right note of bright freshness.
I still feel sort of crappy, so I went back again tonight. This time I spied some 1000-year-old eggs with tofu, so I got that, along with some napa cabbage braised with shiitakes & dried shrimp, and a plate of chewy-crunchy salted turnip with spicy red pepper. Then they asked me if I wanted pork sung with my egg-and-tofu, and when I said yes they drowned the bowl with fluffy pork goodness, which made me happy, happy, happy. I just love rice porridge with sweet-salty pork threads dissolved in it, and the spicy turnip & fermented eggs were awesome with it. Delicious. I ate not even half of what I ordered, and I am stuffed to the ears, and the whole works set me back $11 and change. Three people could easily eat on what I ordered, and two would be stuffed, so this is cheap eats for sure.
I am toying with bringing my two coworkers here one night after meetings — there are some scary looking foods (which I am sure are delish) like tiny whole squids or soybeans mixed with tiny silver dried anchovies, but the vast majority of dishes are highly approachable: tofu, sausage, cabbage, green beans, cucumber, ground pork, fish, shrimp.
It looks to me like at least half the patrons get takeaway, to be used as a quickie dinner. Geeky bachelors and young families walk out with a few cardboard cartons of savory prepared dishes and a tub of congee, which beats the hell out of Domino’s Pizza any day. It reminds me of the prepared foods counter at Whole Foods, only better. And if you choose to eat in, it feels more like a Chinese version of tapas, comfort-food style. It’s just awesome, and I will be sad not to have it near me when my work at Apple is done.

I went to dinner last night with coworkers from the San Mateo office of my company, to some unnamed restaurant in San Mateo, and amusingly I found myself walking in the door of Joy Luck Place, the exact same restaurant I ate in the night before only in a different town. On my recommendation we ordered the shrimps in mayo, which were devoured before I got any, which was fine since I was macking down the very excellent sauteed pea pod stems, which were the tenderest I’ve ever had, and some nice tofu/seafood/roasted garlic clay pot, and a smoked glazed sea bass (also with mayo), and some tasty scallops in hot bean sauce with broccoli, among other things. The seafood and vegetable dishes are better than the meat dishes (which are respectable enough), so I would recommend you focus your order toward the fruits of the sea. Again I forgot my camera; I suck.

I am in Cupertino, California, which is a horrifying wasteland of strip malls and concrete, and frankly the circumstances of my arriving here were more than a little frantic, with multiple cell phone calls at the same time and rental car counters without any cars and general mayhem. So it was most gratifying to finally meet up with MissLudmilla for dinner and chow down on some high-quality west coast chinese food.
Which is in and of itself a saga of some magnitude — I’d read an article some years back in one of the food rags about a constellation of fantastically great Chinese restaurants tucked away in the strip malls of Silicon Valley, and at the time I’d thought, damn, I’d really love to eat in some of those restaurants, but when the heck will i ever be in Silicon Valley? Lo and behold, I finally get sent to a client site out here, but I can’t dig up the damn article ANYWHERE. I enlisted my Bay Area food minions, and the power librarians at the Chicago Public Library, and some searches of Google and Epicurious, all to no avail. Finally I went nuclear on the situation and called up the editorial offices of Gourmet Magazine and left a message on their generic voicemail box. Within an hour, the article was on my fax machine. Hot damn.
We chose a strip mall here in Cupertino, since it had a wide selection of options and happened to be right around the corner, a bonus since we were both ravenous and it was already 8pm. After casing the place — and deciding that I need to go to Porridge Place for lunch one of the days I am here for congee, yum — we settled on Joy Luck Place, for two reasons. 1) it was full of chinese people who seemed happy, and 2) it served shrimps with mayonnaise and walnuts, a dish that has fascinated me with its transcendent unlikeliness since I first heard of it, though I’ve never had a chance to try it. (The place also serves Buddha Jumps Over The Wall, but you have to order in advance for that.)
The shrimps were awesome. Big sweet fresh shrimps, coated with mayonnaise, dusted with cornstarch and deep fried. Yum. The walnuts were only lightly sweetened, with a dusty nutty taste to them that was very pleasant, and nice with the shrimps or alone. A completely insane set of ingredients to combine, and yet it totally works. MissLudmilla said it was one of the nicest versions of the dish she’d had, more subtle and less goopily sweet than many, so bonus for us.
We also got some beef in XO sauce with enoki & button mushrooms, which was fine, some mustard green with a bland sauce and some shreds of delicious Yunnan ham, and an appetizer plate of lusciously fatty roast duck with perfectly crisped skin and a pile of slightly sweetened beans of some sort, maybe adzuki. There are all sorts of classic luxury foods on the menu, including a whole section of shark fin dishes, not least of them a $50 soup of shark fin and abalone, and the place did seem to be full of people in the market for celebratory and/or showy dishes — we were totally out of place with our elbows on the table and casual conversation, but it was late enough in the evening that we didn’t cause any trouble, and the staff pretty much started cleaning up around us as we finished up.
The shrimps are fantastic and worth the trip. The boiled spiced peanuts that arrive as amuse bouche are also pretty addictive, so watch out. The rest of the dishes were merely good, but after the wastelands of Chicago’s chinese cuisine, merely good is fine eating indeed.
10893 N Wolfe Road, Cupertino

