Food
December 20th, 2010
PIE DAY!
In September when I ate a crapload of food with the Serious Eats crew who were in town to do research for their upcoming book, one of the highlights was walking into Hoosier Mama and ordering every one of each available slice. Yesterday, I headed back with four other people to do a modified version of the same: five people sharing 10 slices of pie. It was actually supposed to be 6×12 but Carrie decided not to come, thereby securing a prime spot on the not invited list for the foreseeable future.
Anyhow, the five of us enjoyed the following:
Maple Pecan
Apple Quince
Apple Pear Cranberry
Sugar Cream Pie
Orange Cream
Orange Cream once again
Vinegar Chess
Coconut Cream
Lemon Meringue
Apple
Mince
I initially tried to list these things in order of deliciousness, but that’s simply an impossible task when dealing with so many incredible pies. We ate nearly every single bite. The orange cream and lemon meringue were both outstanding, but even on a table full of pie they stood out as extremely sweet; about two bites of each of those was left behind. The mince pie was actively disliked by 4 of us, but it reminded Philip of his childhood and he was happy to polish that one off.
For me, the first three pies pictured really stood out. Pecan pie is my favorite type of pie yet I’d somehow never had it at Hoosier Mama. That was a mistake. I’ve had some excellent pecan pie in my life, but this maple pecan had the best flavor of them all. Texturally, I like a pecan pie with a little more chewiness, but that’s barely worth mentioning. The apple and quince pie was as good as a fall fruit pie on a traditional crust can possibly be. Quince, which I don’t remember eating previously, is like an apple but a little lighter in flavor and a softer texture. Every crust at Hoosier Mama is delicious, but this one was warm and the butter sang through. The apple/pear/cranberry pie is one I’ve wanted to try there for a while. The outstanding fruit was a shade tart thanks to the cranberry, a sensation that’s balanced by the crumble top.
The group outing to Hoosier Mama was a brilliant idea and one I intend to replicate every three months.
November 24th, 2010
South Park v. Food Network
and South Park v. people who take food too seriously.
In both fights, South Park wins. CLICK HERE.
November 19th, 2010
Los Angeles 2010 Day 4
After the massive meal at Jitlada followed by a milkshake and donuts the night before, I could have taken Sunday off from eating. There are two major benefits to living in California. One, all sorts of readily available delicious produce. And two, sports are on TV much earlier.
After a morning that involved watching most of the Bears game, which was inexplicably a national telecast, we headed out to one of my host’s favorite places to eat sandwiches, Bay Cities Italian Deli in Santa Monica.
Mrs. G’Nice and I split two sandwiches. One was the Godmother, pictured above, came with Genoa salami, mortadella coppacola, Ham, prosciutto, and provolone, and was topped with mayo, mustard, onions, pickles, tomatoes, lettuce, Italian dressing & mild pepper. The other was a more simple soppressata with fresh mozzarella. That one also came topped with all of the accoutrements although I ate it separately on that much more simple sandwich. The bread, a chewy rustic ciabatta, was outstanding. The meats were fine but nothing exciting.
After lunch, we did some grocery shopping. I have a Costco card any my hosts don’t so we went there where they were absurdly restrained in their shopping. From there we went to Trader Joe’s. And now we were ready to go home where the hostess made dinner:
Yes, after a weekend of gluttony and feasting on some amazing food, my final meal was a salad. A good salad, mind you, but not the most filling meal. In fact, none of us were filled. So before settling in for a movie for the night, we made a quick run back to Milk.
This magnificent creation is the Strawberry Shortcake shake. It’s made with vanilla ice cream, malted milk, strawberry sorbet and buttery crunch cookie crumbles. It wasn’t quite as good as the Mikie Way Malt I had the night before, but it was very close and I was in the mood for something fruit.
And with nothing but a morning bus ride to the airport remaining, my excellent 3.5 days in Los Angeles came to an end. Next time: More food!
Major thanks go to my great hosts. Look how happy I made them:
Picture removed.
