My trip in Asia (Hong Kong, Macau, Danshui, Shanghai, and Yunnan province) was fulfilling and eye-opening, and my experiences may well be worth entries in travelogues yet unpublished; my mind is still fresh with reflections on the strangeness of ‘reverse’ culture shock, the precious rarities of family time, as well as the strangely natural familiarity I’ve felt with people and places quite unknown within my periphery of experience. It was was as if I am learning the meaning of “travel” for the first time in quite a while — something that strikes me as strange, refreshing and, dare I say, perhaps enlightening.

But here at Edible Couple I’d like to offer a special series on the foods I’ve been lucky enough to consume during the trip. From fast food laksa at the Macau Venetian, to slowly chosen food at a 2000m drop cliffside restaurant; from regional delicacies like yak meat in Yunnan to favorite local dishes like dim-sum in Hong Kong, I’ll try to recount some interesting highlights to whet appetites, both gustatory and intellectual. Here goes!

Chapter One. Hong Kong

Here I would have liked to have spent time trying out the restaurants, real retro chachantangs and private dining rooms reviewed from good ol’ openrice.com, but alas, there was little time to even do some serious “I’m in HK now so let’s go crazy” shopping.

We attempted to dine at this Chinese restaurant for lunch several times – yes, the one with the typical fish tanks at the storefront but containing your less-than-typical seafood (sharks, eels, conches, 60-lb sea groupers, and 8-ft crabs.) Finally one late morning we got a table and tasted some of my mom’s favorite Sau Baos (”Longevity Buns”). These rotund, voluptuous buns have a signature peach-butt shape and a notorious sprinkling of food coloring, and contain lotus seed fillings – like your regular Lian Rong Bao – but only bigger, tastier, and better.

Although I ordered a side of fresh-blanched romaine lettuce, we also cozied ourselves to a plate of turnip cake. There was a special guest to this dish, something called “Golden cake” which was porous, chewy, and slightly sweet. I likened its texture to the “White Sugar Cake” served in dim-sum restaurants and made on streetside stands back in the 1950s — a retro delicacy which is still served occasionally.

Taking a break from climbing the Central hills, we paused for a quick drink at the herbal/medicinal tea shop. Here, you can fill your prescriptions for serious Chinese remedies of all sorts, and get your touristy eyeful of reptilian, seahorse, or antelope body parts. A fridge full of prepared Guilinggao stands by. While sipping our 24-flower teas in paper cups adorned with 1970s orange flower print, I peeked over at the nearby daipaidongs – the famous ones that still survive in Central – where locals and the curious alike can enjoy fish head soups, tomato beef noodles, and everything in between.

A quick family dinner at Langham Place – the ultra-modern 30-story tower of shopping malls in Mong Kok – takes us to a fusion eatery with a tolerable wait-time, an interesting decor (counterfeit Yue Minjun paintings, anyone?) and perhaps a most direct request for customers: “Welcome to our restaurant. We kindly ask that you complete your dining experience with us within the timed period of 45 minutes.” There, we had (among other things) a Hong Kong style stone bowl bibimbab; a braised oxtail over poorly-executed risotto; and a shrimp marinara angel hair pasta. We had time to spare afterwards to browse through electronics and (what else) DVDs!

There were two meals remaining of note. The first one is an unsatisfying foray into mainstream Cantonese vegetarian cuisine. We perhaps picked a poor candidate for this particular indulgence – just a neighborhood eatery – to judge this frequently misunderstood but admittedly strange area of culinary interpretations of religious ideals. It is common to find these eateries in Hong Kong, in streetside shops as well as real restaurants, serving vegetarian versions of common meat dishes and proclaiming various Buddhist ethics on their side bookshelves and mantelpieces (”Relish life”; “Clear head leads to clear living”, etc.). Having this dinner led me to think again that this type of cuisine – especially poorly made interpretations of duck, chicken, or pork, with too much corn starch or sweet sauce slathered everywhere – severely betrays its pristine purpose of any sort of Zen ideals of clarity and chaste intake of food. I venture to say that it has developed into a vehicle to attract mere admirers of a Buddhist lifestyle who apparently loathe to change their eating habits. With that said, I realized that I’ve grown up liking certain Cantonese vegetarian food in a complete extraction from its original intent: I don’t like Suen Jai (”Sour veggie food” – fried gluten braised in tomato sauce) for its affinity to Sweet and Sour Pork, or anything close to it; nor do I enjoy Lo Hon Jai (Vegetarian medley of mushrooms, non-green vegetables, roots, and bamboo shoots) because I want to feel closer to god. I like to eat those thing simply because they taste good. Perhaps that is what these restaurants should aim for – making good food with much less artificial ingredients and procedures.

