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Archive for the ‘RestaurantSpite’ Category

BakeSpite: Hello from New York

13 Oct

So, hey. I’m covering New York Comic-Con this weekend, which means I can’t really blog much here. At least, not about video games. But I can sure write about food, because I can’t imagine that flying on 1UP. You know?

Cat insisted that for my first night here — actually our first night here, kind of; when she learned I was going to NYC, she booked her own simultaneous vacation out of sheer jealousy and will be here in the same city as me, though not actually doing anything with me so she can hang out with friends while I work for a solid weekend — for my first night here, I go to one of her old favorite haunts: La Bonne Soupe, a French (obviously) bistro in midtown. I guess it’s pretty reasonably priced for something that isn’t fast food in NYC, as a hamburger with fries — sorry, I mean, steak haché aux pomme frites —  is less than $15. (I love this city, but I’m not so crazy about the pricing.) And, fortunately, it is very tasty. I had the steak haché a poivre, despite not being much for red meat, and I did not regret a bite of it.

Someone also ordered escargot for the table, and that was super tasty as well. I’ve had some pretty bad escargot in my time, but this was excellent. Probably because each snail was cooked while completely immersed in garlic and butter. Yes, yes, French cuisine, I’ve figured out your “secret,” and that secret is beaucoup beurre.

Here is another secret: Brown sauces never, ever photograph well. Doesn’t this look nasty? But it was delicious! This place does hamburgers Hamburg steak style, just meat with sauce, and the sauce in question here is made with cream, cognac, and peppercorns. The fries were super-crispy, which means probably double-fried and double-fatty. And the wine was surprisingly decent for a wine at a New York restaurant; unlike pretty much any other wine I’ve ever had at a restaurant here without diving into the “second mortgage” section of the wine list, it tasted of fruit rather than vinegar.

In short, a success. And a nice change of pace after a day of airport food.

Tomorrow: sad lamentations about the fact that there is no decent food within a half-mile of the Javits Center.

 
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Secrets of adulthood… revealed!

08 Aug

Hey folks, I’m back online. Did you miss me? (Given the way traffic to the site has been falling steadily over the past year, I doubt you did!) I wasn’t too far away these past few days; I just went and got hitched, is all. I’ve now come to realize why people get fat after they get married: Apparently you eat like a pig to celebrate. I couldn’t begin to guess how many calories I’ve consumed in the past few days… and, annoyingly, it’ll be a while before I can burn them off. I threw my back out Sunday while doing some household chores, and the resultant excruciating agony means I won’t be hitting the elliptical trainer any time soon. So I guess I’ll just have to live with the physical evidence of our gluttony for a while.

Ah, but what gluttony. I’ve eaten some magnificent food this weekend, and while the crazy-expensive place we ate after the ceremony was exquisite, dollar-for-dollar the best place we’ve been was definitely a new-ish Vietnamese sandwich shop called Bun Mee. I’ve been seeing this place praised to the rafters for the past week or two at every turn, and much to my surprise it actually lives up to every inch of its hype. Six bucks nets you what is possibly the best banh mi I’ve ever eaten; yes, yes, banh mi should be about half that expensive, but the added cost is not frivolous. I mean, look at this:

Here we have two halves of different sandwiches. On the left is a braised pork belly sandwich with amazingly tender and flavorful meat; on the right is the infamous Bun Mee specialty, which is basically a sloppy joe (ground beef in curry sauce topped with a fried egg) in banh mi form. It is so good. So, so good. The ingredients are fresh, the bread is perfect (tender inside, crisp and flaky outside), and despite using decidedly non-traditional components they still manage to taste authentically Vietnamese. They’re unique, but they still get the flavors right. Really great stuff.

Ignore the pile of purple onions; I hate onions and have always been that person who fastidiously picks them out of his food.

Seriously, though, Bun Mee deserves all the praise it’s received, and anyone visiting San Francisco should be obligated to grab a bite there. It’s a cheap lunch, but maaaan is it good. Oh, and to be all authentic and San Francisco-y, we topped off our lunch with sundaes from Ghiarardelli Square. I’ve accompanied people to Ghirardelli but have always forgone actually getting my own dessert as a concession to calorie-counting. But I figured if you can’t cut loose on a weekend like this, when can you cut loose? I was immediately filled with regret when I witnessed the monstrosity of a milkshake I had unleashed:

It was really great, though. I mean, it’s basically a malt combined with a sundae, so big ol’ globs of fudge get sucked up the straw as you drink.

