hrj | Entries tagged with reviews: restaurants

I've become addicted to the restaurant reviews in Diablo magazine, since it has a lot of coverage of the part of the world I live in now. So I've been scoping out places to try on my "bike to the calorie-fest" program. The Rising Loafer cafe in Danville is perfectly situated for this program, given that it lies a mere two blocks off the Iron Horse trail. And it has a bakery! What more could one want?

I was a bit concerned that the Diablo review said the prime outdoor tables fill up quickly on weekday mornings, but it may be that 9am is still early for a weekend. (I left the house at a dawdling 7am out of concern for likely temperatures.). By the time I pedaled up to the lovely streetside courtyard, there were still plenty of al fresco tables available.

My usual test of a new breakfast place is the eggs Benedict and there was the added attraction that the advertised house-made English muffins. But I also wanted to try a specialty pastry, so I asked to substitute the giant cinnamon roll for the bread side. Well, no, they can't do substitutions -- so I happily ordered the roll separately and told them to hold the bread.

My plate arrived with a side of bread. But it was a slice of banana bread so I wasn't about to send it back to get trashed. On the other hand, I didn't have anywhere good to stash it in my bike tool bag. Ah well. It's a long ride.

The eggs Benedict passed the test with flying colors, mostly. The muffins were excellent and the eggs nice and runny. The Hollandaise seemed a little on the insipid side, but I tend to like it sharp. The dish came with home fries which were crisp and hot, studded with bits of rosemary. I spared them from catsup and used them to mop up the leftover yolk and sauce.

There was supposed to be a "fruit garnish" which was missing, but nobody else around me seemed to have fitted one either, so this may have been a menu change. The cinnamon roll was hot and fresh ... and somewhat unfortunately smothered in white icing. But with most of the icing scraped off it was definitely worth having ordered. Fluffy and -- other than the icing -- not too sweet.

At the end, having contemplated the logistics of taking the banana bread with me, I decided to nibble on it while loitering over email and writing reviews. Like the underlying cinnamon roll, it was not too sweet but a bit less moist than I prefer. (Although it may have been warm when cut and therefore evaporated a bit while I ate.). The walnut content was about right but maybe a higher banana content? At any rate, I finished it with my second cup of coffee.

All in all, a place worth returning to. And when I work up to my goal of taking the Iron Horse all the way to Dublin and back, it would make a good breakfast break ( with a somewhat lighter menu than today!).

Bette's Oceanview Diner is one of those iconic Berkeley places that a certain type of eater loves to mention loving. It's located in the 4th St shopping area at the foot of University that has the sort of collection of establishments that earn the nickname "gourmet ghetto". In addition to the Diner, Bette's has a to-go bakery next door and a line of baking mixes for their scones, pancakes, etc.

Although I regularly find myself swinging by 4th St on a weekend morning for one reason or another, I don't usually attempt to have brunch at Bette's due to the horrific waits involved. The first time I ate there, maybe half a dozen years ago, I had a maybe 20 minute wait just to sit at the counter and felt too intimidated by the "move 'em along" bustle of the staff to enjoy my usual paper-reading weekend brunch experience, although I recall the smoked salmon scramble as being delicious.

But this morning, having gotten out of the house before 7:30 to drop Dad off at BART for his conference in SF, I was looking for some breakfast place that opened before 8am and found that I'd hit the sweet spot where one could at least get a counter space with no wait at all. (I might have even been able to get a table with a minimal wait.) On the plus side, I'll note that the staff were cheerful, friendly, attentive, and prompt with every service they offered. On this occasion I felt none of the "move 'em along" vibe that I did last time.

On the minus side, based on today's meal, I have no idea how Bette's gained the reputation that leads to their popularity. I had an herb and cheese omelet, which comes with home fries and a bread item of choice for which I chose the lemon & current scone (my favorite among their commercial baking mixes). The scone was excellent: crumbly and moist -- crumbly enough that I had a near scone tragedy when my attempt to butter it led to structural failure and I was left buttering the resulting chunks individually. But they were delicious.

