San Diego eats + ESPN linkage.

My hypothetical awards ballots are up, and some of the comments are priceless – mostly whining about bias or calling me an idiot. You can also see my briefer-than-normal scouting reports on the eight playoff teams:

Minnesota Twins
New York Yankees
Tampa Bay Rays
Texas Rangers

Atlanta Braves
Cincinnati Reds
Philadelphia Phillies
San Francisco Giants

I hope to resume regular dish blogging now that those playoff previews are done. Thanks for bearing with me.

We didn’t make it to my old favorite, Cafe 222 (waffle heaven), but did get to The Mission, recommended by readers and by a scout as well. It pushes a hipster vibe but on Sunday morning the place was full of families with young kids, so all the talk about “revolution” seems a little silly. All of the food was fresh with bright colors, and the egg dishes come with two slices of light, airy rosemary bread that I’d probably buy by the loaf if I lived in San Diego. The blueberry-cornmeal pancakes were a disappointment, as they’re not cornmeal pancakes but regular pancakes with some coarsely-ground cornmeal thrown on the griddle – dry – with pancake batter poured over them, resulting in an unpleasant, pebble-like texture that ruined what was otherwise a soft, fluffy pancake. The meats, both bacon and chicken apple sausage, were better, while the rosemary potatoes were hit or miss, with some pieces perfect but others overcooked. I’d like to try them again while ordering differently.

Our other breakfast spot was Brian’s 24 on 6th, offering huge portions of solid-average food (eggs, pancakes, french toast) but nothing spectacular. It had the advantages of being fairly quick and walkable from our hotel, but I’d rate it behind the Mission and Cafe 222.

Ortega’s Mexican Bistro in Hillcrest was the huge dinner find, authentic homestyle Mexican cooking in a more upscale setting. The restaurant is in what looks like a converted two-story house with funky internal architectural features and lots of distressed wood, but really, who cares about that when you have someone in the back making fresh flour tortillas by hand? I might fly to San Diego once a week to grab a bag of those things – the texture and fullness was amazing, and if you told me they used lard in there I’d believe you. The roasted-tomato salsa that came with the chips before the meal was also outstanding, thick but not unwieldy and not in the least watery, and they make a very solid jamaica agua fresca. The sopecitos appetizer was rich, a little too dense for me (that’s a comment on my tastes, though, as “dense” may be authentic for all I know), and didn’t need the sour crema laced over the tops. Their carnitas were superbly done, no hint of dryness with lots of crispy edges, and with the sides of rice and charro beans it was more than either of us could finish. That whole Hillcrest neighborhood looks like the kind of place I’d love to live.

We had one dinner in the Gaslamp district – I got a lot of suggestions from readers, but many weren’t appropriate for dinner with a four-year-old – so we called an audible and went to Trattoria la Bocca, offering well-made if overpriced Italian food. My wife’s mushroom risotto was perfectly cooked, just al dente with a creamy (texture, not flavor) sauce that didn’t overwhelm the rice or mushrooms; I had a sauteed veal dish with artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes, and zucchini where every element was cooked properly but the dish as a whole had too many competing flavors. For what it’s worth, of those reader recommendations, the most intriguing one was a bar-restaurant called Neighborhood, which will be at the top of my list of places to hit the next time I’m in San Diego by myself.

Right near Petco is a small boutique shop called Cupcake Heaven that sells … well, you know. We tried several kinds over the 48-odd hours we were there, with the chocolate-chocolate and peanut butter ones my favorites; the peanut butter frosting had a texture somewhere between mousse and buttercream, and there were peanuts in the cupcake itself, resulting in something like the lightest peanut butter cookie you’ve ever had. The pumpkin cupcake’s frosting was very gingery, fine for me but lost on my ginger-hating wife. And the cupcakes were still fairly moist the second day.

I only tried one concession stand at Petco, Randy Jones’ BBQ, which was nothing more than standard, boring ballpark Q drowned in a sticky-sweet sauce. I hope there’s something better there for Padre fans.

Washington DC eats.

Chat today at 1 pm EDT. Baseball Tonight on ESPN Radio at 10:27 pm EDT (if your local affiliate isn’t carrying the late game).

All right, I’ve been promising this for two weeks but playoff writing took precedence. I had two full days in DC plus a half-day, which turned into five different restaurants plus what I ate at the ballpark. All of these places but one are in the McPherson Square/Farragut area.

Breakfast both mornings was at Teaism, a tea salon that serves a full breakfast with a limited menu, although it was diverse enough for me. The best item – besides the tea, which is loose-leaf and served in ceramic pots – is the ginger scones, crumbly and faintly sweet with chunks of crystallized ginger in the scone and castor sugar on top. Two of those plus the cilantro scrambled eggs – cilantro and diced green bell pepper in eggs, little light on the salt and probably cooked 30 seconds past perfect – was more than enough food, since the egg platter comes with a small fruit salad and triangles of grilled whole-wheat naan. I also tried the tea-cured salmon, which had great flavor (a little sweet, a little savory, like a cup of a mild Indian black tea with a half teaspoon of sugar) and was obviously very fresh (they say they do the curing themselves) but had a chewier texture than good smoked salmon. Teaism’s only real drawback is that it’s not cheap, running $15+ each day including tip.

Worst meal of the trip, by far, was at Kaz Sushi Bistro, an overpriced Japanese restaurant where the focus is definitely not on the food. The fish itself was completely tasteless; the seaweed salad came with a mayonnaise-based dressing; everything was overpriced; and the two people serving as hosts were rude to each other and to at least one group of customers.

