Thailandia - Fullerton

A good rule-of-thumb on determining whether a Thai restaurant is owned and operated by Thais? Count the number of condiments on the table. The more you see, the more likely it is one.

Observe what I saw at Fullerton's Thailandia. We have sambal oelek (ground chile paste), naam plaa phrik (sliced Thai chiles in fish sauce), phrik dong (pickled chiles in vinegar), and phrik pon (dried chile flakes)--a quadruple power play of hot, hot, hot and hotter.


Why all the condiments? Thais like to customize their dishes to their individual tastes. And this isn't even the most I've seen. At other Thai restaurants, there has been granulated sugar, Maggi sauce, ground peanuts, and trusty bottles of Huy Fong Food's Sriracha (which is actually just a version of a Thai chile sauce of the same name) on the tables.


Now, I must warn you that the presence of these condiments does not guarantee greatness, nor authenticity; but man does it make everything better!

On the appetizer sampler we ordered--a platter of egg rolls, fried shrimp, shrimp rolls, and crab rangoons--I slathered, dribbled, sprinkled, and applied so much from the condiment array that my ears glowed red, my brow dripped with rivulets of sweat, and I was panting like a shaggy dog in August.


It may have even skewed my impressions on the pad Thai and pineapple fried rice we ordered, which my friends thought was simply okay. But I wasn't eating the same dish they were. Every spoonful of mine had at least three explosive rounds of Thai chile from the naam plaa phrik...which would be the way I'd eat everything if every restaurant I go to were owned by Thais.

Thailandia
2500 E Chapman Ave.
Fullerton, CA 92831
714-526-0777

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Pita Grill - Irvine

Force of habit and cheapness rules my daily work-lunch routine. At least once out of the week, if it's not Yoshinoya, then it's Wendy's. At Yoshinoya, I add extra chicken skin to whatever I happen to order (even the beef bowl), and at Wendy's I turn their baked potato into a sort of improvised shepherd's pie by fluffing up the potato good and soft with the butter and sour cream, and then slowly working in their chili. Try it yourself. You'll love it.

But there's now a third on the rotation. Pita Grill is a special place. A place that serves food I didn't expect a place like Pita Grill to serve. Their kebabs explode with juice and cooked to any degree of desired doneness. Twirling columns of meat are shaved with a handheld device that whirrs and whinies. The most popular is the chicken, piled in snowy mountains and eaten with pita bread after being slathered in a potent garlic toum, one of the best I've tasted which is as good as, if not better than, Zankou's.

And then there's the veggie plate (shown above).

For a little less than $10, I can choose any 5 items from their mile-long side dish display, a pick-and-choose array full of veggie entrees that I actually want to eat, including a krab salad I took an immediate liking to. There's also well-seasoned falafels (two per order); fried cauliflower so addictive you forget it's cauliflower; hummus as smooth as butter cream; and many more items that would cost a fortune if you ordered it a la carte.

Pita Grill
3800 N Barranca Pkwy. Ste N
Irvine, CA 92606
(949) 552-7482
http://pitagrillirvine.com

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Pudding and Boba Milk Slush at Capital - Irvine

I may have mentioned that I am addicted to the pudding and boba milk slush with “special sauce” at Meow Meow Café. This has proved to be a problematic addiction. I live in Orange County. Meow Meow is in West Covina. I've explored the alternatives here in OC and until recently, none have measured up. I even tried Half and Half, which was supposed to be known for the drink, but found that it was lacking that certain something that makes Meow Meow's drink so irresistible--a drink that I willingly make the drive to West Covina almost weekly for it.

This last weekend, after another long slog to my milk slush Mecca, we discovered that Meow Meow Cafe was closed. There was a sign on the door that said they'll be shuttered for two weeks for "beverage training"...whatever that means.

So back home to OC we went, sad and milk slush-less, but not before I remembered that Capital at Diamond Jamboree offered two pudding-and-boba milk slushes (or something like that) for the low price of $5. Meow Meow charges that for one!

Was it the catnip that Meow Meow's concoction was? No. But it is actually good in a different way. The slush has an almost pandan-like flavor to it; the boba is soft and pleasureable. And although absent the addictive brown sugar syrup Meow Meow's drink uses, Capital's has a gentle sweetness all its own.

It is the closest to Meow Meow's yet, and most importantly, half the price...because if I'm addicted to Meow Meow's drink, I'm also to bargains.