The restaurant Jong Chu (”Main Chef”) has many branches, but we visited a particularly popular one in Wanchai. As you may recall from a previous entry, this is where I had the best steamed fish in a long time. Indeed, the fish was as perfect as they come: sweet, juicy fillets that slide out from a clean, surprisingly unfishy skin with just a soft touch of the chopstick, with a tender mouth feel that was neither mushy nor meaty. Every part of the fish was cooked just right, nothing was under or overdone, and the broth was well-seasoned – there was the taste of broth, not salty store-bought soy sauce. Another highlight of this dinner was the Wooden Barreled Chicken in the broth that cooked it – as many of you know, kuai fei gai (”Empress Chicken”) is prepared in a strenuous 12+ hour process where the meat is actually braised “raw” with broth until the liquid marinates and “cooks” the chicken. That night’s example in the wooden barrel was exemplary – yet again, the chicken meat was tender with a bounce-back mouthfeel, and the broth was quite good with rice!

Another afternoon through the bowels of residential areas led us through the essential (now mostly indoor) produce markets. The smell of gray water, the sticky floors, the din of the market-goers all helped to bring me back to my childhood. Unfortunately, the dim, warm-tinted lighting is now partially replaced by sterile fluorescent bulbs; the butchers no longer wear “butcher cleats” (5-inch high wooden platform sandals where feet are secured by a thick, black strip of plastic nailed by steel rivets); and even the shopkeepers now shout at a lower volume. It seemed as if everything is dimmed in spirit, until I was consoled by the remaining shops that maintain their century-old facades, the old ladies with their 100 sq ft tofu counters (my favorite), and lastly, the comings and goings of grandmothers and aunties, forever in their colorfully patterned blouses, shopping everyday for the freshest vegetables for a stir-fry or selecting fresh poultry for soups or otherwise. They shall eventually go home to create home-cooked meals to be remembered and missed by someone for years to come.

Well, Hippo is back now, but we’ve had a hard time getting our blog legs back. I had meant to post up a weekly single mashup, involving me, myself and lots of Whole Foods sense-deadening paraphernalia (read: beer). Now that Hippo has something like 50,000 words to post about her China trip, this mashup will seem a little pathetic. Nevertheless…

While we decide whether we are willing to spend money on Flickr (no!), I’ll be doing this week’s mashup using the good ol’ search-wordpress-for-hours-for-some-kind-of-stupid-plugin-that-does-this-crap-well method. For the most part, the image descriptions are self-explanatory. The four major themes here were: blurry pictures because Hippo stole our camera, alcohol, beets, and a little dinner party I went to with friends involving death metal and mac and cheese.

[Show as slideshow]

I cheated on Hippo the other week.

That’s why this post is delayed…I just didn’t know if she could handle the truth.

She was gone. I was hungry…

I ate with someone else, ok?

There, I said it.

He was a man, too. And we ate at Laotian/Thai joint Green Papaya, which Hippo and I haven’t gone to together yet…-gasp!-

But! It was sooooo good!

Well, not quite. It was more like…really weird and awkward, you know…like it always is the first time…

No, not *him*. He was just whatever. I’m talking about the bittered duck I had.

Yah, bittered duck. What? Never heard of it? Well, here’s what it looks like:

Duck, all bittered up...

When I think of substantive, bitter food, I think of bitter melon and unsweetened chocolate, maybe beer or radicchio. I don’t think…Chinese herbs with a bit of duck-taste on the side! Man, this stuff was unbelievable! The first few chunks were pretty good, but then I started to feel like my organs were being soaked in bitterness – I started to feel like I tasted the emotion rather than the taste.

So this is what it’s like to cheat. Crap.

