Thai Nakorn [Stanton]

After failing to make the 2pm deadline in Torrance, we headed back to the OC with our heads hung low, thinking of ways to redeem our failed attempt at lunch. We vaguely remembered hearing that Thai Nakorn had reopened after the fire and made a few phone calls to find its new address. We didn't have much success, but thought we'd try our luck on Beach Blvd.

My SO thought he remembered seeing a bright red sign in a photo online so we kept our eyes peeled and were rewarded with a sighting only 10 minutes after getting off the freeway. We didnt even have to make a u-turn.

The new Thai Nakorn lacks the same charm as its original location near Knotts Berry Farm, though I'm told its pretty similar to the Garden Grove store that previously burned down. We were not deterred, however, thanks to our raging appetites which had been waiting to eat since noon that day. We perused the lunch specials and I settled on the Red Curry Shrimp while my SO went for his stand-by, off-the-menu order of Pad See-Ew. We rounded out our meal with a Thai tea to share and spent the next few minutes in quiet anticipation of our food.

The tea was a little too sweet for my tastes and admittedly, I dont take much of a liking to Thai food. However, I have had my share of travels in Thailand so I can attest to the quality and authenticity of the flavors. I enjoyed the tom yum soup and my curry had ample amounts of shrimp in it. They were a good size and someone even took the care to devein them before serving. It was spicy as hell, but overall, a solid Thai curry. I found the Pad See-Ew to be flavorful and similarly laden with large quantities beef and Chinese broccoli. My only complaint was that the noodles stuck together, indicating that the dish might have been stir-fried for too long or without enough oil [though less oil is more beneficial for your health].

Not the best Thai I've had, but still a good pick if you're in the area and are looking for a meal that cant go that wrong.

Thai Nakorn
11951 Beach Blvd
Stanton, CA 90680
(714) 799-2031

Il Chianti [Lomita]

Update September 1, 2007. See original post below.

Thank you Il Chianti for another stellar meal. Our choices this time leaned towards Southern Italian-Mediterranean preparations and seemed lighter on the whole. See the following montage of photos and accompanying descriptions below.




The Caribbean Salad was your standard green salad with a variety of cold seafoods. It was nothing spectacular, though the miso hybrid was a touch more interesting than your average dressing.

The Tuna Tartar initially elicited a sigh of resignation from me. While the concept is quite stale, Il Chianti does a fabulous interpretation, macerating the tuna into a puree and pairing it with fresh green onions and a light lemon-scented olive oil.

The Fried Octopus in a Balsamico Sauce was excellent as well.

The Crab Pilaf was a spin-off of the popular Squid Ink Risotto with the addition of a gigantic crab leg and clams and minus the fancy sizzling clay pot. Without the table-side presentation, the rice is as good as ever with the seafood adding even more flavor and interest.

The Fresh Tagliatelle with Pancetta and Paprika was the star of the night. The chewy tagliatelle was made in-house and easily one of the best pasta choices I've had yet. The sauce was tart with an earthy savoriness from the pancetta.

The Bouillabaisse was a cornucopia of shellfish with a broth spiked with sundried tomatoes and olives. Even after our server told us, we still couldn't identify the fish, which was chewy like calamari and flaked like black cod. The fish didn't work for us, though the rest of the dish was conceivably good.

---

June 5, 2007

We wanted to share Il Chianti with some friends, so we came for a second visit only one week after our first [I'm going to combine both visits into one review]. We were disappointed that the May specials hadn't yet turned over, but the extremely tall menu gave us more than enough options to choose from. Since we had pretty much exhausted the specials on our last visit, we opted to delve more deeply into the regular menu this time around.

Il Chianti is the type of restaurant where you can dare to be adventurous without regret. It is suitable for business affairs without being overly stuffy for a casual night out. And best of all, it is very reasonably priced.

The restaurant is well sectioned off with a few patio areas, an eat-in bar, private rooms, and a raised seating area with views of the open kitchen. Even if Il Chianti was packed to the brim, you would never notice because of the intimate set-up that makes you feel as if the restaurant is only a handful of tables. The vibe is of an Italian trattoria, though the chalkboard specials are written in Japanese.

