The Anti-Food Blogger

You are probably thinking, "What's up with the fugly food pictures in this post?"

Yes, they are less than attractive and yes, they are old (from September 2008). For a while, I was debating whether to delete them forever, but a recent sequence of events involving two trips to Southern California in the last week, encouraged me to post them.

These pictures are from a wedding I attended in Los Angeles. My friend's wedding was set on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus and she held her rehearsal dinner in Westwood, at Palomino on Wilshire Boulevard. It was a sweet and intimate wedding, complete with swing dancing, a breathtaking view of the sun setting on the architecturally stunning red brick buildings on the UCLA campus, and fun guests. But, I hesitated on posting these pictures in part because of my interaction with a certain type of person during the wedding events...

The anti-food blogger.

Allow me to explain the entire story. I don't usually try to publicize my blog in public circles, but if I meet someone who is really into food, I will often casually say, "Hey, it seems like you love fine dining/cooking/eating in general. I do too! I even have a food blog!"

Well, at the rehearsal for the wedding, that's exactly what happened and exactly what I did. But instead of the usual response of, "Wow, you do? What's the address? I will check it out" response, I was greeted with his, "I hate food bloggers" line.

After hearing his response, I was taken aback. After I asked him "why," he explained to me in a Mario Batali-type way, that food bloggers generally don't fact-check their sources or research their recipes, and often pontificate their unsubstantiated assertions to those who regard them as credible sources who espouse reliable facts. I responded to him that while the web is flooded with bad information and spam garbage, the internet as a whole, has increased the availability of good information, valuable opinions, and entertaining multimedia (images, video, and sound recordings) to the public and food blogs have done that as well. Also, internet users and blog readers are cognizant that not all information on the web is 100% accurate, and most people know that information on Wikipedia is not gospel or like the contents of a university textbook.

I don't think he was convinced by my answer, and I wasn't really swayed by his opinion either. But we continued our conversation about food blogs, and eventually, we simply agreed to disagree. Thankfully, by the end of the night, we both realized that we were both opinionated people, who actually did share quite a lot in common.

Nevertheless, I was a little riled up, and thus, neglected to really pay attention to what was on the special menu that Palomino has given to our wedding rehearsal party. But here are the pictures and the menu descriptions of what I "think" the dishes were, and some food pictures from the wedding itself.

In clockwise order, these pictures are from Palomino: (1) braised beef short rib with mascarpone polenta, white beans cooked with rapini and pancetta, and gremolata; (2) capellini pomodoro, dressed with extra virgin olive oil and chiffonaded basil, and cooked with chicken, plum tomatoes, garlic, and Parmesan; and (3) prawn scampi cooked in a citrus-herb butter with capers and white wine, and served with garlic crostini and herb capellini.

And here is what I had at the rehearsal dinner and at the wedding, in clockwise order from the top: (1) ravioli made from fresh saffron pasta filled with lobster, bay scallops, and tarragon with herb mascarpone, from Palomino; (2) coconut shrimp and a selection of tea sandwiches, breads, and tapenades; (3) ahi tuna teriyaki encrusted with two types of sesame seeds; and (4) tapenades and breads.


After my discussion with this anti-food blogger friend, I gave a lot of thought to the purpose of my food blogging. Admittedly, I don't have a culinary school degree, but I love eating, and that is why I blog. What do you think about food blogging? I would love to hear your thoughts!

Why I Miss Summer in Southern California

These pictures should speak for themselves. No words are necessary.


But if you need words, check out how Taste Memory has aptly summarized why In-N-Out burgers epitomize summer in Southern California.

Otherwise, just imagine the juicy all-meat patty, perfectly grilled and placed upon a toasted white bun, with accompanying leaves of crisp lettuce and slices of ruby red tomato. Oh, and also, the greasy slab of American cheese. That should be enough to make you miss getting drive-in burgers at In-N-Out and going to the Southern California beaches during the summer.

In-N-Out has a cult following because it makes everything on its menu with fresh ingredients and keeps strongly to its company values, which incorporate religious attributes and sound business practices. I definitely became a follower during my time in Southern California, and will bow my head adoringly to the In-N-Out gods from afar.

