Four years ago I thought ramen was cardboard one microwaved and poured MSG on until it becomes edible. Don’t get me wrong, I ate it all the time, (and still do when my girlfriend leaves for the weekend). Then, while living in Japan, Sarah and I discovered a ramen shack dubbed “Juso Ramen.” No one knew the restaurant’s real name—reading Japanese is really hard, guys—but Juso was the neighborhood and Juso Ramen served the best bowl of ramen in Juso. Maybe all of Osaka.
Sarah loved Juso Ramen’s creamy pork broth. I loved their marbled pork belly. But what really set a bowl of Juso Ramen apart was how much garlic they used. Just an absurd amount. After eating there, my pee and nipples would smell like Garlic for the next 24 hours. My nipples! I hadn’t even known that was a thing. Since returning to the Bay, Sarah and I have roamed the Richmond searching for a ramen shop to fill the noodle-shaped hole in our stomachs, but none fit style and caliber of our Juso Ramen. Then we found Hawker Eats—an Asian-fusion izakaya and ramen shop brought to you by Judy Chen and Kevin Chen, formerly of the Richmond restaurant Kaiju.
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In September I wrote about Red Lantern, a pan-Asian restaurant and my first sushi-love in San Francisco’s Richmond neighborhood. So my heart was understandably broken when Red Lantern closed last month. But what the Sushi Gods take with one hand they give with the other. And what they gave was Sushi Delight.
Picture a half-Japanese, half-Korean twenty-something with a 10-gallon hat on his head and a stalk of wheat hanging from his lip. That’s KoJa. Don’t be fooled by the name (a portmanteau of Korea and Japan)—when it comes to style and soul, KoJa’s all-American. Burgers, wings, tacos, fries. Their menu looks like a Hooters' menu, only built from rice and miso, kimchi and barbecue—the staple ingredients of Korean and Japanese cuisine.
The upscale American bistro franchise The Counter is best known for its excessively customizable burgers. The 100-plus-ingredient burger menu is printed on a whiteboard and comes with an Expo pen with which you can check off whatever weird options strike your fancy—(looking at you Thai peanut sauce)—without having to memorize and recite them all for your server. Your comfort with executive decision making will determine if you view this as a limitless build-a-burger workshop or a paralysis-inducing option overload. It was The Counter’s alcoholic milkshakes, though, that recently brought the family together for my brother’s, a.k.a. Big Willy, 31st birthday. This birthday boy is crazy about his boozy shakes and insisted on ordering a variety. We must have wound up drinking half bottle of liquor and damn near a full cow udder of dairy that night.
Their “Adult Shakes” are also customizable, but mixing and matching liquor and lactose is no task for a newcomer. Rather I recommend choosing one of these four pre-builds and—for the love of God—avoid the unholy whole-milk abomination at the end of this list: Labor Day marked my first excursion into my new neighborhood, San Francisco's Outer Richmond district.. Unfortunately, I was largely disappointed. To be fair, I can't I can't really blame the neighborhood for the regrettable rooftop party, or the ill-advised decision to play some drinking game called "rage cage" with the college students living above me. It wasn't the neighborhood that made me drunk and sunburned, it wasn't the neighborhood that made me drink the "bitch cup", and it certainly wasn't the neighborhood that asked me how old I was in front of everyone. Labor Day was not a total loss, though, thanks to my discovery of the Asian fusion restaurant Red Lantern. It's hard to miss, sitting on the corner of Geary and 22nd, decorated with paper lanterns and its emanating Asian pan-flute music from within. Berkeley's Eureka was for me, an aptly named accidental discovery. The man selling The Street Spirit on the corner of Bancroft pointed it out to me after I told him "no, I'm not looking for any weed, just a place to watch the Raiders game".
Eureka, demarcated on their sign with only a "!", is not your typical sports bar. The entryway is lined with shelves of whiskeys, presumably stored at their ideal temperatures. The front wall is open to the street and closely arranged tables fill the central seating area in a way that makes the restaurant feel more like an indoor patio than the common sports bars, in which patrons slouch towards dimly lit corners. Every chef knows that presentation separates a dining experience from a meal. Rachel and Michael Dunn, the Concord-based chocolatiers of Rachel Dunn Chocolates, know that presentation separates their confectionery from candy. Presentation is also what distinguishes the company's Chocolate Workshop from any old cooking class.
On July 14 the Bay Area food truck festival "Off The Grid" brought its culinary cavalcade for the first time to Walnut Creek and I, along with my girlfriend Sarah, were among the hundreds who were front and center for the gourmet fast food premier. Some foodies came from afar to see how Walnut Creek compared to Off the Grid's several dozen other locales. Some locals came only with vague notions of "checking it out." Sarah and I, though, had arrived with a mission: eat a meal from every food truck. All ten of them.
The plan to eat a living octopus started shortly before our plane departed for Incheon International Airport in South Korea. I know it was then, because the idea came from a video on Brian's phone, and I remember that shortly thereafter a flight attendant reprimanded Sarah for using a phone while the plane was driving down the tarmac.
Brian, being a large man and thinking himself secretive, turned in his aisle seat so that passengers looking into our row could only see his back. He handed the phone to poor Sarah, his sister and my girlfriend, who had the middle seat on account of being the smallest and the social link between Brian and myself. "Brian," The reproachful manner in which Sarah said his name is an amusing catchphrase from our travels together. Even as I write it I can hear the exact cadence of her voice, rising on the first syllable with exasperation, and falling on the second, acknowledging the futility of whatever the ensuing lecture will have. "The plane is already moving, you have to turn your phone off. You're gonna make the plane crash." Brian tapped the play button, still held reluctantly in Sarah's hand. The video started with an American tourist sitting in a restaurant with Korean characters on the windows. In front of her sits a bowl with a baby octopus, wriggling in the shallow water. "That woman, she's about to eat that octopus," Brian whispered. "Like the whole thing. Still alive?" I asked. "Yeah. And we should do it, too." |