Also, I didn’t realize until just now that my doctor-prescribed transitional lenses combined with the hat and jacket Cat picked out for me over the past few days make me look like a blind jazz musician. Man, I wish I were that cool.

I’d photoblog more, but in looking over my images from the past few days, it turns out most of the pictures I’ve taken have been of food. I guess I’m filing this one under BakesSpite, then.

 
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BakeSpite: Now that is bánh mì

27 Apr

Well, that’s about enough of PlayStation for a little while. I need a mental break. Let’s write about food instead.

Remember a few weeks ago when I posted about an overpriced, mediocre Vietnamese sandwich I had the misfortune of purchasing for lunch? I wasn’t too broken up, because I knew I was en route to Orange County in a few days. And the best thing about Orange County — possibly the one good thing, really — is the suburb of Westchester, which has a huge Vietnamese immigrant community. And that means plentiful, cheap, delicious, Vietnamese food. Such as this:

This is not the best bánh mì I’ve ever eaten, but that’s just because I’ve had better bread before. Everything else about it was perfect. (The bread was merely really good.) The vegetables were plentiful, the pickles perfectly flavored, the meat wonderfully smoky, the mayonnaise buttery rich and spread thin enough that it was an accent rather than an overpowering goop. The bread could have been a little softer inside and a little crustier outside, but what the hey.

And, of course, since it was in Westminster, that means the price wasn’t $8.50 like it is near my office, but rather:

Yes, it was $2.50. Two and a half bucks for 12″ of deliciousness. That makes it half the price of those Subway $5 footlongs. And about ten times as tasty.

You know the sad little bins of withered sandwich fixings you see at Subway? The ingredients were super-fresh and piled high, with an emphasis on quality rather than variety. This is, as it should be.

I couldn’t even begin to spell the name of this place, but if you ever find yourself in Westminster, CA with the desire to buy more super-delicious food than you can eat in a single sitting, look for a place at the corner of Euclid and W Edinger. Your tastebuds will thank you.

No, just kidding; they’ll be too busy exploding with pleasure to thank you, but the sentiment will still be there.

 
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BakeSpite: Banh mi right in the wallet

04 Apr

Sorry, kids, it’s another food post. Man cannot live on games alone, you know? I must confess, tragically, that I have been trying to expand the scope of this site back to more of what it used to be, before it became “the place where GameSpite Quarterly stuff gets reprinted.” There’ll be reprints, don’t you worry! But it needs more original content, too, you know? And after having been around video games all day every day for nearly eight years, sometimes it’s good to write about something different. My apologies if this angries up your blood. Feel free to stop visiting, if you prefer; I won’t take it personally. Unless you make fun of me. I mean, who wouldn’t take that personally?

Anyway, the title of this post makes a little more sense (and is a lot more crass) if you realize that bánh mì is pronounced, approximately, “bang me.” I’m all for proper pronunciation, but I always feel a little naughty ordering one of these things.

So, yeah, bánh mì. Today my coworker Alice asked if I knew of any good bánh mì places around the office. I only knew of two, neither of which has a particularly great reputation, but I told her I’d tag along and try a new place with her. She agreed… and then left without me shortly after. Monstrous. So, thus stymied, I ventured out on my own and decided to forego bánh mì in favor of trying a new place I’d noticed last week and which someone even recommended in the comments thread of the other day’s Sushirrito post: a Korean-looking place called Spice Kit.

By a completely bizarre coincidence, care to guess what they sell at Spice Kit?

Yup, bánh mì. They sell some other stuff (specifically, salads and Korean wraps), but I figured I shouldn’t spurn wacky cosmic coincidences. I ordered the pork bánh mì and a packet of lotus chips.

