A little over a week ago, I found myself in the meager barroom lobby of Hill Country Barbecue, nursing a smoked pork chop and wading through a tidal pool of chatter at the wrap dinner for 93 Plates.

Hagan, our host, was growing irate. Something like 40 bloggers had gathered to help close out his month-long carousel of comped meals at 93 New York restaurants, cafes and bars, but due to the fact that Hill Country was throwing a flat-fee benefit meal for Haiti and wouldn’t accept group reservations without some form of advanced payment, he had to settle for six tiny tables and a shortage of standing room on his big night out.

This didn’t stop everyone from having a good time, but it was more or less a clusterfuck. At the end of the evening, Hagan pointed the finger at Hill Country, seemingly in disbelief that they would pass up an opportunity to entertain “the tastemakers of the city” and make some decent scratch in the process. Wanderingfoodie.com underscores his disappointment, declaring that “this place really screwed up.”

If I were to sum 93 Plates and Hagan Blount from the scenes of that meal, this story wouldn’t be pretty. Some have already gone down that road, singling out 93 Plates as unscrupulous or uninspired and Hagan’s self-branding as obnoxious. There is truth in the vitriol, but whenever someone gets pissed enough to drag a name through the mud, “Well, what did you expect?” becomes a very relevant question.

Stumbling through the comments in Amy Cao’s takedown of the man days after reading Robert Sietsema’s breakdown of food writing ethics certainly made me re-examine my own expectations as a food blogger. When I created The Eaten Path in 2007, I had no expertise to offer. I designed the site in a fit of curmudgeonly disdain for three-column efficiency, preempting ambition and placing all my focus on what I hoped would be a series of interesting stories about food. If there is such a thing as an old fashioned food blog, I’d like to think that this is it.

The wrap party showed me just how varied a food blog’s intent and execution can be. While I’m happy with my storytelling corner, many bloggers do fancy themselves critics, aiming to provide a service to readers in their judgment of bites around town – concurrently, many readers expect just as much. Others are more concerned with the idioms of eating out, the cult of the chef and the news cycle of dining gossip, plugging themselves into all things food and doing their best to keep their fingers on an increasingly glamorous – and publicly so – part of New York’s pulse. The fact that this is at once the food capital and the Iphone capital of the United States raises the bar for anyone trying to make his name, and this is where 93 Plates starts spinning.

The free meal I shared with Hagan at Ost Cafe gave me a clear understanding of the man, whose antics I think are worth this story. Our conversation circled around his fascination with what makes food blogs “successful”; by this point he had stopped thinking so much about words, ordering his meals to maximize image content and relying on video to boost traffic to his site. He told me that he’d once sent an audition tape to the Food Network, updated me on his quest to be the #1 search result for “foodie” (he’s currently on page 4) and re-asserted his dream of being paid for the task of being an eating head. The only thing he had left to figure out was a clear and compelling product.

Surveying the crop at Hill Country, I sensed that a substantial chunk of food bloggers is not too far behind this train of thought. Yes, we all love food, but for some an insatiable sense of hunger – a hunger for interaction, for a constant feeling of movement, for a sense of community and empowerment, however superimposed – is just as important, if not more. In their element, these alpha bloggers are spokespersons, networking machines and adventurers, but at any point in conversation they could probably replace “food” with any other topic and land roughly on the same points. This can feel understandably grating to the people who are just trying to share a bit of themselves in a bowl of noodles or a newly minted recipe, and even insulting to those whose love of food is rooted in the physical communities from which so many wonderful meals have grown over time.

Still, while the content of 93 Plates is questionable, I can’t help but be impressed that one man got away with this much free eating. And while the crowd at the wrap dinner split sharply between those itching to get their hands on some food and those content to survive on booze and schmooze, 93 Plates really did bring a fair and diverse share of the food blogging gene pool together. Whether it was ultimately to trade business cards or trade blows is incidental; the event was a success precisely because of Hagan’s desire to be surrounded by “the blogging elite,” an achievement he shouldn’t be ashamed to claim.

But should anyone trust The Wandering Foodie’s “reviews” of free food? Well, no, but isn’t this a given? Not to slight the man too much here, but to deem anything public poison assumes that it will be invariably consumed. I can’t think of a major food blog that’s paid any attention to 93 Plates, I can’t say if Hagan even cares, and I can’t call moral betrayal when the moral of his story is, “Free food? Sign me up!”

Are food bloggers tastemakers, and if so, what does this mean for media standards and the sphere of popular taste?

This to me is the more relevant question. I’m bound to butt heads with anyone who thinks that restaurants have a responsibility to court food bloggers and bow to the oohs and aahs of new media. After all, to the curmudgeonly eater a free review is no review at all, and an uninformed community is just a few misplaced steps away from an unruly mob. I hope Hagan has learned enough from this stunt to know that a community is made of stronger stuff than status updates, and I do have faith that if he remembers to order some humble pie, his hunger will take him to a decent place – or at the very least, to a place that serves a damn good pork chop.

My first and strongest impression of Mill Valley, CA can be found in television reruns. Captain B.J. Hunnicutt of the 4077th proudly hailed from the up-and-coming Marin County township, and for years he was my sole example by which to measure it. Thanks to M*A*S*H, my mental picture of Mill Valley teemed with laid-back, wise-cracking, playfully-mustachioed pranksters riding motorcycles. Then I went to Mill Valley, and as it turned out, my mental picture didn’t have to change much. Of course, you can’t really ride a motorcycle up and down the idyllic hillsides of Mount Tamalpais. B.J. would have to trade in the bike for one of those hybrid seven-seaters with five-star safety ratings that everyone else drives. Besides that, and a quick shave, Captain Hunnicutt would fit right in. He’s white, he’s liberal, he works in a high-paying profession and he’s… well… fiction.