Feast your eyes on this:

Have you ever seen something so completely appealing? A plate of rice, with beans and salad, topped with steak, capped by a fried egg, and garnished with fried plantain and a glorious curve of crisply fried pork belly.
Tallasiandude ate this at a new mexican/guatemalan place in downtown Waltham called Guanachapi (273 Moody St.) and said it totally kicked ass. His Latina-American dining companion said the food was just like her mom makes. I just think the photo is food porn at its finest.
And I am comforted to know that I will not have to totally give up my addiction to high-quality family-style Mexican food when I finally leave Chicago. *whew*

Beer Bistro: very good $2 burgers on Tuesdays, an extensive and high-quality beer list, and Tater Tots. ‘Nuff said.
Cobra Lounge: had the potential to be so very, very awful, and instead is totally awesome. It does have whiffs of pretentious hipsterism, but when the wings are the best I’ve had in years, and there is Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Ramones on the jukebox, and every one of my preferred bourbons is behind the bar, I can more than live with that. Bonus points for being within stumbling distance of home.
The Hideout: Low rent deteriorating vintage interior tucked in behind warehouses and truck lots, with good cheap drinks. Heaven. High hipster quotient, but what can you do?

My friend Bar comes to Chicago for business, and for once I was actually in town when she was here. I’d been hankering to try out one of the beer gardens we have here, so we trundled over to Resi’s Bierstube on Irving Park, wandered through the deserted bar and found a seat in the back yard under a tree.
If only all bars could be like this.
A wide and excellent selection of German beers on draft, including dark wheat beers, which I’ve never even seen before and enjoy very much. Affable indy-rock waitresses. And enormous portions of pork — we had a smoked chop and a weiner schnitzel — that come with sides of bland sauerkraut, gorgeously vinegary german potato salad studded with bacon, and rye bread with butter. We could have stayed there all night, and more or less, we did — when they closed the beer garden, we stayed another hour at the bar until the rest of the patrons left, and when the staff let us know they wanted to close up early and head home, we wandered out into the warm evening, happily full of pork and beer and good will.
And had a bit of schnitzel and potato salad left over to medicate the hangover next morning.

My roommate gave me a gift certificate to Hot Chocolate for my birthday, which was awesomely nice of her… particularly in view of how excessively yummy the food turned out to be there.

In an effort to try as many of the desserts as possible without totally overloading on sugar all at once, we started with a cup of the dark hot chocolate. Which was thick, silken with melted chocolate, and perfectly balanced between sweet and bitter. And with a homemade marshmallow on the side.

