The dish

Let’s just get one thing out of the way first: Downtown Houston is something of a disaster, at least over by Minute Maid Park. That area is particularly decrepit, with abandoned buildings ringing the stadium. I walked across the street from my hotel to the ballpark, but didn’t feel safe walking anywhere else in that part of town. I drove up to Market Square in search of a restaurant that turned out to be closed for dinner (it’s only open three hours a day, 11-2 – great business model), and that area is also ringed by abandoned buildings, not to mention the ultimate feel-good establishment, the bail bondsman, which I passed on the way there.

Azuma is a high-end sushi joint in the Market Square area, and by high-end, I mean that only one person who worked in the place spoke Japanese, and the restaurant was more about ambiance and selling booze than it was about the fish. But unlike most of the other restaurants I saw in a walk around Market Square, it was open, had customers, and didn’t look like a front for the Lithuanian mob or something. (Most ominous was the “Irish pub” that had one customer, a cop, sitting out front. In fact, the sheer number of cops I saw around Market Square made me wonder what the hell goes on around there that requires that many cops in a two-square-block radius.)

Anyway, Azuma’s food didn’t live up to its ambiance. I went with an “Asian mixed greens salad,” which was a mesclun salad with asparagus added, and enough dressing to drown a rhinoceros. Once I was done spattering dressing all over Market Square – you try eating vinegar soup with a pair of chopsticks – I turned to the sushi. The spicy tuna rolls didn’t contain mayo (bonus points), but the tuna itself was fishy, and the chefs hadn’t removed the blood-line portion of the fish. It was also too spicy for my tastes, but that did have the benefit of making me forget that it tasted fishy. The salmon was better and was clearly fresh, but didn’t have much taste of its own, lacking that slight sweetness that good sake should have. I also tried a fish called escolar, which had a good smooth texture but tasted something like Styrofoam peanuts. Add in one serving of unagi and the total came to over $30.

Friday morning I headed to a restaurant featured on The Hungry Detective, a Food Network show aimed at finding “off the beaten path” restaurants and a new addition to my Save-Until-I-Delete list on the Tivo. The Breakfast Klub is just what the name says – a breakfast joint that serves up eggs, bacon, sausage, waffles (with fried chicken wings, the house specialty), and what I have to say is the best breakfast biscuit I have ever had. The thing was pillow-soft, almost like cotton candy, with a tremendous butter flavor and just a hint of a buttermilk tang. Seriously, a box of those vs. a box of Krispy Kremes … wars have started over dilemmas like that. (I’ll take one box of each, thanks.) I went back the next day to try the waffle, but was disappointed; although it was made on a Belgian-style griddle, it was a traditional batter, so the finished product was dense and a bit dry, and I was surprised that it wasn’t sweet. The eggs were good the first day but divine the second, cooked but not overcooked and still moist when they reached the table. I’d also take the country sausage (a little tough, but with outstanding flavor) over the bacon (nothing special). But the biscuits – seriously, I’d beat you to death with a butter knife over the last one.

The other pleasant surprise of the trip was, of all things, the restaurant in my hotel, the Inn at the Ballpark. Because the hotel and its Ballpark Café (okay, no points for the name) are right across the street from Minute Maid, it made a perfect spot for me to jump over, grab lunch, and get back during the one-hour breaks between games. And it turns out that the food there is very good, especially because they’re clearly using fresh ingredients for everything they make. At my first visit, I went for the default option, the grilled chicken sandwich (served with roasted red peppers on focaccia), and was amazed to find that unlike most grilled chicken breasts, this one wasn’t cooked within an inch of its life. It had a perfect brown sear on the outside, and the inside was fully-cooked but still moist. The shrimp BLT – I ordered the fried shrimp sandwich (which sounded like a makeshift po’ boy), but the waitress screwed up my order) – was also delicious, with shrimp that were also cooked properly, as well as sliced avocado and bacon. The restaurant makes its own potato chips, and I’d bet that the French fries were cut on-site as well.

The kicker for me was the Sunday breakfast, which is usually a disaster at good restaurants. I ordered off the menu – if you’ve read Kitchen Confidential, you know why – and went for the yogurt/fruit plate. I ended up with a 10″ plate full of fresh fruit, a dish of yogurt, and a blueberry muffin that had just been made. The waiter thought I was done with the dish with the last bite of the muffin on it, and I nearly broke his wrist to keep him from taking it. But what impressed me the most was the fact that the executive chef, Oscar Mejia, came out and manned the omelette station himself. I told him how much I’d enjoyed the food over the past few days, and he gave all the credit to the people who work for him in the kitchen.

