Eating Out Your Lovin’ Buns

Ahhh, love sweet love. What could be more romantic than a day dedicated to one sided gift giving and the exchange of poorly worded missives of lust? Well, we do it a little different in EOF town! Rather than jumping through the hoops of convention, we’ve broken St. Valentine’s down to its more hedonistic roots.

This usually entails a trip over to Whole Foods or some other specialty food retailer for a kaleidoscopic selection of tidbits and drinkables and confections. This year, we weren’t so keen on the last two ducks in the steam table and the rest just didn’t seem to fit our appetites. So I came up with the idea to have our entrees over at BB’s Lounge. Figuring it, being a lounge, would be fairly open and accessible, as opposed to every other place groaning under the weight of their horny patrons bellowing for more free bread.

And it turned out that I was fairly correct. The bar was lightly populated, there were a couple tables open and it didn’t feel “slammed”. Oh how fucking wrong I was! Their first fuckup, we sat at the bar for 10 minutes while the lone waitress/bartender seemed to simply be running around with no plates, making no drinks and addressing no patrons. Ah well, give it a minute, right? Again, bad idea. Someday I’ll be smart enough to start acting on my gut instinct in restaurants, but then again, how would I ever give a properly bad review? Got bad vibe from restaurant, ate somewhere else, feel smug. Hardly riveting.

To continue on the suck parade, the bartender finally comes to us and asks if we were there for dinner. We give the affirmative. She asks if we’d like to sit at the bar, but noticing two unoccupied tables, it seems stupid to loom over dinner at the bar when we could sit back and relax into our hedonism. We’re assured that they will clear the table and have us seated immediately. Patience has paid off, yes?

Nope! First off, it takes another 15 minutes for the baffled bottled redhead to bus a table. I feel the spidey sense tingle start to go off like an industrial vibrator in my medulla oblongata. Suddenly, two well dressed types appear from the back area and proceed to hover around “our” table. Steady….obviously the people working here are too stupid to discuss this with, so blowing up at them is useless. I’d use words far too large for them to understand like “unacceptable”. Aaaaand here it comes.

After 30 minutes, during which at no point did anyone even offer to take a drink order (we were sitting at the BAR!), the special needs bartender shamefacedly comes to us to explain that Giulia’s next door is sending their overflow into THIS establishment and that my promised table was out promised by some cuntburger that I couldn’t even have the satisfaction of spraying with spittle as I sputtered my indignation. And as a consolation, we’re offered…to wait another half hour for a fucking table! This lackluster human being and substandard employee didn’t even have the firing brain cells to point out that we were already in chairs at a table-like device and could just put our orders in. Resisting the urge to pneumatically propel a gobbet of oral digestive fluids into her uncomprehending eye, we chose the better part of valor and beat feet.

Rather than let the fact that I’ll never set foot in BB’s Lounge or it’s parent restaurant Giulia’s, short of going to gloat over their closed façade ruin the evening, we set back out in search of our entrée. Considering that even DiCiccio’s (pronounced Dee Sick Eee Oh’s) was overflowing with corpulent humanity, a brick and mortar eating establishment is out of the question at this point. As we ponder, I mention that we might as well opt for an ironic twist to the evening and go for pizza. Strangely, the idea sticks and we beeline right back to Whole Foods, praying that they haven’t shut off the oven for the night.

As we burst back in, rushing to the hot food section, I see that there is still a reassuring flicker of good honest fire coming from the brick oven. Sadly, they’re a little bit broken down, but their lovely pizza chef was more than willing to throw together a one-off pie for a desperate and disgruntled couple. After confusing her with contradicting descriptions of what we wanted, she was finally able to winnow down to what would be our actual order. Red sauce, fresh mozzarella, salami, pepperoni, basil and artichoke hearts, all on a nice thin somewhat soft, crackery crust.

Goals finally achieved, we bomb back to the pad for our celebration. We pop a bottle of Prosecco, an Italian sparkling wine. It’s fairly tasty, but closer to domestic champagnes than our usual Moet. A bit sharper and a little too dry. But certainly a high brow accompaniment to our pizza dinner and our magical panoply of goodies. Embarrassingly, we enjoyed the pizza so much that we were far too full to get into the cheeses, olives and pickled okra that we had planned to snack on, or the ice cream treats that we had so coveted just an hour prior. But we did get to enjoy our his and hers desserts that we picked up in the bakery. She enjoyed a nice fruit tart that the baker had sweetly retopped with fresher fruit and I, a couple small chocolate cups with a smooth chocolate mousse and berries.

