Anna K.'s Profile

I have this great camera. It's just a digital point-and-shoot, but it's a really trustworthy and good one, and I didn't have the money to replace it with an equivalent one. It's traveled half the world with me, but as soon as I got home from Thailand, it started giving me a "lens error."

Every photo repair shop I called or visited either laughed at me and told me to just replace the camera, or said they'd charge me upwards of $150 to send it to the manufacturer for repair. And then I found iCamera.

$85 later, and my camera is as good as new. It did take a few weeks because the part had to be back-ordered, but the sweet old man who runs the store and does all the repairs gave me a loaner camera (a slightly older model, but basically the same thing as mine) for no extra charge to use while I was waiting.

I love the fact that even in our disposable modern world, there are still places that will fix things instead of throwing them away and replacing them, and provide great service to top it off.

It just makes me so happy that this place exists, and there are nurses whose main job is to sit down with travelers and figure out what vaccines they need to stay healthy while globetrotting. I walked out of here thinking there was hope for world peace. Of course, that might have been the endorphin rush from all those shots.

It's true that this place doesn't take insurance, but their prices are affordable, not to mention way cheaper than getting typhoid or malaria. It's a cute office, too - maps and tapestries all over the place.

Some of the best Indian fare in the Bay Area. Obviously, that's saying a lot. Every single thing I've ever tried here (in three visits) has been fantastic. Fresh, perfectly spiced, large portions that guarantee you'll go home with tasty leftovers. All the food is freshly prepared and quickly served. Tandoori orders come out on sizzling platters, and the naan always tastes like it was baked to order. Chicken Saag Wala, one of my favorites, is about as perfect as that dish can get -- flavorful and nuanced, yet mild enough for the delicate spinach taste to come through, which is rare since most places just load up their dishes with spice. Lamb Korma, also good. Vegetarian samosas are spicy and big and come with a selection of delicious chutneys.

However, if you're the type who expects the waitstaff to be uniformly smiling and Americanized, don't even bother - you'll end up writing something uppity and giving this place a bad name. Yes, all the guys that work here are rude and have no idea about what Americans consider to be "good service." One time, my companion failed to put his napkin in his lap before the food came, so our waiter scowled and pointedly thrust the napkin at him. Another time, the guy refilling our water glasses got a call on his cell phone and went to answer it, and ended up overfilling the glasses. Some could take this for bad service, but here's how I look at it: if you go to India, the waiters most likely will not smile at you. They'll just bring you your food with a scowl. And the particular quality of service here just makes me think that this place is so authentic, they just haven't learned the smiley ways of the Americans yet. And when they do, the food will probably suffer. If you want flair, go to f'ing Applebees. If you want good Indian good, come to Royal Taj.

I am not normally that crazy about meatloaf. I am also not normally that crazy about veggie dishes that mimic meat dishes -- if I want meat, I'll eat meat, and if I want tofu, I'll eat tofu: it's about food honesty, you know? But all that being said, Ananda Fuara's neatloaf is the tastiest meatloaf, real or fake, that I've ever had. It's moist and wonderfully textured and slathered in a tangy, delicious sauce.

I've been here twice and haven't ordered anything other than the neatloaf yet, but bites off companions' plates revealed that the other menu items are also tasty. Not fancy-tasty, just good-quality-simple-food-tasty, which is really the best kind of tasty. Also: cheap, convenient, just cultish enough to make it unique, and the bathrooms are like awesome little peace shrines. But these are all details that don't hold a candle to the neatloaf. Mmm, neatloaf.

DO NOT USE YOUR CREDIT CARD IN THIS STORE. Seriously.

Here's what just happened to me: I went to Walgreens to pick up a few things, went to check out, and started punching some buttons on the credit card machine. But before I got a chance to actually swipe my card, the register spit out a receipt, and cashier handed me my bag of stuff, and I would have walked out having stolen someone else's identity.