One last note on Houston – while flying out of IAH, I grabbed a chopped beef sandwich at Harlon’s BBQ, the only non-fast-food chain dinner option I could find, and for a quick airport meal, it was pretty good; the meat wasn’t dry and didn’t taste or look like it had been sitting for hours. Out in the world I’d demand better, but by the low standards of airport cuisine, this was pretty good.

My wife and I recently got the chance to go out for dinner without our daughter for the first time in about five months, but neither of us was interested in heading downtown, so our options for a nicer meal were somewhat limited. We decided to try Porcini’s, an Italian restaurant in Watertown very close to our favorite little restaurant in the area, Strip-T’s.

It was a mistake.

The main meal was fair; my wife liked her veal saltimbocca, but my veal piccata wasn’t pounded thin enough and the sauce was very tart, meaning that it didn’t have enough butter to balance out the acidity. But the gigantic failure on Porcini’s part was their tiramisu, which we decided to split. It looked like it was done correctly, but after one bite each, we realized that the cheese-custard was sour. It overwhelmed the taste of the dessert, and I thought they might have skimped on the ingredients by using cream cheese instead of mascarpone (an imported Italian cheese that has a texture similar to American cream cheese, but a much milder and smoother taste). So I asked the waitress if there was cream cheese in it. She asked the chef, and came back to tell us that yes, the tiramisu contained a “mixture” of cream cheese and mascarpone (which I took to mean that it had 98% cream cheese and 2% mascarpone). I pointed out that that “wasn’t exactly traditional,” and she just shrugged her shoulders.

She didn’t take it off the bill. I took it out of her tip.

And for what it’s worth, I’m not a fan of any restaurant that cuts corners on ingredients. I don’t care how good your chef is; if the ingredients suck, so will the finished product. Porcini’s cuts corners on ingredients. That’s a dealbreaker for me.

My wife pointed out that we should have just gone to Strip-T’s, which is a much more casual, mom-and-pop type of restaurant that specializes in ridiculously fresh fish. We wanted to do something a little more upscale, but as often as not, upscale just means a higher price, not a better meal.

Naples didn’t offer many hidden-gem restaurants of the sort that I particularly like to hit when I travel, but there were two spots worth mentioning, one on each end of the price scale.

Driving towards the hotel (the Naples Grande Resort) from the Fort Myers airport, I caught a glimpse of a place called Tacos Ardiente in a strip mall just before I got to the hotel. Since almost every other restaurant I saw on Pine Ridge Road was a fast-food restaurant or casual-dining chain franchise, I was pretty sure that I’d need a place like that to keep me sane. It was good enough the first day that I went back for a second. I can’t speak to authenticity, but their tacos were outstanding, and unlike any I’d had before. I tried both the chicken and steak tacos; the steak ones had more flavor. The tacos were served in a soft flour shell with lettuce, shredded cabbage, cheese (although naturally I had them leave it out), and a fresh tomato salsa; they went for $1.99 each. I also ordered a small side order of guacamole (50 cents), which tasted homemade. So the damage for one meal, including a Jarritos tamarind soda, was about $6 including tax.

I saw a few good comments on chowhound about a sushi place a mile or two north of the hotel on US-41 called Sushi-Thai. I’m usually wary of sushi-plus-non-Japanese-food restaurants, but this is Florida, and beggars can’t be choosers. I stuck with sushi and was pleasantly surprised. The salmon was very fresh and mild-tasting; it didn’t have the slight sweetness of Pacific salmon, but it still had good flavor and boded well for the rest of the fish. The unagi was excellent, although it’s hard to screw it up. The spicy tuna maki was a treat, as I’d never had it prepared this way before: Rather than tossing finely chopped tuna with a spicy sauce (sometimes containing mayo, making the whole thing wretched), the chef made a plain tuna maki, cut the roll into eight pieces, then drizzled a hot chile pepper sauce over the top of it. The taste of the tuna really came through in a way that traditional spicy tuna rolls don’t allow. I also splurged on fried shumai, which were just lightly browned and not even a little bit greasy.

By the way, the best quote from the GM meetings belongs to Jeff Angus of Management by Baseball fame: “Alcohol is the humidor of conversation.”

When I travel, whether for work or for vacation, I take one aspect of the trip very seriously: Eating. A bad meal is a wasted opportunity, so when I’m headed out of town, I do some homework to make sure I hit the best local spots. This week’s trip was to St. Louis, a town known for doing things to ravioli that would get them arrested in most of Italy.

