Restaurants I miss...

We're now on week 4 or 5 of hotels and restaurant meals.  To be honest, I've lost track of how long we've been eating restaurant meals.  But it's long enough that at the end of the day, the last thing I want to do is decide which restaurant I want to go to.  I'd much rather go to my kitchen, open the refrigerator, and pull out some leftovers.  Like Irish beef stew.  Or baked chicken and mashed potatoes.  So as we struggle to decide the eternal question, where are we going tonight for dinner, I've been thinking about some of the places I miss.

Riverside, CA:
Romano's Pizza.  Especially after two years of no pizza (Anthony's doesn't count), this was delicious.  Doesn't matter if it's the thin crust or not.  It's good.
Art's Bar & Grill.  Can't beat the Wednesday or Saturday prime rib special.

Santa Barbara, CA:
Pane e Vino.  Fettuccine ai formaggi.  Still one of my all time favorites.
The Palace.  Good food, good service.

Jacksonville, FL:
Sticky Fingers.  I miss the combo where you can get 4 different kinds of ribs.
Sliders.  The crabcakes.  The beach atmosphere.

Seoul:
Sultan's Kebabs.  Great lunch.
Le Sainte Ex.  Excellent dinners.
Yongsusan:  Only ate here once.  But it's still the most memorable meal I've ever eaten outside of one particular Valentine's Day dinner someone cooked for me.

I know, I know.  At some point I'll have some favorites in Honolulu.  But for now, Waikiki options are over priced.  Or chain restaurants.  There are only so many times I can eat Cheesecake Factory cheesecake before I get tired of it.

So, what are your favorite restaurants?

Thank you!

A great big thank you to my team, who treated me to a wonderful dinner at Tang.
It was a dark and stormy night.  Yet we managed to get all the way across the river and to the restaurant in time.  I'm not sure I've seen it rain that hard here before.  And there was thunder and lightning to add some ambience.   So we were all a bit soaked by the time we got there.

We had the fixed price menu, which came with the option of green fried rice or pho as the main entree.  We had some appetizers, but I wasn't fast enough with the camera.  We'd pretty much inhaled them.  The first one had kind of a thick rice paper wrapper and the second was fried spring roll.  Then we had this dish with noodles, broth, and salad with a dish of pork on the side.  You dipped the pork and noodles into the broth.  Salad, too, if you were so inclined.

Noodles and salad with broth

Pork with green onion like vegetable

Pho, with beef, rice noodles, green onions, and sliced onion

Dessert, tomato sorbet (I think)

Thank you to my team for a wonderful dinner!

Dunkin Donuts Mangosteen Filled Donut

Korean Dunkin Donuts has a wide range of filled donuts.  They each come in a little paper wrapper, with a picture of the fruit.  They have pineapple, and raspberry, and blueberry, and mangosteen.

dumplings and noodles

Seoul is filled with little restaurants that specialize in one or two items. No matter which direction you go, there are small restaurants with a few tables, a few signs on the wall with the menu with 5-6 items, and self serve water or tea and side dishes.  A few weeks ago, we saw a couple of restaurants that looked worth trying, so tonight we went back. One served dumplings (meat, seafood, or vegetable), and the other served fried noodles, fried dumplings, and a dumpling soup. We saw people with dumplings in the noodle restaurant, and people with noodles and soup in the dumpling restaurant. But we couldn't figure out the magic words to get noodles in the dumpling restaurant. So we had dumplings first, then went to the second restaurant for our second course. Next time, we'll start at the noodle restaurant and have the dumplings second.

Meat dumplings:

You get 6 steamed dumplings per order. Meat is a pork mixture. Vegetable had baby leeks, finely chopped noodles, and a touch of tofu. Next time I'll try the seafood.

Fried noodles (aka yakisoba). Has onion, finely sliced carrot, green onions, and a bit of meat.

Introducing the Park Ji Sung Soccer Donut

In honor of the World Cup, Dunkin Donuts is currently serving the Park Ji Sung soccer donut.



