I’ve had some good food in the past few months. It’s a good time to recap some of those experiences and name some of the best gastronomic items I’ve ingested recently. Most of these pictures were already posted, but a few may be a bit different. Click on the pictures to go to the blog post about my experience.

Best Carnitas Burrito - Taqueria La Bamba

These giant burritos are filled with mouth-watering carnitas. They’re the only place in the Bay Area that really makes it with a perfectly cruchy exterior and juicy inside.

2058 Old Middlefield Way
Mountain View, CA
650-965-2755

Best Tortilla Chips - Tres Potrillos Taqueria

These chips are light, crunchy, yet flaky. I found myself enjoying the chips much more than the main entree.

670 N Fairoaks Ave
Sunnyvale 94086
408-735-8657

Best Pastrami Sandwich - Katz’s Deli

Without a doubt, Katz’s Deli serves up the juicest, thickest, most tender pastrami ever laid on by human eyes.

205 East Houston St
New York, NY
212-254-2246

Best Cheesecake - Carnegie Deli

This piece of New York style heaven is creamy, velvety, and huge.

854 Seventh Ave (at 55th Street)
New York, NY
800-334-5606

Best Pancakes - The Paramount

They’re light and fluffy, melting in your mouth.

44 Charles St
Boston, MA
617-720-1152

Best Pasta - Max’s

Max’s has, without a doubt, the best pasta I have had. I’m sure some traditional places in Italy will have better pasta, but for a low-key place in the East Village, this is perfect.

51 Avenue B
New York, NY
212-539-0111

Best Pho - Turtle Tower

The noodles are made fresh in the restaurant, and the broth is exquisitely flavorful and clean. This northern Vietnamese style restaurant doesn’t serve hoison sauce–a small sacrifice for their bowl of love.

631 Larkin Street
San Francisco, CA 94109
415-409-3333

Pho is not only a bowl of noodles with broth, it’s an experience. The slurping. The steamed glasses. The slathering of pungent sauces. These elements are a must when eating at your local noodle shop. Unfortunately, Pho Hoa fails to deliver this satisfying gastronomic experience.

Pho Hoa is located in the Tenderloin district of SF. I’m usually wary of going to the Tenderloin, unless the trip is necessary, as in the case of searching for the perfect bowl of pho. Legend has it that the district is called the Tenderloin because police officers used to receive an extra hazard pay when patrolling the area, and thus, were able to eat nice steak dinners every night. Seriously though, don’t wander into this part of town late at night.

Pho Hoa looks just like any other nondescript pho shop. The service is fast and the menu is no-frills. You know what you’re getting when walking into this place. I ordered my usual–pho with thinly sliced rare beef. One of hallmarks of a good pho shop is consistency, able to deliver steaming, tasty, and utterly fulfilling bowls of heaven any time you visit.

However, when my bowl came out it was not steaming–a bad sign. I took a few mouthfuls, and lo and behold, my glasses were not fogging up–a total blasphemy! Also, my beef didn’t cook all the way through in the stagnant lukewarm broth. At this point, Pho Hoa has hit rock bottom. It’s really hard to recover a pho when it’s lukewarm, no matter how good the noodles and beef are.

On the plus side, they gave a good amount of beef and noodles, which I couldn’t enjoy fully due to the broth catastrophe.

I will not be returning soon to Pho Hoa.

Pho Hoa
431 Jones St. (between Ellis and O’Farrell)
(415) 673-3163

This past Saturday, I went to an exhibit in the Hayes Valley Market called “The Most Powerful Sound”. The description of the event said that the pieces were inspired by “scientific sonic phenomena such as infrasound and sonoluminescence”. The gallery consisted of a motley collection of art, sound, and technology. A lot of the artwork I saw were post-modernistic, and some very abstract.

Some of the interesting pieces were books (which were almost zine-like in nature) that were accompanied by sounds. You’re instructed to listen to a specific audio segment while digesting the printed material. Other pieces were videos accompanied by (usually eerie) sounds, live sound work by two people who were blowing a hairdryer into a microphone and using potential differences in antennas to produce truly bizarre sounds, a room with barious bottles to bang on, and a puzzling golden foam ball hanging from the ceiling.

All in all, it was an interesting evening. The fence along the market was set up to be an impromptu art gallery where any artist could put their piece up for sale. A young girl had put one of her pieces up (probably with an encouraging word from the mother) and actually got it sold. When she found out, she wasn’t very happy, saying that she wanted it back.