Maybe Mill Valley is an actual place, but after hanging around the town a few times, I can’t shake the feeling that everything there is a little bit storybook. The streets are clean of litter and loiterers, the sidewalks are full of mommies pushing strollers, the public education system is well-funded, and a cheerful woman hands you a free tote bag when you walk into the supermarket. Everything is just right in Mill Valley and that’s a little off-putting, because it doesn’t seem real. It’s like some kind of 21st-century Pleasantville, as if Mill Valley took American culture, re-engineered it for its own purposes, and then bottled it for families with household incomes of at least six digits.

Mill Valley’s food culture is no different. Everything looks the same, but the recipes change, like a B.L.T. made of applewood-smoked bacon, arugula and roma tomato. It’s delicious, and it’s classically American, but its authenticity is part pageantry. At least, this is how I felt when I walked into Pearl’s Phat Burgers, Mill Valley’s version of the American fast food diner. The small restaurant is sparse white, with minimal red trim and a couple cafeteria tables. It gives the impression of a generic greasy spoon due to a classic menu board on the wall and the lack of a wait staff, but a closer look at the options obscures the place’s definition. Pearl’s may be dressed up as a generic American grease peddler, but the burgers aren’t plain old American burgers. They’re just pretending to be.

I guess – for an upscale, forward-thinking population like Mill Valley – cheap, greasy diner food is a matter of nostalgia. For me, taking a gourmet burger and trying to pass it off as being ungourmet sounds like some kind of prank that Hawkeye Pierce and B.J. Hunnicutt might come up with. I have to give Pearl’s credit, though. There’s a psychology to the experience, and for someone like me, who can’t help but despise the idea of “gourmet” burgers, the disguise works in everyone’s favor. If Pearl’s served burgers on ceramic plates and wood tables, I would have liked it less, because, you know, I’m prejudiced.

Gourmet or not, Pearl’s burger has found fans. Bobby Flay and friends awarded Pearl’s Phat Burgers as the Best Burger in the Bay Area at the Great American Food and Music Fest. The prize winner was the Kobe Bula Burger, Pearl’s reinvention of the Hawaiian burger using bacon, swiss, mayo and spicy pineapple teriyaki sauce. As a fan of Hawaiian teri-burgers in general, it wasn’t hard for me to like the Bula, whose tangy, sweet sauce gives the impression of eating a messy, teriyaki-glazed pineapple slice without the accompanying physical difficulty. The bacon is thick cut and chewy, the way bacon should be, and the patty itself is pink on the inside, the way patties should be. Still, I remain skeptical of the burger’s “Best” title, because the combination of fatty Niman Ranch beef and a generous portion of swiss cheese left pools of grease in my digestive system. Maybe I should have forked over the extra four dollars for the Kobe.

Definitely not the generic burger joint, Pearl’s offers buffalo and turkey patties, too. I liked the lean texture of the buffalo more than the fat and grease of the beef; however, as per usual, the buffalo burger was not quite as flavorful. That said, I’ll gladly order the Bula Burger with beef again, maybe without the cheese, but I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the buffalo to anyone who doesn’t want to feel like crap after her meal. This is Mill Valley after all, where eating at a classic greasy spoon doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your health and where food culture doesn’t have to end in a food coma. That’s the Mill Valley brand, bottled and ready to go, coming to a city near you. There’s already a Pearl’s in San Francisco. Next time you order a burger at a generic diner near you, beware – it just might be gourmet.

Pearl’s Phat Burgers
8 E Blithedale Ave
Mill Valley, CA 94941
(415) 381-6010

Over the past two months, the New York food press has buzzed intermittently around Dos Toros, lower Manhattan’s newest burrito joint. Most stories running on Dos Toros sprout from some combination of the words “burrito,” “San Francisco,” “Mission” and “California,” framing reviews with California ex-pats’ scorn for New York’s Mexican food in general and New York’s burritos in particular. Obligatory jabs over the correct usage of these terms, attacks on the authenticity of Dos Toros and of course some gratuitous Chipotle bashing ensued, once again handing Mexican food the role of rorschach test for any given eater’s lack of imagination, unwillingness to commute in the name of carnitas or neurotic devotion to semantics.

Well, I’m a California ex-pat, I love Mexican food, and I’m pretty damn neurotic when it comes to words. Technically speaking, Dos Toros is a “mission style burrito” – big, steamed flour tortilla, rice, beans, meat, pico de gallo. It is not, however, a Mission burrito. It’s not even a California burrito, if you want to be really ornery about it… but that’s a story for Zach to handle.

Gordo’s, the taqueria that inspired Dos Toros, is located in the Sunset, just outside Golden Gate Park. It has a second location in the Elmwood district of Berkeley, where I lived for one year and ate at Gordo’s almost every week. Most of those meals were the direct result of laziness and proximity – Gordo’s doesn’t hold a candle to La Taqueria, Farolito, or even El Castillito in the Mission. I can say the same for my burrito at Dos Toros: the tortilla there is full of win and the meat is surprisingly juicy, but ultimately it’s an exercise in form, not flavor.