Casa Blanca is a small Peruvian (or Peruvian-plus) place on Vermont Ave that is an anti-Kaz in that the focus is on the food and definitely not on the decor or ambience. I ordered chicharrones (fried chunks of pork shoulder) with fried yucca, which was, of course, a bit on the heavy side but crispy and salty with a little bit of a peppery kick. Their homemade tamarind juice is good, a little too sweet for me but given the tangy taste of tamarind, I imagine this is how most people prefer the drink. They apparently also make great empanadas, although those appeared to be for takeout customers and weren’t on the menu. Service is a bit indifferent, and remained so even when I ordered in Spanish. Cash only.

I left the area once for lunch and headed over to Eastern Market to try Market Lunch, where folks apparently line up in great numbers on weekend mornings for pancakes. I had read that Market Lunch had one of the top crab cake sandwiches in the city, and their fries are hand-cut, which sold me. The crab cake was above-average, mostly crab, all lump, lightly seasoned so that the primary taste is of the crab meat, but the crab cake itself wasn’t fresh or even hot, just lukewarm, as if it had been sitting for five minutes. I understand they’re trying to keep people moving, but crab cakes should, at worst, be kept hot if they have to be held at all. The fries were on the greasy side. I suppose if you work in the area and need something fast, this is a great option, but I’m not sure it was worth the Metro* trip.

*Seriously, another city with a crappy subway system. Philly’s system is cash-only and is filthier than Rome’s. Washington’s takes credit cards, but the cost of your ride depends on exactly where you’re boarding and exiting, instead of the single-price system used, oh, everywhere else in the country. And is there a reason the stations are all so dark? You could grow white asparagus down there.

As for Nationals Park, it’s nice, clean, big, and kind of boring. It has forced character, not actual charm. And I’m sorry, you don’t get to put up posters of great players who didn’t play for your franchise – you can take the Senators’ history, by all means, but Honus Wagner is not yours. They get big props for Teddy’s Q stand out in right field. They smoke the meat right there, in a smoker that’s at the edge of the tent, and both items I had were solid. The pulled pork sandwich wasn’t too dry and only needed a little sauce for flavor, while the beef (short) rib was perfectly smoked with plenty of well-browned edges. I’m not sure what’s in the beef rub, but it’s sweet without any heat – a little pepper would balance out the sweetness well. Two quibbles: At $14, the rib should come with something on the side, even the tiny cole slaw that comes with the sandwich; and it seems odd that you have to go to another stand to get a starch like French fries. The Nats also get props for the kosher-food cart across the aisle from the Q. The knish was excellent, smoking hot (not just made, but they had the sense to keep it hot), and the three people working at the cart are animals – everything moved quickly, and when the line started to build up, they moved faster. I saw a little gelato stand up the first base line and wanted to try it, but I was so full from the Q each night that I never had the chance.

Yankee Stadium eats.

I’ll be on ESPN 710 in LA at 1:12 pm PDT today, and on Mike & Mike tomorrow morning at 9:25 am EDT. I posted a piece on five interesting prospects recalled on Tuesday. I also appeared on AllNight on ESPN Radio last night.

I am not impressed by the food at Yankee Stadium. You build a $1 billion ballpark in the greatest eating city in the country – at taxpayer expense, of course – and you put in Johnny Rockets and Nathan’s and Famiglia Pizza? There’s virtually nothing local. The breadth of cuisines represented in the city where you can find food from any country where they eat food is dismal. And I only found one item there there I’d actually recommend*, the steamed dumplings at the noodle bar in the third base food court. They were superb, not heavy, not over-gingered (I like ginger, but a lot of restaurants go a little berserk in the dumplings), and steamed perfectly. You get four for $6, which wasn’t quite enough for lunch, but two servings would have been overkill.

*Okay, I lied, they have Carvel, which, for those of you outside the northeast, is frozen custard that rivals anything I’ve had in Wisconsin. It’s overpriced, and you can get it just as easily outside the Stadium, but yes, I had some, and you probably should too.

I went to the Lobel’s stand for a $15 steak sandwich, which seems to be the consensus “best food item in Yankee Stadium.” I don’t really have a problem with paying $15 for good beef; beef is expensive, and it should be, because cheap beef is nasty to eat, bad for the environment, and really bad for the cows*. But this sandwich was boring as hell – the steak had absolutely no flavor of its own, it was drowned in some undefined sauce, and, worst of all, it was tough. I’m no aficionado of steak, but one thing I know is that good steak should not be tough. Either it wasn’t cooked right, or it wasn’t carved right, not that I could tell under the tsunami of brown stuff on top.

* Okay, beef production in general is bad for cows. Just go with it.

That’s the good and the bad; here’s the ugly. Zeppole are the Italian version of fried dough – thick blobs of yeast-raised dough deep-fried until crispy on the outside but soft and chewy on the inside, and then doused with powdered sugar. If you grew up in New York and ever went to an Italian feast, you probably love them as I do. What they serve at Yankee Stadium and call zeppole should get the concessions people arrested. They’re tiny, tasteless, and, worst of all, fried before the game. It’s a ballpark. You have deep fryers at full blast all around the place. You can’t fry a few zeppole to order? If they’re not going to do it right, they should just take it off the menu entirely.

I did have one meal in Manhattan on this trip, breakfast at Good Enough to Eat at 83rd and Amsterdam, recommended by a few readers, including a couple of NYC sportswriters. I asked the girl behind the bar what I should get, and she suggested the four-grain blueberry pancakes, which sounded good since 1) I like pancakes 2) I like blueberries 3) “four grain” makes it sound all healthy-like. They were fine, nothing special, and including a few stray blackberries, which I’m assuming was an accident rather than a gift from a Keith Law fanboy in the kitchen. The pancakes themselves had a faint cardboard-y taste of whole wheat – common, but avoidable – and they were a little overdone and dry, and probably shouldn’t have left the kitchen like that, although it takes a lot more to get me to send a dish back and waste the food.