The Beau's Three Favorite Words

It's not, "I love you."

Nor is it, "I adore you."

It isn't even, "You da' man."

Rather, it is "Monterey Park Food," which can be found at a three-word restaurant, "Mandarin Noodle House."

For those of you unfamiliar with Monterey Park, it is home to one of the largest ethnic Taiwanese enclaves in the United States. My beau (a Taiwanese man) calls Monterey Park the "promised land" because of its authentic and affordable Chinese/Taiwanese food. Therefore, for a friend's recent wedding (after the back-to-back scheduled events of the rehearsal, rehearsal dinner, and wedding) we snuck away to Mandarin Noodle House, a typical Monterey Park establishment, right before zooming off to LAX for the long trek back home.

There are several classic "must have" items at Mandarin Noodle House.

First, their Chinese beef noodle soup, or niu row mein, is one such "must have." The soup is made with thick and gummy handmade fettuccine-like noodles, and enlivened with bright and zesty cilantro sprigs and coarsely chopped scallions. The warm soup is powered by a rich broth and the cutting flavors of star anise and cinnamon. And the slow-cooked beef is fall-off-the-bone tender--even though there is no bone for it to fall off from.



Look at these handmade noodles!


And their potstickers are almost as good as how my mom makes them.


The key word in that sentence: "almost."

The doughy skins of Mandarin Noodle House's potstickers gingerly hold together the pork filling, and the bottoms of the potstickers are seared in a hot skillet, until the bottom portion of the dough forms a thin, crisp crust.


I recommend for you to try those two dishes, but if you are trying out a Chinese/Taiwanese restaurant, you should also explore other options, such as these beef-filled rolls with sweet hoisin sauce, cilantro, and scallions. Let me warn you, you won't find any items like "chop suey," "General Tso's Chicken," or "sweet and sour pork" on the menus of restaurants like these.


Hey, I'm on a roll (pun not intended), so I might as well add a few words about another restaurant to which my beau and Short Exact introduced me a while back, "Shanghai Dumpling King." Shanghai Dumpling King, which is conveniently also three words, serves classic Chinese/Taiwanese-style dishes. You can also get potstickers, pan-fried scallion flatbreads (awkwardly translated in Chinese restaurants as green onion pancakes), and great beef noodle soup there too. However, the only thing is that Shanghai Dumpling King is in the Bay Area, not in Monterey Park! I just wanted to mention it, to point out another critical item to order at a good Chinese/Taiwanese restaurant: shao loeng baos, which are steamed dumplings with ground pork and hot pork broth precariously sealed inside of them.


If looks could kill, I would be D.O.A. at these restaurants.

Unfortunately, after my own cursory hunting, I was unable to find any authentic Chinese/Taiwanese restaurants in the Greater New Orleans area, but if you know of any off the beaten path, please share the love!

I hope that this post opened your eyes about Chinese/Taiwanese food, and has encouraged you to try some in your area, in the near future!

Grill You Know It's True, Oo, Oo, Oo, I Love You

Sorry I have been so quiet lately. . . I have been a little too addicted to the NBA Playoffs this month. But it is almost over!

However, my lack of recent posts mean that there is a huge backlog of photos and half-written posts, languishing in Blogger, and not yet ready to be finalized and published.

You can imagine my delight when a fellow food blogging friend, Eat, Drink, and Be Merry posted about a place I've been meaning to post about for over seven months: Shik Do Rak. (I've heard that Shik Do Rak means something like "the hungry esophagus" in Korean. (But don't blindly trust my translation, because I heard it from a Caucasian guy!)

Now that Eat, Drink, and Be Merry posted about this Korean Barbecue restaurant in Los Angeles' Koreatown, I thought I'd piggy-back on his post, by posting a few pictures and encouraging you to try this tasty Los Angeles-area eatery where you can chargrill your own red meat, onions, and halved button mushrooms on a circular Korean-style grill.

If you've never been to have Korean barbecue before, it entails a lot of cooking on your end. Your server will bring you out a tray of various marinated or non-marinated red meats, and you may grill them on your sizzling table grill to your liking. Remember, when manning the grill, be sure to move the cooked pieces of meat to a specified, cooler area of the grill (and away from the uncooked meat) to prevent cross-contamination.