With a cream filling lightly reminiscent of citrus.

Looking at this just makes me hungry...

Pork cooked in achiote sauce in banana leaves until it falls apart, with homemade salsa.

kimchi jiggae dinner

On my list of Korean foods to try was kimchi jiggae. So we went in search of a small kimchi jiggae restaurant over near the US embassy. This place was hard to find, with just a sign above the door which got lost among all the neon signs sticking out into the alley.

We opened the door and immediately walked into a table, with patrons. We managed to work our way upstairs and sat down. The stairs required intense concentration and much dexterity. I highly recommend staying completely sober if eating upstairs in this restaurant for your safety. The foot of the stairs are across from a stove with pots of bubbling stuff, which means falling would result in more than just bruises. And the steps themselves are a bit narrow, even for my size 5 feet.

Once we sat down, they brought out trays with our pot (for 2 people) of kimchi jiggae and put it on the burner. Note the green pipe -- this is the gas pipe. The pipe came down and wrapped behind me along the wall. There are so many things I see in restaurants here that I don't think I would ever see in the U.S., such as barbecue grills on the table in front of you, burners on the table, and gas heated cooking stoves right in front of you.


Kimchi jiggae is a stew made with 3 year old kimchi, tofu, and pork. It's spicy. For me, it was a touch spicy, but it was still good. Made my nose run and sweat break out on my forehead.


Our side dishes... kimchi, bean sprouts, water radish kimchi, something else in red sauce, and an egg roll, which was essentially an omelet with green onions.


This is the entrance to the restaurant. To the left is a door with Chinese symbols that say small rain. I'm not sure what that means.

Yongsusan (Acrovista branch)

On Wednesday last week, a wonderful foodie friend of mine introduced me to a restaurant in Seoul called Yongsusan.  There's a branch in Los Angeles (950 S Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, CA, 90006, 213 388 3042) -- anyone within driving distance of this place should go.  And if you don't go on your own, I will make you go when I come back.

The food served is modern Korean, based on Kaesong style traditional food.  The decor is modern Korean at this particular branch (Acrovista -- which is near the JW Marriott), with traditional Korean tables (small and short) used to create modern tables and used as decoration on the walls.  Below is the place setting.


Sea weed soup.  This was light and tasted like the ocean (minus the gagging saltwater experience).  It's difficult to describe, but it was like essence of seafood.


Tofu encrusted with black sesame seeds. I'm not a fan of tofu normally, but these were slightly crunchy, light, and oh so delicious.


The next course was bean sprouts with dried persimmon (the orange stuff in front), with noodles with bean sprouts (in back).  First, I had a bite of each separately.  The persimmon one was slightly sweet.  Then I combined the two for a totally different flavor.


Then there was this dish.


Which became these little guys. Which were dipped into a mustard sauce.

Next was a dish with pork marinated in a slightly sweet sauce, white kimchi, and radish.

Combine the pork, white kimchi, and radish into an amazing combination of salt and sweet.

Next was the Nine Gods dish, which was a broth with all sorts of delicacies inside it, including walnuts, shrimp, oysters, fish cakes, and other goodies.  There was a special shaped spoon that we used to eat this that fit into the bowl.






















And then there was tempura.  Things dipped in batter and fried always taste better.  These are peppers stuffed with minced pork with some herbs (bottom part of the plate) and oysters with kimchi (upper part of the plate).


Jellyfish salad with mustard sauce.  The mustard sauce was sinus clearing, kind of like a large dose of wasabi. There were also small slices of beef and mushroom, plus finely julienned cucumber.  Jellyfish salads are really like noodle salads, and if you didn't know it was jellyfish, you'd think you were eating noodles.


Even more tempura... shrimp and ginseng.  The ginseng has a consistency similar to that of a sweet potato, and has a very slight gingery tang to it.  I've had it in samgyetang, and to me it has a woody taste to it that I'm not particularly fond of.  Shrimp tempura... 'nuff said.

