→ August 10, 2007
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Long Beach eats.

Since I got to my hotel around 11 am Pacific Time, it kind of felt like I was caught in between breakfast and lunch. It seemed like a good time to try Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles, recommended by at least two readers. Much to my surprise, I loved the chicken and didn’t care for the waffles. The chicken was “southern style,” although I’d dispute that since the breading was thin, but either way it was delicious, salty and spicy but not hot-spicy, and it had clearly just come out of the fryer. The white meat was still moist, which to me is always a good test of a kitchen’s frying abilities. The waffles, however, were pale and limp, clearly undercooked, with little sugar (needed for taste but also helps browning) and an overwhelming taste of ground cloves. I did order a biscuit on the side, just on a whim, and it was good even though it was no longer hot – nice flaky texture, buttery flavor, just lacked that crispy exterior I like in a good southern biscuit.

Sunday night I wanted sushi, and since my favorite place from last year (Kinokawa) isn’t open on Sundays, I tried Japengo in downtown Long Beach. It was excellent, with fresh and flavorful fish and very friendly and quick service. I ordered two nigiri, salmon and eel, and two maki, spicy tuna and avocado. A small edamame dish comes with dinner, and after I chatted up the guy making my sushi (from Mexico, but there was at least one Japanese sushi-ya behind the counter), I ended up with a freebie: a roll with salmon and avocado that had been tempura’d whole, served with two sauces, one teriyaki and one mayo-based that didn’t have much taste. I’m not usually big on semi-cooked foods like that – the salmon wasn’t cooked, but it wasn’t quite raw any more either – but I wasn’t going to insult the guy by not eating it, and other than that one objection it was excellent. I do think the salmon was farm-raised, since it was very pale, but it had a good flavor and I’m more concerned with that than I am with how it was raised. Japengo also gets points for very good green tea.

Monday breakfast was a return to the Pot Holder, which was my favorite of the two Long Beach breakfast spots I’d hit last year (the other being Egg Heaven a few blocks away). I went for the chorizo scramble, which – as you might imagine – is scrambled eggs with a healthy dose of chorizo sausage. If, as Mario Batali claims, parmiggiano-reggiano is the undisputed king of all cheeses, then chorizo is the king of all sausages, with a smoky, spicy flavor that can’t be replicated by any pretenders to its throne. The Pot Holder’s chorizo scramble was heavy on the chorizo; the eggs were a bit overcooked and so the whole dish didn’t really hold together, but let’s be honest: I was there for the chorizo. The dish also comes with some solid home fries, soft interior with a nice hard crust, and toast. Total cost for that plus tip was an even $10. I went back the next day and had one of the specials that included scrambled eggs (fine but slightly overcooked), link sausage (straight from a package), and pancakes (solid average).

Monday lunch was In-n-Out. I don’t want to hear it. I like their fries, and I’m not brooking any dissent here.

Dinner was with a friend from college at a place in LA right on the Santa Monica line called Sushi Sasabune. (This appears to be the restaurant’s home page, although it’s more focused on their Honolulu location.) I’ve never been to a sushi place like this. Sasabune bills itself not just as a restaurant that serves only traditional sushi, but as the veritable guardian of the sushi tradition. There are two signs at the front counter stating that they do not serve spicy tuna or other hand-cut rolls like California rolls. It’s not clear if there’s a menu for ordering à la carte; we ordered the omakase, which means that it’s the chef’s choice. As sushi arrived – usually two pieces at a time for each person – the waitress instructs the diners whether or not it is acceptable to use soy sauce on those pieces. The restaurant’s motto, which appears on the wrappers of the steamed hand towels served before the meal, is “Trust Me,” which one lengthy review posted on the walls outside the restrooms translates as, “Shut up and eat what I tell you to.” Such a restaurant wouldn’t likely stay in business long if the food wasn’t good – granted, it might stay in business a while because of idiots who would be drawn to the novelty of the thing – but the sushi here is amazing. The selection of nigiri included but wasn’t limited to halibut, salmon, yellowtail, two kinds of snapper, albacore, butterfish, and kampachi (a real standout, since I hadn’t liked it when I’d tried it previously but liked it here). The last item was a long uncut roll of minced crab and rice. Several of the nigiri came with a sauce already on them, and several had sliced scallions or other tiny accoutrements on top. What stood out about the fish was the amazing texture, which was softer than any sushi I’d ever had previously. The flavors were outstanding, and I can’t remember a dud in the bunch even though some of the sauce-sushi combinations were unusual (to me, at least). It’s not for the fiscally faint of heart: the total cost was over $50 per person. For that kind of money, I don’t just want good food, I want an experience, but Sasabune delivered.

