San Francisco walkabout - 8/13-8/24 (Part 2)

Part 1 gets us through the weekend. Here's the week's meanderings.

Included: Cancun, Eiji, Kirin, Lee's, Saigon Sandwiches

More...
Kuau: 08/17/09 - Dinner: We cooked! We had ravioli with asparagus in the sauce. It was good, and refreshing to eat a meal cooked in our own kitchen.

08/18/09 - Dinner: Vietnamese sandwiches. I bought two different types of pork sandwiches from Saigon Sandwiches. I also bought a pork salad and a pork combo (very inexpensive pate being one of the two types of pork) sandwich from Lee’s across the street. We’ll post more extensively on Vietnamese sandwiches shortly, as we are going to Chinatown in NYC in a few days to compare the best of the West vs the best of the East for this western rendition of an eastern food which was created after the West infiltrated the east when France took over Vietnamese and introduced French bread to this authentically noodle or salad meal.

08/19/09- Dinner: We met Tasha and her husband Mark in the Castro for sushi. We went to Eiji Sushi. The place is tiny and apparently has a decent sized cult following. For some reason, when we got home that night, Ellie’s roommate asked us if we had ordered two specific items from the menu. We had. ’m not sure if you understand. This place had like 6 seats. It’s tiny.

I guess they are famous for making their own tofu. Ellie and I split a tofu dish with a bunch of little sides (kind of like Korean, but much smaller, like Japanese) that was pretty good. The tofu was about half water, but somehow that was good too. I was pleasantly surprised, and even more surprising is that Ellie seemed to think it was pretty good too.

We then ordered a bit of sushi and a soupy dish which Ellie said was yosenabe. It was kind of like a seafood casserole. Not exciting in any way, but simple, clean, and filling. They were both pretty good. More like meh, not at all like bleh.

We had the strawberry mochi for dessert. This was really fun. It was one nice jumbo sized strawberry surrounded by red bean paste inside of mochi. It was mild and sweet and tart and extremely fresh and satisfying. A bit small though. I’d probably order it again, although I don’t think it’s quite worth a cult following. Oh yeah, Ellie’s roommate had asked if we got the strawberry mochi and the tofu. It’s all over Yelp too.

Ellie: I was surprised I liked the strawberry mochi simply because it was lined with red bean paste (to stick the strawberry to the mochi). It was actually one of the only times in my life I’ve liked red bean.

8/20/09 – Dinner: Burma SuperStar. See separate post on Burma Superstar.

Kuau: 08/21/09- Dinner: We went to the East Bay on Friday and ended up grabbing a quesadilla from Cancun in Berkeley. It was substantially worse than I recall the burritos being. I should have known since the prices had almost doubled since I went there last time and they had all this local farm crap on the walls. I wanted Mexican, not mexi-cali or some other biodynamic sauce.

Anyway, the quesadilla came with about 8 chips, was $7.00, full of grease and salt, and didn’t have any rice to soak up the grease or nullify the salt of the carnitas. I’m actually curious to eat an El Farolito's quesadilla for comparison (and because that place is amazing and it comes with half an avocado on it). Maybe I just haven’t had a quesadilla in a long time and they are all greasy and salty when compared to a burrito. Either way, it was very disappointing.

Ellie: I thought the most disappointing thing about this was that although the salsa bar looked amazing, and the salsas that we tried were awesome, they were super stingy with salsa cups. They gave us one with our meal, and when I asked for extra, he grudgingly gave me one more. I felt too guilty to ask again. Which is too bad, because the salsas we tried – I think avocado, mango, and a regular one – were great.

Kuau: We then walked to North Berkeley to pick a dinner spot with Andy Storrs and Billy. Ellie ran into a friend from high school drinking a beer while waiting in line at The Cheese Board for a pizza. Right after she finished explaining how he was this world class musician when he was 13 and apparently just got back from some tour, she ran into a friend from college. This was near a bus stop in front of a Safeway one block from The Cheese Board. It was weird. Ellie yelled at her second friend and explained how weird she thought it was.

Ellie: Oh shut up. I didn’t yell at her. I yelled ... with her.

Kuau: With. Sure.

Once that was over, we settled on Kirin. This is a Chinese place that became an Albany kid hot spot in the late 90’s when it came to town. I had been hearing about it for years, so I was pretty excited to eat there finally. It’s pricey for Chinese (which means meals are $13 instead of $10). We got mu shu pork for the table, which Ellie liked. I had been trying to convince her to get mu shu basically since we met, but she was convinced that it some made up California Chinese dish (which may be correct. Like crab rangoons on the East Coast). Anyway, we had mu shu last month at San Tung and she was ready for some more. They were good, and she liked it too, which is great because now I can order it in the future.

Ellie: We also got the Braised Fish a la Kirin, a chicken dish, and some curry, I think lamb. Clearly I don’t remember the curry very well, but that’s probably more because we had awesome curries 3 times that week. I think I need to eat a bad curry to clear my head. Actually I don’t know if I’ve ever had a curry that’s bad, so maybe good curry isn’t too impressive. The chicken dish was also good. The braised fish does actually deserve a mention, though. It was served in one of those cute little black pots and had wonderful flavor and texture.

Kuau: The other dishes were pretty good also, although I was a bit fooded out and sick of eating every meal out at this point. In fact, it is around this point that I started to feel like all food tastes the same. I actually mildly decided that I completely understand why people like to eat cheap food everyday and don’t like going to nice restaurants. It goes like this.

If you eat out every day, the food pretty much all starts to taste the same. Given that everything will taste the same, it makes sense to settle on something cheap, like a burger or sandwich on the East Coast or a burrito on the West Coast. Why bother spending $20 each at Kirin if you won’t remember the food when you can spend $6 at El Farolito and be more full and more satisfied? If a place is similar to El Farolito, but a walk away, then why go anywhere else? Pretty soon it makes economic sense to live above a cheap burrito restaurant and eat them all day. In fact, it doesn’t even decrease your food utils and it decreases your bank account more slowly than Kirin, so why ever go?

You could, of course, just cook. When you cook, eating out becomes fun again. So maybe Kirin would be a good place to go to if we lived in the East Bay and usually cooked. As is, don’t ever travel to the East Bay from SF just to eat at Kirin. Or even Rivoli. And probably even Chez Panisse. Unless you cook. Then you could maybe go to Rivoli. But even then, you can just find a closer Rivoli in SF.

But if you cook and live in the Berkeley area, then Rivoli is probably a great value.

Anyway, so Kirin was fine but it was in this weird category of above average Chinese with an American flair and above average Chinese prices. I don’t think Chinese is the right cuisine to do above average in. I want Peking duck, cheap dim sum, or a $9 shrimp dish smothered in syrupy sauce.