Papalote San Francisco and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Tortilla Chips

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Papalote is one of our favorite taquerias in San Francisco. Their famous salsa is beloved worldwide and they've recently even begun selling it by the jar and can ship it out on demand.

To date, one of the happier moments when dining in their establishment has consistently been the arrival of piping hot freshly cooked bright yellow salty tortilla chips, accompanied by the aforementioned tasty salsa. Sadly, in the last few months things have taken a nasty turn for the worse. The chips have become a pre-bought, from-the-bag, cold, gray-white, stale, tasteless experience. At first we thought perhaps we were unlucky and they had simply run out of their fresh chips, or had a chip emergency. But after today's most recent visit, probably the fourth since we discovered this change, we find it necessary to resign ourselves to a new harsh reality.

Papalote now serves low quality tortilla chips. What was a top-of-the-line high quality first impression made on both new and returning customers alike is now a forgettable experience that dampens what would otherwise be the same fantastic award-winning dining experience they've offered for years.

We've submitted feedback on their site to this effect. Please do whatever you can to entreat management to return the chips to their former glory.

35th street bistro and oaxaca

Just ate at the 35th Street Bistro again, hadn't been there in a while. Their trout was truly excellent, the highlight of the meal. Clam appetizer also very good. Profiteroles for dessert, along with a strawberry in balsamic vinegar whipped cream sort of a thing. For my entree I had orecchiette, pancetta, peas and spinach pasta which I enjoyed but was unfortunately overshadowed by the glory of the trout. Did I mention the trout was good? Just a light crusting of pepper and sea salt and perhaps some kind of herbal goodness.

The strawberry and balsamic vinegar dish seems to be the latest fashion, our having seen it at a couple of different places now.

I've eaten at La Carta de Oaxaca twice in the past couple of weeks. New menu item is the Tostada (not the shrimp one -- this one has shredded beef). Favorite dishes are now (1) pozole, (2) pork tamale, (3) entomatada w/ tomatilla sauce, (4) tostada [not the shrimp one].

90+ degree weather in Seattle makes things rough. Our very furry cats are unhappy and wedging themselves into contorted positions on the tile in the bathroom. Cold Pellegrino in the refrigerator makes things slightly more bearable. Has anyone gotten their cats to drink ice water? Ours turn their noses up at it.

Tawon Thai

Our friendly neighborhood Thai restaurant, Tawon Thai is directly across the street from my apartment building in Fremont. It is happy and delicious food, as their menu and other of their pamphleteria would have it. My particular favorite dish is their Egg Noodle Soup with Pork -- a rich dark brown broth with roasted garlic and green onion. Highly recommended. Another favorite is the Gai Manow, best described as a chicken breast with spinach and roasted/steamed in a coconut milk lemon sauce. The Tom Kha Gai is thick and rich. Their peanut sauce (accompanying the Chicken Satae appetizer) is among the best I've had. Try it, you'll like it!

Tawon Thai

Our friendly neighborhood Thai restaurant, Tawon Thai is directly across the street from my apartment building in Fremont. It is happy and delicious food, as their menu and other of their pamphleteria would have it. My particular favorite dish is their Egg Noodle Soup with Pork -- a rich dark brown broth with roasted garlic and green onion. Highly recommended. Another favorite is the Gai Manow, best described as a chicken breast with spinach and roasted/steamed in a coconut milk lemon sauce. The Tom Kha Gai is thick and rich. Their peanut sauce (accompanying the Chicken Satae appetizer) is among the best I've had. Try it, you'll like it!

San Francisco Consumptibles

Having now returned from my trip to San Francisco, clearly we're all in need of a recap of some of the key meals in hindsight that I haven't yet touched upon. Now, normally I'd head straight on over to Gordo Taqueria in the Richmond district (one on Geary near 14th Ave., and one on Clement near 24th Ave.). However, this time I thought I'd try something out of the ordinary and went to Los Hermanos first (in the Marina district, by Chestnut and Fillmore).

Los Hermanos is a different burrito experience than Gordo. Their meats are much saucier, the rice isn't as heavily colored, and their guacamole and sour cream are watery in comparison. I happen to really enjoy the flavor of the sauce on their chicken and beef (the beef is somewhat like a Chile Colorado). Above is a shot of me with the burrito -- you can see by my ecstatic expression how fabulously exciting holding one of these in my hands really was. I munched it halfway, but at that point my interest began to wane. I have two theories as to why this might be: (1) the 2.5 lbs of burrito was beginning to fill me up, or (2) though the burrito is a nice change of pace from Gordo, it's just not as tasty at the end of the day.

Yes, intrepid readers, you know what this meant! The next day, my friends Tom, Jaa and I awoke early and headed straight over to Gordo, where I continued my food journaling documentation endeavors. Now that I've been living in Seattle for about seven years on and off, I've perfected the answer to the question, "what do you get at your favorite restaurant in all of San Francisco when you may only get to go there a couple of times a year?". Here it is, the long-awaited unveiling:

1. Carne asada corn quesadilla, no salsa, with hot sauce.
2. Carnitas flour quesadilla, no salsa, with beans, rice, guacamole and hot sauce.
3. Chile verde super burrito, no salsa or sour cream, with hot sauce.