Food, Travel | 2 Comments
November 18th, 2010
Los Angeles 2010 Day 3
So up until now, I’ve left out a key detail. I was pretty freaking exhausted. I slept for five hours on Wednesday night and left my house at 6:45 Thursday morning to walk 1.5 miles to drop Fred off at the kennel before hopping on the train to the airport. In LA that night, I was up until about midnight local time running around and eating. Then on Friday, I had a ridiculously long day that included me dozing off at the Clippers game.
Greg had class Saturday mid-morning until the early afternoon so I was on my own. My plan was to get up and go to the Santa Monica Market. On my previous visit to LA, I was blown away by the Hollywood Market and Santa Monica is supposed to be even better. But my exhaustion finally won out and I didn’t wake up until 9:30 on Saturday morning. With a 1:30 lunch reservation, I would have had to spend an hour on the bus to get to Santa Monica in order to spend an hour there and then hop a bus for another hour to get to lunch. I decided to sit on my ass for a while before heading out early to walk around before Mozza.
Perhaps the best thing ever to happen to eggplant
Mozza was the third and final place I was determined to revisit while in LA (Stan’s and Bulgarini being the others). Greg Nice and his opposite-of-positive wife had no interest in going, so I took advantage of him being in class and her being at work to go with some cousins (my mother’s first cousin and his wife and daughter). We started with the Eggplant caponata was an amazing combination of flavors with so much going on that figuring guessing the ingredients would be a colossal waste of time. There’s sweet, there’s spicy, there’s herbishness, there’s savory, and there’s a whole lot of umami richness. Fortunately, the recipe is here so I now know there is sugar, cinnamon, cocoa, hot chili flakes, mint, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, pine nuts, thyme, onions, pepper, currants, tomato sauce and a whole mess of roasted eggplant. It’s too complicated for me to try at home, but it’s good enough that I can’t imagine returning to Mozza and not getting it.
As amazing as the eggplant was, I probably liked the fried squash blossoms filled with ricotta even more. I was a little worried that the delicate squash blossom would be thoroughly dominated but the batter was tempura-like in its lightness and the creamy ricotta complemented rather than overwhelmed. For a pizzeria to put this much effort into the non-pizza items is really a treat.
I love the pizza at Mozza. For those unfamiliar with the place, it’s a joint effort from the culinary minds of Mario Batali and Nancy Silverton. Everyone knows who he is but she’s actually the bigger force here. Silverton is widely known as one of the best breadsmiths on the planet and her pizza crust is a remarkably crisp and chewy piece of bread. The one problem with it is that sometimes the pizzas feel more like a bread with independent toppings rather than a unified pizza. That was how I felt about the pizza with Coach farm goat cheese, leeks, scallions, garlic and bacon. I liked it but there were leftovers.
I wouldn’t have ordered the mushroom and tallegio pizza but it was delicious. These mushrooms were packed with flavor and tangy tallegio makes for an excellent pizza cheese. I would have liked this pizza more if there were sauce on it, but it’s clear that Mozza is more geared towards white pizzas.
I tried seven pizzas on my first visit to Mozza. I tried 3 more this time. The best pizza of the bunch, by a decent margin, is this squash blossom and burrata pizza with tomato sauce. Light, rich, sweet, creamy, crisp, chewy and altogether freaking delicious. At $23, it’s the most expensive pizza in the place by $5, presumably due to the large lumps of burrata. This one was the pizza that I’d wished I’d tried last time and after a year and a half of regret, it was every bit as good as I dreamed it would be.
Going to Mozza and not getting dessert should be illegal. We got three. Pictured above was my choice, caramel gelato topped with marshmallow sauce, caramel and Spanish peanuts, all of which were on a chewy caramel wafer. I don’t know what took so long for sweet/salt desserts to catch on, but that’s a fad I really hope lasts forever. This stuff was amazing.
We also got Mozza’s most famous dessert, the butterscotch budino. This picture is actually from my visit in March 2009 but it looked and tasted the same. I said it last year and I’ll say it again: Rich and creamy do not begin to describe the succulent treat. Toss in some caramel and some sea salt and you’ve got about as good a pudding as exists. The third dessert, a simple bowl of housemade sorbet for my allergic-to-everything cousin, was also outstanding. She got chocolate and passionfruit which were merely delicious, and a scoop of coconut which was near Bulgarini quality.