Well, at least there were other interesting things, like another instance of the water-flavored-like-Thai-iced-tea; a Vietnamese-style plate of herbs/greens that included what appeared to be green beans of some sort…odd; and some freshly-made sticky rice (by “freshly-made,” I mean the man ran across the street to a some kind of tax/accounting business and came out with magically-made sticky rice, which unfortunately didn’t taste at all like money).

My partner in culinary adultery (some reviews call them “dining partners,” but let’s be honest – eating is more sexual than that) had a boring-sounding, but palate-satisfying curry chicken noodle soup. Admire the droplets of oil sprinkled all over the soup, while I go mire in some more guilt, a whole week after the incident.

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Green Papaya Deli
207 International Blvd
Oakland, CA 94606
(510) 836-5337

“today for late lunch we went to Arugula, this old house converted into a coffee/resto. we had smoked salmon potato soup, some mashies, sandwich (w/ a big slab of salmon) and some weak salad and fries. for dinner we went into this “chic” little french place – next to another french resto by the same owner – called 570. (all number-only places are supposed to be chic.) owned by a bald frenchie who speaks mandarin, the menu was sparse, and the prix fixe had only two choices in each course: tomato bruschetta or hearts of artichoke*; tagine lamb shank w/ couscous* or homemade pasta of the day; vanilla mascarpone or chocolate profiterole*. the starred ones are what i picked; my mom has only the handmade spaghetti w/ tomato sauce, and dad had grilled salmon with more mashies. quality is just okay and the tagine is not tagine at all – braised lamb shanks more like, not the unique moroccan flavor.”

“today we went to this taiwanese-opened vegetarian buffet – all elaborate and shit but service sucky, tell you later. there are like 5000 things to eat but your email reminded me of one of them – this chilled slice of bitter melon with a slice of banana and some sort of cream in the middle. pretty interesting. otherwise there were a lot of fake meats and stuff that weren’t so impressive. their vege eel is better than golden lotus’ fish – really like fish in texture and had like 2 layers of skin, one fried and one slimy.”

“i did eat yak cheese last night”

“DINNER LAST NIGHT AFTER RETURNING TO SHANGHAI WAS AT THIS JAPANESE-STYLE (OPENED BY TW PPL) WESTERN RESTAURANT WITH SIZZLING STEAK PLATTERS, CURRY RICE OF ALL KINDS, AND OTHER SORTS OF WESTERNIZED FOOD. I HAD THE SEA BASS TONKATSU CURRY RICE WITH PICKLED VEGGIES, AND SHARED A VEGGIE APPETIZER – LONG STEMS OF CARROTS AND CUCUMBERS (LIKE 10 INCHES LONG) WITH 4 TYPES OF DIPS (SWEET YOGURT, THOUSAND-ISLAND MAYO, CUCUMBER MINT, AND SHOYU SESAME TERIYAKI THING.”

“tonight, we had the most beautifully steamed fish – some sort of sea fish, a grouper or something – beeeautifully done.  the fish was a fat and chunky fish but every inch of it was cooked just right – nothing hard, nothing raw, everything was like…feathery.  haven’t had this sort of perfection in years.  and the oil soy sauce thing was not too salty either.  then there was roasted pigeon, and then a clay pot with crab and vermicelli, and then your favorite type of chicken (yellow skin, cooked in broth) served in this wooden barrel thing with the broth, and this cantonese soup cooked the right way (over a slow fire in a specially-shaped pot) - winter melon and a type of dried cuttlefish — and then there were fireworks on tv…right over our table.”

“we had a long dinner – ate at this elaborate southeast asian resto – and then i spent a long time picking dvds.”

“you shoulda come along last night
it’s like my kinda restaurant
beautiful presentation
menus are hand written and illustrated – each one is different
like a book
lots of small dishes
we had this tea
taiwanese ppl opened it – there’s a distinct design aesthetic in the ambience and the food styling
pickled daikon cut into fan-slices, stacked on a tower – looks like a tree trunk
tofu pudding
not good  - worse than bad panna cotta”

“Wanna go on a date?”
“Sure, depends on what we’re eating.”
“Let’s go to Dopo.”
“Yay, it’s a date then.”