The takeaway isn’t that Dos Toros is a bad place to eat and that it’s failed in the realm of authenticity; it’s that this burrito, on its own merits, is not a cause for celebration, let alone a cause célèbre. Gordo’s wasn’t too exciting in the East Bay, its clone isn’t too exciting to me in New York, and Ed Levine was entirely in his right mind to compare Dos Toros to Chipotle for the purposes of review. In the end, either is a fine place to stop off for a quick walk-and-eat lunch – after all, we’re not going to fly out to San Francisco or San Diego on our lunch breaks.

We can, however, catch a train to Hell’s Kitchen. There, dead center on the south side of an otherwise unadorned block of W. 47th St., stands the bodega that houses the three-table-and-one-short-order-window known as La Rosita Mexican Deli. Here, every meal is cooked to order, every meat kisses the grill before it lands on your plate, and corn tortillas for quesadillas and sopes are made by hand. If that’s not enticing enough: They deliver.

Tacos ($2.50 each and generously sized) are rightfully the best vehicle for sampling the various meats on offer here, all of which are done quite well. Chorizo – also pulled from the casing and grilled to order – is chunky and hearty, with a slight sweetness standing in place of heat. Carnitas are thankfully tender, with lightly crisped edges and just the right amount of savory. Chicharrones here are much more rubbery and fatty pork skin than they are crisp and crunchy pork rind, and show up stewed in blazing hot salsa verde if you request them “spicy.”

Two less usual taco fillings on the regular menu at La Rosita are arroz con pollo and arroz con huevo (rice with chicken and rice with egg, respectively). The former, pairing inoffensive Spanish rice with juicy bits of grilled chicken, is a delight for those who don’t want to overdo it on meat. The latter, featuring a halved hard boiled egg, is admittedly not much fun, but I wouldn’t stop hard boiled lovers from throwing it on the tray.

Working down the menu yields greater rewards: La Rosita’s quesadillas and sopes are nothings short of outstanding. The sope – a handmade and fried corn tortilla topped with meat, sour cream, lettuce, radish and onion, then sprinkled with crumbly queso fresco – hits just about every texture and taste in right proportion. The quesadilla, which combines the shape of an empanada with the outer crunch of a chimichanga, is unlike anything I’ve recognized as a quesadilla, and it’s for the best. The distinct qualities of these offerings – only helped by the availability of cerveza at $2.25 a pop – make it that much easier to forget about cross-country comparisons to seminal meals.

My favorite menu choice so far, though, is La Rosita’s milanesa de pollo ($5.50). Apparently Italian in origin and typically found on sandwiches in Central and South America, these breaded and deep fried slices of white and dark chicken play a heavy cousin to Japanese katsu and are damn good when trimmed with queso blanco, avocado, lettuce, tomato and pickled jalapeno, then thrown onto a refried bean-laced bun for the enjoyment of anyone with taste buds. La Rosita offers a torta with milanesa made of beef as well, but right now I’m more tempted by the fact that they have a $5.00 all-day breakfast special and list a short order burger at $2.50.

…and La Rosita’s burrito? Let me be the first to say on behalf of California: Who gives a shit?

Thanks to Zach Brooks for the tip on this place!

La Rosita Mexican Deli
526 W. 47th St.
New York, NY 10036
212.397.1137

Zach Brooks, founder of one of the most successful food blogs in the world, left New York on Saturday, January 30. Since Zach will no doubt make fun of me for every remotely poetic word in this post, I’ll keep this shoutout on point.

Zach is a man who cuts through bullshit without getting his hands dirty. Zach made his success by giving voice to a community of eaters rather than work on his own shadow. Zach is a down-to-earth dude whose first conversation with me involved a debate on whether or not it’s appropriate to use the word “retard” (we were both on the same side) and whose most recent conversation with me involved heavy usage of Panda Express.

Zach’s also been kind enough to show me around Midtown over the past year, sharing meals here and there and introducing me to the gems of his world (which, at times, is also my world).

During one of his farewell lunches in Midtown, Zach took me to the Jamaican Dutchy on 51st at 7th, where he said his goodbyes to cart owner O’Neill and bestowed upon me the wonder of stewed peas (beef, pigs’ tails and beans stewed to a delicious, goopy mess over rice). On the side we tried O’Neill’s new Dutchy Dog (nothing to brag about, except for the inclusion of a tasty red sauce in the key of chili) and bread fruit (fried wedges of a starchy, yuca-like plant that do best dipped in curry or stew). If you don’t have time to click through to Zach’s original writeup of stewed peas: They are great, and you can order them from the Jamaican Dutchy on Thursdays.

Best wishes to Mr. Midtown, whose site now includes Downtown New York and Philadelphia on its beat, and a hearty “keep on keepin’ on” to all of the Midtown Lunchers who will continue keeping tabs on counter and cart intelligence on their turf in Manhattan. And to Los Angeles: Prepare to be served!

I like the slogan, “Taste the Rainbow.” Unlike M&Ms’ “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand,” it’s not overly practical. “Hungry? Why Wait?” doesn’t necessarily encourage someone to eat a Snickers bar, but rather anything that’s lying around nearby, which could be a Twinkie, for all we know. And slogans like “Two for me, none for you” and “Nobody better lay a finger on my Butterfinger” are just greedy.

“Taste the rainbow” is great. Rainbows are fleeting rarities. You can’t even touch a rainbow; to taste one would be a crazy magical experience. However, Skittles, as fun as they may be, are too hard and chewy to really fit the bill.

