Brad L.'s Profile

After six years of complaining about the Chinese food in Berkeley, I finally got somebody to drive me out here for dim sum. We showed up late on a Saturday -- no wait, but they were out of some items (no suckling pig, denied). For the sake of the bill payer's wallet, we also declined the big ticket items -- no dungeness xiaolongbao or lobster dumplings. Still, we got a pretty good idea as to why this place is raved about. Koi seems to have a very square idea as to what constitutes great dim sum: besides the luxury ingredients, the recipes are crowd-pleasing. Almost every dish used sugar and/or glutamates (not necessarily MSG) for a little boost. If what pleases crowds doesn't always please you, you might find the flavour profiles a little repetitive.

The skill in the kitchen, however, is difficult to dispute. Chicken feet were the best ever: they managed to bring out the flavour while avoiding unnecessary oiliness, which to me was unprecedented. Soy duck tongues were a nice contrast in texture. Taro puffs were as tasty as at Yank Sing but sexier, stretching out towards the ceiling. Daikon cakes and crab claw balls also showed the kitchen's facility with different kinds of frying. The oyster sauce gai lan was remarkably youthful, if a little sweet. Siu mai and har gau were varietally correct and excellently wrapped, if not exceptionally filled. Poached beef tripe had a fun texture but was very bland: I prefer the black bean sauce version of the tripe from one of the other stomachs (I can never remember which stomach is which). Pork sticky rice was good filler. The cloying shrimp cheong fun was the only true miss, while the pork cheong fun was much better. As for desserts, pan-fried pumpkin cake and mango pudding were both very good. Opinions were split as to whether the bird's nest on the dan tats was or wasn't a waste of that ingredient.

Service was actually better than I expected, and they had no problem bringing us out two different pots of (very good) tea.

If I came back for dim sum with a party of four and a reasonable budget (say $25 per person after tip), I'd order something like:

abalone siu mai
har gau
half order of xiaolongbao
pumpkin & sea cucumber rice rolls
chicken feet
taro puffs
daikon cakes
roasted suckling pig
Sichuan surf clams
beef organs combo
gai lan
black sesame balls

Though really I want to get here for dinner.

I eat a lot of Thai food in Berkeley, but I'm sometimes frustrated because it seems that it could quite easily be better (as it is at Ruen Pair and Da Nang in Albany, and Chai Thai and Soi 4 in Oakland). I guess the Berkeley Thai Temple is the epitome of this. Some of their food is the best Thai in Berkeley. Some of it isn't.

I've never ordered their steam table stuff because it's well, steam table stuff. The small samples I've nicked from other people's plates haven't made me change my mind.

On the other hand, the papaya salad is mad decent. Made to order, so those of us who like to go crazy on the seafoodness can say so. Crazy spicy unless otherwise specified. Pairs well with the much-discussed mango sticky rice.

You can eat well here, but it takes some research.

(this is my meal of the year so far, so I might as well copy and paste my C---h---- report here.)

A hardcore Chow group staying in Hollywood would make it their first point of business drive directly to Jitlada; we wimped out, checking into our hotel first before walking to the restaurant, armed with quotations from the sage Erik M. We had a couple of chiliphobes in the party, so no khua kling "Phat Lung", not that I think I could have handled it.

From the regular menu:

#16 oxtail soup: all those nice soft bits I like, broth quite spicy though not quite challengingly so to my taste
#45 steamed mussels: best I've had outside New Zealand, complex broth but I maybe liked the more straightforward oxtail broth better
#67 country fried chicken: fine but we probably should've gone for the fried turmeric chicken E.M. mentioned somewhere

From the Southern menu:

#1 green curry with egg yolk-stuffed fish balls: balls were fun but the curry seemed a bit, uh, mild
#18 spicy stir-fried sator beans and soft-shelled crab: I could have eaten those funky beans all day, crab maybe not the best accompaniment
#35 mango salad: a very useful change-up dish, mango did an excellent job mitigating spice inflammation
#65 fried frogs' legs: less salty than I'm used to my fried food being, but the sauce worked wonders

The restaurant was full, but the only way this detracted from our experience was that our water glasses weren't filled up as often as we would've liked.

Comparisons to other Thai restaurants are fraught because of Jitlada's different style of food, but to me, having eaten at Lotus of Siam in Vegas, Pok Pok in Portland, and most of the better-known places in the Bay Area (though I haven't tried current Tenderloin hotspot Lers Ros), this was my favourite Thai meal ever. It made a trip to the Thai provinces seem a necessity.

I don't have enough to say to justify a review for each individual taco truck, so here's a ranking of the ones I've been to this year (bearing in mind that I never get past 40th), along with my favourite comida at each.

1. Sinaloa seafood truck -- shrimp tostada
2. El Novillo -- tripas
3. Los Michoacanos -- lengua
4. Sinaloa meat truck -- cabeza
5. El Paisa -- pastor
6. Esmeralda -- carne asada
7. El Ojo de Agua -- horchata

I agree that the Sinaloa complex is where it's at if you just want to stick to one place: if you're not in the mood for seafood, you can have cow head. I personally find it fun to try out different trucks to find out what their relative strengths are, but admit there's a degree of culinary risk involved. Still, if you want to explore, the tripas and carnitas at El Novillo would be a good place to start...

Not that there's a great deal of difference, but this original branch is the one to go to if you have the choice. They sometimes have specials, like a Molinari chorizo the other week, and the high turnover eliminates the risk of semi-stale buns or condiments. Usually, though, I'll go to the closest branch.