After lunch I went back to the homestead to join Greg Nice where we hung out for a few hours before dinner. Tim Dog left his wife and child in Irvine and was nice enough to drive up to join us for dinner. We made it over to Jitlada around 7:40. Jitlada is a Thai restaurant that specializes in southern Thai food. It’s immensely popular and the back story as to how that came to be is pretty interesting.
There’s a dude named Erik M. who used to live in Chicago and now lives in LA. He was a frequent poster on LTH and he’s a Thai food fiend who also speaks Thai. He reported on Jitlada in 2007 on LTH and translated the menu into English. He also posted on LA’s Chowhound page. About a month later, a respected Chowhounder went and seconded Erik’s declaration that the place was amazing. A month or two after that, Jonathan Gold went and waxed eloquently about the place, solidifying its place in the LA food scene. Armed with menu suggestions from Erik M., we headed to Jitlada where we met up with another college friend. Randomly, not long after we sat down, a pair of friends of Greg’s friends sat down at the table next to us. We decided to merge, increasing our ordering power to 7.
Pork Crying Tiger
I don’t know enough about Thai food to speak particularly intelligently on what I are. What I can say is this: I have never had Thai food as close to as good as this meal. The Crying Tiger Pork is one of the restaurant’s self-proclaimed featured dishes and for good reason. The pork was a flavor explosion and the accompanying sauce brought some excellent heat.
Cooling things off and bringing some sweetness was a great coconut mango salad topped with cashew and shrimp. This one was pretty straightforward, but that didn’t make the blend of textures and flavors any less delicious.
Recommended by Erik M. and Rachael Ray was the shredded catfish salad with chilies. Neither too fishy nor too spicy, this unique crisp dish went over very well.
Apparently tumeric is all the rage in southern Thailand and this off-menu fried tumeric chicken was outstanding.
Not a big deal that the picture of the spicy beef stir-fry with lemongrass is blurry. This was the least eaten dish at the table and the only dud of the night.
This one falls under the “I don’t know what I’m talking about” category. I think this is called Jungle Noodles with chicken but the interwebs tell me Jungle Noodles are extremely spicy. This one had some heat, but it wasn’t overpowering at all. So either I have the name wrong, the restaurant dulled it down for my non-Thai table, or the internets are wrong. Who really cares? The noodle soup was good.
Among the absolute best dishes of the night/my trip/my last several months was Goong Pear, fried shrimp and fried basil with a spicy curry sauce. The extra crisp breading was so good that more than one of us picked up stray pieces of it long after the shrimp and basil were gone. What’s that? Fried basil? For reals? Yes:
Mudfish doesn’t sound like a particularly good eating treat and it turns out that it isn’t. This dense dried fish was kind of boring but the sweet and hot curry it came in was not. Filling out the bowl was some water spinach. The curry was outstanding and had me thinking out loud that I’d like to come back to Jitlada and just do a curry sampler.
When deciding between a couple of soups, I asked our server for advice. This kind woman, who somehow managed to understand my butchering of her native language as I read off most of our order from a piece of paper I’d brought with me, convinced me to try this tumeric-seasoned soup with chicken and kaffir lime leaves. She said I could get the other soups at other places but that they were the only ones with this particular soup, which is called tom kai baan tom khii-min.
Here’s my little bowl of soup without all the pesky and delicious broth in the way. As I sit here typing this and thinking about the soup I am literally salivating. Freaking fantastic.
I wouldn’t have considered getting pad see ew as it’s something I’ve had plenty of times before. This was one of the choices by the couple I didn’t know. It was a particularly good version and was absolutely loaded with seafood. I’m not sure I’d get it again but that’s only because there are so many other more interesting choices. I certainly don’t regret eating it.
These shrimp were also ordered by the people I don’t know and I’m not really sure what they were. Check out the silverware in the top of the picture to give you an idea how big the shrimp were. They were cooked perfectly and covered in a thick sauce that had more seasonings in it than I’d care to guess. Very good, but about twice as expensive as the average dish at Jitlada (most are in the $10-$12 range).
The final dish of the evening was green curry with fish balls stuffed with egg yolks. This one was very, very good but it was more unique than it was delicious. The curry was, like every other curry we sampled, excellent.
