 The best (known) green tea of China. The cream of the cream of the crop. I feel sophisticated just drinking it. Paired with a tangerine bee pollen truffle and I almost hear little cherubim playing the lyre. You can read the whole story in my journal Tea & Mai. I’m off to dance in my head.  The sky is grey. The ipod plays Gustav Mahler’s piano quartet in A minor. One hand turns the page to Der Prokurator. The other hand maneuvers the fork into a stack of three pancakes. Oozing chocolate chips and a thick strip of bacon. Bistro 1491 sits, in fact, at 1491 Solano Avenue. Somehow I keep thinking that the name is 1941. It feels so. The burn orange walls, the abstract paintings, the white-haired ladies by the window. The pancakes are fluffy, soft, good at first, the bacon is at the right saltiness. The maple syrup errs on the watery side, or maybe it’s just overwhelmed by what’s supposed to be dark chocolate but turns out too sweet. About 60% dark. A heavy feel sets in after the pancakes are gone, what’s left on the plate are messy streaks of brown chocolate and faint yellow syrup. It could almost make a hasty painting. But hasty does not suit this scene. Address: Bistro 1491 1491 Solano Ave (between Santa Fe Ave & Curtis St) Albany, CA 94706 (510) 526-9601 Breakfast at noon: dark chocolate & bacon pancakes – $8.65 Continue reading Friday afternoon, Bistro 1491  Dressed in black and white patterns from walls to chairs, FIVE spots a slightly older, more refined atmosphere for casual hotel dining just above the Berkeley BART station. I meant to go here after someone said that he finally understood the rave behind “chicken and waffle” after he had it during FIVE’s After Hour Happy Hour. If that dry white meat and cake-like bread at FIVE was that good, then surely the other things wouldn’t disappoint. Now nothing on the regular dinner menu costs 5 bucks like the Happy Hour (7-9 pm) nosh, but I got hungry before 7 pm, so I dashed in on what seemed to be a busy night. The hotel is hosting some conference. Nobody wanted to eat with me today, but one beauty of going alone is that you can always get a table. That said, if you have a party of 4 or less and would like to raid FIVE, which you should, I have a FIVE Vip Card “valid for a 20% discount in FIVE” to give you. Here’s how to get it: Leave me a comment below by midnight March 31, and if […] Continue reading FIVE and a Flavor Giveaway  Every year just after the winter holiday hustle and bustle, Mom and Dad let me choose a restaurant for my early birthday dinner. Last year it was Martin’s Place for barbecue. Dad never tells me no, but let’s just say that Mom didn’t feel too confident of my aesthetics since then. This year she gently insists on French. But I manage to sneak in a twist of Texas. 😉 After all, Chef Philippe Schmit dubbed himself the French Cowboy. His two-story Philippe Restaurant & Lounge opened last February just a mile north of The Galleria. Looking out to the Houston’s limitless horizon, the second-floor dining room is bathed in a warm chocolate hue of the furniture, accented with soft vanilla light and word decorations made of Chef Schmit’s quotes in watermelon red. In contrast, the menu is bold, extensive, spanning from Texas BBQ and cactus to foie gras and fish pâté, from the classic croque monsieur to the carefree duck confit tamales; there’s a little something for everyone. “The Moroccan”, beef tartare with raisin, almond and the Tunisian hot sauce Continue reading French and Texan intertwined at Phillippe of Houston  What’s with this time of the year that festivals keep popping up every weekend? Just two weeks ago my friends and I were strolling among some 60 food trucks at Jack London Square; then last week we had some awesome grilled chicken at Martin Luther King Park; and this past Sunday we wound up queuing in the shivering bay wind for some artisan desserts at Ghirardelli Square. If we keep this up(*) I will become quite athletic, all that walking and standing in (long) line build muscles, you know. 