 Since Hongdae is where I stayed in Seoul, this is where I had most of my meals. In this post I’ll spotlight 4 restaurants that stood out to me mostly because of the dishes that I had there. These include: Korean-style onigiri (rice balls), kimchi mandu (dumplings), vegetable and meat pancake, and gamjatang (potato soup) without the gamja (potato). #1 Kong’s Riceball It was my second day in Seoul and I was still very overwhelmed with being in South Korea. I had a pretty big lunch at the museum cafe in the War Memorial of Korea and on my way back to my hostel, I wanted dinner but just a small dinner. I remembered passing by this restaurant the day before when my friend was showing me around the area and figured today will be the perfect day to try it! Continue reading Eating in Seoul: Spotlighting 4 Hongdae Restaurants
 Friday. Nancy messaged Kristen and me that we should meet up early the next morning for breakfast at Jodie’s. We love breakfast. “How early, though?”, I asked. – I could pick you all up… Mai at 7:45, Kristen at 7:50 ish… – I have to say, this is insanely early, maybe I would just skip sleeping… – Well, it is a TINY place next to a salon, I believe. It only seats eight at a time. The shop opens at 8 AM… There is the possibility of going later – 10 ish – but we would have to wait for “turnover” and wouldn’t be sitting with each other… – … – They have a table outside… it might be cold… They said they can’t predict if there will be only a few people or a lot… so we could always go a little later, but then we might have to wait for the table, but at least when that happens, we could still all sit together… Shall we try for 8:30 then? A bit of a compromise 😉 – 7:45 or 8:30 are the same to me, so let’s do 7:45. 🙂 Now, I’m an astronomer […]
Continue reading Breakfast at Jodie’s
 When I walked down that aisle, I beamed with pride. In my hand, a bag of okonomiyaki flour, a bag of katsuobushi, bottles of sauces and aonori. Kristen took care of the cabbage and meats. Pancake day. Osaka style. At least that was the plan. We didn’t plan on being authentic. We couldn’t. An American-born Taiwanese and a Vietnamese who haven’t lived in Japan at all are not gonna make an “authentic okonomiyaki” on first try. That’s why we chose premixed okonomiyaki flour instead of grating a nagaimo, bottled mayonnaise instead of whipping up eggs and oil ourselves. But just the thought of making our own okonomiyaki in whatever shape we want and however we want it, not having to go anywhere and regretting over soggy, over-salted mashes called okonomiyaki, generated the we-can-own-this attitude that guaranteed pride no matter what the outcome. It’s a sort of defiance after too many letdowns. Instead of mixing flour with water, we boiled roasted corn and mixed flour with corn tea. Apart from that and the avoidance of green onion (I’d add green onion if I’m making pajeon – green onion pancake, but not okonomiyaki), and impatience – pouring more […]
Continue reading Kitchen hour: quasi-Osaka Okonomiyaki
 Put me next to a pig foot and I turn into a total nut case. But boy, these chunkies, sweet, salty, chewy, just a little spicy… I cleaned the bones until they were white. A feeble attempt at including some starch to our lunch: ground beef and pork coins covered in batter and fried. Dessert: ho tteok (호떡) – chewy sweet pancake with some kind of syrup or melted brown sugar filling, and the best part? They’re not too sweet!
 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
 Unpredictability #1: “Are you opened today?” Before you set your GPS to Myung Dong in Houston, make sure you call and ask that question in the clearest, simplest way possible. Aaron tried different versions, most were a bit too elaborately polite with a perfect American accent, and only succeeded in confusing the poor old man. I tried it once and got the answer “Yes, open.” We hopped en route. (If you don’t call, there’s a slim chance that your schedule will coincide with the owner couple’s schedule, which depends on the lady’s health, and she’s the only chef. That slim chance didn’t happen for me the first time I set out for Myung Dong.) The limited English conversation is nothing uncommon at Korean and Vietnamese mom-and-pop diners, but I have to mention it because it’s one of those things that make me classify Myung Dong as more “authentic” than the other Korean restaurants in Houston. The second thing is that its name doesn’t contain “Seoul” or “Korean”, they go more local: Myungdong (명동) is a part of Seoul (in Vietnam, its equivalent would be a phường). The third thing is that […]
Continue reading The unpredictable Myung Dong
 San Antonio sleeps in on Sunday. It may be the seventh largest city in the States but it acts like either a college student or an old man who can’t sleep at night and frequently doses off in the day: Saturday night – cars, tourists and horse carriages packed Houston, Commerce and the streets about, Sunday morning – there may be 50 cars on the freeway and 3 people wandering downtown: us. The plus side for walking the pavements at 6 am is you can pose for pictures without being embarrassed about acting like a tourist. The downside is the restaurants aren’t opened, actually, they remain closed for the rest of the day. Just when we thought about settling for the hotel breakfast, the internet came to rescue: the Guenther House in Arsenal, an 1860 old-house-turned-museum with a late Victorian styled parlor, German-imported porcelain and a terrace looking out to the river, serves breakfast all day. The pancakes are fluffy. The white gravy is thick like melted cheese. The pineapples and oranges are sweet. Continue reading Breakfast at the Guenther House
 The most irresistible American meal is the full country breakfast. I know it’s derived from the full English breakfast and all, and it’s probably so irresistible just because who in their right mind would refuse food after a long night with an empty stomach (hence the word “fast” – not eating, in “breakfast”). And yes, there’s nothing speedy about the old country breakfast. Making pancakes, scrambling eggs, frying sausages takes a good hour off your morning, not to mention scrubbing the skillets afterwards. I probably will never make a full country breakfast at home until I have nothing better to do, but thank God for blessing America with countless roadside brick houses opened up just to serve breakfast. And may those like Millbrae Pancake House flourish despite the swamping force of IHOP and the likes, because they serve freaking good breakfast. I said freaking good because I happened to order the one dish that, it turns out for the first time, everyone on Yelp seems to agree to be MPH’s best. The Swedish pancake with lingonberry butter. Have no idea how Swedish this really is, but the pancake is […]
Continue reading Millbrae Pancake House – Old country breakfast with a berry good twist
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