The fish part of the fish ball was kind of a tough fish meatball. I liked it and would recommend people try it, but I’m not sure I’d order it again. Jitlada’s menu is huge and on my next visit (there will be one), I’ll want to try mostly new items. The egg yolk was particularly flavorful. There are rumors that it’s a duck egg, but in my limited experience, those are bigger and darker. I suspect this is more of an MSG-enhanced egg but who knows.
We skipped dessert because we had milk shakes on the brain. I’d heard great things about the toasted pecan shake at a trendy Hollywood burger spot nearby and the plan was to stop there on the way home. But at dinner, discussion had turned to donuts and the decision was made that we should get donuts and shakes for dessert. I had nothing to do with the decision but I certainly wasn’t going to object.
We said our goodbyes to the couple we ran in to and then the original five split up to get dessert to take to Greg’s house. G’Nice, wife and Timmy went for donuts while Emily and I went to get shakes. Upon our arrival, I learned that shakes are no longer on the menu. I was ready to cry when Emily suggested Milk.
It was 10:50 and Milk closes at 11. I called and they agreed to take a phone order even though we might not make it by 11. Very cool on their part. I had no idea what they had so I just asked what their most popular shakes were and I ended up with the The MILKIE Way Malt, which is vanilla ice cream, malted milk, chocolate chips and caramel-chocolate swirl. Milk shakes should not cost $7 but this one might have been worth it.
It turns out that donuts are an ideal accompaniment for donuts. These beauties were from a place called SK’s. They weren’t on the level of Stan’s or Donut Man, but they were still very good. Really, all fresh donuts are good.
Oh, there was a celebrity sighting that day. Now, if you tell someone you ate at Mozza and Jitlada and saw a celebrity and asked the person to guess where, the are going to guess the former. But seated near us at the decidedly not fancy Thai Restaurant were the remarkably shiny Jerry O’Connnell and his wife, the woman formerly known as Rebecca Romijn-Stamos.
November 17th, 2010
Los Angeles 2010 Day 2
While I did pretty well my first day in LA, my second day put it to shame. G’Nice is a dear friend but he has two fatal flaws when it comes to being a culinary tour guide. First, the boy simply does not like food enough. And second, a decade of living and driving in LA has left him a shell of a man who wets his pants at the thought of driving on a highway.
I had a couple of places I wanted to get to that were a decent drive out of the city and there was no way G’Nice was going to drive me there. So when he had to spend Friday morning rehearsing, I turned to Li, another friend from college. She loves to eat and is married to a man who does not. She also had no work Friday, so she packed up the mini person and we headed way east to Glendora. There was absolutely no traffic at around 9:00 and after half an hour on the road, we got to Donut Man.
Pumpkin Cream Cheese
Blueberry Cream Cheese
Donut Man is known for their donuts filled with strawberries or peaches but those bad boys only use fresh fruit and those seasons are long over. The featured flavor this time of year is pumpkin which wouldn’t quite work in chunk form. The pumpkin cream cheese is good, but it’s a whole lot of sweet filling. Li and I split that one and the blueberry cream cheese one on the spot and I saved the raspberry that was identical to blueberry for later. We were all ready to go when I decided to grab a cup of coffee. When I went back to the register, I realized I’d only seen half the donuts.
Apples!
Neon Lemon
So the first two donuts were good but they left me wondering what all the fuss was about. The apple donut, on the other hand, rocked my sugar-loving world. Made in the style of the famous strawberry and peach donuts – a donut version of pita – these suckers blend a fresh apple pie-like filling with a sweet, crisp and soft donut. That thing makes me want to make the drive back to Donut Man in the summer.
The lemon donut was much, much better than it looks. It looks like a cloyingly sweet fake lemon filling. It was sweet, but it didn’t taste like something invented in a factory. My second favorite of the ones I had at Donut Man.
We were actually done eating donuts after the first two. The apple and lemon ones would not be touched until it was time for a late night snack. In the meantime, we had a date with ice cream in the near future but at Li’s suggestion we made a savory pit stop in between.