Let's flesh this out a little more and explain some of the reasoning behind these selections. First of all, I always omit salsa as I find that when inserted into the component, it invariably makes the meal cold and wet. I like their salsa, but if I use it at all I want to apply it on a per-bite basis. Second, their hot sauce is unique, fabulous and tasty -- it's a green watery liquid that's probably a 3 / 5 spicy-wise, but also imparts a nice chile flavor to the dish. Third, sour cream never reheats well in the microwave, and I also find I sometimes grow tired of it, and if it's permeated the whole item then you're rather out of luck, so I omit it as a rule.

So, you may ask, what's so special about this place? Why do I love it so? Why do I (quite literally) dream about it a few times a month? Why do my brother and I treat it like holy ground? Pictures can't necessarily do it justice, but I'll try.

Examine the carne asada quesadilla to the right. This was the last bite, and it was as delectable as the first. Fried in lard, thick with cheese, and beef that's been sitting in brown beef juice right up until the moment they spooned it onto the quesadilla. The tortilla is soaked in grease but crunchy. I usually put some salt on each bite. This is my standard opening appetizer dish. The carnitas corn quesadilla is also excellent, but the carnitas is greasy enough that it pushes it beyond the category of "appetizer" into the "you won't be able to eat the rest of your meal" arena.

Next up were the flour quesadilla and the super burrito. There's a style and approach question here -- which do you eat first? Do you eat some of one, and then the other? I went with my gut instinct, and as you can see here, that meant holding one in each hand and alternating bites.
In my opinion, the primary item is the burrito, with the quesadilla acting a bit like a "chaser". Where one might normally grow tired of the chile verde sauce, here I was able to use the carnitas in the quesadilla to quell any uprising mutinous outcry of my tastebuds. Variety is the keyword here, and I made sure there was plenty of it. The flour quesadillas are lighter and flakier than the corn ones usually turn out, and they're much bigger, which makes it easier to have all of the burrito-based materials (beans, rice, etc.) added to them. One could argue, "Why even order a burrito? It's not fried, so it can't possibly be as tasty as the quesadilla." And, you'd basically be right. I ordered a burrito because ordering two flour quesadillas is absolutely and completely over the top, but I still needed a delivery vehicle to carry two different meats into my belly.

I've eaten a lot of chile verde in my time, but the best is here. Here's a close-up shot of the last piece of chile verde I was able to eat.

The meat has been cooked to a pot-roast tenderness, where it flakes easily and absorbs a great deal of the tomatillo sauce or whatever it is that's used to make the chile verde. Burritos made with this ingredient tend to be saucier than most, so look out if you're wearing anything that you'll be sad to drip upon. White oxford cloth shirts need not apply.

As I type this, I am wistful and despondent, knowing that it will be months before I am again able to visit this mecca of culinary delights. For those of you in the San Francisco Bay Area, seek it out, and think of me.

San Francisco, Day One and Half of Two

On arrival in San Francisco on vacation for a week or so, my friends Tom and Jaa greeted me with a festival of glory at the R&G Lounge chinese restaurant in Chinatown. A long-time staple and favorite of ours, we ordered:

• Hot and Sour Soup with Wonton: pork and shrimp filled solid wontons with noodle that isn't overcooked, and a hot and sour soup with all the right ingredients and flavor.
  
• Lemon Chicken: hot, crispy, high-qual lemon dipping sauce, pure and simple.
  
• Three Treasure (or something like that): Shrimp stuffed peppers, tofu and eggplant.
• Beef Ho Fun: wide flat noodles with zesty beef hunklets.

For lunch today I stopped by Hahn's Hibachi, one of a small chain throughout the city that professes to serve Korean BBQ. I love the stuff, but am not sure how authentic it really is. I'm especially fond of their hot chili sauce which is somewhat like sriracha with more pepper seeds and a bit of vinegar mixed in.


Here's a shot of the sandwich. Note the melted cheese, the thick boneless chunks of chicken (and not all dry, flavorless white meat), and you can see a bit of the light brown Korean BBQ sauce in among the chicken, cheese and bread as well. The bread is thin, but not too thin, and soft so that it doesn't slash up your mouth. I wolfed this thing down in about 3 minutes. It's $6, and it'll be one of the best $6 you ever spent.

I'm also a big fan of their meat plates: I usually get the combo chicken and beef, but they're all good. Meat mountain reigns supreme at Hahn's, and you just can't go wrong. We should all eat there as often as possible.

Rumor has it that tonight I'm eating at Wasabi and Ginger, a Sushi place somewhere near Russian Hill.