All in all, Valentines worked out nicely for the general domestic tranquility of the Eating Out Fresno household. Whole Foods did a good job of stepping up and I’ve got to compliment their staff on being extremely friendly and helpful. Conversely, our semi-brief experience at BB’s Lounge was one of the most unprofessional moments I’ve had in any business in Fresno, much less a restaurant. It’s especially shocking because we had previously had a very positive experience there. But 100% and 0% still average out to an F. It looks like we’ll be on the hunt for another decent Italian restaurant to patronize. Because seriously, fuck BB’s Lounge.


-Pook

Eating Out Mr. Fishy Pants

Mmmm mmm! Choked chicken of the sea over sticky alabaster mouthfuls. So, this past Humpday we wound up opting out of Pub Quiz after meeting Manhole on the very day that KRZR died. Don’t even get me started on that mess. I just hope y’all will avoid listening to any Clear Channel stations in the future. Nevermind all that mess though, it’s dinner time and Mr. Sushi has Ki-rin Iciban, so kampai!

It was raining a bit out and a little chilly, so naturally we’ll start off with a couple bowls of miso soup. It was a nice robust red miso rather than the milder white miso I run into most often. A fairly nice start. So we moved on to our opening roll, which I think was called the White Dragon. Either way it was crab salad with tempura shrimp and cucumber inside and topped with yellowtail and dotted with eel sauce, fairly light in flavor and tasty. Though there’s that tendency with the rolls to be a challenging mouthful, even for a bigmouth like me. Thankfully it wasn’t over sauced and rather picturesquely plated.

Next up, we attempted to order their beef ta-ta, which I have to guess was a riff on tartare. It pretty much sounded like the beef sashimi that we get at Yoshino’s. But alas, they were beefless. And there was sadness. But we rallied around a plate of regular tuna sashimi. Really nice and clean tasting, however the daikon or whatever it was that they used as a garnish, smelled like it had lightly brushed some unwashed orangutan balls before being shredded as a platform for our fish. Not overpowering, but there was a mild, noticeable funk. So, onto their rainbow roll. It’s pretty much a cali roll with a random selection of fishes on top. I got the bit with a bit of tuna and a bit of whitefish on top. Again, nice tasting, the fish tasted really light and clean.

I noticed that their prices for nigiri sushi (just fish on rice) was like $4.50 for two pieces. That’s a bit high considering the portion size and simplicity. The fancier rolls were $9.00 and had quite a bit more ingredients and complexity, not to mention were just generally more food. So, I hop off the sushi train and try out their Japanese ramen bowl. At $5, it’s about the same price as 1 order of sushi and it’s HUGE! I got a giant steaming bowl of dashi, noodles, carrots, bell peppers and a mild cabbage (probably Napa). The broth was excellent, there was that nice smoky flavor from the bonito flakes, with the carrot and bell pepper adding a little hint of their flavor to it all. That was the dish that put me down, I barely got halfway through it before waving the surrender flag.

One thing I have to compliment for sure was their service. Their greeter had us seated immediately and had our drink orders, which arrived promptly. The sushi chef introduced himself and pointed out a couple specials and let us peruse through the menus. He was never far off and all it took was eye contact for him to take another order. Plus as we were rapping up, a couple of the guys stopped by and chatted with us a bit and ribbed me for not finishing my ramen. They really made us feel welcome.

All in all, I really had a nice time at Mr. Sushi. The service and piscine quality really went a long way to outshine some funky radish and slightly high sushi prices. Plus their menu is fairly widely varied, with some Korean and other choices besides their Japanese and sushi items. And with the streets down for repairs in the Tower, just about everybody could deal with us stopping by to try something new. So grab a sake to ward off the early chill of autumn and enjoy a jaunty jaunt in the Tower.


-Pook

Eating Out A Bad Habit

Lordy, it seems like it’s been an age since we’ve last reviewed anything restaurantish around town. A mean economy can subconsciously make one a little less experimental in their eating. I’ve been hitting a lot of familiar and favorite places. And while it makes for boring blogging, I’m glad to do my part to keep the places I love, open. But that doesn’t preclude us entirely from trying anything new.