Now, if you’re not familiar with bánh mì — though you should be now that the term has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary — they’re basically the only good thing to come of Vietnam’s French colonialism. The French introduced into Vietnam the idea of sandwiches, French bread, and paté, resulting in these fantastic mini-meals. A good bánh mì is fresh, delicious, filling, and incredibly cheap. (If you pay more than $4 for a bánh mì, you’re doing it wrong.)

And right there is when I had my first ominous foreboding about Spice Kit. The bánh mì pictured above — pork with paté — cost a preposterous $8.50. I could see paying that much at The Slanted Door or something, but that’s because it would be served on a plate of truffle dust by a man in a nice suit. Spice Kit’s decor reminds me of Chipotlé.

But hey, I thought, maybe this is some super-fancy sandwich that’ll totally be worth it. It wasn’t. By the time I walked the two blocks to my office, the mediocre mayonnaise they’d slathered all over the sandwich (nowhere near as buttery and rich as the stuff I’m used to) had soaked through the bread and started to cause the thing to fall apart. The paté spread — which costs an extra 75 cents — was scraped so thinly across the bread I longed for an electron microscope to confirm its presence. The pickled carrots and radish were far too sweet, and they overdid it on the jalapeños, too.

Worst of all was the meat. The meat! Bánh mì pork is supposed to be thinly sliced, marinated, and grilled in that inimitable Vietnamese way. This stuff lacked the amazing flavor of Vietnamese pork and was cut into chunks that refused to stay inside the bread; worse, about a quarter of them were just fat, no meat. You know, there’s nothing worse than ending a meal with one final bite that’s worse than the rest of the dish you’ve just consumed, and that’s exactly what happened here: the last bit of sandwich turned out to be a rubbery chunk of fat in soggy, sweet, mayo-soaked bread. Yuck.

On the plus side, the bread that wasn’t water-logged was quite tasty, and the chef shares my belief that there’s no such thing as too much cilantro. Otherwise, though, this was a sandwich that cost twice as much as the ones that are available from about half a dozen places within 10 blocks of my apartment… and was about half as good.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, if you ever end up in San Francisco and feel like eating a bánh mì, don’t get it here. As for myself, I’ll be spending next week in Irvine, so the best bánh mì on the west coast (specifically, in Westminster) will be a short drive away. I foresee palate-cleansing in the near future.

P.S.: Video games! There, now everyone’s happy. Except my mouth :(

 
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BakeSpite: St. Patrick’s Day is the worst holiday of all (and it’s all McDonald’s fault)

22 Mar

The set of desks in our office where Travis Williams, Mike Cruz, and Frank Cifaldi sit together is basically a cauldron of bad ideas, a fiery pot that simmers with menace until the day’s misguided inspiration bubbles to the top and bursts in our faces. Today’s bad idea? “I wonder if McDonald’s still sells Shamrock Shakes? We should go find out!”

For some reason, I decided to tag along. Like everyone else in our troupe, I had never consumed a Shamrock Shake, but I’ve always been curious. Mainly, I suppose, because I feel a vague affinity for St. Patrick’s Day, it coming a day after my birthday and all. What do you call it when you do something stupid and you’re well aware that it’s stupid but you plunge headlong into stupidity anyway? Whatever that term is — lack of survival instincts, perhaps — I knew I was suffering from it. But I went along with it anyway.

Guys, Shamrock Shakes are terrible, and I’m talking terrible by the dubious standards of McDonald’s. Or what I recall as their dubious standards — admittedly, the only thing I’ve eaten from McDonald’s in the past seven years was a couple of their fake Chic-Fil-A sandwiches back when they were packing coupons for free ones in Amazon.com orders. I like my health, and I like food that is made of recognizable ingredients and tastes good, so McDonald’s and I don’t spend much time together.

Let’s deal with the obvious fact that this thing looks less like a milkshake and more like someone melted a bar of Irish Spring soap into a cup. Points for being all Irish-y with their St. Patrick’s tie-in, I guess, but I feel like that’s simply a given from a place with the name “McDonald’s.” Minus points for looking like something I should rub against my body instead of putting inside my body. On the other hand, maybe I should give them credit for that. Usually McDonald’s isn’t so forthcoming about the fact that its products aren’t appropriate for human consumption.