The numbers tell the story: for four years, this has been the closest restaurant to my house. I've been here three times, which is two more times than I've been to Shen Hua. Though King Yen bills itself as "Szechwan Mandarin cuisine", you'll be hard-pressed to find a trace of Sichuan peppercorn. But with fresh ingredients and some wok skills, this place is actually pretty okay if you're satisfied by yuppified Chinese (though Da Lian, run by a former King Yen chef, IMO finds a better compromise between Americanisation and actually tasting good). If you want a tongue-numbing version of kung pao chicken, try China Village or Sichuan Fusion. But if you want a version with a bunch of vegetables for no good reason, King Yen should do fine.

While I continue to evangelise for Fruitvale, there are some Mexican dishes I should be able to get a good version of without an hour round trip on the 1R. Take pollo and carne asada: spice or marinate the meat, throw it on the grill, serve with whatever. Sounds easy, but so many places in Berkeley get it wrong, whether by overcooking or by using dormitory-grade meat. Fortunately, one of the places that gets in right is virtually at my doorstep. I've purchased takeout from Gordo's dozens of times, getting the chicken plate on the majority of those occasions. Chicken is very good, while beans, rice and tortillas are serviceable. (That sounds like faint praise, but serviceable tortillas are few and far between in Berkeley.) The pico de gallo is refreshing, while you can ask for complimentary hot sauce to keep yourself on your toes. I don't find the add-ons, like guac and sour cream, to be worth paying the extra cents for.

Wanted to try the lunch special (tea leaf salad + samusa soup) except they only offer that Tuesday to Thursday for some reason. So I just had the tea leaf salad. They go to Burma to procure their laphet (fermented tea leaves): don't know if Aung San Suu Kyi would approve or disapprove, but one hopes this means they can get the stuff that isn't chemically dyed*. It's a pretty good version of the salad, with lots of crunchy bits, and jalapenos giving just the right spiciness for my taste. It's much better than Nan Yang's version, which has way too much filler. I like Larkin Express's tea-leaf-centric version a bit more, but I'd be happy to eat BSS's salad semi-regularly. Also had a pot of tie guan yin tea, pretty good for what I think was a bagged version.

Will certainly return to try more of the menu.

*pro-tip: if the laphet stains your hands yellow, don't eat it.

Beer-battered fish tacos, yay. The fish was nicely fried -- not entirely crisp on the outside but still moist on the inside. The saucing isn't super-faithful to the Baja style, or at least my never-been-to-Ensenada Platonic ideal of it: it's light on cream and has more than a hint of acidity, which I actually like. The tortilla sucked pretty hard, though. The fish taco at the Sinaloa seafood truck comes in a much tastier tortilla, and is a third of the price. The fish taco at Taqueria la Familia on Shattuck is about as good as Calaca Loca's, and the woman running that place was much more on-the-ball than were the workers here. (The "marlyn" taco at Mariscos German in San Diego is a dozen times as mercuriffic, but that's a different beast.) Still, respect this place for using line-caught fish, and for not wasting the meat by over-frying it into oblivion. Recommended to sustainability geeks, and to some extent I am one.

Brad's top 100 Bay Area restaurants and such (a series to be completed over the next couple of years), #100:

You've seen that Pizza Hut ad where they lie to a bunch of people and tell them they're watching the taping of a TV cooking show, and then everyone's like "OMG best pizza evah"? This experimental design isn't exactly going to get you grant money from the NSF. Primary flaw: the lack of a control -- if you don't have anything to compare to, your experiment is crap. The thing that even the NSF has difficulty with (and the basic idea of the dissertation I was supposed to finish a year or two ago), however, is that not all controls are created equal. You win a taste test with Domino's, I'm not going to hand you a trophy.

And then when you can't do an experiment, comparison becomes even harder. When communism collapsed, adjudicators were quick to hand capitalism, specifically in its American form, the World Socioeconomic Structure Championship belt. Which was justifiable, but then everybody stopped thinking about the possibilities of democratic socialism or individualist anarchism or, for that matter, Singaporean corporatism. We all instead rushed on to the neoliberal gravy train and bought laptops and whoops, the NASDAQ just tanked, but that's okay, the bank will still give a mortgage. And now it's 2009, the gravy train has congealed and we have heart disease, and now most everybody thinks that "even less regulation" doesn't sound like a viable solution, but an adequate stimulus plan can't help but get filibustered and, uh, what can we do?

Of course the previous paragraph doesn't really apply to Berkeleans, not particularly meaning the students but instead the pinkos trying to keep the stereotypes about the city alive. They have many flaws, like hygiene (couldn't resist, sorry), but a lack of thinking outside the box isn't on the list. Take the folks who, forty years ago, decided that everyone would get paid the same wage, and everyone would have the same say in running the place. It wasn't an original idea -- they copped it from Israel's kibbutzes -- but that scarcely makes it less remarkable. Many management gurus would've rolled their eyes, but the Cheese Board grew, adding baking and pizza-making operations, until they became a cornerstone of Berzerkley society.

The pizza is evidence that production on this scale can be both idiosyncratic and innovative. The toppings get the attention: in addition to the advice in my previous review, I find myself avoiding days when the pie is over-carbed, and running down there when there's an acidic topping. Their baking method is cleverer still: the double-cooking means the pizza has a crispness atypical of pies that aren't super-thin. Consumers like it better than Pizza Hut (I trust you do not find a blind test necessary here), as do the collective members -- as they should, since they get paid, one hears, about double what they'd get doing working for the chain. So why, even in Berkeley, are there only about ten worker co-ops?

And more study questions: how widely is the Cheese Board model applicable in the US? Are large co-ops, the size of Mondragon (who even have their own university out in Basque country) viable here? Can someone collect some comprehensive data on American worker co-ops (nobody's even sure how many there are)? Can we get some legislation that recognises (and maybe encourages) the co-op as a distinct structure, without red-taping them to death? And can some of you start a pizza collective that uses pork products liberally? Please?