Taiwanese shaved ice, or chua bing, is more deserving. In the States chances are that the phrase “shaved ice” conjures up images of a snow cone with flavoured syrup, but it’s on quite a different wavelength in Asia. Asian countries offer all sorts of shaved ice: kakigori topped with green tea syrup and azuki beans in Japan, patbingsu topped with cereal and frozen yogurt in South Korea, ice kacang with corn in Singapore/Malaysia or halo halo in the Philippines.

In Taiwan there are many variations on the shaved ice theme, and mango shaved ice really deserves Skittles’ slogan. Golden cubes of fresh mango, fresh, sweet, and juicy, sit on top of a mountain of fluffy light ice, then is doused with rivers of condensed milk. The ice is more finely shaved than that of a snow cone — think of the difference between freshly fallen snow (fluffy) and snow that’s been sitting for too long on the sidewalk (not fluffy). If you go for the trinity of mango, strawberry and kiwi, you’re in for an intensely fresh treat. Unlike in other countries, the fruit on Taiwanese shaved ice is not canned (one of the benefits of being on a tropical island). Stone-cold sober, you’re confronted with a kaleidoscope of colour and intense flavours.

An extremely popular destination for shaved ice in Taipei is Ice Monster on Yong Kang Street, but I prefer Tai Yi Milk King, which is close to National Taiwan University. Because it’s closer to a student population, the shaved ice here is cheaper, more generous with its fruit and very fresh because of the fast turnover. The store also offers traditional Taiwanese shaved ice, with the option of adding red bean, grass jelly, ai yu (lemon jelly) and taro balls. I think they make all of its ingredients on-site: the taro balls are chewy, the red bean are sweet and well cooked, and they’re very generous with the condensed milk.

Tai Yi Milk King is also representative of the Taiwanese approach to service.

Living in Beijing, I’ve grown accustomed to not asking for changes to my order:
“Can I have pearls in my green tea?”
“No.”
“But you have pearl milk tea. I can give you some more money, and you can put the pearls in the green tea?”
“Pearls are for the pearl tea. No pearls in green tea.”
“Okay.” (I slink away. The pearl tea here isn’t that great anyway.)

In contrast, the choices at Tai Yi Milk King are dazzling, and like in most other food places in Taiwan, the employees are flexible. If you want rice balls with your kiwi ice, they’ll oblige. If you want one-half red bean, one-fourth green bean and only a bit of condensed milk, you’ll get it with no questions asked. Certain combination requests – like lemon jelly with mango cubes – will be met with a raised eyebrow, but only for a fraction of a second before the jelly and mango are scooped onto your ice mountain and pushed on the tray.

Then, off you go with your own little piece of the rainbow. Cheesy, but what’s dessert if not an extra dose of sweetness?

Tai Yi Milk King
82, Xin Sheng S. Road, Section 3
Taipei, Taiwan
(02) 2362 3712

Nate Tabak is a journalist and a man of flavor working in California’s East Bay.

I never set out to fall in love with a pastry. It was March 2006, and morning in Zagreb found me fresh off a train from Budapest and greeted by a cold, neurotransmitter-sucking rain. My traveling companion, Martyna, whose Polish origins likely imparted to her a survival-based meat-and-starch homing mechanism, knew what had to be done. Several minutes later a bag splotched with grease strains revealed a tapestry of crunchy tenderness spiraling around clusters of granular beef, crafted by Bosnians whose fearlessness was reflected in sodium content. Burek, my personal rapture.

Like the union of cheese and crust in pizza, the convergence of pastry and savory in burek can only be a good thing, assuming it is safe and consensual. For all history of conflict and hardship, the Balkans can be counted upon to offer this nexus of deliciousness no matter the circumstance.

Originally from Turkey – perhaps left as a consolation prize from the Ottoman occupiers, who called it börek – burek (or byrek, among many other aliases) has taken on a life of its own in southeastern Europe, especially in the former Yugoslavia, which should be the focus of any serious discussion about the pastry. It’s also worth noting that the term burek itself is an oversimplification of a food family in which specific varieties sometimes have names of their own, depending on the country.

The premise is simple: Take a rich pastry dough, roll or layer it with meat, cheese, spinach or any number of fillings, and bake. Starting from that basic foundation, burek has almost an unfair advantage on the front line of the culinary wars when it comes to flavor.

Although I’d consider myself a novice with regards to this pasty, an extremely conservative tally would place my consumption at a minimum of sixty in at least eleven countries and two New York boroughs over the past four years. From Kosovo Polje to San Jose, Calif., coal-fired ovens to bus station microwaves, one inalienable truth has emerged: The only thing that’s stopped me from finishing burek is satiation, more a personal failure than anything else.

Burek, after all, is something you can eat daily – or, as I’ve done on a few occasions, for every meal. Cheese for breakfast, meat for lunch, spinach for dinner. This might resemble a gastrointestinal nightmare in the making, perhaps unwise from a nutritionist’s standpoint. But this is where true Balkan brilliance comes in.

Yogurt. Plain, shaken into submission and drunken from the carton, it is an essential component to any burek session. From a flavor standpoint, the addition of potable cultured dairy product offers a nice a contrast to the oft-aggressive, one-two punch of salt and fat. Perhaps of greater importance are its reinforcements to the viscera in the form of bacteria.