Like all McDonald’s shakes, the Shamrock Shake is a cold slurry that almost resembles dairy, except that it’s a little too gritty and slimy and seems more like drinking a petroleum-based product. You know, like frothy Vaseline or something. Flavor-wise, though, the Shamrock Shake tastes almost exactly like someone blended Scope mouthwash into a vanilla shake.

Hmm… Dial soap; Vaseline; Scope. I see a theme developing here. If this were a beauty product review, I’d say McDonald’s knocked one out of the park! But since we’re talking about a dessert, something clearly went horribly wrong. But at least I lived to tell the tale, and with only moderate intestinal discomfort! When it comes to fast food, that’s a victory. Rating: A PLUS PLUS

 
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Bread of the dead

03 Nov

Japan may have babies who look like bread, but Mexico takes a more practical approach with bread that looks like babies. Or something like that. I’m speaking, of course, about Pan de Los Muertos, or Day of the Dead bread, which apparently is an annual tradition to help celebrate the Day of the Dead every November 1st and 2nd.

I don’t really know the science behind it all. I just know that every year around this time, local super-awesome bakery coop Arizmendi sells Pan de Los Muertos. And this year, I bought one. The last one, in fact — the only one remaining yesterday afternoon an hour before close.

I don’t know the story or heritage behind Pan de Los Muertos, but for whatever reason it’s shaped like a baby. It’s kind of like a mandragora root made of delicious yeastiness, except for the part about screaming so loud when you pull it from the baker’s rack that you die in agony.

I’m not sure if it’s traditional for one leg to be curled under like this, or if I simply got the Ian Anderson of bread babies. I guess I should have given it a flute to see what would happen, but I didn’t have a chance; as soon as Cat saw this little dude, she bit off his head. I think she eats chocolate Easter bunnies ears-first, too. Not me. I believe in starting from the feet and working up so they can feel pain longer.

Here’s the reverse angle. I’m not sure what the eyes are made of, because again, they were gone before I had a chance to try them. I’m going to just assume they’re strawberry Twizzlers, that most traditional of Mexican foods.

No, really! It’s not an impossible stretch. This bread is made, among other things, with orange peel and anise seed. And anise, of course, tastes like licorice. And if you make licorice not-completely-gross, you end up with Twizzlers. So really, it makes perfect sense. When you’re deranged, the way I am.

As for the bread itself, it’s really good — not too dry or dense, but not excessively moist or airy, either. It has a consistency almost like a King Cake (which does not look like a baby, but has a baby inside of it, so there’s kind of a theme here). Unlike a King Cake, it seems more baked than fried, and it has a much lighter glaze than that puddle of colored goo they put on King Cake. The sugar glaze is incredibly sticky and makes a mess of everything in the same room as the Pan de Los Muertos, but it’s applied much more thinly than on a donut or other sweet pastries. The bread itself isn’t sugary at all, so there’s really just a hint of sweetness about it.

The orange and anise seed give the bread a good flavor. I can’t stand licorice, so I was worried about the presence of anise, but it’s added sparingly — just enough to lend it a touch of flavor without creating an overpowering licorice taste. The orange peel is even more sparing, just enough to detect on the edge of your tongue, with the occasional tiny burst of strong orange when you take a mouthful that has a piece of grated peel in it.

I suppose if this were proper New Foods Journalism I would do some research on the history and heritage of Pan de Los Muertos. For all I know it’s something Arizmendi totally made up to bilk San Francisco’s stupid bleeding heart white people like me. But it’s a very tasty deception if that’s the case. Ignorance is bliss.

I’m sad I have to wait another year to get a taste of those bread baby eyeballs, though.

 
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Pepper Lunch, Shibuya

14 Sep

Yesterday at lunch I let our esteemed leader Sam determine our choice of food. His selection was a place called Pepper Lunch. I’ve walked past the Pepper Lunch in Akihabara lord knows how many times over the past few years, but it looked kind of… not iconically Japanese. So I’ve always passed it by in favor of curry, ramen, sushi, that sort of thing.