Alas, I can't say as much for the rest of the meal. The home fries were horribly greasy and rather scorched. Home fries should be crisp and browned, not crunchy and black in places. The herb and cheese omelet was so bland that I nearly committed the enormity of dousing it with ketchup. The handful of chopped herbs provided color but no flavor that I was able to discern. I was unable to determine what type of cheese had been used as it also provided no contribution of identifiable flavor. (It was a white melty cheese, so maybe a monterey jack or colby?) There was also a greasy feel to the omelet but I think that came mostly from the cheese rather than the cooking method.

Perhaps I should have tried the pancakes or waffles, given that the starch dishes seem to be their specialty, but on the whole I think I'll give Bette's a pass in the future ... even if I do find myself up before 8am on a Saturday and looking for food.

As I have mentioned on previous occasions, I'm not only a serious Jane Austen fan, but have a possibly unhealthy fascination with Austen "fan fiction" of various flavors. So it was a natural reflex to pick up a copy of The Watsons & Emma Watson, an unfinished Austen fragment worked up into a completed story by Joan Aiken, whose forays into this genre I had not previously noted.

I suppose it is every successful novelist's nightmare that, after their death, an industry will spring up to exploit their every sketch and abandoned draft. This, of course, is what fireplaces are for, though later fans are always grateful when they aren't used. It's hard to know what might have come of this fragment if Austen herself had returned to it and redeemed by a happy ending a protagonist whose life perhaps hit a little too close to home. All I know is that, having read past the Austen segment and two chapters into the Aiken work-up, I find myself completely uninterested in proceeding. It isn't that the character couldn't be made interesting -- she has every bit as much potential as other Austen heroines. But Aiken's writing is, to me, hopelessly pedestrian, awkward, and infused with "the researcher's disease". This last was obvious from the first page where the title character and her sister Elizabeth are doing the laundry together and we get an excruciatingly detailed catalog of Regency stain-removal approaches:

'Indeed yes!' agreed her sister Elizabeth, briskly giving a stir to various tubs of laundry soaking in solutions of household soda and unslaked lime. 'Those cloths you have there, Emma, can go straight into the copper, unless any of them is badly stained.'

'Only this handkerchief of my father's, which as ink on it.'

'Spread it out in a pan of oxalic acid. Or spirits of sorrel. You will find the bottles next door, on the shelf.'

To be fair, no other passages have been quite so egregious, but it was an inauspicious start. So Thursday evening, when I decided to go off and get a somewhat-overdue haircut, I went looking for a book to take with me for the waiting room and the post-haircut sushi that is part of my ritual (one of my favorite sushi places being a couple of blocks from where I get my hair cut). And given that I found myself rejecting The Watsons for casual restaurant reading, I concluded that I should acknowledge the failure and move on to a more deserving member of my to-read stack. (Whereupon I finally started Jo Walton's Farthing and immediately became hooked.)

Oh, and the sushi place? Has gone downhill since changing management recently. The quality of the fish was lacking; the crab nigiri that were my favorite were absent; and the place was infested with screaming children, including one who was being allowed to randomly snatch trays off the sushi boats that were then returned to the display by a parent. Well, there are plenty of other fish-houses in the sea.

So what do I do with an "unscheduled" weekend? Let's see. Saturday: slept in until 10am or so, then cooked a nice complex breakfast. (Reason #37 I want a girlfriend: so I can have someone else enjoy my weekend breakfast cooking, too.) Mid-afternoon, off to go furniture window-shopping in consignment stores with

scotica, culminating in her buying a nice oak "lawyer's bookcase" that she'd had her eye on for some weeks. (Since I had the Element there, she actually had a way of getting it home.) Then off to a new (to us) sushi place in Palo Alto: Fuki Sushi. Really excellent food. We sat at the bar and stuck to nigiri, asking the chef to give us whatever he thought was good. (We had to persuade him that we really did mean "whatever".)