Then we got a salad of green & wax beans, perfectly cooked and dressed in a honey dijon vinaigrette, tossed with some halved heirloom grape tomatoes, and sprinkled with blue cheese. This dish is spectacular, just delicious and nicely composed. Highly recommended!
We also got an herbed flatbread with a dip/spread of deviled egg filling, and a chopped salad “nicoise” of seared tuna, new potato, avocado, egg, olives, asparagus and greens in a green goddess dressing. These were tasty but not so extravagantly good as the bean salad.

Then we got a crock of macaroni & cheese made with some fancy artisanal gruyere & cheddar, which was just absurdly rich and delicious. In the middle of summer it was wonderful, and I can’t wait to have some more in the middle of winter. It went really well with the faintly smoked German Schlenferla helles lager beer we’d acquired in a fit of adding excess to already excessive pleasure.

Then it was time for dessert. Tallasiandude had wanted to get three, but we were getting rather full by this time so we restrained ourselves to two. The obvious choices among the many lovelies were the warm brioche donuts, and the dark chocolate souffle cake with salted caramel ice cream and pretzel.

Sadly, the donuts were a disappointment, tasty enough but undercooked in the middle and sort of overwhelmingly doughy. But the unbilled “garnish” — a copious spill of caramel corn — more than made up for it, being rich, buttery, crunchy, salty & sweet, and a total knockout when dipped into the hot fudge sauce that came with the donuts.
The warm chocolate souffle cake, on the other hand, is a triumph. The cake is heavy and thick in flavor but light in texture, and sits in a pool of dark caramel sauce that ties the cake together with the salt-caramel ice cream. The pretzel takes the form of a pencil-thin squiggle of handmade, generously salted pretzel laid over the top as a lacy garnish. Really great, just up my street — chocolate, caramel, salt & sweet, rich and light at the same time.
They have a nice little menu, a great selection of desserts, a great list of unusual beers, and a very comfortable atmosphere done up in shades of brown, just sleek enough to stay on the good side of casual but still be glamorous. We’ll go back.

tallasiandude came to chicago to visit for my birthday — yay! — and i made reservations at Blackbird for us. He’d been getting a little tired of hearing me yammer on about how awesome it was, without ever taking him there. He’s not generally excited about fancy-pants restaurants per se, but I knew he’d like this one… and he did. 🙂

The amuse-bouche was not a soup this time, as it has been on all my previous trips, but rather a morsel of roast mackerel in a bit of broth with minced green olives and radish sprouts.

For wine, we followed the server’s recommendation of a 2003 Alsatian Grand Cru riesling from Bernhard (and I only know this by looking at the photo), which was, as promised, lovely with the range of food we’d ordered, and nicely dry and almost sparkly. We got drunk, because we are getting to be lightweights in our old age. Hee.

Among the many reasons I love the tallasiandude is that he was completely down with adopting my new habit of ordering two courses of appetizers. So we started with a tuna tartare on a schmear of avocado with jalapeno, watermelon, heirloom tomato, what seemed to be strips of jicama (but were rather chewier — we both couldn’t figure out what they were), mache, and crushed coriander seed. And some sort of savory vinaigrette that I believe involved cured meat. This dish was freaking fantastic, with different explosions of flavor with each bite as watermelon met coriander met tomato met tuna. Damn. This one will probably be on the menu all summer, and it is worth a trip.

We ordered the suckling pig, which this time came with pickled ramps (woo, ramps!), rhubarb mostarda, braised chard, and a parsley salad in vinaigrette. I think this is the best version of the pig I’ve had so far, and it was extremely well prepared, too, with extramoist meat inside a very crispy crust. Yum.

We also ordered the duck breast + livers, but instead what arrived was smoked trout with roe and deep fried morels. The server told us there was a computer mixup, and to keep the trout while we waited on the duck… so bonus for us. The trout & roe was delightful, and how could smoked fish not be, really? The deep fried morels, oddly, weren’t my favorite — deep frying seemed somehow to overpower the mushrooms, though tallasiandude loved them utterly.