Silly me! Turns out Pepper Lunch is extremely Japanese. We stopped at the one in Shibuya beneath the Yamanote rail bridge, and it’s absolutely the sort of place you only see here in Japan. Despite being a steak restaurant, even. You make your meal selection via vending machine ticket, customizing your order by purchasing specific tickets, and hand your tickets off to the wait staff. A few minutes later, they bring you your customized order. I guess it’s kind of like vender cafes in New York, but somehow more idiomatic to Japan.

In the case of Pepper Lunch, that idiom spans a very specific choice of skillet-fried steaks. They also really like corn here, offering not only a portion of corn with each steak selection but also selling it as a side and in the form of a corn soup. I’m not really sure where the “pepper” part of Pepper Lunch comes into play, but maybe “pepper” is code for “corn” here.

Your meat is delivered to the table uncooked, but that’s OK because it’s served on an insanely hot skillet with a pair of tongs to allow you to flip the meat chunks for even cooking. Each meal option is a different cut and comes with different sides — mine included corn (of course), a couple of carrot pieces, some thin slices of garlic, and a very lonely green bean. The meat is served with a generous dab of seasoned butter sitting on top, which melts as you flip the meat and makes the food dangerously delicious. Well, I say “dangerously,” but I eat beef and eggs and other similar foods so rarely that my cholesterol is epically low; you could double it and I’d still be in the healthy cholesterol range. So I dug into my rare indulgence of butter-soaked beef with gusto.

Like most Japanese fast food I’ve experienced, Pepper Lunch’s servings are pretty horrifyingly unhealthy, but the high fat and cholesterol content are mitigated by the small portions. Of course, like curry restaurants, you can choose to overeat to your poor straining heart’s content, but I find the smallest portions (“diet” portions, intended to be eaten by office ladies watching their weight) are almost always enough to satisfy.

I don’t imagine Pepper Lunch is the sort of place I’ll eat often, but it was surprisingly delicious. I’d even regret having passed it up all these years if not for the fact that in doing so I usually end up at someplace like the crazy chirashi restaurant on Chuo-dori I discovered last year. Basically I guess what I’m saying is that when I’m in Japan, and I eat food, I go away happy.

 
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Saiwaii Ramen

22 Aug

“This broth is great! I wonder what their secret is? Why’s it so good?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s basically just liquid pig.”

(Saiwaii Ramen, 2240 Irving Street in San Francisco. It’s new, and it’s pretty decent.)

 
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A damn good slice of pizza

09 Jun

It seems like my life is full of New Yorkers. I love them, but as we all know, the common thread that binds people from New York City is their adamant, unshakable belief that NYC is innately superior to all other points on the map. That’s fine. Home town pride is natural. I still have a deep fondness for my home towns of Flint, MI and Lubbock, TX… even though I really shouldn’t.

The one area that New York pride really grinds on my nerves, though, is when it comes to pizza. New York-style pizza is, in my opinion, just shy of inedible, with their platonic ideal consisting of plasticky cheese and a miniscule hint of sauce scraped haphazardly across a thin, cardboard-like crust. I have eaten New York-style pizza in New York from New York pizzerias that have been canonized by New Yorkers, and that pizza was unremarkable at best, awful at worst. It’s even worse when certain unnamed people at 1UP insist on buying San Francisco-made attempts at NYC-style pizza for staff meetings and parties. Bad as New York-style pizza is, true disaster strikes when people who aren’t currently living in New York City try to mimic it.

Frankly, the whole thing put me off pizza for a few years. I’d convinced myself that I just don’t like pizza altogether… until one night last summer, when I walked past a local pizzeria called Irving Pizza and bought a slice on a whim. It was fantastic, and it reminded me that I don’t hate pizza — I just hate the oppressive fascism of New York pizza adherents.

Custom margherita slice from Irving Pizza.

Irving Pizza, so named because it is located on Irving Street, made me love pizza again.

The crust is thicker than New York pizza, yet it’s thinner than the Chicago tradition demands. It’s soft but not doughy, and the crust edges are reminiscent of a good ciabatta; tender and spongy inside, but crisp and brown outside.

The sauce is rich and well-seasoned. It’s not applied too heavily, but it still has enough of a presence that you can actually taste it, unlike the faint intaglio of red you see on New York pizza. I’m not entire sure what the cheese blend consists of, but it’s definitely more than just mozzarella. It’s melty and always perfectly browned, and thick enough to make you feel like you’re actually eating something substantial without giving you what Cat refers to as “cheese belly.”