The Japanese-Italian fusion restaurant serves up salad, pizzas, pastas and entrees divided up by primi and secondi courses.

Every meal at Il Chianti comes with their special bread, which isnt so special in of itself were it not for the olive oil and balsamic onion confit. A step above your average balsamic vinegar and oil combo, the onion confit adds both texture and depth.

Appetizers

We started with the special edamame appetizer ($5), which came shelled and with parmesan. I didnt think the Italian treatment did much for the edamame, but the dish wasnt bad by any means. Then came the soft-shell crab rolls ($3.80 each), which were not what we expected at all. There is a two order minimum on these, which are billed as an Il Chianti special. They come with two crepes, two soft-shelled crabs (one of which is encrusted with sesame], lettuce, a miso dipping sauce, and a spicy mayo dipping sauce. After you assemble them like spring rolls, you can toss your head back and revel in the melody of flavors. They are simple, but very good.

Pastas
On our second visit, we also tried the Il Chianti crab cakes from the Specials. We were misled by the vague description, which cited only that the crab cakes were served with two sauces when it also should have mentioned that they were more like potato latkes with crab inside. The cakes were so starchy that we could barely even see the crab, let alone taste it. The tomato and cream cheese sauces that it came went were equally lackluster.

After filing through the Chowhound boards, we decided against the heartier entrees and went straight to the pastas. The first was the gnocchi of the day ($13.50 medium), which came with an herbed tomato cream sauce, dried tomatoes and duck meatballs. The flavor of the duck in the meatballs wasn't as pronounced as I would have liked, but they were robust nonetheless.

On our second visit, we tried two more specials including the gratin of the day ($8.50) and the chef's pasta ($12.50). The gratin was a baked penne in a spinach cream sauce with seasonal vegetables and while we loved the decadence of the high-end mashed potatoes, we didnt care much for the zucchinis and bell peppers. The chef's pasta is always a duo and this time, it was spaghetti prepared two ways: (1) Marinara sauce with mushrooms and bacon (2) Cream mentaiko [cod roe] sauce. While the pasta was undercooked, the sauces played well off of each other with the thin red sauce balancing the heavier cream base.

Risottos & Pilafs
The restaurant's specialty is the squid ink risotto ($12.50 medium), which is served in a hot stone pot. They mix and serve the risotto tableside and between the two of us, we each had one piece of squid to share (three pieces to share when we had four people). Though that may seem skimpy, it's really the risotto that's the star attraction.

Pizzas
To make sure we had adequately visited the menu, we added the Umibe pizza onto our order for round two. It was a seafood pizza topped with mozarella, baby clams, dried tomatoes, and an egg. It was unique in both its toppings and its treatment of the egg, which was baked separately from the pizza. Interesting flavor-wise, but not necessarily mouth watering.

Dessert
Dessert has been disappointing on both occasions with the tiramisu being too heavy for my taste (though my SO enjoyed it) and the cheesecake souffle lacking in both texture and flavor. We wanted to try the pineapple panna cotta, but were told they were still making it. We asked how long it would take and our waiter told us, "many hours."

Although some of the dishes didn't live up to their menu descriptions, we attributed that more to a language barrier than poor marketing. While the waiters speak enough English to answer your most basic questions, come equipped with a Japanese menu if you have other special requests that involve ingredients and preparations not already listed on the menu at some point or other. We have thoroughly enjoyed our dinners [both this week and last], which came out to a reasonable $47 with dessert for two people and $96 for four.

*Thanks to Sheepathon for taking photos of our dinner.

Il Chianti
24503 Narbonne Ave
Lomita, CA 90717
(310) 325-5000

Aki's Bakery [San Jose]

Before coming to pick up my guava cake ($51 for 1/3 sheet), I scoured the Yelp postings to see what to expect. Naturally, the staff was disorganized, my cake was lost, and when found, it was unfinished. There were probably twice as many people working as there were customers and it still took us twenty minutes to get out of there.