The draw to burek goes beyond being tasty. It’s also a cheap and efficient vehicle for calories: In poorer countries, where burek quality tends to be superior anyway, a piece – or a long, narrow tube cut into bite-sized morsels as is the Albanian version, primarily found in Albania and Kosovo – will set you back €1 with the requisite carton of drinkable yogurt. Ubiquity, too, doesn’t hurt. Burek is found in specialty shops, bakeries and restaurants.

The greater challenge in any former Yugoslav city probably is avoiding the sight and smell of burek; locating a delicious specimen is by far the easier task.

January 23, 2010 was National Pie Day, and I missed it. There are fewer things I will say with less pride, and today I am making amends – for myself, for my country and for the men who, however fictional, will never lose sight of the better things in life (clicking on that link, by the way, will take you to my friend Paul’s incredible, pie-based, award-winning new video game, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, available on Xbox Arcade next month).

My relationship with pie wasn’t always given short shrift. In fact, it’s one of the essential relationships in my life.

In summer of 2005, I was just discovering my own taste buds – not only was I not much of an eater, I was almost nothing of a cook. When Boykji offered to teach me how to make pie crust from scratch, I wondered if this lesson would be too lofty a goal for a regular canned chili eater. In what I would consider a major turning point for my personality, I not only accepted the challenge but also committed myself to baking three pies in one evening.

Not only did I learn how to make a great pie crust that night, I gained a lifelong appreciation of cooking from scratch. Like most things involving the kitchen, homemade pie crust is far easier than most people think. The recipe is almost nonexistent, the whole process takes fifteen minutes, and as long as you have a decent teacher your results will outmatch any factory-made pie crust in existence. If you don’t believe me now, just wait until February, when I write a full story on pie crust as part of Cathy Erway’s Eating In Challenge. Making a crust with nothing but your own two hands, a fork and a rolling pin is also incredibly rewarding – not just the first time you do it, but every time after.

Declaring my first three pies successes, I spent the rest of that summer exploring the wide world of home baked pie. Taking full advantage of the fruits of the season (and the bounty of produce that is the Berkeley Bowl), I took on a new type of pie every week, setting aside one night to learn more about baking and spending the next afternoon testing my skills out on my intensive Russian language class. While baking does exist in parallel to chemistry, there’s no substitute for practical experience, good company and the inspiration that comes with learning how a process feels, rather than how it’s measured. I remember more than anything else a pleasurable calm in preparing my ingredients, knowing that the time invested was just as rewarding as the payoff.

After digging up these photos, I understood that missing the neighborhood celebration of National Pie Day at K&M was a breaking point in my life. As if chasing multiple stories, taking some rough shifts at the day job and working nonstop on my book proposal weren’t enough of a drain, recent sickness and anxiety had thrown everything into a dizzying, exhausting mess, leaving me to re-evaluate how much New York living I can really handle. I should have taken the 23rd as a cue to take a step back and smell the softened butter; instead, I holed up in my apartment to stress and hammer out more prose on the wood piles of North Carolina.

I decided to edit this error in my ways by setting aside the better part of an afternoon for my own belated celebration of National Pie Day. With three sticks of butter softening on the counter, I dusted off the cookbook that my college roommates had given to me as a graduation gift and invited one of my best friends over to learn from me how to make a flour pie crust from scratch. Her excitement at tasting that crust right out of the oven would have been enough to make my day, but I too had new territory to cover.

The recipe I ultimately settled on, mile high strawberry pie, called for a graham cracker crust, so I threw a stack of crackers into a Ziploc freezer bag, pushed all the air out, sealed it, and began crushing the crackers into fine crumbs with a rolling pin. Not only does this trick make a molehill out of a mountain, it’s incredibly fun!

After mixing the crumbs with melted butter, sugar and pinch of salt, I grated the zest of a lemon into the bowl for some extra punch. Ten preheated minutes later, I had a fully baked and beautiful crust for the taking. As one concession to the modern pulse, I used my roommate’s electric mixer to beat egg whites, sugar, heavy cream, lemon juice and frozen strawberries into a light and sweet “mile high” filling.

While the recipe calls for this pie to be chilled, I bet that freezing it overnight would yield a much better result, and I think it’s safe to claim that my gamble has paid off. While I can’t really taste the zest in my crust, a slice straight out of the freezer has a refreshing and ephemeral quality that places it on the level of a good icebox pie. It’s no coincidence that icebox pie ranks just as highly on my list of best memories, and while I’m already behind trailing deadlines as I write this paragraph, if just one of you out there decides to bake your own pie after reading this, I’ll be able to add this day to that list.

Happy National Pie Day!

Recipe for Graham Cracker Crust from Pie Pie Pie
1 1/2 cups crumbs
1 stick unsalted butter, melted
2 tablespoons sugar
Pinch of salt

Crush crumbs and mix with sugar and salt in a bowl. Add melted butter and stir vigorously until all crumbs are moistened. Pat mixture into a 9-inch pie pan hands. Preheat oven to 325F and bake for 8-10 minutes. Allow crust to cool completely before adding filling.

Recipe for Mile High Strawberry Pie from Pie Pie Pie
4 egg whites
Pinch of salt
2/3 cup sugar
1 1/4 cups sliced, frozen strawberries, thawed but not drained
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 cup heavy whipping cream

Beat egg whites and salt at moderate speed with an electric mixer until the mixture forms soft, foamy peaks. Add sugar while continuing to beat until the mixture forms stiff, firm peaks. Add lemon juice and strawberries with any thawed out juices, then beat at high speed for about two minutes, or until the mixture is thick and fluffy, and forms billowy, slightly droopy peaks when the beater is lifted. Be careful not to overbeat.

