A blog about dining, cooking, and eating in and around Orange County, California.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Dippin' Dots - Huntington Beach
What does it mean when something that bills itself as "The Ice Cream of the Future®" instills nostalgia? It means I'm getting older.
Unless you happen to frequent Boomers or amusement parks, Dippin' Dots--once the rage in malls along with Spencers Gifts and other 80's relics--are a rare sight these days. The novelty was invented back in 1987 by a university graduate student who took a good idea (to freeze ice cream droplets in liquid nitrogen) and turned it into a business. To put it perspective, that's the year of Dirty Dancing. Where we you then? If you were a teenage girl, you were possibly in a mall eating one, snapping gum, listening to Madonna, your hair in an Aquanet coif.
Me, I was probably with fellow nerds playing the original Legend of Zelda on an NES. Oh how that gold cartridge shined!
Eating these ice cream pellets thawed out memories frozen in time and made me realize how far we've come from our youth. Also, it made me remember how damned cold these things are! After the fifth spoonful, my tongue was thoroughly in a state of cryo-stasis, numbed and sapped of warmth. Before that happened I was actually able to enjoy the ice cream, which really did taste like banana split and birthday cake, two flavors created by mixing other pellets together.
Ah, The Boiling Crab. You and you alone have figured out how to do it. When others have faltered, you continue to dazzle, you continue to expand, onward and upwards from the humble store in a forgettable mall in Garden Grove, to the San Gabriel Valley, where tastes are finicky and discriminating.
Even here, at the newest outlet at Rowland Heights, wait times are routinely long and frustrating. But the rewards are great. Your minutes spent thumb-twiddling outside will eventually get you a table inside, draped in wax paper and you, with a bib tied around your neck.
You look damned silly with it. But you'll be glad you set aside your dignity for once. The best stuff here is steeped in a butter-y, furiously red-tinged sauce that will get all over the place. Anything not covered will be sprayed crimson like a CSI crime scene.
Once you don protection, dive into a pile of seafood that's simply prepared for reasonable rates. Mostly importantly, everything is as fresh as if the dock were right outside. This is how to do Cajun seafood boil. Drinks served in paper cups; rice scooped into to-go containers.
Catfish is fried into flaky strips as supple as custard. Fries are cloaked in a dangerous chili powder that makes you wince and reach for more.
But the thing to get is the shrimp ($8.99 a pound). The crustaceans, fat and plump, come out in a clear plastic sack and will be best bang for the buck, yielding the most meat pound-for-pound.
Do it Whole-Shabang, which is an ingenious and patentable concoction made from butter, lemon juice, Zatarain's and lots of garlic. Opting for mild is sufficient. Anything hotter and you should've probably brought goggles, lest you want that stuff to accidentally get into your eyes and cause blindness.
Strip each critter of its head, suck the goods from its skull, being careful not to let its sharp appendages poke you a new orifice. Dig into the underbelly, and disrobe it of its shell and tail. Eat the spindly legs and take the sweet meat for once last dip in that sauce before eating. Repeat.
And oh you'll need rice. Plenty of rice.
By the end you'll see the dozens of beady eyes looking up at you from a pile of spent casings. Survey the carnage you have wrought. Lick your fingers with satisfaction. Wipe your throbbing mouth and sweaty brow. You've done well here, my friend.
The Boiling Crab (626) 964-9300 18902 E Gale Ave. Ste. A Rowland Heights, CA 91748
Now this is how I like my food trucks: when it practically comes to me.
Piaggio On Wheels just happened to be exactly where it needed to be at exactly the moment I needed it to be there.
And when I found them at the Blackmarket Market parking lot, there were no lines, save for two guys in suits who were already eating their dripping tacos, standing next to their car.
After them, I was the only customer. It was a sleepy Friday.
Jose Piaggio, once a restaurateur, now a nomadic chef with family in tow, tended to sizzling griddle at the back of the vehicle. I heard the clang of his spatula as he prepared my meal. His wife, having taken my order moments before, was tidying up. Their young son, who's out on summer break, sat patiently behind the steering wheel, looking out into the distance.
Soon my order of my Argentine sausage sandwich was ready. And I took it to eat in my car, parked under the shade of a tree. I kept the door open, windows rolled down. The breeze blew through.
I sank my teeth into their crusty bread, a sturdy loaf with the ultimately soft center that was soaked through with the oily run-off of the chimichurri they slathered on like spackle.
The sausage--a spicy, red-pepper-flecked specimen split in half with the open sides fried brown--had a coarse kind of meatiness, and was actually quite lean in comparison to how much of that delicious oil leeched out.