But that was okay. I expected that.

I also expected that the cakes were probably going to look like the type of thing that a 12-year old would bake his mother on her birthday, complete with scraggly kids handwriting (but without the sentimentality). But that was okay. I knew my cake would look like somebody threw up all over it.

C'est vrai, n'est-ce pas? I wasn't exaggerating.

What wasn't okay was that I had expected an ethereally light angel food cake iced with a sweet-tart guava puree that perfectly offset whatever little sweetness was in the cake batter. But boy was I wrong.

The cake fell flat in terms of its one-dimensional flavor, which tasted of white sugar with every bite. The guava whipped cream laced inside tasted nothing like guava and the puree on top was too skimpy to make any lasting impression. I do have to give it to them though--the cake was very moist.

You can find better for your money. In fact, you could probably even do it yourself better.

Aki's Bakery
355 Meridian Avenue
San Jose, Ca 95126
Tel (408)-287-5404 or Fax (408) 287-0660

Pardon my dust

I have been contemplating keeping a separate food blog for some time now, but other endeavors have always gotten in the way. Last year, it was my website facelift and more recently, it has been maintaining my status as a Yelp Elite. But the more I thought about it, the less inclined I felt to do it. Switching over to my Blogger account, html overrides, templates, tags, moving my reviews [not to mention the broken "m" key on my keyboard]...hadn't I been through all this already? When will I ever learn to stop diving into my infatuations head first?

And then it hit me while we were having dinner last night. I had made some sort of gluttonous move at the dinner table when my SO remarked that hell for me would be a bowl of soup from The French Laundry and a pair of chopsticks for hands. The catch was that the bowl would be glued down to the table and I would spend my days futilely jabbing away at the liquid mess without ever managing to even taste a single drop.

My love affair with food has always been more than a passing flirtation--it is a passion.

As a matter of coincidence [or not], I have been up since 3am on account of my rumbling tummy. Since I couldn't get back to sleep, I started browsing templates for ideas and before I knew it, the sun had risen and I had gone through 5,000 blog skins without success. I eventually managed to find one by guenhwyvar that was acceptable for tweaking and have been playing with it for the last 14 hours (aesthetics are just as important as content). Consequently, I will be spending the next few days backdating reviews from Yelp and working out the kinks with my blogger.

So please, pardon my dust.

Musha [Torrance]

I thought Musha was inventive and I enjoyed the creative takes on the izakaya dishes, but the flavors were a little overwhelming for my palette.

The four of us came in with a last minute reservation on a Friday night and were reseated after they had a large party come in for the communal table. The atmosphere here is very convivial and true to what a Japanese pub should be like, complete with pitchers of Asahi and the like.

It took us awhile to navigate the menu, which is written lyrically in jPop English. We managed to parse out ingredients and preparations and ordered way too much food between the three of us. I remembered asking our waiter, "Do you think that's enough food?" To which, he shakes his head in disapproval and scoffs "No." We laughed about it later, but he ended up suggesting that we order the tuna carpaccio (pictured above), which also happened to be the most expensive thing on our bill. It was okay at best.

The portions were generous, but the ambitious menu items often failed to meet our expectations. There was just too much going on in the dishes. The baked scallop baguette was overwhelmed so much by the melted cheese, that we couldnt even taste the scallops. Hell, we could hardly even see them (pictured, right). The yaki udon was nothing more than a simple stir-fry dish.

And the waiter's scoff? We ended up with way too much food for the three of us. All in all, I would come back because I liked the vibe of the restaurant, the food was decent, and the menu, large enough that there was room for exploration.

* Photos courtesy of Sheepathon

Musha
1725 W Carson St Ste B
Torrance, CA 90501
(310) 787-7344

Katsu-Ya [Studio City]

Katsu-ya is tiny and even after arriving 15 minutes early for our 6pm reservations, we had to wait another hour. But let me tell you what, it was worth it.

Only 45 minutes after it was open, there was already a crowd outside the door of the strip mall restaurant. We opened the door only to find another mob, which we had to carefully navigate in order to make our way to the hostess.