Place pie in the freezer immediately, and serve when frozen.

My first trip north of Rodeo, CA introduced me to a couple things: what it’s like to be stranded in Ashland when the 5 freeway closes down due to blizzard conditions, and the cultural landscape of the Pacific Northwest that can only be described as alternative. This is the region whence came Starbucks, yet there are more bookstores per city block than coffee shops with green or brown signs. Oregon and Washington are beautiful, hilly countrysides full of art lovers and liberals, a wonderland that would be a beacon to many if it didn’t have a storm cloud hovering overhead at all times. Literally. I don’t think I saw a blue sky once in Oregon that wasn’t partnered with a rainbow.

In Portland, I didn’t see a blue sky at all. Then again, I would have been happy hanging out inside the West Coast’s largest bookstore all day, or exploring the rest of the offbeat city of bridges, rain or not. Truthfully, I didn’t know much about Portland before I got there, but I could have guessed that Mele and I would end up eating donuts in the rain at some point. Before our trip, I guessed two things: that I couldn’t visit Portland without having some Voodoo Dougnuts, and they wouldn’t be worth the hype. Sadly, I was right on both counts.

Street carts and outdoor counters puzzle me in a city with constant precipitation. Voodoo Doughnut was not the only place that encouraged people to wait in the rain, but it did have the longest line. While there is nothing culinarily spectacular about Voodoo, it’s an interesting place with a creative menu, and a fitting tourist spot for the city that inspired The Simpsons. That said, I’m not sure if “the magic was in the hole,” and I really don’t know what that is supposed to mean. There was nothing enlightening in either donut we tried, the “Voodoo” or the “Portland,” and I have no reason to wait in that line again.

Of course, the Pacific Northwest isn’t all liberal white people browsing indepedent bookstores, hanging out in eccentric cafes and eating at unique snack shops or hip international bistros. Seattle and Portland are multicultural cities; likewise, my best meal during our visit to Portland came from the side of Portland where the streetlights are painted imperial red. At Bun Bo Hue Restaurant in heavily Vietnamese Southeast Portland, tradition wins over creative redesign and soup wins over fried dough.

That isn’t to say that Bun Bo Hue Restaurant serves the usual kind of Vietnamese food. The restaurant’s signature dish, Bun Bo Hue, is specifically central Vietnamese fare, originating from the imperial capital. Unlike the North’s famous Pho, which has garnered popularity in America at the speed of sushi, Bun Bo Hue has stayed relatively unsampled by laymen like myself and remains deep in the hearts of Little Saigons everywhere.

The interior, however, looked like every Vietnamese restaurant I’d ever been to. Flat screens aired Vietnamese television, heavily made-up older women waited tables and the cilantro was shaped like snake scales. A Yelp! review described the place as dumpy, but it’d be considered a pretty nice hole-in-the-wall by Southern California’s standards, and the only thing I worried about was whether or not I’d be able to read the menu. Fortunately, I already knew what I wanted, and a little phrase like “pig knuckles and congealed pig blood” wasn’t going to scare me away.

Okay, “pig knuckles and congealed pig blood” did scare me a little, so I didn’t follow suit with everyone else in the room and order the extra meat option. I soon regretted this choice. While the gelatinous blood squares were far from delicious – not bad, but boring, like an over-boiled vegetable – the pig knuckles served as poor man’s oxtail, delicious fall-off-the-cartilage stew morsels that had me fishing through soup broth for more. Also hearty were the noodles, which were more of a comfort vermicelli than the thinner pho variety, and a perfect vessel for a more potent broth.

Based on everything we tried, Bun Bo Hue Restaurant is worthy of recommendation to anyone passing through Southeast Portland. The fried chicken skin, crispy without being tough or crumbly, burst with a spectrum of seasoning. That was the name of the game: The pork dish, aside from the rather forgettable garnish of pork fat shavings, was a welcome bombardment of pepper and other intense but purposeful flavors, and of course, the bún bò hue was a sensual feast of taste profile counter-measures. Aside from sweet onions, Vietnamese cilantro and a side of lime wedges, bun bo hue is a very different soup than pho. In place of sweet, bún bò hue broth is tangy, like lemon grass. Instead of being rich and fatty, bún bò hue broth is peppery and multifaceted. Both soups, however, have the tendency to overpower the senses and leave you sitting up and taking deep breaths, because you can feel the flavors staining the walls of your mouth and esophagus. In a good way.

Can you name this dining counter?

If so, you’ve had the privilege of tasting one of America’s finest burgers. If not, you’ll get your answer below the fold.

This is the last of the point-and-eat posts from my holiday in California. I’ve saved what are probably my three favorite meals of the two weeks I spent on the west coast for the end of this series, and – to no one’s surprise, I hope – the ranking of all three has as much to do with people, place and memory as with the food I ate.

Mitsuru Cafe – Little Tokyo, Downtown L.A.

While I was in the boundaries of Los Angeles, I was recruited to review downtown LA’s Nickel Diner for a magazine pitch. While that meal was mostly boring, it did give Boykji and me a chance to stroll through the downtown area on a sunny day. We walked through the neon sign wonderland known as Grand Central Market, peeked inside the Blade Runner set known as the Bradbury Building, and navigated our way through the plazas of Little Tokyo, where we stumbled a cross a long line of eaters awaiting their chance to enter a small Japanese cafe.