Later in the week, I would rendezvous with them again. This time at an equally convenient time and place on a leisurely and quiet Saturday afternoon. We took two empanadas, a chicken and a caprese. Each were crimped in different ways to tell them apart. Though the shells were fried to a delectable crispiness, the fillings were a bit scant. Again, the chimichurri filled in the blanks. Amazing how much heavy lifting this sauce of mostly parsley and olive oil can do.
The skirt steak tacos saw more chimichurri. Its abundant serving of meat was practically wearing a chimichurri toupee. Their tofu taco had a single spear of the bean curd the size and shape of a French toast stick, covered in a thousand-island colored sauce that accounted for much of its flavor.
Let's see, where is Piaggio On Wheels going to be at today?
Piaggio On Wheels (949)350-6557 http://www.piaggioonwheels.com Various locations in OC, check website or Twitter
Pop's Cafe is the kind of place I didn't think existed any more--the type of diner you only see in either old film noirs with Bogart or latter day movies that involve DeLorean time machines. The tiny-as-a-shoebox dining room, heck, the entire building seems stuck in a Norman Rockwell painting, dated somewhere between the 30s or 50s.
There's a counter with red swivel stools that's already loose and wiggly from decades of use. You'd half expect the customers who saddle up to it to read newspapers with Dick Tracy comics and hang up their fedoras as they enter. Above our heads, precariously hung fans sweep the air like the sputtering propellers of a plane about to take off and attack the Germans. Quaint is the word I'd use here, and in a good way.
As Gustavo Arellano wrote in his excellent Hole-in-the-Wall piece on it this week, breakfast is the meal to get here. And they serve it up until the point they don't, in the early afternoon. The best time to come are Sundays when street parking is free and eating breakfast for lunch can be called brunch.
The matriarch of the Korean family that runs the place, a warm and affable lady, will refill your coffee mug till you can't bear to consume any more caffeine. But once the clock ticks 1:30 p.m., she'll start turning away any new customers. "By 1:30 p.m., we're outta here!" she smiled at me, glancing up at the clock. Weekdays, they finish up by 2:30.
Their hash browns are hash browns as hash browns should be: massively portioned, gilded in a crispy browned outer crust where starch met griddle. The rest is fluffy and ethereal, resisting little to your fork as if it were mashed potato, and actually, just as buttery.
A plateful of it, partnered with two eggs and corned beef hash that's got the same nice sweetly crisp brownness on its crust, will fuel you up for hours, supplanting the need for lunch and dinner. The meal comes with buttered toast, the densest I've ever seen and completely unnecessary if you don't intend to chop down a tree afterwards.
And oh, the way they do their eggs here is also notable. Unlike say, your local Denny's, they know the difference between over-easy and over-medium.
Even better than the hash browns are the Irish potatoes. It's crispy on two fronts: that now-familiar outer browning for one, but also bits of green pepper and onion that snap with garden freshness. It's the kind of counter balance you need when you tackle the gut-bomb of the sausage biscuit they've drowned in a gravy as rich as a milkshake. Underneath that white and silky loveliness is a bonafide sandwich with a patty as thick as a gourmet burger.
You wish there's one of these in every street corner, perhaps your own. There'd be no trouble getting up out of bed in the morning when breakfasts like these await. Nevermind that you would not likely want to do anything else besides crawl back in it afterward.
Pop's Cafe (714) 543-2772 112 East 9th Street Santa Ana, CA 92701-3505
How long has it been since you heard the screeching wail of a band saw grinding through animal bone. If you've been only to Ralphs and Albertsons for your meat, I'm guessing never.
It will be a strange and disturbing din indeed, one reserved for horror movies with Rube Goldberg plots instigated by freaky puppets. To hear one is to be at an "ethnic" grocery store, be it Mexican, or Asian, where the dirty work of actual butchery takes place not behind closed doors, but in your face, full frontal and uncensored.
Though distant at first, you'll hear the unmistakable squeal when you walk through the sliding doors of T&K Food Market in the heart of Little Saigon, where traffic is hectic and parking scarce. Inside the store however, it's more serene, save for the sound of the saw and the PA system which will play some warbly Viet pop when no one is chatting up the specials in Vietnamese.
Above you in this airy, spotless warehouse with skylights and wide aisles like a mini-Costco, there are cameras pointed at you at every turn. You know this because directly in front of the turnstiles, three TV sets are tuned to two dozen closed-circuit camera feeds. It's a not-so-subtle message to shoplifters: "We're watching you and our band saw is sharp."