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68626,00.html?tw=rss.TOP

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/08/20/BAGJCEASE41.DTL
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I must confess, I eat fast. I annoy Tippy all the time since I usually finish my meal well ahead of schedule. I’m not sure why I like to eat fast, maybe I find that the flavors intensify as the speed of ingestion goes up. I even eat really rich desserts fast.

On this particular day, I was dining on some salmon that we grilled. The fillets contained some little bones that I shrugged off and ate–bad move. One of the bones got lodged near my uvula. I didn’t choke, but was simply annoyed. At first, I just tried hacking it up, or just swallowing it, without success.

The bone had somehow lodged itself horizontally across my uvula. It was a weird feeling having something touch my uvula and knowing about it. It’s not everyday that someone bumps into your uvula and you know about it.

In any case, I had the worst time trying to get the bone out, since I have a huge gag reflex (just ask my childhood dentist, he probably still has nightmares about me to this day). I looked up some remedies online, and got a few suggestions:

1. Drink lots of water.
2. Eat lots of bread or rice without chewing.
3. Hold lemon juice or vinegar in your mouth.
4. Have a trustworth friend use tweezers to carefully dislodge the bone.
5. Learn Buddhist meditation techniques to will the bone out. Basically, learn how to control the muscles near the uvula, which you probably never had to consciously use.
6. Don’t do a damn thing. Just wait till the bone naturally comes out.

I had already tried (1) and (2) to no success. For (3), I tried putting some fish bones in vinegar, and didn’t see them dissolve. (5) intrigued me, and I tried really hard to get it out–no luck. I was surely not going to do (6), the bone was very irritating, and I had Tippy try to get it out with some chop sticks, but I gagged to easily.

Finally, I got the bone out using a mirror and a single chop stick.

Not a pleasant evening…

There are just some things in this world that are too scary. On my way to the Indonesian festival in Union Square, I happened upon a gaggle of grannies singing and protesting the torture of people in places like Haiti.

You know, I’m all for people expressing themselves and exercizing their right to speech, however, the mere thought of grandmas doing this type of activity makes me feel… well, awkward. The guy in the orange jumpsuit with a sack over his head doesn’t help either.

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_201
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http://patrick.net/housing/crash.html

There are just some restaurants you wished did better. Performed better. Tasted better. And it’s not in a complaining way–maybe you got a good tip about the place, or you heard through the grapevine that the place was really authentic. But then, you show up only to smell the obvious stench of a failing business. This was what happened at Bamboo Village.

I read various reviews of this Indonesian eatery saying that it’s really authentic and good food. These were from actual local Indonesian people, so who was I to question? We walked into Bamboo Village on what should have been a busy Saturday night. The place was dead–there was probably only one other couple eating. This is a bad sign.

Service was mediocre–we weren’t even offered water after receiving our menu. The waiter seemed to make himself sparse. This is ridiculous, since there were only two occupied tables.

The entire restaurant was covered in bamboo. I am not kidding you when I say that the whole restaurant–the walls, the trim, the ceilings, the decorations. It was apparent that someone put in a lot of thought about the decor. Maybe a little too much thought.

I decided to order rendang, a traditional Indonesian and Malaysian dish that consists of beef boiled slowly in a thick coconut curry sauce. The beef is supposed to be fork tender, like stew beef. Bamboo Village’s rendition was as tough as rubber. I had to request a knife, and even then, the whole table shook with the amount of force necessary to cut it. In short, the flavors were nice, giving a wallop of coconut, curry, and lemongrass tones. But the texture was horrible.

Next up was the fried fish in sweet and sour chili sauce. The fish was cooked in a curious way. Instead of butterflying it whole, they seemed to have butterflied it on both sides. I’ve never seen this done before. The fish itself wasn’t too flavorful, and neither was the sauce. I expected a lot more acid and heat in the sauce. The flavors simply went thud as it hit my tongue. One of the only redeeming sauces was the hot sauce that we had specifically requested. This is the kind of hot sauce that doesn’t joke around. The heat hits you, and hits you hard in the mouth like a suckerpunch, reminding me of the taste of raw habeneros.

The last dish was the Indonesian fried rice. It was flavorful, and had fish sauce in it, but nothing to write home about (or blog about).

In the end, we were utterly unsatisfied. A place like Bamboo Village really has the potential to lure in customers looking for some exotic Indonesian cuisine. They failed on fundamental levels of service and quality.