Seafood and vegetable skewer with shrimp, squid, mushroom, and broccoli in a light teriyaki sauce.


Galbi, or ribs, that fell off the bone.


Kimchi, which was brought out just before the main course.  Yes, the main course.  The main course is considered to be the rice or noodle dish at the end.

These are the side dishes that came out with the main dish.  From top clockwise, freeze dried squid, garlic tops in red pepper paste, and dried anchovies.  The garlic tops (you know, what you get when you let the garlic sit for too long in the pantry), are kind of woody in texture.  They look kind of like green onions, but they didn't have as much of a tang to them as I thought they would.  The freeze dried squid are salty and semi-sweet at the same time.


The main dish.  In this case, I opted for the hot noodles.  The choices were hot noodles, cold noodles (potato starch noodles with red pepper paste), or rice (sort of a rice porridge with water added to the rice where a crust is allowed to form at the bottom of the pan).  The hot noodles are thin buckwheat noodles, with a small bit of kimchi and some shredded beef brisket.


The dessert...  Rice cakes.  The one on the left is kind of chewy, with a light flavor to it.  The one on the left has a half a cherry tomato in it, so when you bite it, there's a burst of tomato flavor mixed in with the rice cake.

With the rice cakes came this drink made from grapes.  This is nothing compared to the Welch's grape juice found in the grocery store.  It was sweet, yet light, and really tasted like fruit.


Even though this all seems like a ton of food, it really wasn't.  Each of the courses ranged from one to three or four bites each.  The noodles were not that plentiful.  It was just enough food to feel comfortably full at the end.  This was also one of the most memorable meals I've ever eaten.

Wine Wednesday turned into Italian Wednesday

For a while, there's been a highly irregular Wine Wednesday gathering where we go to a wine bar and have wine and whine.  But our wine bar was closed one Wednesday when we managed to get our act together and a group of people together, so we headed up the street to La Tavola and had Italian food and wine.

The lasagna -- good, could have used a touch of salt.  But decent.


Pasta with a cream sauce.  As I recall, it was decent.


The tiramisu.  Yum.  Although I don't understand the point of the fork outline.  I've seen this on other desserts at other restaurants.  I suppose it's kind of cute.


A second tiramisu with a different decoration.

Learning to cook Korean food

The other day, a very kind and patient friend came by and showed some of us how to make some Korean dishes at home.  These are the results.

Seafood pancake.  We cheated a bit and bought a bag of pancake mix for this.  At least now I know what to get at the store.  You mix water with the pancake mix (it's kind of like bisquik), add seafood.  Put it in the heated pan with oil, and then put baby leeks and some thinly sliced pepper on top.  Let one side cook until it gets slightly crispy, then flip it over and cook the other side.  The dipping sauce is a mixture of soy sauce with brown rice vinegar, with some finely chopped baby leeks and maybe a slice or two of pepper.


Mandu guk -- dumpling soup.  First, we started the soup, which was a piece of beef brisket, a leek, and a couple cloves of garlic covered in water and brought to a boil.  Then we lowered the heat and simmered it.  It's better to simmer as long as possible (all day) for the best flavor.  But we only cooked it while we prepped everything else.  Then, we made up the mixture for the dumplings, which contains kimchi (rinsed and finely chopped), some firm tofu smooshed until it's got a texture like ground beef, minced beef, minced pork, finely chopped baby leeks, some very finely minced garlic, and some mung bean sprouts that had been boiled very briefly until soft, then rinsed in cold water, drained and chopped very finely.

When the broth is done and ready to be used, a little bit of soy sauce was added for the color.  And salt was added to taste. The dumpling mixture was mixed up and then we filled dumplings using wrappers bought at the store.  The garnish on top of the soup is egg.  The egg white and yolk were cooked separately in a pan kind of like an omelet, then chopped into a diamond shape.


This is mung bean pancake, made from a mix found at the store.