As you get closer to the butcher, your olfactory senses take over. A fog of death seems to settle around the area. The smell of fresh meat, of sweet blood and fetid offal is thick enough to wade through. These are scents typically locked away under Cryovac and cellophane. Here the odor is airborne. If you were in the African savannah, a breeze that carries it would surely attract predators.
I ask the butcher to cut my chosen pork spareribs into a size that I communicate by holding up the space between two fingers. He nods, and the bones are passed through the saw as though it were butter.
Later, I pay for my butchered bones at a checkout counter which looks like any other, complete with flat screen computer monitors that play commercials along with my tally. But with every beep of every barcode swipe, I still hear the blades wail. I know I'm not at Safeway anymore.
T&K Food Market (714) 775-6678 9681 Bolsa Avenue Westminster, CA 92683-5906
If you already know about it or even had it yourself, this post will neither be timely nor informative.
I just felt the need to document, perhaps for my internist, that I ate it this week. The Double Down, as you know, has been called an abomination of marketing--a culmination of everything that's wrong about fast food culture and the latest in the kind of corporate one-upmanship that previously brought us Taco Bell's Crunchwrap Supreme™ and Hardee's Monster Biscuit™.
But first, a primer just in case you've been living in a grass hut the past couple of months: the Double Down is KFC's chicken sandwich where the bun is replaced by two deep-fried chicken breasts.
Inside, there are two slices of cheese, sauce, and of course, bacon. The bacon, I think, is a key ingredient, and not because it really brings anything to the party except more fat and salt (more on that later). No, the bacon is there because doing anything these days without bacon is like Lady Gaga without the bizarre outfits.
Bacon = Bras That Shoot Fire = Attention.
Yet despite it all (actually, because of it all) I wanted none of it. I avoided it as if it were a movie with live action animals that talk. I even turned down my editor's request to do a piece on it. My fellow Weekling, Das Ubergeek, was finally stuck with the task. His last words were to remind us that he took one for the team. (I haven't forgotten, Dave, I haven't forgotten).
But then with a product which seemed designed like a college fraternity dare (Dude, try this thing I made last night!), I finally tried one because someone dared me.
"Aw c'mon. You're a food blogger. It is your duty to at least try it!" a friend (and the soon-to-be, bunless-chicken-sandwich co-conspirator you see pictured above) goaded.
So I caved and went.
It's true what everyone's said. It's salty. Insanely and almost unbearingly so. That first bite is like a sodium shock to the system. Every pore of my tongue got immediately parched, robbed dry of moisture. I'm telling you, you can melt driveway ice or cure meat with the amount of salt that's in this thing. It's not just the breading either; every millimeter of the flesh is super-saturated with sodium.
But then a strange thing happened. On the second bite, and every successive chew afterward, my mouth became acclimated. Like the proverbial frog in hot water, I started building up a tolerance. It actually stopped tasting salty, and started being edible. And the bacon? Pretty soon, it didn't even taste like bacon, but a flavorless piece of nothing, which really says something about how overwhelming the salt content was.
With my shell-shocked tastebuds dulled, I actually found myself saying to my friends, "Hey, this isn't that bad. Stick it between two slices of bread and you get a $5 chicken sandwich. It's sort of anti-climatic actually."
...Which is when I got cocky. I decided that hot sauce was what it needed. So I opened a packet with a picture of the colonel on it and poured the entire contents over the remainder of the "sandwich". That, mi amigos, was a mistake. Now it was even saltier, and also soaked in sour vinegary-ness.
I must have drank 10 cups of water that afternoon to rehydrate myself.
So, doctor, if you're reading this, for the record, I only had one Double Down. It was my first, and I promise, it will be my last.
KFC (949) 559-4240 15463 Culver Drive Irvine, CA 92604-2850
If you have already made up your mind about shabu shabu, i.e. you don't buy into it because of one (or all) of the reasons below:
a) You're boiling meat in water. b) You're paying through the nose for the privilege.
...read no further. I agree with you: shabu shabu is, for the most part, expensive for what it is. I am not going to change your mind with this post. So stop reading now. You have been warned.
Are the rest of you still with me? Good.
Yes, even though I know I could accomplish the same thing at home (I even have access to an induction shabu shabu pot), I still occasionally find the need to go out to get it. Why? Well, making shabu shabu yourself inevitably results in an unwanted excess of raw food that lasts for days. There is only a finite number of dishes you can make with shabu shabu ingredients.
So when the itch to water-boil meat hits (which, fortunately, only happens once a year for me), it's usually laziness that brings me to restaurants like Shabu Shabu Bar.