Just as Eat, Drink, and Be Merry suggests in his post, Shik Do Rak offers thin, flat sheets of rice paper noodle that you use to wrap the grilled meat and leafy greens before chowing down.

Also, use the flavored oils and hot chili sauce to taste.

As you eat your rice paper wraps, don't forget to eat your fill of their selection of pickled, salted, and fermented vegetables, called panchan. For those of you who are unfamiliar with panchan, it generally consists of such items as pickled bean sprouts, cucumbers, seaweed, and fermented napa cabbage (kimchee). Panchan has an acerbic crunch and a pleasant vinegary bitterness. I call them "chopstick foods"--as opposed to "finger foods"--because the elements are easily pinched between the tapered ends of a pair of lengthened and slender chopsticks.

And, Shik Do Rak also offers a satisfying spicy tofu soup to close your barbecued meal. The soup is made with clams and red Korean chili pepper powder, and is called soondubu.

I hope this brief post gave you a nice orientation on Korean barbecue (if you were previously unacquainted with it)! Korean barbecue is very fun: it is as elaborate as a Broadway production because it comes replete with 1) sizzling, spitting, and glowing grill grates and 2) smoke which continuously emanates from the grill. Best of all, Korean barbecue restaurants are great places to take a large group of friends, especially friends who are collaborative, ambitious people who take charge at social events--or if those friends merely like to barbecue meat!

Good Things Really Do Come In Dumpling Packages

For my annual Thanksgiving pilgrimage down to Southern California, I was compelled by the force (of my growling stomach) to make a necessary pit stop at the Arcadia location of the famed Din Tai Fung chain restaurant from Taiwan. Din Tai Fung produces the perfect dough-wrapped, meat-filled packages, packages that are aptly known in Chinese as "shao loeng baos."

Joe's Shanghai in Flushing, New York, you ain’t got nuthin' on these Taiwanese chain-restaurant babies.

That Din Tai Fung's soup dumplings run out within an hour of opening (and that they only sell soup dumplings on the weekends) is an indicator of how good this place is.

You can't miss Din Tai Fung. You'll see a line of pushy patrons snaking around the insides of a strip mall, and like me, their eyes will be bright with "visions of steaming shao loeng baos dancing in their heads."

My favorite part of Din Tai Fung is not the dumplings themselves, but the ability to watch the entire production. When patrons enter the restaurant, they are allowed a bird’s-eye view of how Din Tai Fung’s dumplings are made. Immaculately-cleaned, thick, and soundproof glass windows enclose the dumpling-making area and allow patrons to peer at the assembly-line.

The dumpling makers work in a rapid-fire sequence of coordinated movements. Worker #1 rolls tight, flour-dusted dough balls into thin, flat, and circular dumpling wrappers. He does this by efficiently moving a wooden rolling pin over the dough using his right palm and simultaneously twisting his left wrist to quickly rotate the wrapper in a counterclockwise motion. Worker #2 then pats a round meatball-sized circle of ground pork onto the wrapper using a flattened wooden dowel specially used to portion the perfect amount of meat into the dumpling. Worker #3 then manually folds mini-pleats into the perimeter edges of the dumpling wrapper and squeezes the wrapper over the meat to form either a crescent moon-shaped dumpling or a beggar’s bag-shaped dumpling.

Just talking about the dumpling-making process has gotten me in the mood for these dumplings. Even if you don't live nearby any location of Din Tai Fung, I highly encourage you to try these perfect and juicy packages this holiday season!

Why Did'ja Do It to Me Sam Woo? My Restaurant Manifesto

For the 7+ hour drive down to Southern California from Northern California, my family has designated certain pitstops as places we "always" stop, even if we don't need to fill up on gas or go to the restroom. One pitstop is the fast food haven in Lost Hills, and the other one is Sam Woo in San Gabriel. The Sam Woo that acts as our rest-stop, is not from the Sam Woo Seafood Restaurant lineage (referred to "Sam Woo-bourgeoisie," because it is generally priced around $10/entreé), but it is the Sam Woo BBQ Restaurant (referred to "Sam Woo-proletariat," because it is priced around $5/entreé), or as I like to call it, "the Sam Woo for the working, blue-collar people."

