charlotteann

I love this stuff. I know I’ve said it before several times on this blog and certainly in person. I don’t think people think of me as being a fiend for ramen as much as they think of me as a nut for pizza or Chinese food, but my appetite for this stuff is becoming insatiable. So insatiable I am willing to risk indigestion by putting %80 of a bowl of ramen for dinner on top of a large, late lunch. Whether its gluttony or hedonism, I enjoy ramen at restaurants and in the comfort of my own apartment at least twice a week. And last week a friend and I finally had our second ramen dinner together at Norikonoko in Berkeley, CA.

A fellow ramen f(r)iend

I had brought this friend to my personal favorite, Tanpopo in San Francisco’s Japantown, where we enjoyed two enormous bowls of awesome before he suggested we try his favorite spot. After our dining experience at Norikonoko it looks as though we’ll be trying to one-up each other, a challenge for which I am more than excited (and think I am winning already, hah!). Norikonoko is a very cozy restaurant with a sliding door and maybe ten tables. It’s a bit beyond the hubbub of that mess of retail stores and coffee shops that exist for UC Berkeley students on Telegraph avenue inside of a dark wood grotto of restaurants and shops. Although ramen isn’t exactly a main feature on the menu (I’d say the robata dinners had that spot), there were four options available. In my experience, the fewer options you have for a particular dish the better: the restaurant isn’t trying to please everyone and (hopefully) as a result prepares those few variations very well.

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I know what you’re thinking, “Charlotte, you should TOTALLY give up photography and get into graphic design cuz you’re sooo talented, obvi!”

But seriously, there is a multitude of take-out options in my neighborhood and I rarely take advantage of any save the pizza place down the street after a night of responsible alcohol consumption. The affectionately so-called Tendernob lies somewhere between the Tenderloin (smells like pee) and Nob Hill (smells like money) features many different cuisines, especially if you are willing to expand its borders to the upper blocks of the ‘Loin. There are Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Mexican, and Indian restaurants scattered among the dive bars and liquor stores. A few blocks up and you see more Thai, pizza, the famous Pearl’s burgers, and even an Indonesian place catering to the hotels and Academy of Art students. And me, I live here. When I’m lazy I’ll make instant ramen instead of getting take-out, but when I’m sick and the dishes are piling up and I haven’t showered in two days, I’ll spend the dough on a couple entrées if only for comfort’s sake.

Enter the Osha Thai Noodle Café on Geary St., a mere two blocks from my building. Osha is a family-owned thing, and this nearest location is apparently the original amongst the seven locations in San Francisco. It’s open until 3 AM on Fridays and Saturdays and every time I’ve walked by on such an evening it’s packed. In fact, it usually looks busy. A fact I coupled with a recent article from 7×7: The 2010 Eat+Drink Reader’s Choice Awards to pick Osha for this maiden voyage of Take-Out Tuesday. In short, it was not so good. In length, allow me to explain using words and pictures.

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It’s been a little over two weeks since my 10-day vacation to Portland, Oregon. I wish I had tried more of the street food vendors but overall I think I ate pretty well. Apizza Scholl’s was at the top of my food to-do list, which didn’t have much else on it as specific: food served from a truck, local fare, and noodles (obvs). I accomplished all of these things, and more! But for the sake of brevity and an inflated sense of content on this blog, I will not be covering everything I ate and photographed in one post. No, I shall draw it out, probably over the next two weeks. Let’s start with breakfast!

I already mentioned the totally delicious breakfast I had at Jam on Hawthorne, but let’s talk about the pho I had for my morning repast a couple days later at Pho Gia in Northeast Portland.

Pho Tai

It was really quite good but a bit heavy on the noodles and light on the beef.

Noodle overload!

Plenty of yelp reviewers had mentioned the clovey sweetness of Pho Gia’s broth and I agree but without issue. Aside from over-noodling, my only other problem was with the onions: having not been entirely severed from the core (?) the slices were all stuck together and difficult to separate. Is that too nitpicky? I don’t think so. Enjoying pho should be easy and uninhibited. After slurping as many noodles and spoonfuls of broth I could possibly contain, I drank my ca phe sua da (good, but not especially strong).

All done!