We stopped off at Shanghai Bamboo House in Monrovia for some Chinese food. The San Gabriel Valley is littered with awesome Chinese restaurants and Li picked this one. I would have loved to have feasted at this place but I still had a lot left to sample that day. We got two dishes. One, a noodle dish with taro and chicken, was merely very, very good.
But the real reason Li picked the place is because of their reputation for xiao long bao AKA soup dumplings AKA Shanghai soup dumplings. I’m no expert on these things, but if there are better ones anywhere, I want to try them. And with an order of 8 running less than $5, they were as good of a deal as they were delicious. Each doughy pouch is filled with a nice hunk of pork and a fantastic salty broth. There is also a dipping sauce provided that I highly recommend using. It’s primarily a blend of soy sauce and vinegar and adds a wonderful sweet tang.
From there it was back to dessert at the second place that was a return visit from my last trip to LA: Bulgarini Gelato.
I have tried a lot of ice cream in my day and there are many that I love. But I have never, never, never, never had ice cream as good as what’s served at Bulgarini. I went with five scoops: pistachio, almond, Florentine chocolate with sea salt, pear sorbet and goat milk with cocoa nibs. I don’t have much to say about this stuff that hasn’t been said by others. To put it succinctly, Leo Bulgarini is a master artisan who is manic about only using the best ingredients imaginable. The downside of that occurs when he is unable to procure the precise ingredients he wants. So, for example, the Italian hazelnuts he flies to Italy to buy were out of stock which meant I couldn’t have any more of his sensational hazelnut gelato on this visit. The upside is that he puts out what may well be the best ice cream anywhere.
My insatiable sweet tooth was rewarded again with a stop at Galco’s, the pop/soda pop/soda superstore. This place has more artisanal pops under one roof than anyone else. I made myself exercise some restraint and only bought 4 bottles. I tried a maple cream soda from New Hampshire, a local cola, and a huckleberry pop from Wyoming. But the one I was most excited to get was the sugar Dr. Pepper. There’s one plant in Texas that makes sugar-based Dr. Pepper. I’ve known about it for years but I can’t justify the shipping costs. I finally had it and, sadly, I wasn’t overly thrilled. Unlike Mexican Coke v. regular Coke, I couldn’t really tell a difference between this stuff and regular Dr. Pepper. I’d like to do a side-by-side taste test and will the next time I go to Galco’s.
It was not time to return to the savory so Li and I headed to Daikokuya in Little Tokyo for a legendary bowl of ramen. Noodles, an egg that marinates for a day before it’s served, bamboo shoots, bean sprouts, green onions and kurobuta pork (known in the U.S. as Berkshire pork) would be good on their own. But sweet Lord is the broth something special. Made from soy sauce and pork bones that boil for more than a day, the regular broth is a remarkably rich and delicious soup that I would like to swim in. I couldn’t resist the option of getting mine kotteri style, which means there’s an assload of extra pork fat dumped in there. Yes, I got pork soup with extra pork and I’m a better man because of it.
As a general rule babies don’t excite me until they are about 2 but Li’s 11-month-old daughter Natalia was an exception. I liked the remarkably happy baby well enough but she really won me over when she wanted to pet the sweet pit bull we passed after leaving Daikokuya. Almost as exciting around that time in the day was G’Nice announcing that he was going to come meet us.
Greg Nice wanted ice cream and Li and I were in no position to object so we headed off to Silverlake to hit the wildly popular Scoops. I wanted to limit myself to one scoop, but that’s not an option. If you order one scoop, you get two! I opted for banana-honey and blueberry (the flavors change often). Both were excellent though my appreciation was somewhat limited thanks to my trip to Bulgarini a few hours earlier. My only real criticism was that the banana pretty much dominated the honey.
It was now about 5:00 and it was time Li to go home and Greg and I to head to the Staples Center to see the Clip Show.
Let me tell you a quick story here. We headed to the stadium for a Clippers/Pistons game that wasn’t going to start until 7:30. We got there around 5:30 and discovered that the street parking wasn’t available until 6:00. G’Nice then made a decision that permanently bars him from calling me cheap. Rather than pay $7 to park, we sat in the car for a full half hour so we could park for free.
Magic!