- Dialogue that may or may not have taken place on a particularly humdrum night

So we did dress up, me in heels (a phenomenon comparable to that of good toro meat) and him in a black button-down H&M shirt, and we sauntered on over to Dopo, one of a few quality Italian restaurants on this side of the Bay located just up the street from us on Piedmont Ave.  The small restaurant, next to a fabric store and across from a customer-deprived Chinese-American eatery, was humming and buzzing with late-diners and wine drinkers as people waited for tables at 9pm.  So we waited, white wine in hand, as we laid our eyes on the token eye candy at the front of the restaurant:  a shiny, brand new orange-sorbet Vespa.

“It must be brand new – look at how there are no scuffs on the well-oiled tires,” I said.
“Oh…yea, that’s right, no license plate either,” Elephant replied.

The date talk, after years of practice, began slowly but surely.

Fortunately, the food really warmed up these seasoned interlocutors.  After getting a seat at a very cozy window-front corner, we asked for Acme bread and wonderful house-made ciccioli — which is, basically, spreadable pork and lard with the consistency of very soft butter.  It was an addictive combination, a guilty pleasure of sourdough, perfect bread crusts and indulgent fat, almost spam-like.  We had seconds.

Elephant and I couldn’t decide on what to order.  We dreamed about ordering “for 2″ platters of the salume, the antipasti and the verdure – there were Petrale Sole with mint, Arancini with goat cheese, lobster sausage, little gem salads, coppa, just to name a few – but we tried their pasta dishes instead.  I had the lasagna napoletana:  very crispy on top, it was surrounded by a rich flood of its filling of tomatoes and some sausage meat.  The soft, melting pasta sheets looked as if they were either with spinach or squid ink (low lighting makes one wonder) and they tasted almost like baked eggplant.  I enjoyed the dish but didn’t find enough of a bite or kick in it – perhaps a sign of overdone cooking or a lack of textural elements like squash and cheese – but I hesitate to hate, as it was a homey dish and I enjoyed its no-nonsense presentation.

Elephant got the hipper dish, in my opinion:  a ricotta gnocchi with pork and lemon honey.  The gnocchi was superbly done – baby soft and tender, carrying the tang of ricotta but not its flakiness – and the creamy sauce had a pleasant hint of sweetness that really complemented the flavor profile of the dish.  Being indulgent gourmands, we swiped up the leftover sauce with Acme bread; that was almost worthy of another blog entry, but not quite!

The restaurant has quieted down now as diners around us began to leave.  We looked at the dessert menu.  Melon sorbetto?  Lemon Zeppetto? Emiliano cheese?  We couldn’t turn back now.  We settled on sharing an espresso panna cotta, topped with well-whipped cream.  Served in a ramekin instead of being popped out of it onto a plate, the texture was more pudding/custard than panna cotta (a slight disappointment) — until I hit the bottom of the ramekin and saw the gelatinized layer of ground espresso.  Reassured, I enjoyed this luscious treat, a concoction of milk and coffee that put a sweet note at the end of a satisfying meal (and, dare I say, date).

“I’ll miss eating with you,” I said.
“I’ll miss you too, Hippo,” he replied.

And on that note, I will jet off to Asia and bring back more yummy food notes when I return!

Happy Eating, everyone.

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I’m going to cheat a little. Since I read Hippo’s entry ahead of time, and since it’s way better than anything I could write about Italian spam butter…I’ll steer clear of food description and, being the good academic I purport to and sometimes just pretend to be, I’ll talk a bit *about* food description. Yes, that means I’ll describe food description…which is like, so over your head. Besides, Hippo and I fought over how I’m so demanding of her about this blog and I act as if I care more about it, so I just want to make sure that I come off as a hypocrite by not writing as much as her, so that she can say, “I told you so.” See? That’s love.

Actually, I really just want to point out that I don’t get Italian food. This subject was part of what Hippo calls our “date conversation.” She must be a pretty special lady to count this as date conversation, but hey…I sure ain’t complaining.

Anyway, here’s my super deep reason for not “getting” Italian food: I can’t remember all the names. Seriously. I don’t know what the deal is! I mean, despite having an inability to learn languages better than, say, your average amoeba, I can at least remember escargot and coq au vin and boeuf bourguignon, but I can’t remember…you know…the Italian ones.

So I told Hippo that this must be because the Italian food I’ve had isn’t meat-forward. And I must at least unconsciously think that a cuisine that isn’t meat-forward isn’t a cuisine that’s worth remembering! I think that must explain the difference between easier-to-remember French stuff and harder-to-remember Italian stuff – it’s hard for me to forget a big slab of wine-drenched chicken in front of me, but it’s easy for me to forget what kind of gnocci I had, and what the gnocci was dressed with and what it was mixed with – honestly, I don’t remember any of it, except that it was pretty good.