Capital
2700 Alton Pkwy Ste 127
Irvine, CA 92606
(949) 252-8188

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Lemongrass Chicken Salad at Greenleaf Gourmet Chopshop - Costa Mesa

Salads get a bad rap. It’s the name: salad. We Americans associate the word with lettuce, usually iceberg, which is flavorless, bland--the antithesis of a steak. For those on a diet, salad is punishment. But perhaps the comedian John Pinette put it best when he said this about salad:

“Salad isn't food. Salad comes with the food. Salad is a promissory note that something good is going to happen...”

It’s something you eat not necessarily because you want to, but because you want to say you did. But I’ve eaten plenty of salads. I love salads...provided it has things in it that can be loved. My favorite salad is the Indonesian dish gado gado, which is technically called a salad but has tofu, hard boiled eggs, and a peanut sauce that can make anything it touches edible. In fact, there are a lot of Indonesian dishes that are technically salads. It's just Indonesians don't have a word for salad. Salad is food. Food is salad. My unproven hypothesis is that the word “salad” exists only in meat-centric societies that needs something to describe a food that contains mostly vegetable.

The lemongrass chicken salad I had recently at Greenleaf Gourmet Chopshop, which has made a name for itself in making salads, is another salad in a short list of Western World salads I’ve enjoyed. When I ate it I felt good about myself. Perhaps it’s because the restaurant is designed to make you feel good about yourself and your dietary decision to eat there. There’s a working garden outside and non-HFCS soda dispensed in the drink fountains. The place looks like a log cabin built by hipsters.

The salad I ate has chicken, but it was beside the point. This salad would have been good without the chicken. What makes it a great is everything else, including the tender, delicate baby mixed greens, the mango, the grilled pineapple, the jicama, the toasted coconut, the cashews, and most of of all, the lychee vinaigrette that has hints of Thai chili, Thai basil and yes, the perfume of that magical herb, lemongrass. This is a salad that's more than a promissory note; it's a salad jackpot.

Greenleaf Gourmet Chopshop
234 East 17th St.
Costa Mesa, CA 92627
(949) 200-3950
http://greenleafchopshop.com

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Banh Tom (Sweet Potato and Shrimp Fritters) at Van's - Garden Grove

There are two things you need to order at Van's Restaurants. First and foremost are the banh xeo. Van's is, without question, the reigning ruler of these crispy fried Vietnamese pancakes that can be best described as a cross between a French crepe and a Venezuelan arepa. You eat it with a bunch of herbs, sluice it with fish sauce, making little lettuce-wrapped burritos with the scraps of crispy fried batter and the oil-wilted bean sprouts and shrimp.

The second thing you need to order is the banh tom. In fact, just order the banh xeo and banh tom. The two will make what I consider a very lovely lunch.

Banh tom is deep-fried simplicity at its finest and most basic. They take sweet potato, lace it in a light tempura batter, then drop it in the oil with these thick, fat, juicy, gigantic whole shrimp. Traditionally, like at Brodard across the street, they are supposed to arrange the sweet potato sticks to form little rafts on which the shrimp rests. No such effort is made at Van’s. Van’s doesn’t do much more than throw a mess of the potatoes into the fryer and follow it with the shrimp somewhere in the middle. But somehow, Van’s banh tom is much better, crispier, sweeter, more delicate and more decadent than Brodard’s.

Be prepared on how greasy the thing is. It straddles that fine line where you’d say it’s too oily but never goes over it. It’s perfect tangle of hot, fried food. You eat it the same way you eat the banh xeo: with fistfuls of herb and cold dunks into that ambrosial fish sauce.

I should warn those who’ve never been to Van’s that this restaurant is old, well-worn and grimy. The floors seems to be perennially strewn with bits of food from the last group of customers who just finished their own banh xeo and banh tom feasts. There will be a few discarded stems and bits of torn napkin that may not have had a chance to be swept up. The overworked busboys simply can't keep up with the demand for tables and the ravenous appetites of those who come for the banh xeo and the banh tom.

Van's
14122 Brookhurst St
Garden Grove, CA 92843
(714) 530-6858

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The Viking Truck - Orange County

Yes, that is a Space Shuttle in the background. No, it's not a real Space Shuttle, but neither is the Viking ship parked in front of it. The Norse vessel is, in fact, the Viking Truck, a soldier itself in the army of luxe loncheras that has invaded Orange County the past couple of years. But the irony was too delicious for me not to snap a pic, and also, order a corn dog.

Years ago, when this food truck craze was just in its infancy, I wrote somewhere that I wished the Disneyland Corn Dog Truck (you know, the one at the end of Main Street) would break free of its moorings and do a victory lap around Orange County. It offered what’s not only the most affordable and the best thing to eat in the Magic Kingdom, but also the most wonderfule corn dogs this side of the OC Fair.