The primary objective of this week’s mission was to sample Ted Drewes’ Frozen Custard, the legend of which extends well beyond St. Louis; Alton Brown even stopped there in one episode of his recent series on road food, Feasting on Asphalt. As AB does, I do, so I had a printout from Google Maps in my laptop case before I even boarded the plane to Missouri, showing me the route from my hotel to Ted Drewes’ one year-round location. Everyone (AB included) said to get a “concrete,” a blended custard thing that stays in the cup when it’s held upside (although I was warned by the girl who served me that that trick only works for a minute or so, but not once it starts to melt … I must look like a guy who can’t tie his own shoes in the morning). But with all apologies to the members of the Drewes Militia, I wasn’t impressed. The texture of the custard was outstanding (an 80 on the 20-80 scouting scale, where 50 is average, 80 is Hall-of-Famer caliber and 20 is Joey Gathright’s power), but the flavor was a 45 at best. I even went twice and got a different flavor the second time, but was let down again. The chocolate flavor tasted like vanilla custard laced with bad chocolate syrup, while the custard in my Oreo® concrete was way too sweet.

Hodak’s fried chicken was a bigger success. I’m not sure why they bother with the menu. Do people go there for something else? Ridiculously good value, too, with two half-chicken-with-fries plates plus two iced teas (yes, I went with a friend) plus tip coming to $18.

The morning I left St. Louis, I stopped at the Goody Goody Diner out on Natural Bridge Road for breakfast, since it’s on the way to the airport and I wanted to have a big breakfast since I’d be in the air through lunchtime. I was already a little skittish about the area when a possibly inebriated woman asked me for fifty cents on the sidewalk in front of the building – okay, maybe the fact that the neighborhood looks like Tikrit on a good day didn’t help – but I went in anyway.

And then came the stares.

That sort of thing happens when a short, skinny white guy carrying a book and wearing an outfit entirely from Banana Republic walks into a working-class diner where all but three of the forty-odd people in the joint are African-American. I sat at the counter, and when I discovered it was Waffle Week, I was sold – waffles are definitely my favorite breakfast food, which does not mean I only have them for breakfast, and I’ve had a hankering for a good waffle since I had a dynamite one at Hell’s Kitchen in Minneapolis back in July. I ordered one of the specials, which included a waffle, two eggs (scrambled, always), and sausage. When the dishes came – there were three sausage patties on the plate – the gentleman next to me said, “Damn!”

I figured this was just another sad case of breakfast envy, something I’m all too familiar with. That’s when someone else gets their breakfast and you realize that you should have ordered what he ordered. So I asked the guy, “What?”

“You hungry!”

I guess short, skinny white guys don’t usually eat much at Goody Goody. (By the way, the food was excellent, with the eggs cooked perfectly.)

But back to the abuse of ravioli. Turns out that there’s a local specialty dish called “toasted ravioli” – ravioli that have been breaded and (by the taste of things) fried, served with a tomato sauce that tastes like it came right out of a jar. I suppose in a world where Twinkies and Oreos are fair game for the fryer, I can’t necessarily complain about fried ravioli, even if it offends my sensibilities as a native New Yorker and an Italian-American. But a funny thing happened when toasted ravioli were on menu in the press dining room. A woman brought out a catering tray full of the things, and I asked her if they contained cheese (because I avoid ricotta). She gave me a smirk and said, “No,” then turned away. I stood there for a minute, because for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why she thought this was a strange question. So I asked her, “There’s no cheese in the ravioli?” And, again with the smirk and a look that said “you stupid tourist,” she said, “There’s no cheese in ravioli. There’s cheese in tortellini, but there’s meat in ravioli.”

Now, before lactose intolerance ruined a perfectly good love affair between me and stuffed pasta dishes, I grew up eating ravioli, usually bought fresh from Pasta Buona in Smithtown, New York, and while you could buy meat ravioli, the default option was cheese. In fact, that’s the case everywhere in New York, and when I’ve seen them in Italy, the filling is usually cheese or cheese with spinach. Needless to say, I wasn’t going to take this guff from some Midwestern girl who looked like her ancestors might have been named Olaf and Inga.

So I said, trying to match her smirk as best as I could, “Oh, is that how you do things around here.” The moth went right for the flame: “Why, where are you from?”

“Italy.” (Which is, of course, not true.)

“Oh.”

Okay, not the most ethical way to win the argument, but it was effective. Besides, you can’t do those things to ravioli and get away with it.