This one, however, I'd been hearing about for months. It actually ups the ante on shabu shabu's DIY nature in that they provide a mortar and pestle for you to grind your own goma (sesame seed sauce). Call it silly, call it stupid, call it counter intuitive. It's the same reason why people do 1000 piece puzzles or climb Everest: just so they can say they did.
Anyway, the grind-your-own-goma bit is just for show. No matter how much elbow grease you put into it, the seeds will never turn into a paste. Instead, the waitress (who will pity your efforts) will pour in the real sauce from a bottle and then amp it up with garlic, scallions and a dash of chili oil. She'll do the same for the ponzu if you let her.
And that's another thing about Shabu Shabu Bar that endears it to its fans: for a DIY joint, you get more service than you would at a normal sit-down. It's like they're compensating. She'll skim the scum off from your pot, mix your sauces, serve rice, make conversation, and even prepare your noodle soup with the now flavorful water once you've finished cooking your meat.
For our meal, in the guise of being smart and savvy shoppers, we shunned the smaller plates (which go upwards to $20 for around eight to ten slices of meat) and decided to go whole hog, er, whole cow, on the meant-to-be-shared $50 Yokozuna Platter, which the menu said consists of about 40 or more slices of rib eye.
Only when it arrived did I realize what we had we gotten ourselves into! Sure, most of it was air, but this was sliced beef formidably stacked into a literal meat mountain, looking much like those giant paper-mâché volcanos kids make for their grade school science projects.
The Man v. Food enormity of the task ahead made me queasy. I'm not the kind of guy who relishes overstuffing myself. When I looked over at my lovely dining companion, and remembered how small her appetite was, I thought to myself: we're screwed. We're never going to finish this, even if I had fasted the whole day (and I hadn't).
At my first swish, the lightness and wispiness of it gave me confidence. The ponzu sauce really takes the edge off the richness of the meat, which, by the way, is planed to the sheerness of tissue paper, sliced against the grain to disintegrate on contact with your tongue--probably one of the best shabu shabu meats I've had.
Around the fifteenth slice, I started getting the meat sweats. I abandoned my rice, using it more as a resting platform to put my cooked beef before I can summon the strength to pop it in my mouth.
By the final two pieces I felt lethargic, drunk of beef and excess. I took the udon noodle soup our server thoughtfully made for us and took a few sips. I couldn't even make myself eat a single strand of noodle.
Later at home, I was doubled over on the couch, groaning and feeling guilty at how much I ate, and actually, so was she. Yeah, maybe leftover shabu shabu ingredients in our fridge wouldn't have been so bad.
Shabu Shabu Bar 1945 East 17th Street Santa Ana, CA 92705-8603 (714) 954-0332
I like vegan restaurants like I like magic shows. They entertain me in the same way: wonderment through trickery. Even though I know I'm being fooled, in the end, I'm happy to be left scratching my head and asking "How'd they do that?"
Take for example the chicken in Loving Hut's orange chicken, though it squeaked, it chewed and tasted like chicken. I knew it wasn't chicken, but gosh darn it, how did they make it so uncanny. It tasted more like chicken than other things that are supposed to be chicken (ahem, McNuggets).
But it is also because of this that being a vegan chef is actually easier these days than being a magician. Think about it: Movie special effects, Penn and Teller, and that masked guy who gave away all the secrets have left audiences jaded and expecting more from their illusionists. Poor David Blaine's resorted to sitting atop lightpoles and such to get attention.
Vegan chefs, on the other hand, just have to do a little better than the lowest common denominator of processed foods and things that masquerade as meat.
For instance, have you tried real maple syrup after you grew up with Aunt Jemima? It's the maple syrup that tastes fake. That's the world we live in.
I think that if we continue on the path that we're on, someday, when we're forced into eating paste pushed out of a tube by our robot masters, we won't know any better.
That's not to say Loving Hut folks don't strive to overachieve with their cuisine. This worldwide vegan chain seems to be hellbent on turning us into happy non-meaters. And yes, they're doing it with more than a little bit of culinary alakazams and abracadabras (not to mention some purported video propaganda that I've yet to see.)
The sauce lubricating the tofu and eggplant stir fry tastes like oyster sauce, but has no oysters. The nuoc cham dip for the deep fried egg rolls made my head spin. How did they make fish sauce that smacks of fish without fish? Magic, that's what.
Their deep fried shrimp is sort of close to the real thing (complete with shrimp stripes), but its the diversionary tactics that make the dish. The breading, the salt and pepper, and the bright mix of onions coalesce to become a vegan dish that exceeds the sum of its (non-animal) parts.