Well, that’s never going to happen. I’ve seen the Little Red Wagon move. It creeps along at a snail’s pace as if it were stuck on half a gear. And I’m pretty sure the DMV does not consider it street legal.


That’s where The Viking Truck comes in. It serves corn dogs, freshly dipped gigantic ones about the size as Disneyland's. I’ve not done a side-by-side comparison, but I like these just as much.

The batter isn’t as thick, nor are they lopsided and malformed like a petrified amoeba--one of the best qualities of a Disney corn dog--but it is more delicate, and slightly creamier also. The Viking Truck’s batter actually melts after you breach the outer crust. And the wiener beneath is thicker, a better tasting dog than I presume Disneyland now uses (they reportedly changed it to a “healthier” pork-and-chicken blend of some kind).

And there’s this fact: a picture of the Little Red Wagon with Tomorrowland in the background isn’t nearly as anachronistic.

The Viking Truck
http://www.thevikingtruck.com/

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Goldilocks - Las Vegas

If you like Filipino food and happen to find yourself in Vegas, get thee off the strip and locate Goldilocks on your Google Maps app, stat! You won't regret it. Filipino food, which is surprisingly plentiful in Sin City, is still unappreciated by non-Pinoys even in this increasingly metropolitan town in the middle of the desert; but this, from what I can tell, is where the local Filipinos go when they want a good, bountiful pot of sinigang, thick kare kare, and binagoongan fried rice.

You might be dismissing my recommendation right about now, thinking that you've been to the Cerritos Goldilocks and that it wasn't "all that" compared to Magic Wok. But the Vegas Goldilocks operate their kitchens their own way, answering to no one but their own high standards. It may be in the same Goldilocks family, but the cooking here is as different from the Cerritos branch as your mom's compared to your aunt's.


We ordered a bowl of sinigang and it was one of the finest I've sipped in a long time, with mustard greens, actual pork spare ribs, and pieces of okra that slowly thickened the broth. And as always when we go to this Goldilocks, we ordered the ukoy, a fried nest of shredded yams, zucchini and carrots rendered crispy and greaseless with a whole shrimp stuck to it and a sour-sweet-soy dipping sauce you use to douse.

Don't even try to find ukoy on the menu at the Cerritos Goldilocks...they don't have it, because (say it with me) what happens in the Vegas Goldilocks, stays in the Vegas Goldilocks...

Goldilocks Bake Shop & Restaurant
2797 S Maryland Parkway
Las Vegas, NV 89109
(702) 368-2253

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Mortadella Pizzetta at Mesa - Costa Mesa

Mozza. Ortica. Il Dolce. Pielogy. Yadda. Yadda. There's a lot of pizzas out there. And a lot of them are good. A lot of them are great. But you know what's my favorite pizza right now? The one you see pictured above, offered and served not by a hyped-up or Naples-certified pizzeria that touts its wood burning oven or the Batali behind the curtain, but a hip, small plate restaurant that has been hip for a long time now.

Yes, it's Mesa. And their pizza is friggin' awesome. That pretty much summarizes what I said when I bit into the first slice. "This is friggin' awesome," I said to my tablemates. And they agreed. The crust is perfect--not soggy, not tough, as thin as those hand-tossed pies from all the places I mentioned, but tender, more pliant, and still in possession of that bubbled-burnt edge that I like to savour slowly at the end, especially when the crust is this good.

And the toppings? This one had mortadella, sharp parmesan, blubbery burrata, red onion, sofrito and something called "finishing oil"; but it matters less what they are and more that whatever it is, it's infused, melted in, incorporated, at one with the crust. I really have no other way to describe the pizzas at Mesa that what I said a paragraph ago: it's friggin' awesome.

Mesa
725 Baker St.,
Costa Mesa, CA 92626
Phone:(714) 557-6700
www.mesacostamesa.com

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Ahi Ahi Sushi Bar & Grill - Foothill Ranch

I admit it. If it weren't for the fact that Open Table had them listed as one of a few select 1,000 point reservations, I wouldn't have given Ahi Ahi Sushi Bar & Grill a chance. Would you? It's located in Foothill Ranch, which is a really inconvenient town to visit if you don't live or work there. Check the map! It's tucked away near the actual foothills, nowhere near any freeways that don't charge toll.

So even before I even saw it, I pegged Ahi Ahi Sushi Bar & Grill to be a stereotypical suburban sushi joint in a stereotypical suburban strip mall in a stereotypical suburb, which these days means teriyaki bento specials with California rolls, miso soup, a citrusy-dressed iceberg salad, and all that jazz (which may or may not be the easy-listening kind).