Tuesday’s only new place was Kinokawa, the sushi place I’ve mentioned in chats before. I ended up eating a smaller dinner than normal; I went with soup, salad, some salmon and some unagi – very fresh – plus a cut roll that’s worth mentioning. Last year, they had some ridiculous cut roll (maki) that caught my attention; I remember it had shrimp tempura in the middle and salmon on the outside, and avocado in there somewhere. Well, this time they didn’t have it listed anywhere, so I ordered something similar in the hopes that it would be the same thing or close to it, but it wasn’t. The one I ordered, called the Frederic Roll (I’m sure that’s the traditional Japanese name, too), had shrimp tempura and avocado in the middle and spicy tuna on top. That was fine, but the whole thing was covered with ponzu sauce and a bit of a mayo sauce, and it was just gluttony – too rich, too sweet, too heavy for sushi. I usually avoid fancy rolls because they obscure the taste of the fish, but I was trying to unlock a memory, and unfortunately the teahouse was out of madeleines.

The last good new spot was another breakfast place, The Coffee Cup on 4th. I was pretty happy with the Pot Holder, but I have to say now that the Coffee Cup’s food is better – it’s just better prepared. I went with a special that included two eggs, two sausage links (better, but still generic), and two pancakes, and I ordered a side of toast. The scrambled eggs were cooked just right, barely cooked through but not runny. The pancakes were actually a little overcooked on the outside, with a slightly burned taste, but the cakes themselves were very good, with a light texture. (They came slathered in butter, which is really too bad, because there’s no way I wasn’t going to eat that part first, no matter how bad it is for me.) And unlike at the Pot Holder, the toast at the Coffee Cup wasn’t cold when it reached the table. I’d still have to try a chorizo scramble-type dish at the Coffee Cup to make the switch, but I’m just about sold.

One last note – I did try the Green Field churrascaria, just east of the park where Blair Field is located. Turns out that this is a chain, and I’ve been to one of their locations in Allston, Massachusetts. The food really isn’t that good. It’s not authentic churrasco, since the meat isn’t anywhere near seasoned enough, the feijão is bland, and there were no fried plantains (I don’t know if that’s really authentic, but I’ve had them at other churrascarias, and who cares if they’re authentic or not – they’re plantains, and they’re fried). And this particular place was very disappointing – one of the meats was beyond rare in the middle, while the lamb was well done (that’s not good), and the sides on the buffet table (bad sign) weren’t hot. Skip it.

Off to San Diego…

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→ July 14, 2007
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San Francisco eats.

My first meal in San Francisco was a dud, a sushi/Japanese place called Hana Zen. The fish was fresh, but totally tasteless, and the prices were on the high side. Skip it.

Breakfast on Saturday was at an upscale but very tiny restaurant called Canteen that does a simple weekend breakfast. I went with my standard plate. The scrambled eggs were really perfectly cooked, not runny but still soft, and the eggs were obviously very fresh. The hit for me was the home fries, made from red potatoes that were parboiled and then finished on a flat-top with just enough oil (or butter) to keep them from sticking. They’re not home fries, but they’re good. The chicken-apple sausage was either homemade or locally made, but it was not cooked enough for me. They do get extra points for nice presentation and for having green tea available as an option.

Saturday’s lunch was a visit to a sushi joint I hadn’t hit in six years, and wasn’t even sure I knew how to find. I stumbled across it while wandered around on Friday afternoon. It’s called Akiko, and it’s on Mason Street, not far from the Powell Street BART station and near Union Square. The place is tiny – four chairs at the sushi bar and maybe eight tables – but the fish is really fresh. The salmon was awesome, deep pink with a great texture, soft but not too soft. The unagi was great, although I’ve rarely run into bad unagi. Even the miso soup was good, tasting fresher than any I’ve had in ages. Just when I thought I was too stuffed to eat anything more, the last item I’d ordered, a spicy tuna hand roll, arrived. The thing was enormous, a good four inches or so long, with a generous serving of spicy tuna that had just enough sauce to flavor the tuna without ever making me think, “ugh, mayo.” And their prices are reasonable for sushi.