What is this stuff, anyway?

It doesn’t help that there are 20 million kinds of pastas. This is definitely a Hippo Tofu and Noodle Monster kind of cuisine, and less of a “Would you like meat with that salad?” Elephant kind of cuisine.

This is terrible!

What was even in Hippo’s lasagne? Is “lasagne” even spelled that way? No way. What color was it?!

And what about this white wine I had? I think it was from the Piemonte region. Wait, is that how you spell that? Wait, was it from there? Wait, what year was it? God, I have no clue!

Alas, I do remember the orange Vespa in front of the resto. It didn’t have a license plate…

Sigh.

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Dopo
Neighborhoods: North Oakland, Piedmont Ave
4293 Piedmont Ave
Oakland, CA 94611
(510) 652-3676

This week’s mashup is engorged (though not nearly as much as we were) because Hippo is preparing to leave the country, we didn’t have time to blog about one of our go-to places, Chef Yu Yu, so we’re including it in our mashup. I’ll take this time now to note that Hippo will be carousing around China for a bagajillion weeks, leaving me high and dry here in Oaktown. Hopefully we’ll get at least photo updates from her as she eats all of China, but if not, I will be filling in solo with bachelor’s food – you know…beer, dumplings, and mac and cheese. It’s gonna be an exciting few weeks, folks.

This week we’ve included some home-grown fare, including Hippo’s delicate use of pickled vegetables, and her attempt to make up for my dining at Chez Panisse *alone* by making a beautiful raspberry, blackberry and beet salad. My Panisse experience drove me to become obsessed with heirloom tomatoes for an entire day. As a result, we present to you: “Tomatoes Frolicking on Blue Mat.” Limited edition prints available. Those tomatoes were, unfortunately or not, sliced thin with beets, edamame, “farmer’s cheese” (also had with some Acme baguette), and a dash of balsamic vinegar, sea salt and black pepper. With an entire week’s worth of pay down the organic, slow-food drain, we decided to stoop to some BBQ chicken wings and cheeseburgers with onion rings at none other than your local Denny’s.

From there, we rebounded rapidly to a number of treats: pomegranate frozen yogurt at Yogurt Harmony in Berkeley (froyo will surely be a blog post in its own right someday); and raspberry and peach tart with a Russian cheesecake from our favorite Hungarian bakery, Crixa.

On the drink front, I felt the need to throw in the Vietnamese iced coffee tea we had at Ao Sen, and the wine I sampled for no reason other than the fact that an older gentlemen completely CLEANED Trader Joe’s out of the bottle, except for one: *mine*!

After the non-success of Digs, I suggested to Hippo that we go down-home, and she suggested that we go to Ao Sen, a Vietnamese pho joint back in my old ‘hood, when I was still living and eating alone.

Reflecting on our visit brings a flood of memories – of days alone gorging on Church’s chicken, fishing for edible boxed goods at Albertson’s, dishing out ATM fees at the local non-Citibank ATM and watching movies alone, beer in hand, at the Parkway, after a day’s work at the almost always, almost all black (and no doubt almost always struggling) local coffee shop. None of this was on my mind, though, as we parked along the curb across the street from the neighborhood’s very own rent-a-Segway-in-Oakland business mistake, housed next to our final destination: the noodle resto we were most fond of in hidden Little Vietnam near Lake Merritt.

The noodle shop was home to an all-Vietnamese lunch crowd, and what was perhaps a multiple-species fly infestation.

No worries. Pho tastes better with protein, traditionally of the raw or cooked beef variety, but hey…maybe a little fly is the secret that makes Ao Sen at least among the top three pho places in the area.

Let me editorialize a bit here. I have no idea what goes into making proper pho broth, but I do know one thing: it’s the broth, stupid. It’s not the Niman Ranch steak you throw into the broth because you and your diners -cough…at Noodle Theory…cough- can afford it.

A steaming bowl of tripe, steak, brisket and noodles.