With an hour and a half to spend, we proceeded to walk around the complex around the Staples Center. Celebrity Sighting: Neil Everett, a late night ESPN anchor who I didn’t recognize. Walking around the complex took all of ten minutes and we decided to go play some games at ESPN Zone. After some pop-a-shot, we thought we were done when some dude gave us cards that allowed unlimited games until about 7:40, right after the basketball game started. Free passes at ESPN Zone are much more fun than I would have imagined.
Also better than expected was the game I saw – an overtime battle that saw the crappy Pistons beat the crappy but young and talented Clippers. We saw Charlie Villanueva play the game of his life and future superstar Blake Griffin pull down 18 rebounds to go with his 18 points. Villanueva was a fluke but Griffin is the real deal. When his first contract is up and he signs with a team not owned by a despicable human being, he’s going to be huge. As good as the game was, for me the highlight of the night was the sports museum inside. The museum, which features highlights from some dude’s $30 million memorabilia collection, included the most impressive collection of sports cards I remember seeing (it’s possible what I saw Cooperstown in the 80s was better but I don’t remember it well).
After the game, we stopped off at a pupuseria. I had a card for the place, but I lost it so I don’t know the name. These heavy pork, bean and cheese beauties were very good and well worth the $1.50. Our late night snack was completed with some delicious leftover donuts from Donut Man.
November 16th, 2010
Los Angeles 2010 Day 1
On Thursday morning, I dropped Fred off at the kennel and headed to the airport. I cleared airport security about 20 minutes before take-off, rendering my B26 Southwest Airlines Boarding Pass moot as I was one of the last people on the plane and was stuck in a middle seat. Fortunately, that was the low point of the trip.
Greg Nice picked me up at the airport in his sweet ride and we headed towards our first stop, Randy’s Donuts, which is located close to the airport.
On my last trip to LA, written up in detail on Serious Eats, I hadn’t even considered Randy’s. There are thousands of donut shops in that town and I figured that any place known primarily for its sign was not at the top of the heap. But I’d since read that the cake donuts were particularly awesome so we made the stop.
Chocolate Raised
Sugar Raised
I’d heard that the best things to get at Randy’s were the raised donuts. For those who, like me, aren’t familiar with the term, raised donuts are made with yeast instead of baking powder. The result is a particularly light donut.
I ordered a few more donuts that weren’t raised, but they were pretty mediocre. When I say mediocre, I mean mediocre by fresh donut standards which means they were pretty damned good but not particularly special. The raised donuts, on the other hand, were soft bits of sweet baked clouds of heaven.
When we left Randy’s, it was time for lunch. We picked up Mrs. Greg Nice, who hid her joy at my arrival quite well, and headed to Umami Burger. First thing we learned at Umami: the host is a self-important dick. Second thing we learned at Umami: our server is a self-important dick. Third thing we learned at Umami: the burger is pretty freaking spectacular.
The burger is made from some rich high quality meat and topped with mushrooms, a Parmesan tuile, roasted tomato and caramelized onion. It was an amazing mixture of flavors and textures that made the pretension well worth suffering through.
While the burger was outstanding, I’ve had a number of burgers at least as good. Not a huge number, but a considerable amount. The onion rings, however, were easily among the best I have ever had.
After finishing up at Umami, it was time to go to a place I’ve been dreaming about for the last 18 months: Stan’s Donuts. I had a lot of delicious food on my last trip to Los Angeles but there were three places that absolutely blew my mind and Stan’s was one of them. The other two, Pizzeria Mozza and Bulgarini Gelato, are foods that I can only have in L.A. But donuts are easily transportable. Last May when the Bulls were set to begin a playoff series against the Cavaliers, I made a little wager with Greg Nice. If the Bulls could win more than one game, I would buy him a $20 comic book. If they could not, he would bring me $20 worth of donuts from Stan’s when he came to Chicago in August (the visit that would coincide with Burger Day 2.0).
Gregory Nice is a man with no integrity and he came to Chicago without his debt and with no guilt about not being a man of his word. On my first day in L.A. there would be no more delaying my date with Stan and we drove to Westwood for the donuts. I have to admit that I was a little nervous. Had I built these donuts up too much in my mind? Were they actually no better than other donuts I’d had since? In a word, hell fucking no. These are the best donuts I have ever had.