So that’s it for today, kids. I’ll be back soon with tales of the not-so-good noodles, the meat stuffed with other meat, and, of course, the pizza.

I have returned from my travels to the East Coast and my homeland of Montana. I also turned 24, so please feel free to wish me a happy birthday in the comments section so I feel loved and it looks like my blog gets comments. I am planning on revising the focus of this whole endeavor so that it might concern more pragmatic things. But before we get to that, here are some photos from two of my favorite places to eat in Billings, Montana: Caramel Cookie Waffle (first three images), and Bistro Enzo.

Pastrami sandwich

Chicken curry soup

Lemon bar

Beef short ribs

The Caramel Cookie Waffle bakes, cooks, prepares, and sells some of the most delicious and wholesome food I have ever had. Seriously, you can taste the love that went into its making. Well, maybe not so much in the Dutch candies they sell, but everything else there is simply and delightfully good. Aside from their sandwiches, pastries (savory and sweet), soups, salads, and baked goodies, they sell some seriously scrumptious stroopwafels. I already ate the 10 I brought home with me and thus have no photograph, but here’s the wiki article in case you have no idea what I am talking about. If you should find yourself in Billings and in need of a tasty, home-cooked style lunch, go here. Then buy a bunch of their cookies and give them to your friends so they will have no choice but to love you forever and ever.

Bistro Enzo has been a favorite of mine since they opened. The head chef is one cool dude, too. The food is consistently innovative and eco-conscious. They also have a kids menu and very talented servers - I’ve had worse at more expensive restaurants in San Francisco and New York. My lousy photograph in no way represents the melt-in-your mouth awesomeness of those (grass-fed!) beef ribs. I shouldn’t have ate all of them because of the crême brulée I was to eat later, but I did. And I liked it.

Now if you go to Billings you’ll know what’s up, at least for two meals. I have been eating at these places for years and they refuse to disappoint me.

Coming soon: packing your lunch.

No, no .. not yet anyway. I have been eating soup every day but not photographing it. Did you know that soup is really hard to photograph? It reflects light in weird ways, the steam will fog the lens, and the utter roundness of the bowl isn’t very interesting. I had some pho at Pho Tan Hoa the other day and it was delicious as usual. The other three days I consumed Maruchan instant ramen. Sometimes I add tofu, cilantro, Thai basil, and sriracha. No matter how you dress it up, it’s good.

In other news (because let’s face it, you might getting sick of soup) I dined at one of San Francisco’s recent additions to the pizza scene, Flour + Water. None of their pizzas featured meat save for sparsely scattered anchovies (one friend ordered the Pizza Bianca) and the salad menu was lacking in leafy greens. Maybe it was my fault for being in the mood for those things. Or maybe it’s because every pizza restaurant ever has those things and I had reasonable expectations, even from a menu that changes daily. So, anyway, pasta = back-up plan. All of their pastas are made fresh daily (yeah!) and mine was really good (I had the green something with pork cheek). The fried peppers were good albeit oily, and while I don’t care for sardines the presentation was nice. So yes, I enjoyed my pasta and our appetizer, but let’s get to my biggest gripe: the wine. Or rather, the wine glasses. Flour + Water probably had a decent list (I know next to nothing about Italian wines) but I really like my red wine served in a glass made for red wine. It’s unpleasant to try and stick your nose into a white wine glass and if I am going to shell out $12.50 for a drink I best be able to inhale its oaky nuances pain-free.

I caught my own food! The hunt wasn’t quite like that described in Michael Pollan’s third chapter of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and I won’t be writing about it as well or in such detail, so if you want to know how a lobsterman works, there’s a Wikipedia page just for you. I didn’t actually pull my future dinner out of the water (I’m not strong enough to haul water-logged buoys) but I did pick it out of the bucket and held it briefly while I stretched two fat rubber bands onto its claws before dropping it into another bucket. Once a lobster is captured it spends the rest of its life in some sort of bucket filled with seawater, including the one in which it will likely be boiled to death. Ocean, trap filled with rotting fish, bucket, pot, stomach, … you know the rest.
This is what lobsters eat:

After my time was up in Maine, I took a bus down to New York City to visit some old friends. I ate pizza in two boroughs, a sno-cone from a street vendor in Flatbush, and drank my very first Skittle bomb. Tragically, I also had some camera issues. My neutral density filter - it served me well in Maine - was stuck to my haze filter. Being somewhat paranoid, I refused to just take both off and leave the lens surface vulnerable to the elements. Almost all my photographs from New York are as a result vignetted, blurry, and underexposed. Oh well!
The lovely lady I was staying with made some delicious guacamole for me and her boyfriend to enjoy after we played a game of Scrabble, which I lost by a wide margin. I met another friend at The High Line for lunch, but I was a bit late thanks to the Q train and we ended up walking from 16th St. up to 34th St. so she wouldn’t be late to work. This was okay with me as it placed me rather conveniently near B&H, where the sales associate I cornered could not help me with my filter problem. So aside from not being able to take good photos, losing at Scrabble, and sweating profusely on several journeys between Manhattan and Brooklyn, I had a wonderful time.

My flight back to San Francisco involved a layover in Austin, Texas. I chose to scarf down two BBQ tacos from a Salt Lick “truck” located on the other side of a security checkpoint from the food court version. I walked between these two establishments at least three times, debating the best way to get a good deal on my airport food. This is why you read my blog; I go above and beyond. The Salt Lick (food court) charges about $12 for a plate of food, and about $14+ for a sandwich. You can also buy an entire brisket to bring with you on the plane, presumably as a gift for whomever you are visiting. Turned off by the outrageous prices for a stupid BBQ sandwich with a mushy side and the thought of being gifted an entire brisket purchased at an airport, I wandered over to the cart that sells the same meat on a tortilla for $3.99 a pop. I bought two tacos - the brisket (!) and pork - and a jubilantly labeled iced tea from Sweet Leaf Tea for about $11. I could have spent the same amount on only one kind of meat, but instead I got two. I win! The pork, which came with a scant amount of green cabbage, was definitely better than the brisket (go figure) and the tea was indeed sweet. As far as airport meals go, this one was actually decent. If you find yourself in a similar situation and want to drink a beer with your BBQ, go to the taco cart (closes at 6PM) because it is located right next to a stage, which has a real live band playing real live music in front of a bar. Don’t mess with Texas.

Pork soup dumplings at Taiwan Cafe in Boston
I definitely love soup dumplings. My first were somewhere in New York’s Chinatown some number of years ago after my dad read about them in one of his guide books. Wherever he goes, a half dozen of those damn things are purchased in advance and then given to me to browse. Why does he buy them if he wants someone else to find something good? Luckily, he dragged us to soup dumplings and I fell in love immediately after the first scalding slurp.
I admit I haven’t tried very hard to relocate that restaurant in New York. It might be gone for all I know, but the memory of it remains and I love me some dumplings no matter what Chinese restaurant I may (frequently) find myself in. I again went with yelpers, finding their appraisal of the Taiwan Cafe’s soup dumplings to be somewhat convincing. They weren’t exactly bursting with flavor but they did the trick. Hit the spot. Gave me a fix. Whatever. Next time I’m in Boston I’ll try a different place, though.

Pizza (again!) in Chatham
So, the picture I took of the sign outside the place we had lunch specifically for this blog entry didn’t have the name of the restaurant on it. I suck. They had sandwiches, wraps, crepes, and an ice cream shop right next door. I think the ice cream was their primary attraction, and it’s across from the Impudent Oyster. My pizza was absolutely delicious and certainly gives the aforementioned PIzzeria Regina a run for its money. I had a bite of my friend’s scallops kabob wrap and it was pretty good but rather bizarre.

Well! That’s it. I am feeling too hot (temperature-wise, of course) to go on. I know I take lots of pictures of the things I eat, but I use my camera for other activities, too. Here are some of my favorites from my recent trip to Massassassachusetts:

Swans!

Hermit crabs!

Folks!

It’s been awhile since my last entry because I was in Boston. I went to Cape Cod, too, but that’s for later. As very few of you probably know, I have never lived anywhere for longer than a year or so (not including my hometown of Billings, Montana). My current residency in the Bay Area will have endured two years this September and I am not quite sure I want to call it home. The truth is I have no idea where I want to end up. New York is too big, San Francisco has a boring climate, states in the mountain time zone are pretty but rural, and Europe is too far away. You can probably see where this is going: I really, really liked Boston. They have a Chinatown, beautiful brick buildings, mass transit, and no shortage of young, straight men. I also miss snow and my family - two things much more likely to visit Boston than San Francisco. This decision has at least a year and half to figure itself out however, so let’s talk about what I ate this weekend.