Anyway, I don’t remember much except a wave of nostalgia hit me as I drank that very first sip of that rich beef flank, beef brisket, beef tendon, beef tripe-infused beef broth (oh yah, there’s the seasoning too…). “Man, we sure haven’t had this in a while,” was I all I could say to Hippo, recalling the other night’s Whatever F-ing Ranch flank steak.

Of course, after the first sip – you know, to respect the actual flavor of the thing – I go to town: Hoisin, fish sauce, Siracha, two more kinds of chili sauce, jalapeno, bean sprouts, some Viet herb (”ngo gai”), basil, basil, basil, lime. Hey, whatever about purity, man. This is like a pho buffet after a night full of drunken haute-dining tomfoolery. Besides, the flies sharing my meal can’t taste subtlety.

4.2 seconds later, I’m done. Oops, I guess it tasted good.

I then proceeded to spend the next 4.2 hours just watching Hippo eat her own dish. I don’t recommend such a thing in such a place – it’s just enough time to count the flies, and remind yourself of just exactly what kind of plastic cafeteria chair-like thing you’re sitting on. Take your time just eating.

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Ao Sen – another one of our “old favorites” – never fails to disappoint. We visited the other day for lunch from feeling nostalgic for the old hood, and they delivered: authentic Vietnamese food served in an environment as close to the real thing without going to SJ, LA, or Hanoi. The flies waiting for their next bite, the old parquet floor, the servers speaking only in Vietnamese, and the grease on the tables — everything was replicated with utmost dedication and detail. Although I’ve never visited Vietnam, I still felt that Ao Sen evoked a feeling like “home” – memories of the street eateries, the quick, cheap, and delicious food, and the hustle and bustle of urban Asia.

But the food, the food! Indeed, the food is what we came here for. Elephant ordered his usual pho, an ensemble of beef and onions in a rich, long-brewed broth served with thin flat rice noodles. Pair that with a generous plate of bean sprouts, Vietnamese basil (with the purple stems), jalapeno slices, and sprigs of parsley, and you’ve got a whole range of flavors to soak into. The broth was good as usual: I could still savor the taste in my head. Though I did chastise Elephant slightly for “contaminating the integrity of the broth – it’s the culmination of a chef’s work,” I said. Hmm. I guess he just isn’t as much of a purist as I am.

I had one of my favorites — the Hanoi style bun (pronounced “mbung”), round rice vermicelli served separately from a bowl of vinegar broth, grilled meats (steak and pork/seafood patty), pickled vegetables (carrots and lovely, breath-of-fresh-air thin slices of jicama and chayote), and fresh, fresh herbal greens (iceberg lettuce, Thai basil with green stems, big leafy mint leaves).

I’ve always had a very soft spot for bun (one of many noodle categories I crave) ever since I had it in a Maxims-chain version of a Vietnamese haute-cuisine restaurant when I lived in Hong Kong as a child – ironic, but true. There’s something to say about food fancies developed at a young age: it stays with you, and somehow everything you taste afterwards will be compared back to your first cuisine-discovery experience. And good bun is so hard to come by in the States, even in high-density Vietnamese restaurant areas like San Jose or Atlanta.

So when I first encountered Ao Sen’s version, I knew it was special — at least until I find something better. There’s something about freshly made bun – that almost sticky but never pasty balance of starch, flour and water, coupled with a perfectly-seasoned vinegar broth, that really hits the spot. Hanoi-style bun is an exciting, hands-on dish that really engages the diner to create their own meal: you can dip your ingredients in the broth one by one to enjoy them separately; you can do a simple wrap, like a huge mint leaf with a chunk of the pork patty and some basil, and the taste will surely remind you of a good shiso leaf-kalbi combo at any high-end Korean BBQ restaurant. Or, you can make a wrap with some meat, some chayote slices, a bit of the bun, lots of herbs, and dip it in the broth to make a tantalizing bite – I’d even go as far to say that it tastes better than your typical chubby Mission-style burritos, in most cases!

Bun, all mixed up!

For the more adventurous diners among you — especially anyone who can appreciate sweet-and-salty food, as we don’t get enough respect in the culinary world — try another one of my favorites, a dish (almost) never found anywhere in the Bay Area: a bun served with chewy, crispy julienned pork skin, leafy herbs, and rich coconut milk. The combination, while it sounds strange, is surprisingly tasty and refreshing — almost like having Taiwanese shaved ice and Chiyashi Chuka (Japanese cold noodles served in summertime) together – in the best way imaginable. It’s perfect for your tropical-weather craving appetites when you crave something fatty, smooth, but refreshing all at the same time.

