About FB

I skip lunch to write about food.

I can be happy eating Chinese fried rice out of the box while discussing food authenticity and downplaying fine fusion cuisine. It’s not hypocrisy, it’s just setting different expectation levels for different foods.

You are not going to find hundred-dollar tasting menus, renowned chefs, splendid food photography, dazzling evaluations of wine and chocolate on Flavor Boulevard. You are not going to see elaborate recipes either, as I, spoiled by a mother who cooks too well, can’t cook. Besides, I don’t have a kitchen.

Flavor Boulevard is, for the most part, about the little cozy restaurants ’round the corner, the mom-and-pop diners along the highway, the holes-in-the-wall where chefs, waiters, and customers converse in some foreign language and laminated menus are in broken English.

Food blogging is a side hobby that I couldn’t resist, despite the minor distraction called school. Inspired by noodlepie’s street food delineations, in 2008 I started taking pictures, saving the receipts, scribbling down notes everywhere I eat.  Eistube was my firstborn, inexperienced, simple like a young caterpillar crawling everywhere, wildly babbling about everything he saw and ate (including cafeteria food!). Well, that time is past. The caterpillar grew (a little). Flavor Boulevard is dedicated to restaurants around town with affordable concoctions for the students’ everempty pocket, although occasionally it can contain academic flavors when I get emotional about the school business. Nonetheless, I did pack all my posts from Eistube and publish them here, even the ones unrelated to food. You know, all posts are written equal, I just had to be fair.

Scratch all the willy nillies, this blog is about food. And I’ve decided to zone into, in alphabetical order, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. The Chinese influence is deeply rooted in our gastronomical cultures, so occasionally I babble about Chinese food too. The other cuisines, well, I won’t pretend that I know much about them, I don’t know much about anything, but I’ll still eat them, and write when the mood strikes.

I was still inspired by noodlepie’s, and I still don’t have a kitchen.

Know an awesome place? Leave me a comment with its name so that I can try it out too!

Enjoy peeking into restaurants with me! And feel free to send me emails at: mai@flavorboulevard.com

GUEST POSTING: If you feel like talking about food, be it your latest improvisation in the kitchen or an awesome grab on the street, take pictures and shoot me a write-up at mai@flavorboulevard.com! ALL posts that satisfy these guidelines are welcome!

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Mai Truong is pursuing a PhD in physics at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2009, she graduated with Bachelor of Science in Physics and Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas. She used to work as an editor for the online Journal of Young Investigator and now a journalist for the Berkeley Science Review. She is also an editor at the American Journal Experts.
She has an incurable infatuation with the German language, pig trotters, and Korean cuisine (UPDATE: the last thing has also led to an infatuation with the Korean language). She also tends to compare every dish with her Mother’s cooking.

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