Memphis Minnie’s – The smoked andouille sausage was to die for, easily the best Q’d sausage I’ve ever had. It was like butter, but it was still thoroughly cooked, and even though it was a little spicy for my tastes, I ate every last bit of it. The pulled pork was good, smoky, just lacking a little bit of that sweetness that I’ve had in good pulled pork in the South, although it was easily remedied with any of the three sauces (North Carolina vinegar, South Carolina mustard, and Texas red) on the table. The texas beef brisket was good, but definitely a little dry, and it was the only meat left on my plate when I was done. The sides were a little disappointing; the cornbread (comes with every meal) was very sweet and had coarse-grind corn meal, which has a great taste but really needs to be cooked thoroughly (like polenta) before it’s added to cornbread batter. The baked beans were solid, with a heavy smoke flavor, but light on the brown sugar. I went for the French fries because they were hand-cut, but they weren’t any better than, say, In-n-Out’s hand-cut fries. Oh, forgot one thing – the sweet iced tea, named the best in SF in the most recent issue of Where magazine (or whatever that thing in my hotel room was), was like candy. Granted, I like my iced tea unsweetened, but this was practically iced tea syrup.

Dottie’s – This place was worth the visit for one thing alone: The scone. They make their own baked goods and the varieties change every day. I went for an apricot oat scone and was treated to a piping-hot wedge the size of a slice of a deep-dish pie. It was unbelievable – just slightly moist (like a scone should be), with huge chunks of avocado and the nice, complex sweet/nutty flavor of an oatmeal cookie. The meal itself was so-so; the scrambled eggs were cooked properly but were light on salt, the bacon rashers were thick and a little undercooked (I like ‘em crispy), and the potatoes were really light on salt. All of their egg plates come with two slices of homemade buttermilk dill bread, which was a very high-quality bread with a dense crumb, although I’m not big on dill.

My last meal in San Fran was a bit upscale, at a place near my hotel called Fino. I ordered a special, a grilled salmon with artichoke hearts and mushrooms, served in a white wine sauce with whipped potatoes. The salmon was fresh, clearly Pacific, cooked perfectly, and the sauce was light and thin so the fish’s flavor could come through. The “chocolate Fino” dessert, however, was a complete waste of time. It’s a chocolate pudding on a little raspberry sauce, and it’s bruléed before it’s served. Aside from the fact that I burned my finger on the glass bowl, the chocolate pudding was milk chocolate. Why bother? If I wanted a glass of milk, I would have ordered one.

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→ November 5, 2006
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Four days in Phoenix.

The trip to Phoenix didn’t produce any story gems like the St. Louis trip did, but it definitely had its share of good eats, even if I did make a few heretical stops at chain restaurants.

I arrived too late to get to Scottsdale Stadium in time for batting practice, so I shot up Scottsdale Road to a sushi place called Sapporo that I’d been to three times before and considered one of the better sushi joints I’ve been to in the U.S. (It’s also the place where I was when I learned that Darryl Kile had been found dead in his hotel room, something that came back to me when I walked over to the spot in the restaurant where I stood when I took that phone call.) I sat at the sushi bar, figuring I wanted to eat as quickly as possible to get to the game on time, and ordered Too Much Sushiâ„¢, a problem I tend to have when eating alone at sushi restaurants. I also went for their house salad, which turned out to be a lot more ornate than the typical green salad you get in sushi places but with the same ginger dressing, which is really all that matters. The sushi was good but slightly disappointing; I thought the sake (salmon) was a little bland, and the unagi(freshwater eel) wasn’t slightly warm like it usually is. The spicy tuna rolls were very good, but could have been a bit spicier. Anyway, I was pretty sure I’d exceeded my per diem – I’m responsibly for anything I spend over that amount – on just one meal, but when I got the bill, it was $21. Turns out that everything is discounted for happy hour, making that meal the best sushi deal I’ve ever gotten. I know Tony Bourdain warns people to run away from “discount sushi,” but this particular discount is OK.

Café Carumba, a rare high-end restaurant that serves all three meals, was a major find for breakfast, and I wish I’d had a few more days there to work my way through the breakfast menu. I hate doing the eggs/sausage-or-bacon thing every day while I travel – once per trip is usually enough – but it’s hard to find an alternative. (The hotel wanted $10 for its crappy buffet; I wasn’t warm to the idea of giving them $10 for a container of yogurt and a stale pastry.) At Carumba, I did do the eggs-sausage-toast bit, since it’s my usual test dish for a breakfast spot. The sausage patties were delicious, probably house-made, lightly spiced and not too porky. The eggs were overcooked, although I have to admit that they were generous with the portions; apparently the menu’s reference to “two eggs” meant ostrich eggs. The rosemary potato wedges were a little dry, but the flavor was excellent. But what caught my eye was the yogurt-and-granola dish for $5, enough to pull me back the next morning. I don’t know where the granola came from, but it was superb, not too sweet (since the yogurt is already sweetened – I don’t need a sugar rush at 9 a.m.) and with a little cinnamon, and the bowl was topped with a sliced fresh strawberry. That, an English muffin that turned out to be free because the server forgot to bring it out with the yogurt dish, and a cup of hot tea (they serve Tazo) ran $9 with tip. Whenever I get back to Phoenix, my first breakfast stop will be at Carumba for their migas, which they make with chorizo sausage; my failure to try them stands as my major food regret of the trip. Heavy, spicy food isn’t really the ideal breakfast in my book, but this is the sort of sacrifice one has to make from time to time.