Blueberry Fritter
Chocolate Peanut Butter
Blueberry Buttermilk Bar
Cherry Cheese
Peanut Butter Banana
Blueberry
There are donuts out there made with much fancier ingredients that are arguably better than Stan’s. But as donut joints go, if there is a better place, I want to go there soon. There are plenty of places that, like Randy’s, do one thing particularly well. Every single style of donut at Stan’s is delicious. The fritter, the buttermilk bar, the peanut butter ones, the jelly filled ones, the fruit and cheese ones, and the regular donuts are all spectacular. Every one of them is crispy and chewy and packed with strong flavors that are certainly sweet but not sickeningly so.
It’s hard to pick a favorite of the bunch, but I think the blueberry fritter and the blueberry jelly type one (last picture) were the cream of the crop. If it weren’t so ridiculously expensive to ship these things (Stan charges around $50 in shipping fees), I’d eat these a few times a year. As it is, given Greg Nice’s staggering unwillingness to bring me any, I can only have them when I visit L.A.
For dinner we headed to Chego, an ubercool hipster quasi Korean spot that’s all the rage. The place has a pretty interesting back story. Chef Roy Choi got famous when he exploded onto the culinary scene with his Kogi Taco Trucks which featured Korean influenced tacos, a creation that could really only be born in Los Angeles. I tried to get to the taco truck on my last visit to Los Angeles, but it wasn’t where their website promised they’d be. I had no interest in chasing around a truck this time around, but I was happy to check out this new place that has gotten a whole lot of positive press.
Chego is primarily known for its rice bowls. I opted for the Chubby Pork Belly, which comes with kochujang-lacquered Berkshire pork belly, pickled watermelon radishes, water spinach, cilantro, cotija, peanuts, and a fried egg. It was an excellent mix of flavors that I really liked a lot, but I wasn’t blown away as expected.
There was a celebrity sighting at Chego. Aarti Party, the most recent Next Food Network Star, showed up. She was there the last time Greg went and she chatted with the host like they were old friends so I assume she’s a regular.
What did blow my mind at Chego were the Ooey Gooey Fries, which are french fries topped with sour cream sambal, monterey jack, cheddar and cotija cheese, chillies, cilantro, and pickled garlic. I hadn’t slept much the night before and it was after midnight in Chicago by the time I ate at Chego. And I was still pretty full from the donuts and burger I’d already eaten that day. But even in my exhausted full bellied state, these fries were pretty spectacular. Crispy, creamy, spicy, tangy and very, very rich, I couldn’t stop eating them even though I feared eating too many of them would lead to an immediate heart attack.
Coming tomorrow: Day 2 in LA
Food, Travel | 2 Comments
November 8th, 2010
Best Recap of Chicago Pizza Ever Written
You can see it here.
Food, Slice | No Comments
November 4th, 2010
This Week on Serious Eats
With four posts, this was my most productive week ever. I write pizza reviews every week and burger reviews every other week. This week, thanks to a sponsor that wants Serious Eats to feature less known places around the country that have a good bourbon selection, I wrote two extra pieces.
Here they are:
October 29th, 2010
Mado
Went to Mado a couple of weeks ago before the Blackhawks season opener. Check it out:
There’s no sense in going to Mado and not getting the charcuterie plate. This one had a chicken liver pate, a pork rillettes and some kind of cured salami that I can’t remember.
My first main course (I split two) was the beef heart topped with fried onions and a Coney sauce. The good: the hunk of beef heart was absolutely spectacular. Mado makes fantastic use of its wood-burning grill and this piece of cow organ was no exception. The bad: the Coney sauce, typically used on hot dogs in Detroit and Jackson, Michigan, is good for adding to the flavor of a mediocre hot dog, but just got in the way of the magnificent beef. With the sauce, the dish was mediocre but without it, it was spectacular.
Remember that wood-burning grill I mentioned three sentences ago? This is what it does to a rainbow trout.
October 28th, 2010
Italian Beef Tour
On Saturday, I went on a sweet little tour of Italian Beef spots. Rather than limit it to the 3 or 4 people who read this wonderful site, I decided to share it with the world via Serious Eats. Check it out.