Pho at Le’s Restaurant in Allston


I went with yelpers on this one. That it was 2 blocks from my friend’s apartment went into consideration as well. Allston seems like a relatively cool neighborhood, although I have only visited twice and I have a very soft spot for Asian restaurants and supermarkets. It reminded me a little of Washington Heights in New York but with smaller buildings and a highway.
The pho was quite tasty and considerably “cleaner” than my go-to spot in San Francisco. The beef was plentiful and lean, but everything was cooked by the time it reached the table. My friend chose a vermicelli dish with impeccably fried imperial rolls. Her veggies were crispy and accompanied by tasty sauce. She mentioned several times after we finished busting our guts that she would be returning. If I lived in Allston I would, too.

Pizza at Pizzeria Regina in Boston’s North End

If I did move to Boston, I would try my hardest to live in the North End. Potentially weak nightlife and difficult parking aside, it’s beautiful and home to Italian stuff, like pizza. Ah, pizza, my one and only love …
Pizzeria Regina is quite popular. I selected it based on an article on Serious Eats from last year. There was a serious line outside when we arrived (around 1 PM on a sunny Sunday) and we waited around a half hour for a table. They serve pizza exclusively which is totally fine with me. We ordered the Capricciosa (prosciutto, mushrooms, ricotta, parmesa, mozzarella, and fresh basil) and our own concoction that wasn’t very good. Theirs was delicious with the crust and the ricotta-to-parmesan-to-mozzarella ratio as notable wins. The decor and paper plates make for an excellent time warp to the 90’s, so if I end up in the North End I’ll definitely be back with a better camera.

I ate some other things, too, but it’s time to stop blogging. I maxed out a memory card between Boston and Cape Cod and there are plenty of stories to be told. Stay tuned!

So I flew from San Francisco to Long Beach, then took a red eye flight to Boston yesterday and/or today. Even though it took the check-in guy and I some time to sort out how I could avoid paying $50 for my overweight bag, I still like jetBlue - they actually have free snacks. Alas, I have no pictures of those blue potato chips or the animal crackers because I was asleep when they were handing them out. But before I got on my plane to Long Beach, I hit up the Firewood Grill café near gate 12 in the international terminal at SFO. Not the one you see immediately after security, mind you. This was that perfectly fine airport bar & restaurant’s loser little brother. All of their pre-made sandwiches (prices unmarked) had tomatoes, the service was pretty slow, and my Italian sausage sandwich looked like this:

I know what you’re thinking. Well, maybe not exactly, but it’s something like, “Gee, who orders a fatty, greasy sandwich before a long flight?” or “Duh, airport food sucks!” You’re right about the first thing. However, I have had some totally decent airport grub after I got over how much it cost. Not at the Firewood Grill. You know what else sucked about the Firewood Grill? It took a long time because they botched my order. Not cool in an airport, dudes. Also, what’s up with that hexagon to-go container? I’d never bring that thing on an airplane. Maybe I am a little cranky because it’s raining over here in New England and the A’s lost to the Red Sox, but step it up little Firewood Grill brother! Even though we jetBluers have free snacks we always appreciate a real meal before flying.

Mmmm, take-out. Convenience is tasty, especially if you pick the right place. I have a few standbys here in San Francisco’s Tenderloin/Tendernob neighborhood I inhabit, including Milan Pizza and Chutney. Admittedly, I haven’t explored too much: I’m cheap. Sue me. But because it’s Tuesday (the day of the week best suited to go with the words “take out”) and I am avoiding groceries in light of my upcoming trip to the East coast in a week I walked a block up to Eden’s Mediterranean Turkish and Greek Restaurant for a chicken gyro.
I have to say it was absolutely delicious. Ready in 3 minutes and only $6.00. Convenient? Check. Cheap? Check. Lots of yummy dressing but not enough to make the lavash fall apart, crunchy veggies (normally there are raw tomatoes, but I hate those stupid things), and fabulously marinated, moist chicken. Two noms up!