A Sunday festival of Fremont-based restaurant exploration took us to Roxy's Deli for brunch and El Camino for dinner.

At Roxy's Deli I had matzoh ball soup and a corned-beef sandwich.

The soup was reasonable: a light chicken stock with minor herbing and a fluffy matzoh ball that had a wheat-like appearance to its consituent materials. It was a pleasant light soup, but not overwhelmingly authentic in taste for those who are deeply steeped in historical matzoh ball familial sampling and/or New York tastings.

The corned beef sandwich was hearty and a good size. We analyzed the beef extensively, in fact, and have developed a new theory as to what exactly is so different between the Corned Beef of the World (CBOTW) and the Corned Beef of New York (CBONY). Here is a sketch of the Principle of New York Corned Beef Preparation (PONYCBP):

• the tiny individual meat chunklets in CBONY are more well-defined, separated, and individually assessable. This seems likely to be due to a high fat content.
  
• the coloration of CBONY is a deep, rich red. Our hypothesis is that the meat is fried, marinated, soaked, or otherwise immersed in some other kind of fat (e.g. chicken fat, or "schmaltz").
  
• without having to order specially, roughly 3x the expected, necessary, or normally consumable quantity of corned beef is placed on the sandwich.
• The Jewish rye bread is particularly excellent.
  

Unfortunately, none of the four items in the above were to be found at Roxy's, but the sandwich was reasonable nevertheless. A flavorful deli mustard was applied, and the corned beef was heated on a grill. From remote observation, the breakfast dishes (corned beef hash, omelettes, etc.) looked excellent and I'll be giving those a whirl the very next time I go.

We also tried a Lox and Bagel -- the lox was light and fresh, the bagels weren't overly-cheesed, and good quality purple onions were also thrown into the mix. There were capers but not as many as one would like, so we'll be asking for bonus capers on our return.

I summed the restaurant experience up as: a diner experience with Jewish overtones.

And, on to El Camino! My second meal there was far more memorable than the previous one, and the drink sampling is surely a key component. We had a House Margarita (strong, flavorful, light salt on the rim) and a Raspberry Twist (essentially a raspberry sorbet in a glass with mint). Both were tasty and delightful while still knocking the imbiber for an imbibed liquorific loop.

The posole, unlike many posoles that have gone before, was not greasy or red in color. Composed at least in part of chicken, pork, a rich chicken broth, hominy, and green tomatillo sauce, it was one of the highlights of the meal and I will think of it wistfully from time to time until such time as I taste it again. It was served with flour-dusted flour tortillas steaming hot and with some amount of salt pre-applied in a tasteful and thoughtful manner.

The mussels appetizer was served in a hearty cream, chile, and herb sauce with toasted buttery flatbread on the side. We thoroughly enjoyed the mussels, again the orange varietal, and there were several extraordinarily plump instances to be found. This will sound negative, but it's not intended as such: for those who remember playing with cap guns in their youth (cheap metal toy guns that apply pressure to red paper strips containing small amounts of some kind of gunpowder-like substance), as we wrapped up the dish, I found something in the broth tasted faintly like the way the caps used to smell. But in a good way!

The chicken enchilada is memorable for two reasons: (1) the mole is extra chocolatey, and (2) it is served with a side of collard greens with a vinegar-esque sauce. The enchilada contents are comprised of tender chicken morsels. We are going to eat it again and again.

Here's what I want to order the next time I go to El Camino:

• another raspberry twist
• the duck special that I've seen twice but not yet ordered
• the posole
• some kind of dessert
  

Word is that the pulled pork sandwich also looks appealing, and may be on the short list.

Asian Wok and Grill

One of my favorite Chinese dishes is Hong Kong Style Crispy Chow Mein. Properly done, the noodles are thin egg noodles that are fried into a wide, flat, crispy birds-nest hunk. A sauced preparation is poured on top (I'd normally select beef, though most anything can be found inclusive of chicken, seafood, and house combos). The most memorable restaurants at which I've eaten this:

• Hong Kong Flower Lounge (San Francisco and Palo Alto, CA), sadly, I believe this restaurant is no more.
  
• Jasmine (Las Vegas, in the Bellagio), and really everything here is quite excellent.
  
• Noble Court (Bellevue, WA), in my humble opinion the single best Chinese restaurant in the Seattle area.
  

My girlfriend recently discovered that Asian Wok and Grill, near Fremont Ave. and 34th St., serves this dish, and so my quality of life has dramatically improved.

Since no entry would be complete without a carnitas reference, let me suggest that the intrepid reader check out El Puerco Lloron, recommended to me by my co-worker Cam, and a worthy purveyor of fine pork and other meat-based dishes. Eat now or be hungry! I found their beans and tortillas to be particularly tasty -- I believe they make their own tortillas, much like Rosita's in Greenlake. It's also in a fun location, right in the middle of the Pike Place Market area, near the waterfront, some furniture shops, and the Seattle Steam Factory (no, really, that's what the side of the building says).