Whoever had used a MasterCard at that register before me is damn lucky I noticed what happened and started raising hell, otherwise their identity would have been stolen. (Merry Christmas, MasterCard owner!) Of course, the clerks were all looking at me like, "What's your problem, lady? The card went through!" But I wasn't about to partake in identity theft, so I made them cancel the whole transaction, paid for my stuff in cash, and hightailed it out of there.

So, I will say it again: DO NOT USE YOUR CREDIT CARD IN THIS STORE. Seriously.

This place used to be my favorite go-to restaurant in downtown Berkeley. Cheap, tasty, spicy: what more could you want? But then, things changed. One weekend evening several weeks ago, my companion and I ordered our usual selection of food - samosas, chicken tikka masala, tandoori chicken, and a selection of naans - and what arrived at our table was about five times worse than what we'd always had before. The samosas were greasy and under-filled, the chicken tikka tasted all wrong, the tandoori chicken was coated with some weird new spice mixture that did not work at all, and my favorite potato naan was greasy and gross.

The girl working the counter told me that Biryani House just changed their chef. Whoever the new guy is, he sucks, and I'm not going back unless someone assures me that the old chef has returned. I walked past this place the other day, glanced inside, and kept walking. It's sad, really, because it used to be genuinely good!

The one star I'm giving this place has nothing to do with food. The sole star is all for the ambiance, which is genuinely cute and cozy. My boyfriend and I have passed this restaurant many times on our way to Cafe Au Coquelet, and it always looked so inviting that we finally decided to check out their food. Big mistake. Should have kept walking.

We ordered the eggplant chips appetizer, and the battered pieces of eggplant were greasy and soggy. The dipping sauce was all right, but nothing to rave about. Then came our entrees. We got the Himalayan-spiced chicken with rice, which was bland and flavorless, and an eggplant dish in a curry-type sauce, which was also bland and completely unmemorable. The latter we ordered with the Tingmo bread, because it sounded interesting and we wanted variety from rice.

Wow, that bread was some nasty s**t. First of all, it looked and smelled like unbaked white bread, a heady and almost sickening yeast aroma making it anything but appetizing. It was steamed, not raw, thankfully, but here's a news flash: steaming raw white bread dough robs it of any flavor it would have prepared in any other way. The bread pretty much spoiled all the food it touched, and the food wasn't great to begin with. But the worst part came hours later, when the bread just wouldn't leave. It didn't make me sick exactly, but just sat in my stomach like a house guest who'd overstayed his welcome. Nasty.

One of the first things I try to do when moving to a new neighborhood is find a good coffeeshop within walking distance. DiBartolo seems to be my best bet around the Grand Lake area (as in, it's not a damn chain). A few fantastic things about it:

1. YEEEEAAAAH JET FUEL COFFEE
2. Super cute fenced-in courtyard makes for an excellent place to read a book and get wired up on the aforementioned jet fuel
3. Free wi-fi

The bad thing: only open until about 6pm most days. What's up with that?

It shouldn't be very difficult to make a functional copy of a key to a storage unit padlock, right? Apparently it is, if you go to Home Depot. HD screwed up my key, making me run around town trying to find a reliable key-cutter until a friend recommended this place. Not only did Delta Lock & Key make me two good, working copies, but they even tried to re-cut the screwed-up HD key for no extra charge. It didn't work, but I blame HD for that. Should have come to Delta first!

Also, this business recently moved: they're not on West Lane anymore, but on Pacific Ave, just north of Lincoln Road.

I have a friend who doesn't think a meal is complete unless all the food orbits around a piece of meat like planets around the Sun. This is the friend who first brought me to Andy Nguyen's. If that's not the best review a vegan restaurant can get, I don't know what is.

My favorite items on the menu are all the things that come in clay pots. They don't necessarily taste better than the other things on the menu, but I'm a sucker for presentation, and in a place where all the food is good all the time, you have to pick arbitrary favorites.

If you're only aware of vegetarian food that involves jello-esque chunks of tofu wriggling around a plate, I'd advise you to wipe your memory clean and pay a visit to this lovely little restaurant. If my steak-loving friend can learn to love the caramelized tofu fish, so can you.