Mitsuru, as it turns out, is known for its imagawayaki, a kind of red bean hotcake that customers can watch the pastry chef make as they queue up for a turn at the counter. Agreeing that the mention of red bean is reason enough to form up single file, we fell in and fixed our eyes on the windowpane. Working with the deliberation of a grand jury, the unadorned chef filled a hot casting griddle with batter, spooned homemade red bean filling over the cakes as they rose, then, using his fingers as a barometer, flipped one half atop the other to form a seal as the baking process completed.

One long line and $1.25 per piece later, we were handed our imagawayaki in thin paper bags. While these pastries don’t reach the textural highs of the glutinous, black sesame-dotted yakimochi at Cafe Zaiya in New York, they’re still well worth the wait. The crust of each cake, hot and steaming off the griddle, was nicely crisped, while the insides were fluffy. The homemade filling was thankfully not too sweet, and nothing about the pastry tasted artificial or augmented in the slightest. We sat down on a nearby bench and ate with our hands, breaking simple sweet bread amongst our fellow Angelenos.

The Apple Pan – West L.A.
Later that day, we returned to Boykji’s hometown of west Los Angeles, where mother Boyk took us out for dinner at The Apple Pan. I may have eaten at In-N-Out four times during the two weeks I spent in California, but none of those burgers beat out what I still think is the best burger in Los Angeles and possibly my favorite burger in the country.

Part of The Apple Pan’s unique quality (which, as emblazoned on the neon sign posted outside its unassuming building, will last forever) is its presence. Whenever I gripe about diners not really being diners and joints not really being joints, the first image to back up my curmudgeonly mind is the counter at The Apple Pan. There is no form of restaurant seating more elegant: When you walk through the double doors of this institution of eating, you must decide whether to step to the left or to the right. Once you’ve chosen your side of the room, you wait for an open spot at the counter. You receive no ticket and you wait for no waiters; just mind your manners and you’ll get a chance to sit down.

Once you’ve taken your seat – slightly uncomfortable since 1947 – a stately, white-haired buck, clad in white and crowned with folded paper, asks for your order. He’s flanked by years of brick, wood and stainless steel. Line cooks bustle about behind him, freshly grilled patties shifting between their hands and mile-high stacks of iceberg lettuce and pre-sliced cheese towering on one side of the assembly table. He’s one of the friendliest guys you’ll ever meet, but if you try to order before your lady, he will, without hesitation, put you in your place.

A pile of fries, well done if you ask, show up first. Wedged into cardboard, they’re stark, simple and absolutely perfect. As you take your first crunchy bite, the man throws down a cardboard plate, flips over his bottle of Heinz and – in a manner that can only be defined as “not fucking around” – heaps a serving of catsup beside it. He then sets out a wire frame with a tiny, conical paper cup, into which he drops a scoop of ice before handing you a soft drink. The flawless motion of it all makes me wish that Ray Croc had never sucked all the soul out of routine.

Once you’ve had your chance to munch on a few fries and take a sip of your soda, your choice of two burgers hits the counter. The only difference between them is in condiment – the hickory burger is dressed with a tangy barbecue sauce, while the steak burger is dressed with a sweet, red pickle relish. I prefer the taste and texture of relish on my patty, but both burgers are created equal.

Aside from the distinction of sauce, a hamburger at the Apple Pan is as simple as simple may be: loosely packed ground beef grilled medium well, a sizeable wad of iceberg, pickles and mayo on a deeply browned-edge bun. Beef here knows nothing of the heavily stuffed, thickly crusted, medium rare patties that dominate palates of the future. Instead, they offer an endlessly juicy hamburger experience. I have never had a juicier burger (that’s juicy, not bloody or greasy) than I have at the Apple Pan. It’s the template of taste for all hamburgers in fast food (White Castles exempt from all things definitional, of course), and it still holds the title after over half a century of business.

Making your way through a burger and fries here would be enough to land this place on your list of best burger joints in the world. What cements its spot is the next question asked: “Are you going to have pie tonight?”

The only acceptable answer is yes. The only right answer is banana cream. The Apple Pan’s banana cream pulls rank with Lois’ lemon icebox as the best pie of my lifetime. It’s the kind of pie that shows you things you thought pie could never accomplish. Yes, banana can be refreshing. Yes, pastry crust can stay flaky under multiple layers of banana, pudding and whipped cream. Yes, you will dream for months about your next chance to part with six bucks for a slice of pie – banana pie, of all things. Yes, you can have another slice.

Once you’ve polished off the last bits of whipped cream and crust crumb, you pay your tab and let someone else have his turn at the counter. The moment you step out through those swinging doors, you’re back in the twenty-first century, walking along Pico in the shadow of one of L.A.’s biggest shopping malls. This is the kind of dining experience that makes it extremely easy to see through the plastered-on rustics of pretty much every old-timey-themed restaurant I come across. Just as flash is no substitute for flavor, atmosphere is no substitute for history; the Apple Pan operates on both of these principles with a wink in its eye, not a tongue in its cheek.

Shanghai Restaurant – Chinatown, Downtown Oakland
When Oakland’s Shanghai opened a luxurious second branch in the crotch of student territory in Berkeley, it was doomed to the worst kind of failure: failure by ignorance. The restaurant had one or two years of glory, attracting diners from all around the Bay Area but remaining anathema to the undergraduate body, who would sooner gush over its mediocre-with-brunch neighbor, Cafe Durant, than sit down for a meal of xiaolongbao and sticky rice. Then, it closed up shop, content with the bounds of its original hole in the wall on Webster.