We were lucky enough to get a same-day reservation and saw our names scrawled on a whiteboard behind the hostess' podium. It occurred to me that it would be very easy to just take a gander at the board and claim a table that wasnt yours, but I suppose they've been at the business long enough to know that they system works.

The moment our table was ready, we were shuffled into the dining room and brought a whiteboard of specials from which we were supposed to order. I recall a table next to us asking for the dinner menu and scoffing at their selections of terriyaki and tempura when there was a myriad of more interesting specials on their daily menu.

Dont miss the creamy rock shrimp tempura and tuna on crispy rice. If you're looking for something closer to the OC, Ikko in Costa Mesa also makes an amazing rock shrimp tempura salad.

The foie gras was overcooked and lacked the buttery smoothness that one expects from the dish, while the scallops it came with were less than "jumbo". The albacore w/crispy onions looked strikingly similar to the sesame-crusted tuna with warm spinach (pictured) which also came topped with crispy onions. The flavors through both were good, though the onions added little flavor (only texture). The dishes were still perfectly good in and of themselves.

We ordered some yellowtail and found it pretty fresh and well marinated. The honey handroll was lackluster and we've had better blue crab handrolls at Sushi Wasabi in Tustin. Next time, we'll have to peruse the raw offerings some more.

The menu goes on and on and even if you run out of new things to try, the regulars will tantalize time and again. Service was particularly efficient, though not warm in any way. With that massive line that they have outside, Katsu-Ya's objective is to get you in and out as fast as they can, and they do a damn good job of it without making you feel particularly rushed. Our food came out briskly after we had decided on our order.

Overall, we found the flavors to beinteresting without being overwhelming, though the menu can be intimidating. When you eat out as much as I do, intimidating becomes code for potential to impress. I would come here once if a week if it weren't for the hour-long drive.

Katsu-ya has a few other locations around LA, but this one's the original. There's a pretty fancy outpost at Brentwood if you're looking for more of scene.

Katsu-Ya
11680 Ventura Blvd.
Studio City,CA 91604
(818) 985-6976

Chikara Mochi [Gardena]

Chikara is like the Kee Wah of Hong Kong Moon Cakes--that is, there are other options down the street [namely Sakura-ya] that taste better and are cheaper, but this is the brand you buy on Chinese New Years. The mochi here are dainty, attractive, and often molded into whimsical shapes--in other words, perfect for gift giving. Although there is a wide assortment of mochi, manju, and daifuku, the fillings alternate between red and white bean. The texture of the mochi is a little more firm than I'd like and I find it only a few notches better than what you can get at the supermarket. Little English is spoken here, so you may have to find yourself venturing into the unknown.

Ultimately, you will find better bang for your buck elsewhere, but if you're in need of something that looks nice enough to give your mother-in-law, Chikara is what you want.

The picture at the right is actually of the Chikara display at Marukai and not the actual store itself. If I ever forget and go to Sakura-Ya on a Tuesday, I'll revisit Chikara so I can get you some real photos.

Chikara Mochi
16108 S Western Ave
Gardena, CA 90247
(310) 324-5256

The Ghetto Gourmet [LA]

The Gourmet Ghetto is worth a visit for the experience alone, but the food aint so bad either.

I first read about G.G. in a blog entry on underground kitchens by SF Chronicle's Michael Bauer. I was intrigued, but never managed to make the trip while I was still in the Bay. I was down for St. Patrick's day a few months ago and decided to finally give it a shot.

The formula is simple. A multi-course meal + eclectic location [anywhere from rooftops to garages to artist lofts] + communal seating w/11 strangers + BYOB + local performers = a damn good night doing something out of the norm for a reasonable $45.

An email to the list went out on Wednesday for the Saturday dinner and the address was revealed only the day of. When they say improvisational, they mean it on all accounts. Armed with directions to 624 Moulton Avenue in LA, we began our venture into the unknown.

After exiting the 5, we started driving through some seedy warehouses and spotted G.G.'s characteristic pirate flag. We had arrived and we had no idea what was waiting for us inside the inconspicious building.