Sunday, it was up at workday hours to take the bike on BART to Orinda where I met up with

thread_walker and a couple other friends of hers to take Bear Creek Road up around Briones Park, ending up in Concord. Gorgeous ride! Two significant hills and several milder ones. Great scenery. Road-kill count included a couple of long-dead deer and a much fresher turkey vulture, plus many assorted squirrels and a large lizard. I ended up very tired but not even close to exhausted. Sometime around when we were coming into Concord my cell phone rang so after I peeled off to do some shopping at Fry's (printer ink and looking for a bicycle mount for the GPS with no success) I returned the call and it turned out to be

cryptocosm following up on my idea of commissioning him to build the camping-gear/sleeping platform for the back of the Element. Since he was calling from Sacramento, I figured I'd be home by the time he got there, but what with Fry's, taking the time to have breakfast (ok, I guess it was lunch by then), then getting off BART at Rockridge to do the grocery shopping on my way home, he actually got to my place before me.

So we have a design for my platform and the various lumber and hardware acquired. My job is to try to locate a neighbor with a table saw to make cutting the plywood topper a bit easier, then he'll come over some day in the near future to do the construction. I'll post pictures when it's finished -- that'll be easier than trying to describe the thing. The basic idea is to have a removeable framework that supports a sleeping platform, with space for gear storage underneath. The innovation is that the platform will compress sideways when not being slept on to allow a little less than half the rear of the vehicle to be open when desired. (For, e.g., convenience when dressing, and for the ability to transport, e.g., my bicycle inside the vehicle.)

And now I get to collapse and vegetate for the rest of the evening.

scotica came over for a belated birthday dinner, enabling me to shanghai her and the downstairs tenant into helping me cart the new grill up to the deck. (It comes unassembled and I was carrying it up in pieces, but the main grill unit still needed at least two people.) Then we went off to Cesars on Piedmont, the sister-restaurant to the tapas place I ate at before the Bryn Terfel concert in April. ( Read more... )

Saturday was Collegium, always a must-do for me. ( Mental Spaces and the SCA )

Since

klwilliams bugged out on the movie plans for Sunday,

scotica and I went back to the original notion of seeing The Seeker: The Dark is Rising rather than the new Elizabeth flick. ( Vast quantities of spoilers and much gnashing of teeth. )

( A brief excursion to the Mall. )

( And for a food tie-in, the Crab of Light defeats the Dark Mushrooms at the Mayflower Chinese Seafood Restaurant )

I've been meaning to get caught up on some other reviews, in particular, Alma Alexander's Hidden Queen/Changer of Days not-quite-duology, but it's the end of lunch break, so that will have to wait.

Dateline: Seattle Washington; No miles counted (used Bill & Eden's car); Current location of writing: Bill & Eden's house

( Wherein I fulfill cultural and culinary goals. )

Yesterday was my NLT (not less than) monthly not-a-date with

scotica and after ruminating on the inadvisability of planning any activities directly partaking of an Irish theme for St. Patrick's day I pointed out that there was currently a movie in the theaters starring Ioan Gruffudd that we hadn't seen yet, and she pointed out that St. Patrick was, after all, originally Welsh, just like Ioan Gruffudd, so this removed any need to come up with any other thematically-connected activity.

Movie Review: ( Amazing Grace )

It still being a brilliantly sunny day after the movie, we swung by the county park that heads up the hills west of Los Altos for as brisk a walk as can be managed without proper walking shoes. It turned out to be very productive because we started brainstorming ideas for a new "skins" story for me to submit for the new Sword and Sorceress volume and in the course of me reviewing the underpinnings of the magical and social structures of the stories so far, a Question and a Concept emerged that rapidly spawned a Puzzle and a Conflict with an intriguing Guest Character Appearance and an as-yet vague Method of Resolution. So in the space of a hour I went from "I need to come up with an idea for a new story" to "I need to start getting this down on paper!" Having started the brainstorming process by tossing around ideas for titles -- since the titles so far all have some sort of "skin" reference that ends up being a twist on the usual meaning of the reference -- I'm still debating a title.

scotica leans toward Skinned Alive but I'm doubtful because the usual sense is too close to what it would mean in the context of the story. I'm leaning towards Skin and Bones although we'd originally brainstormed that for an entirely different storyline.

Edited to add: I have been reminded that I'd later moved on to prefering the title 'Under My Skin'. Clearly the question is still under consideration in my back-brain.

Restaurant Review: ( Aldo's in Los Altos )