I rest my case. Come taste Ao Sen’s Vietnamese fare for yourself.

P.S. In the meantime, if you are interested in how bun is made for real, please visit this article from EatingAsia, a traveling food blog that lives out my dream to eat, live, and visit Southeast Asia. One of the most respected food blogs around, EatingAsia combines well-written and thoughtful food/social journalism with delectable, cine-verite photographs about the people, places, and events surrounding the world of food in the region. I’ve been a fan of this blog for many years, and I hope you’ll like it too!

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Pho Ao Sen
200 International Blvd.
Oakland, CA 94606
(510) 839-6821
Hours: Mon-Sun 8:00 a.m.-7:00 p.m.

Blue Elephant and I decided to take the plunge – finally – for a Monday prix fixe dinner at Digs Bistro, a small restaurant on Dwight and Sacramento in Berkeley.

We’ve heard much about this place as it was formerly known to be one of the hippest underground dining experiences in Oakland, run by chefs who would serve delicious meals to selected friends and diners.

I wish that I was privy to Digs’ former glory days.

While it is interesting to see the evolution of underground dining into a real restaurant locale, I am not yet convinced of its results. Besides, Digs has replaced one of a few darling mini restos in Berkeley, the French-inspired Olivia Eats. I’ve been hesitant to return to the renovated restaurant for over a year now. But today, I had to confront mental comparisons of this new restaurant with its predecessor. The result was not as pretty as I would have hoped.

Before heading out of the house, we checked out their sample menus online. The choices – a sampling of major meats, Berkeley Bowl-esque vegetables, and some standard desserts – were quite conservative, ie. we weren’t blown away. “Are we setting ourselves up for disappointment?” we wondered.

Well, as we approached the wooden glass-paned door to Digs we saw a hand-written 3-course menu for the night. We looked at each other and realized that we didn’t have a choice in the matter, as we will be served the chef’s choices for tonight.

Settling down onto our seats, I noticed some remnants of Olivia – the French cursive writing on a chalkboard, the tiny restroom, the short zinc bar. I was glad that they knocked down the wall and made the space much more open. Of course, we can’t miss the Modigliani-inspired art all around us: women’s faces painted or assembled with found objects, done with a cubist touch.

The bread and whipped butter arrived to our delight – we had seconds. The sourdough has a chewy crust and a tangy taste in its meat, and the butter was fresh and mild. Not bad!

Then came the Salad with walnuts and goat cheese with mustard dressing. While the greens (some baby frisee, spinach, and radicchio) were very fresh — in fact, all the ingredients throughout dinner tasted fresh — my dish didn’t come with enough dressing. It tasted quite bland as the walnut-and-goat-cheese combo was a tired formula, until I had a second bite and was inundated with the taste of coarse sea salt. Thereafter every bite was as salty and umami as stir-fried chinese Ong Choy. It was quite weird, and I couldn’t figure out whether that was intentional. Perhaps some fresh ground pepper or mustard seeds may do the fresh greens some justice?

Next was the Hangar steak with Gordo Rancho Beans, soaked spinach, and piperade. Done medium rare, the steak paired nicely with the well-seasoned piperade. The spinach was merely poached and was flavorless; the beans reminded one of better days at campsites. Altogether, the dish was a hearty meal one may have at home with friends, or maybe at a chain gourmet restaurant a la Ruby Chris Steak House. I hesitate to comment further: everything tasted fine, and perhaps it was our hopes that let us down.

The saving grace was the fruit tart – nothing over-seasoned or saccharine, it tasted of fresh berries, good butter, and white flour, sprinkled with powdered sugar. The hand-whipped Chantilly was a nice touch and was tactfully draped along one edge of the tart. The crust was almost like shortbread and I craved to finish it with some raspberries!

Blue Elephant shall elaborate, I suppose, on our disappointment. But Digs Bistro’s efforts are nonetheless commendable, for their use of fresh ingredients and no-nonsense attitude to restaurant cooking. Perhaps it’s not our cup of tea, but local businesses who have Digs’ mindset are valuable, and worthy of patronage, nonetheless.