We walked in to a cavernous art studio complete with life-sized trees, construction platforms, and a giant movie projection of insects and bugs of all sorts. There were about ten 12-person tables set along the perimeter of the room and we had prepared ourselves duly by bringing our stadium seat cushions with their high backs. We settled in at a central table, uncorked our bottle of wine, and waited to see who would be joining us for dinner tonight.

We ended up meeting a visiting Austrailian, a magazine editor, a freelance writer, and cheating husband among other characters. While the dim lighting allowed us to forgive the occasionally sloppy presentation and misled execution, we were very impressed with the level of sophistication that Chef Cynthia was able to achieve in what was basically the equivalent of an army tent kitchen. The menu was sent out with the address and though there were slight differences in the final product, we were pleased with the food overall. In fact, the ginger beer floats were TDF.

the menu:
Start: Hamachi Poke over Pickled Chiogga Beet Carpaccio with Shiso & Wasabi Caviar
Next: Warm Roasted Fingerling Potato Salad with Lemongrass-Curry Dressing, Scallions & Toasted Coconut
Entree: 5-Spice Pork Medallions with Ginger-Blood Orange Glaze & Forbidden Rice Pilaf
Dessert: Ginger Beer Floats with Coconut Macaroons

In between courses, there is entertainment for your enjoyment and the selection was nothing short of eclectic on the night we were there: a folk singer, a modern dance performance, and the crowd favorite, a man who hooks up an amp to guitar that is made entirely out of balloons.

Jeremy Townsend and his wife run the whole operation from beginning to end and from East Coast to West. They have a host of chefs who help them devise meals in NYC, Chicago, LA, and of course at home in the Bay Area. I'm proud to count Jeremy as a local Berkeleyan. If it's coming to a city near you, don't pass up the opportunity. And if you plan on going again, let's all hop on the bandwagon and make a night of it!

Gourmet Ghetto
Bay Area, LA, Chicago, and NYC locations to be announced

Eiji [Mission SF]

Eiji is a tiny hole in the wall smack dab in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the Mission. Make sure you make a reservation because the 10 tables fill up quickly.

They are known for their tofu, which is cooked over a portable gas burner right when you order it. It is served with a variety of condiments for your enjoyment and has a very mellow and subtle flavor.

We ordered a spider roll, which we weren't expecting much from, but were pleasantly surprised. The eel and avocado were cut with an exacting precision, which left for a gorgeous and fresh presentation. The roll was also slightly chilled, which I prefer for my sushi.


The best part of the meal was the homemade ichigo daifuku, which is a strawberry-covered mochi with a thin layer of red bean in between. Between all of my mochi shops, I haven't yet found a version that compares to these heavenly homemade treats.

Eiji
317 Sanchez Street
(between 16th St & 17th St)
San Francisco, CA 94114 (415) 558-8149

La Paella [Mid-City West]

I probably cant make any sort of testament as to the authenticity of the paella, but it sure is damn good. I was looking for a tapas recommendation in the area and La Paella was all over the Chowhound message boards and elsewhere.

The owner was very helpful in accomodating our last minute reservation change and we exchanged about four phone calls just to get it right. On the one hand, it's a hassle to deal with, but on the other, most restaurants arent as hospitable with their reservation policies.

The space is tiny and incredibly romantic. You'd never know from the looks of it outside, but the interior mimic an intimate dinner at your house over candlelight. We were the only large party in the place, which was otherwise filled with couples falling in love across the table.

We ordered 11 tapas dishes and the patatas bravas and the calamares a la plancha were amonst our favorites. Though I didnt think the tapas were anything special, we all agreed that we loved the garlic mayonnaise and olive pesto that came with our four baskets of freshly baked bread.

Again, the paella was delicious and we ordered fourservings for six people, which was more than enough. They served the women at the table first and our plates were much more abundant than the rest. If you're like me and dont eat much, switch with one of the boys.

La Paella confirms my suspicion that the best food in LA is a little off the radar, ethnic, and not overpriced.

La Paella
476 S San Vicente Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90048
(323) 951-0745