When I returned to Shanghai, it was business as usual – cramped space, dingy walls, ramshackle tables and an attitude ranging somewhere between indifferent and confused. Perfect for my last night in the East Bay.

Every meal at Shanghai starts off with xiaolongbao. These soup dumplings are the perfect mirror to the rest of Shanghai’s food – not something I would refer to as “refined” and too thick-skinned for me to stand up and call them the best XLB I’ll ever have, but very tasty all the same.

Another standby, Shanghai’s double fried noodles – chow mein style noodles, half tender, half crispy – rides the crest of comfort food. The meat gravy ladled atop is unobtrusive enough to ward off the aura of junk, and the varied textures of meat, pepper, leek and two kinds of noodles is ceaseless fun.

While not nearly as varied, Shanghai’s savory rice cakes (I think it’s niangao) – dressed in green, mixed with pork and doused in a similar gravy – also make for a comforting bite. Sauteed green beans are nicely charred.

This fellow was tasty, but I don’t remember anything in particular about him. Strange that I feel somewhat squeamish around cooked embodied shellfish but can’t resist taking close-up photos of a whole fried fish.

Salted pork with bean sheets is one of Shanghai’s hidden aces and definitely the surprise standout of the evening. The pork on this dish is extremely tender, juicy and savory in the simplest sense. The bean sheets in question are actually flat, wide noodles cut from tofu sheets; the imprinted surface and clean, dense texture are really nice upgrades from a comparably shaped egg or rice noodle.

Easily superior to Shanghai’s xialongbao are Shanghai’s shengjianbao, bite-sized buns filled with the same savory pork filling, then browned from beneath and sprinkled with sesame seeds and green onion. No visit to Webster St. is complete without a handful of these.

I could say the same thing about the restaurant’s red bean pancake, a Christmas card-shaped slap to the cheeks of red bean buns all over town. Made with rice flour and fried until it attains the union of chewy, crisp and greasy, this is the perfect end to a meal composed almost entirely of items off the dim sum menu. And while it might have tasted even better on a warm bench in downtown L.A., it wouldn’t have been as satisfying outside the dank confines of Shanghai.

I’ll see you again next year, California!

The chip butty, found mostly in the UK, is a sandwich of chips, a.k.a. French fries, stuffed between two slices of sturdy bread. To be honest, the concept was a bit confusing at first. One cold winter morning, I pondered while munching on the ridiculously satisfying layers of deep-fried golden potatoes, ketchup, bread and mayonnaise: Why would you put fries in a sandwich? Going through all the effort of frying the potato strips, and then putting them into a sandwich anyway, you might as well eat toast with more toast in the middle, to save electricity, oil and effort.

As starches are staples, they’re not usually coupled with each other and are usually less intense in flavour – in a word, bland. It was akin to finding some bread on your rice, or mashed potatoes mixed with noodles. Yet one morning, when deciding what to have for breakfast one muggy morning in Taipei, the obvious dawned on me: that this happens all the time, and that in fact, my favourite breakfast item, fan tuan (rice wrapped around a fried dough stick), was also a starch within a starch. What’s more, another breakfast mainstay, shao bing you tiao (a fried dough stick tucked into biscuit-like bread) is even more extreme, placing a fried starch inside another fried starch.

The thing is, neither of these is bland at all. Frying adds a savoury touch to the shao bing you tiao, and you can add soy sauce if you want your daily dose of sodium in one go. Fan tuan comes in both sweet and savoury varieties. The latter are delicious, crumbly dried pork and pickled vegetable making for a dry and portable form of breakfast porridge, but it’s the sweet variety that I like the most. Sweet fan tuan is simpler, with nothing added to the rice and fried dough but sugar. Generous amounts, too. The whole warm mixture, just-starting-to-fall-apart glutinous rice blanketing the crispy dough, is just the thing to go with a bowl of warm soy milk (which is also preferably saturated with sugar).

This particular cafe I ended up at that morning, Yonghe Doujiang Dawang, has an open storefront, and the muggy air coming in from the street is blown back by electric fans. Colour-wise, everything inside is a varying shade of fluorescent-lit white or brown, but for some reason the morning here feels anything but drab. The lady who makes the food bustles out front, a television carrying daily scandal blares in the back, and from the basics comes the best sort of comfort breakfast you can get. Fan tuan is made to order, so the dough remains crunchy and the rice warm and soft. Shao bing you tiao is not assembled until the last minute, so the oil doesn’t settle into a soggy mess. There are several branches of this place throughout Taipei, but the setting here, cosy to the core, gives off no hint of this.

In Beijing, those hankering after fan tuan can find it at Yonghe Dawang, a fast-food chain store not to be confused with the Yonghe in Taipei. The interior is reminiscent of McDonalds, and a realisation that starch-on-starch actually depends a lot on fresh and contrasting textures sets in quickly. There, the rice is stale and the dough chewy. Yonghe Dawang’s worst offence, however, is its stinginess with sugar.

I suppose starch within a starch isn’t really that crazy after all. It’s like having a meat inside another meat, as in bacon-wrapped sausage or turducken. It’s good stuff, and – who knows – maybe the next step will be potato sushi.
I will keep my eyes peeled.

Yonghe Doujiang Dawang
Fuxing South Road, Section 2