This isn't to say that I refuse to eat in such places. I have a fondness for a good bento combo special as much as the next guy. It's just, why go all that way when I have my pick of stereotypical suburban sushi joints inside the stereotypical suburb in which I live?

Well, the reason, like I said, was the 1,000 points on Open Table.

But by golly, Ahi Ahi turned out not to be just a stereotypical suburban sushi joint; it was a GREAT stereotypical suburban sushi joint. They had California-type rolls with actual crab meat that, yes, tasted more of actual crab than the mayo typically used to hide imitation. Moreover, they served a seaweed salad with cucumbers that ate like an actual salad, not a side dish. And they fried lobster nuggets, coated in thin batter hiding the sweet, sweet meat that redeemed a species of crustacean I've always thought was way overrated. They even made their sweet potato fries crunchy by encasing the spears in a bonafide tempura.


And when was the last time a stereotypical suburban joint offered grilled asparagus wrapped in bacon this excellent--a dish I usually have to go to a robatayaki or an izakaya to order. Or the miso-glazed seabass--probably the closest thing to fish pudding as I ever want to eat and the dish that convinced me, once and for all, that I'm coming back, 1,000 Open Table points or not.

Of course, the meal did come with a miso soup and salad. But even the salad surprised me. The iceberg was actually chilled. No, I mean chilled deliberately. When I bit into it, it sent shivers up my spine and made me actually say these words to my lovely dining companion, "This iceberg lettuce is amazing!"

And for dessert: fried bananas with ice cream, which is more of a stereotypical suburban Thai restaurant thing than Japanese, now that I think about it...but who's stereotyping here? Not me!

Ahi Ahi Sushi Bar
45 Auto Center Dr.,
Foothill Ranch, CA 92610
(949) 600-9833

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Two 40 South - Brea

Julian Serrano at Aria - Las Vegas

If you hadn't noticed, Vegas ain't what it used to be. Name chefs like English and Ramsay rule over the all-you-can-eat buffets, and the monopolizing presence of French Canadian contortionists have all but rendered the Siegfried and Roy's extinct.

Which is fine by me.

Buffets aren't really my thing and I'd rather see Steve Carrell's send-up of Las Vegas magicians than actually go to a Vegas show with one.


Not that I'm particularly fond of those self-important Cirque du Soleil snooze-fests, either, where weird is done for weird's sake, but the Beatles show at The Mirage? Kinda good because, well, they don't use that New Age Euro crap as soundtrack.

After seeing it, what will probably be my last Cirque show for a while, we chose a restaurant that was conveniently located in our hotel--the reasonably priced Spanish tapas restaurant by Julian Serrano, called, um, Julian Serrano.

It isn't too exorbitantly expensive or required that we be dressed up--a happy middle between the Guy Savoys and the downtown steak-and-egg specials.

Best of all, some of the dishes look like what my college roommate might have slapped together at quarter past midnight, which is kind of refreshing in a restaurant that looks like this.

Two fried eggs are laid atop fast food fries with cut-up Spanish chorizo (though I'm pretty sure he would've used hot dogs or Vienna sausages). The egg yolk oozed out like sauce, mixing with the spicy red oil that leeched out from the chorizo, creating a new substance that's better squeegeed by the fries than ketchup.


Then there was the "Black Rice", a creamy/chewy appetizer-sized portion of a sort-of Spanish seafood paella merged with Italian risotto. Colored as dark as crude oil by squid ink, flavored by sofrito and a decorated with a few char-kissed rings of calamari, we ate the thing while our lips made inky black streaks on the napkins.

We ordered an actual risotto after that. And it was already nicely cheesy even without the slice of manchego on top, with the grains retaining just a little bit of tooth. Between them, there were mushrooms, big, squishy, tasty ones hiding like undiscovered jewels that announced themselves boldly when I least expected.


The last thing we tried turned out to be the item that we saw pictured on posters that advertised the restaurant throughout the hotel--the tuna raspberry skewer.

A cube of raw ahi, crusted with sesame seeds was the bottom building block; the top part was a raspberry Jell-O shot they described as "molecular"; and together it tasted as though you took a slurp of a smoothie right after sushi.

It's good, but it also encapsulated what Vegas can be: flashy but without a lot of substance.


Altogether the meal cost under $70 (with tax, tip, and a dessert I didn't mention), which is still steep, I know, but considering I don't gamble, I think I made it out of Vegas better than most schmucks.

Julian Serrano at Aria
3730 S Las Vegas Blvd.
Las Vegas, NV 89109
(702) 590-8520

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