But perhaps the most daring trick Loving Hut's managed to pull off is the pricing. It is, quite possibly, the cheapest vegan food joint in O.C. The entire meal pictured totalled about thirty dollars and sated me and my normally carnivorous dining companions.
Tada! Flash! Bang! Curtains down! Thank you, I'm here all week. Try the veal...or not.
Loving Hut 237 S. Tustin St. # A Orange, CA (714) 464-0544
I needed bread. Some simple, cheap, factory-baked wheat sandwich slices would do. I was inside Freshia, my local Korean grocer, one afternoon when I realized I did. But after weaving through aisle after aisle and coming up empty, I asked the stock guy, a Latino man who was unloading a box of ramyun, "Where do you keep your Wonder Bread?"
"Oh, we don't stock bread here. But you should try the bakery up front. They have excellent bread!"
So I did. And boy, was he right. SamSoonYi, which rents out the space in the market, bakes a moist, flavorful sandwich loaf that we loved so much, we've bought nothing else since. Sara Lee, Wonder, Roman Meal, you can all kiss off. This bread, this simple half loaf, costing $2.75, has become my pantry standard.
Like I said, it's ultra-moist. So moist, in fact, that if you stand it on its side, the slices fall under the dampness of its own weight. Touch the surface and you can feel the moisture. And the flavor? It's unlike factory brands in that it has it. The taste is bright, salty, evocative of something homemade.
It makes great breakfast toast. To tell you the truth, I haven't tried using it for a sandwich, since I like it plain with a pat of butter. I had it the other day with Spam and eggs.
I would imagine other local bakeries, 85 Degrees C, for instance, would have a similar product. If you're reading this and you're not within three miles of the Freshia in Tustin, I wouldn't go out of the way to get it. Find your own local Korean or Asian bakery.
Besides that, SamSoonYi seems to only bake a half dozen or so at a time. Last Sunday, I got the last of two loaves. So I'm saying this last part more as selfish plea than anything: if you do end up here and find they've only got two left, leave me the last one, will ya?
SamSoonYi Bakery (Inside Freshia Market) (714)7340-8656 14551 Red Hill Ave. Tustin, CA 92780
I've no idea why Pho Bac in Irvine changed its name to Pho Ba Co. But you know what? I don't care. There might have been an ownership change or perhaps not. There are still other Pho Bac's around, namely Pho Bac Ky in Tustin and another in Irvine, on University.
But this one, which is the original that bred the others, has done steady business for years. It is arguably the most consistently popular pho joint in Irvine. The fact that I had to wait for a seat proves that it will continue to be.
Apart from the new logo, which depicts who I presume are the three female owners immortalized in cartoon form in a Charlie's Angels pose, the menu looks unchanged. There are still the endless permutations of pho (brisket, rare beef, tendon, etc.)--enough to keep busy the Irvinite who's too lazy to schlep it to Little Saigon.
As usual, I wasn't there for the pho. It was the special combo for me, which employed crinkly egg noodle instead of the white rice and a clear pork/chicken broth instead of their beef. Included in the soup, as it always has, is a fried wonton skin disc and a leaf of butter lettuce. The former is half submerged in the soup, which I save for last as long as I can, squirting Sriracha on it when I can't wait any longer.
The best part of the dish is actually the meatballs. Textured with bits of chewy tendon in it, they taste like they were homemade. Those haven't changed. What has changed is the way you can take your bowls. There used to be one size offered: large. If you're thinking of doing the dish, opt for it. The small is almost like an appetizer bowl of noodle soup and will not satiate. You will most certainly end up bumming off more food from whoever you are dining with.
After I finished the last drop, my chopsticks wandered over to my tablemate's rice plate, whereupon I noticed a few other things have changed. They're now serving yellow rice instead of just the plain. Also, the pho broth included for sipping isn't as lip-smackingly salty as it used to be.
By the end of it all, we were too full to order the Black Sea drink, a pandan and black jelly dessert slushie-thingy that we always make a point to order at the start of the meal but never get to when we finish. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Pho Ba Co 4250 Barranca Parkway Irvine, CA 92604-1733 (949) 857-8808
What does it mean when something that bills itself as "The Ice Cream of the Future®" instills nostalgia? It means I'm getting older.
Eating these ice cream pellets thawed out memories frozen in time and made me realize how far we've come from our youth. Also, it made me remember how damned cold these things are! After the fifth spoonful, my tongue was thoroughly in a state of cryo-stasis, numbed and sapped of warmth. Before that happened I was actually able to enjoy the ice cream, which really did taste like banana split and birthday cake, two flavors created by mixing other pellets together.