The best part about Irving Pizza, however, is their lunch deal. Four bucks gets you a huge slice of pizza and a gigantic drink. (They no longer advertise the special on their menu, probably because it’s such a good deal.) Their afternoon slice selection is pretty poor — usually just cheese, pepperoni, combo, and Hawaiian — but there’s a secret. If you ask them to add a couple of toppings to a slice of cheese, they’ll send it back to the kitchen and have it tricked out to your custom specs. They accomplish this by dropping on whatever toppings you ask for, sprinkling on a bit more cheese, and running the thing through their oven again to reheat it and seal the toppings with the added cheese.

The margherita shown above is the fruit of this particular cheat; as you can see, they don’t scrimp on the toppings when you ask for a custom slice. They covered the thing with huge, fresh slices of tomato and a ton of shredded basil. Actually, this slice is a bit more meagre than normal, since they usually include a lot more cheese on the top layer. So long as the added toppings don’t fall off en route to my mouth, though, I’m not too picky.

For my money, Irving Pizza is probably the best, most satisfying pizza I’ve ever eaten. It strikes a perfect balance between taste, texture, and substance. Of course, pizza’s a matter of taste, and since BakeSpite’s co-proprietor is rather ferociously from New York City… you can probably expect a rebuttal soon. But hey, if you’re ever in San Francisco, I recommend you try Irving Pizza to decide for yourself — it’s just a block south of Golden Gate Park, right at 19th Ave.

Man, now I want some pizza.

 
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Your move, crepe

31 May

A three-day holiday weekend with lots of sunshine and mild weather? That can only mean one thing: It is Memorial Day, and there is time for crepes. And, obviously, terrible puns about crepes. But don’t blame me; I didn’t start it. No, the culpability for that rests squarely on the shoulders of the proprietors of our neighborhoods creperie, the Crepe Vine.

I’m not sure if this style of crepe is mainly a Bay Area/Northern California thing or if it’s something that became suddenly popular as soon as I moved here, but I’d never seen them before I moved out to San Francisco where they are a ubiquitous weekend brunch food. The formula is always the same: A savory crepe served with home-fried potatoes and a small salad. It’s not something I indulge in often, but when I do I always enjoy it.

(You’ll have to forgive the sub-par photography, as I forgot to bring along the real camera and was left to take iPhone snaps in the glare of the early afternoon sun.)

Above is Cat’s choice of crepe, called the San Francisco. You might wonder what combination of ingredients the owners of the Crepe Vine have deemed worthy of naming after their home town, but the answer I fear is mildly underwhelming. It’s just salmon, greens, onions, dijon, and something to do with capers. Me, I tend to think of salmon as more of a Pacific Northwest thing, whereas the essence of San Francisco would be some sort of Asian fusion. But clearly they’re the ones raking in the American Funbuxx™ with their popular crepe restaurant, whereas I’m some dude who barely ever remembers to update his amateurish food blog, so what do I know?

My own selection, which is much less disgusting in person than the photo would suggest, was the Tuscan. That angry green blob on top is a smear of pesto, and I swear it looks far less toxic in person. Unlike the San Francisco, the Tuscan actually seems somewhat representative of its namesake location, consisting as it does of chicken, feta cheese, pesto and almonds, and big chunks of tomato. Although I don’t doubt someone from Tuscany might sneer at this offering; it is, at the very least, representative of the stereotype of that region.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter what you put in a crepe, because by the simple virtue of being in a crepe it will be delicious. Crepe Vine doesn’t make the absolute best crepes in the world, but they’re definitely tasty. Having those wonderfully carcinogenic home fries on the side doesn’t hurt, either. Those things are delicious in that special way that only something fried to the point of carbon in a pool of heart-stopping fat can be.

It probably goes without saying that Crepe Vine and other similar creperies offer dessert crepes as well, usually made with things like lemon sauce and Nutella, but my wallet and waist line can only afford so much indulgence in a single day. That will be a treat for a different day.

 
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