The duck did arrive shortly thereafter, with a fan of rosy breast slices flanking a row of deep fried duck livers nestled in a salad of cabbage, watercress, endive, chewy chunks of pancetta, and pickled sour cherries. The cherries caught me by surprise with their pungency, but once I knew what I was dealing with, I really enjoyed the contrast they made to the richness of the fried livers and the gentle meatiness of the breast. Tallasiandude thought they were a bit much, but I really dug ’em.

The two entrees were both fucking rockstars. Tallasiandude indulged an uncharacteristic yen for cooked salmon, and ordered the filet of pale king salmon atop a pool of creamy sweet corn and tender chopped broccoli, and topped with sweet dungeness crab and a tangle of baby greens and a bit of bacon. All these flavors worked shockingly well together, with the broccoli being the biggest surprise, perfectly complementing the crab and the corn and the fish and somehow serving as the flavor that tied everything together.

I indulged, period, in the pork belly. Holy crap! This is like a piece of bacon that went to finishing school — a long meaty slab of crisp, well-seasoned pork belly with PERFECTLY rendered fat, with a salad of celery root & baby greens, a pool of tangy sweet-sour vinaigrette, and an outrigger of chanterelle mushrooms and tiny crunchy sweet-corn beignets in a drizzle of honey. Everything about this dish was perfect, delicious, pleasurable, joyful. This is why I eat.

We managed one tiny bit of restraint in our meal at the end, and shared a single dessert of dark chocolate mousse with sweet cream ice cream and a pile of fresh local sweet cherries, and a glass of rather nice port. But then there were the wee little sweets that come with the check — one was a mini whoopie pie, one was a fruit jelly (yum), one was a dark truffle…
As we paid our bill, our server thanked us and told us we really know how to dine — a bizarre and random thing to say, but a welcome compliment indeed. Since as far as I’m concerned, we really DO know how to dine… as do at least some of the other patrons of Blackbird, like the two men next to us, who were in raptures over some of the same dishes we’d eaten, and spent most of their meal alternating between gossip and discussion of fabulous meals past and present.
It was a glorious meal, made the more glorious by being able to share it with my sweetie-pie, and by having him love it just as much as I did. Yay.

How can you not love a place called The Pork Store? It’s so wonderfully to the point.
It is even more delightful when it in fact purveys very fine pork chops, browned perfectly and served up with extremely good hash browns, fluffy pale biscuits, eggs, and good coffee. Yeah, baby!
And when you can find such a place in the middle of all the madness of the trendy Haight, and consume those chops and coffee in the company of good friends new and old — i was there with tallasiandude, MissLudmilla & MonkeyBoy, the Wandis, and Cindy from FoodMigration, plus her sweetie-pie Randy — it may be as near as it’s possible to get to the Platonic ideal of breakfast.

Also while in Oakland, we went to a seafood place called Sea Salt, a comfortably arty spot with good fresh ocean-critters in delicious, just slightly out-of-the-ordinary preparations. Not so out of the ordinary, I suppose, for the Bay Area, but we can’t all live in culinary paradise.
The photos all came out dark and blurry, since I haven’t the patience to set the camera properly for low light conditions — this being the situation that spurred MonkeyBoy to suggest the mini-tripod — and it was an awfully long time ago now, but we had some spectacularly garlicky little squids with white beans, crab cakes on a sparkly relish of corn and peppers, a caesar salad with anchovies, a salmon tartare with some sort of handmade potato chips (recommended!), a bit of king salmon with horseradish sauce, roasted asparagus with mimosa’d egg topping, fish and very tasty chips with a spicy thai dipping sauce, a very good braised mushroom dish, and a dessert of tropical sorbets topped with a tuile in the amusing shape of a swimming fish.