When I recently drove down to visit my parents, I was accompanied by a friend from the East Coast who had eaten in the Monterey Park/San Gabriel area before. He told me before, that Southern California is "nirvana" or "Garden of Eden" for a Chinese-food lover. As we slowly crept our way through the hellish bowels of Los Angeles traffic, he wanted me to suggest a cheap and delicious place we could grab a quick Chinese meal. I was pretty confident that Sam Woo would deliver on his expectations.

When we finally arrived, we were physically exhausted, irritable, and our buttocks were sore and tense from sitting in bumper-to-bumper holiday traffic. Both of us were expecting a meal to "satisfy the masses."

When we were seated, I was surprised by the lack of patrons in the restaurant. I remember there was always a line with large families waiting for seats, and how the old grandparent-types would sit in the waiting area reading their daily newspapers. That day, the restaurant wasn't even half full. But when I looked around, I was happy to see the same waiter there (he must have been working there for about ten years), and also I was overjoyed to see that prices hadn't changed either. $4-5 bucks for choice entreés? They need to move a Sam Woo up to the Bay Area!

Since my friend was the driver, I let him call the shots (I let him order, with only minimal interference).

Our first dish of coeng ching tsai arrived in a monstrous looking mound. Because I had been pandering to my friend's belief that Monterey Park was the "promised land," I tried to describe the faults in the dish as an unusual deviation. But as soon as I tasted it, I realized there were no redeeming qualities to the pile of flaccid, slimy, and fibrous mash.

Okay. Maybe our pent-up road rage was causing us to be easily disgruntled. "Give it another chance," I pleaded to both him and myself.

Ten minutes after the coeng ching tsai had arrived, the next dish hit the table. I had more of a role in ordering the hi shen tsow mein (seafood chow mein), thus, it felt like a steel-semi truck of disappointment hit me in my gut when I saw the way the dish looked. The noodles were mangled and mottled up like a hairball made of greasy orange yarn. See, when my Dad ordered the "same" dish from Sam Woo, I remember decoratively-quartered leaves of baby bok choy gracing a symettrical and crispy pan-fried cake of golden egg noodles. I remember huge pieces of shrimp, white fish, scallops, and squid. I also remember that the sauce perfectly coated the noodles, so as not to ruin the crispiness of fried noodles, but to provide a harmonious balance of flavor and texture.

Our hi shen tsow mein looked like the waiter gave us a dish that an unsatisfied guest had sent back, and the cooks just re-fried the whole thing together again for the next people who were unfortunate enough to order the same thing--us. There were no crispy noodles. None. There was no bright bok choy. None. Just oily, soggy noodles and sporadic bites of seafood.

After waiting for fifteen minutes, we thought that the waiter forgot to write down our final order. We were about to leave and pay our bill, when he came rushing out with our plate of jow yen yo yee (deep-fried and salted squid). This is actually something that I didn't have a lot of experience with eating or ordering, so I didn't have very high expectations. However, my friend did. One bite, and he spit back into his napkin. "This dish is not worth eating, let's pay the bill and go now," he resignedly grunted.

"Wait a minute, I'm not going to pay for a dish and only have you eat one bite!" I angrily retorted, as I shoved an entire fried fritter into my mouth.

Although the jow yen yo yee was colorfully presented and looked delicious, the taste was something else. Stale oil permeated the batter-coating and made it taste like a musty closet--complete with the strange moth ball aroma. Plus, they took the "yen" (salt) part of the recipe to a new extreme. It was so salty, I could feel my mouth reflexively and unconsciously puckering, as if trying to expel what was inside of it.

After we paid the bill and began to exit the shopping plaza where Sam Woo was located, my friend asked me whether I would go back again.

Would I go back again? Oh hayelll yea! It's Sam Woo! So the food was bad one day, no big deal. No "invisible hand" will ever drive me away from Sam Woo. It's given me too many great memories, full bellies, and cheap meals for me to ever change my ideology.