😛 So here’s the deal with the 15th annual Ghirardelli Chocolate Festival: you get a $20 ticket to try 15 samples (there are 31 total, some of them are chocolate favored alcoholic drinks); supposedly the booths started giving samples at noon, but lots of people got there earlier and lined up in front of the booths. Kara’s Cupcakes is one of those booths with a 100 feet line before it even opened. I’m not crazy about cupcakes (yeah… you can tell I’m not American) so I didn’t contribute to that line’s ridiculous […] Continue reading Chocolate festival at Ghirardelli Square  By the time we found Crixa Cakes, the bluish afternoon sunlight was tinkling its almost empty glass cabinets. The bakery closes at 6:30 everyday and does not open on Sunday. The menu changes daily and the cakes go fast. But we were slow at making up our minds. Bakeries are worse than quaint bookstores, where you can at least try out something before buying it. Easiest choice: Boston creme pie. Tender chiffon cake with creamy vanilla custard, covered with dark chocolate ganache. The refrigerated sponge is like Choco Pie, only much better and, of course, pricier at $5.85 a piece. (Fun facts: its monetary value is, however, nothing compared to the Choco Pie in North Korean black markets, where a single pie costs one sixth a worker’s monthly wage.) Curious choice: Pave vergiate. Flourless chocolate cake. Slightly bitter, some on and off hint of lizard eggs or herbal tea. I know that sounds weird, and it’s not like I’ve tried lizard eggs, but you’ve gotta trust your instinct, and as weird as it may sound, it’s a nice subtle taste […] Continue reading Crixa Cakes – The Old World sweets  Pretty packaging. Attractive name. Big thick bar. Teenie tiny holes that are supposed to be bubbles. The texture is rather normal. You have to really focus to feel the difference. It also tastes like store chocolate Easter eggs. Unimpressed. Bubble chocolate – $2.50 a bar at Whole Foods.  Appetizer: green waffle The batter is flavored with pandan leaf (lá dứa) extract and coconut milk. Mudpie first discovered them at Century Bakery in Little Saigon, San Jose, and that’s where we’ve been getting them since, in increasing amount. The most recent deal is buy 10 get 1 free, warm and prepackaged in a nice paper box. Then I had green waffle for breakfast for 3 days straight. Each waffle is about $1-1.50, rather costly if you think about how a banh mi costs only 2.50. But it’s delicious, fluffy and sweet. Main course: Mo’s Bacon bar You can have bacon with breakfast pancakes, and in BLT (bacon-lettuce-tomato) sandwich for lunch, so might as well stuff it into your chocolate for a late night snack, right? The lady who discovered the magic of bacon-chocolate combo had 6 years of culinary study, and she got it right: chocolate goes with everything, and so does salt. The bar isn’t a slab of bacon coated with chocolate (which is kinda what I hoped for). There are only tiny bits of bacon, even more scarce than in a simple salad. An […] Continue reading Down the Aisles 0 – Happy Thanksgiving  Follow up on my previous chocolate review, this time in a much better mood as I’ve settled at the new school. New city, getting further behind in blogging. Deep forest mint: dark with mint (72%): what do you expect, well… it’s like eating your toothpaste, only more unyielding. It’s not bad, but a little sweetness would be nice. You know how you picture a humid, colorful setting damped with flavors and warmth when you hear “deep forest”? This chocolate doesn’t taste at all tropical. It’s cold, harsh, dry, it flushes your sinus with strength. I prefer mint chocolate ice cream. I shouldn’t score this one. Wolf: dark with cranberries and almonds: crunchy, crunchy, little bar, almond, chocolate, there you are… no trace of cranberries though. What else is there? Have I lost taste for dark chocolate? Perhaps. It is 70% in any meaning you can think of. Pass. Continue reading Down the Aisles -1: Endangered species chocolate  Ten weeks after sending off the application to grad school, including 2 weeks of anxious waiting and roller-coaster cycling of hopefulness and hopelessness, the first result I got back is a rejection. How to handle a rejection? You don’t, you just ignore it. It wasn’t a bad moment, to be honest. In some way it was relieving, no more waiting from that school. It’s been restless for the last two weeks. I’ve heard friends getting acceptance and rejection, I’ve thought about the embarrassment, and the choices I have in the worst scenario. Switching to med school would take at least one year to study for the MCAT, another to apply and hang around worthlessly, another 4 in grad school (in the case of acceptance), perhaps 2-3 years of residency (if graduated), which totals to 8-9 years, about the same time length to professorship (if everything goes well). Or I could be a bum, but Chris had assured me that I wouldn’t make it. Judging from my GRE scores, I have little belief that my MCAT score would be impressive, multiple choice tests and I aren’t buddies. But, those were just negative thoughts in the dark hours. I still have […] Continue reading Down the Aisles -2: Bittersweet |
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