Wednesday’s lunch was a trip to Phoenix Ranch Market, something of a religious experience for people who like to cook; it’s a huge Mexican grocery store that also features a large food court. Any time I walk into an ethnic restaurant or store and find it packed with members of that ethnicity (and, therefore, not with people who look like I do), I figure I’m in the right spot. Indeed, despite the fact that the woman who took my order was so flustered by the prior customer’s inability to make up her mind that my burrito ended up an all-carnitas version instead of carnitas with rice and beans, I’m still a huge fan. That plus an enormous tamarind juice that I couldn’t finish ran $7, and I left with three Mexican cookies that cost $1 – two were just like oversized Italian butter cookies, and the third was a cocol, a sort of Mexican sweet bread (not sweetbread) flavored with anise seeds that didn’t thrill me. The food court also offered ice cream, cakes and other pastries, and plenty of other lunch options like enchiladas, tacos, etc. The carnitas, by the way, were served without any sauce (which may be traditional, but it was new to me), but had all the flavor of an excellent barbequed pulled pork.

Wednesday’s dinner and Thursday’s lunch were at chain restaurants. I was in Peoria and options were limited. We’re just going to pretend that those meals never happened.

Friday was the best eating day of the trip, which is typical, since it was also the last eating day of the trip. Breakfast was the aforementioned yogurt meal at Carumba. Lunch was an unusual plate at the Blue Adobe Grill in Mesa, less than a mile from their ballpark. The food is New Mexican cuisine (as in, from New Mexico), and the quality was extremely high. But apparently I’m not a huge fan of the red chile, at least not the varieties used in the cuisine of New Mexico. The carne adovada enchilada had a perfectly good piece of slow-roasted pork that came in an extremely bitter and somewhat spicy red adobo sauce. I’m told that this is normal. Why people would willingly eat something so bitter is beyond me; the only things that should taste that bad are medicine. The bitterness overwhelmed the spiciness and the sweetness that I think lay hidden underneath. I don’t think this is a fault of the cook; I think this is how it’s supposed to taste, and suddenly I’m not so sure that a week in Santa Fe is on my list of vacations to take. The red chile rice was better, with less bitterness but less heat, and the “shredded” beef taco (served on two soft corn tortillas with shredded cabbage) was excellent; the beef was more pulled than anything else, and it was a pleasant surprise to have a taco that wasn’t made with ground beef cooked within an inch of its life. The meal’s highlight was actually the smoky green salsa that came with warm tortilla chips to start the meal. I was tempted to take the salsa with me, but my only potential vessel was a pant pocket, and I thought the salsa might ruin my cell phone.

Friday’s dinner was my one meal with companions, Jeff Erickson of Rotowire and my occasional comrade-in-forks Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus. Looking for a quick meal between BP and the game at Phoenix Municipal Stadium, we hit Honey Bear’s BBQ, a rather, um, unassuming little building on Van Buren just west of the 202. Smoke was pouring out of the back of the building, and once I determined that the place was not on fire, I took it as a good omen. I got greedy and went for the pulled pork, baked beans, and peach cobbler, which ran about $9 including a drink. The pork was excellent, very tender with good smoky flavor, and Joe and I had an extended discussion on the sauce, eventually concluding that the cook was going for a pan-American sauce, with some vinegar (North Carolina), mustard (South Carolina), and sweet (Memphis) flavors coming through. The beans were also plus, with bits of their hot links inside; Joe had a hot link sandwich, and gave it a thumbs up. Their links are hot but not killer-hot and were extremely juicy. The cobbler was good, although the layers of dough ended up a little gummy from sitting there while I ate everything else. Jeff got the ribs and thought they were good, but not as tender as promised (they claim “You don’t need no teeth to eat our meat!”). It was an incredible find by way of Google Maps and Chowhound, and I was still full three hours later.

Next year’s goal will be a chain-free trip to Phoenix. I’m optimistic; there are a lot of good eats to be had in that town, and I think I only scratched the surface of the Mexican scene.

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