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I will indeed elaborate! There’s a certain kind of restaurant at a certain kind of price point that inspires me to make sure I’m not being ripped off.

Dig’s Bistro is one of those restaurants, as far as I can tell from taking quick peeks at its menu for months and having finally tried the third-Monday-of-the-month $25 three-course prix fixe.

Unfortunately, as I tried hard to find the supposed “mustard vinaigrette” through the mountain of salt Dig’s apparently piled onto our mixed green salad starter, the verdict was immediately that I was definitely being ripped off. After some reassurance from Hippo that I was being too harsh, I’m convinced now that, okay fine, it would cost more for me to make such a salad (though the salt is free – it’s on my shelf), along with the relatively high-quality hanger steak entree.

So after some thought, I’ve decided that it’s not so much that I was getting ripped off as it is that this kind of restaurant – perhaps exactly because of its price point – needs to, or just inevitably does, aspire to present a certain kind of food. The food cannot just taste decent. In fact, in some sense the food cannot just taste good. I can’t admire this food just for its being homey, oily curry from a Thai momma’s kitchen. It has to taste unique – at the least it has to have some semblance of that. I want, in other words, not to “be able to make it at home,” if you know what I mean (I mean what you might mean if you say, “I can do that,” in front of certain works of art; most of the time you’re being facetious, but sometimes…sometimes you really mean to be making a criticism).

In any case, our meal at Dig’s just didn’t cut it, I think. At first we weren’t sure if the salad was meant to be so salty, but upon re-reading the menu – “mixed greens with toasted walnuts and mustard vinaigrette” – I think it’s pretty clear it wasn’t. Anyway, even if it was, it didn’t work.

The very first thing I noted about the hanger steak dish that came next was the fact that it was, as far as I could tell, done more medium than the requested medium rare. Some of Hippo’s meat looked more rare than medium rare, so you do the math.

Aside from that, the entree was, like I said, decent – even pretty good.

But we was supposed to be eating “soaked spinach piperade” with the steak. That seems to me to suggest that there’s some spinach *take* on piperade. What I received was (bland) soaked spinach placed next to piperade (the sweet peppers of which were admittedly pretty good). This was all, again, placed next to a pile of beans. Oh, sorry: “Rancho Gordo beans.”

Perhaps one of the criteria for the “uniqueness” I mentioned earlier involves what I would typically consider snobby consideration of the so-called “presentation” of food. In this case, it looked like we were served several ice-cream-scooped portions on a cafeteria line lunch tray.

The saving grace for the meal was the fruit tart dessert asymmetrically topped with Chantilly cream, which was nicely crumbly (until the very end, where it was too hard), and just the right level of heft.

As much as I wanted to like its respectable underground restaurant (from-Oakland!) origins, I must say that I would be reluctant to go back. Maybe it was because this was supposed to be their “deal” of a meal, but if an underground-turned-legit restaurant doesn’t want to provide me with a fantastic meal for a bargain, I’m not so sure it’s really legit.

Just to note, all was not lost on this meal. While writing about it, I discovered from Wikipedia that people consider the hanger steak – the cut of meat hanging from the diaphragm of the steer – more flavorful from the outer skirt steak because of its proximity to the kidneys, which allegedly allows it to preserve the aroma of kidney. How cool is that?!

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Digs Bistro
1453 Dwight Way
(between Edwards St & Sacramento St)
Berkeley, CA 94702
(510) 548-2322
Hours:
Mon, Wed-Thu 5:30 p.m.-9:00 p.m.
Fri-Sat 5:30 p.m.-9:30 p.m.
Sun 5:30 p.m.-9:00 p.m.

Here are some of the yummies we’ve had this week. On a lazy Sunday we tried the new Amanda’s – a healthy alternative to McDonald’s – complete with yummy burgers (patties made of mushroom and walnuts, quite unique and not nutty) and sweet potato fries. Then we went to Tara’s, a strategically-located ice cream joint on ICI-crazed College Ave. Elephant quite liked the selection of non-sweet flavors — Basil, lemongrass, garam masala! Later in the week, while I tried LIMETREE on Irving — roti and Singaporean noodles (maybe try the chili crab next time?) — Elephant gorged himself with a mini quesadilla in San Leandro, for an entirely different reason.