Case in point was the other night, we wanted hamburgers, but didn’t want the usual drive thru at the local choke and puke. When I suddenly remember that there was that new chain’s test location over in Fig Garden. At first I thought it was EurekaBurger!, but alas, they’re on the other side of Fresno’s Mason-Dixon Line. It was The Habit, a Californiacentric chain based out of Santa Barbara. Not as local as I was hoping, but heck, it’s something new.

So off we scoot for a to-go order that we can snarf down in the warmth of our own living room. I go for broke and get their double burger with bacon, plus fries and a strawberry malt. Everything was still a nice temperature upon arrival at the Hobbit Hole, which is a pretty good sign that they actually made the food to order and it was all able to come out at the same time. Although, I’m told they were rather camera shy. Tsk tsk tsk. Can’t a blogger get some visual material and not be looked at like someone preparing a lawsuit or have to kiss the ass of the manager prior, creating the very furor that a food blogger is looking to avoid? This town needs an enema!

On to dinner. First thing I notice upon unwrapping the burger is that the bottom bun is very soggy. Either thin mayo or sweating lettuce or both were to blame. Halfway through the burger it had entire disintegrated, so I was forced to hold that last bit by the patty itself. A big downside of shredded lettuce, besides it giving up water like no other, it also wilts rapidly and therefore loses all worthwhile texture. Gross. The patties were a bit dry and overdone. Not that you expect medium rare, but a burger can be done all the way through and still be moist. The other problem is that I order mine without onions, but their grill is so inundated with their flavor that I spent 5 minutes picking through the lettuce looking for the offending shred of onion my nose declared MUST be in there. And sadly the bacon was overdone as well, what wasn’t dental bill boostingly crunchy was pure rubber and lacked flavor. Overall, an edible burger, but far too expensive to be that unimpressive and have that many faults.

The French fries, which I’m told many consider the bar by which a burger joint is judged, were also sadly lacking. The seasoning wasn’t anything special with no distinct flavors, with a chewy yet gummy texture. It’s odd for French fries to stick to your teeth like taffy. At least the malt was enjoyable. Although if a place screws up ice cream with malt powder and milk in a blender and topped with whipped cream, they should probably have corks on their forks, if you know what I mean Rupert.

Alas, I can’t really recommend them to a discerning public for either flavor or value. But I can always beat the drums of my favorites like Yoshino’s, Cracked Pepper Bistro, The Landmark and Don Pepe’s. Plus there are plenty more nooks and crannies of the Fresno foodiverse for me to probe. I’m thinking with the change of the seasons I need to snoop around for some soul food and barbeque. To the streets!


-Pook

Eating Out My Esteem for Mangosteen

Holy shit! A restaurant review? Here? On Eating Out Fresno? Pshaw! But it’s true! I somehow got out of the house and let some other poor schmuck do the cooking in exchange for hard earned shekels. And as always, it’s a crap shoot on whether or not I’m going to feel like a dumbass for parting with the greenbacks to get something I probably could have ruined better in my own kitchen.

Case in point, Mangosteen, the cute bistro that took over the old Lyon’s building that Kim’s Vietnamese once occupied. I’ve read a fair stack of eater reviews and seen tons and tons of positive feedback on the various restaurant review sites that actually are aware that Fresno exists and has places to eat. So, on a hot summer’s Sunday, it made sense to finally stop in and see if this moderately priced eatery was actually all it had been cracked up to be.

On first impression, it’s quite nice. I can still totally see the old Lyon’s layout, but somehow the architects had subliminally added in Asian elements. Like the main supports of the dining room in the rough shape of the pillars of heaven. Pretty cool. And the mural work on the side and back walls is quite beautiful. And another big plus for a sweltering Fresno day is good air conditioning. Too bad the customers were cooler than the produce in the back, but more on that later.

We’re seated promptly and strangely, before seeing a menu, we’re asked what we would like to drink. Since I’m interested in what unique beverage items they might have, we opt for waters. Odd that I would have to establish that, since it’s pretty much the universal constant of a sit down restaurant. I’ve got that sinking feeling in my guts. Like I’m going to have one of those, “Oh yeah! THIS is why I blog!” moments. Damn it, I really wanted to like this place.

With menus in hand, we peruse their offerings. It’s a decent little menu, reasonably priced and as usual, should have been spell checked before going to the printers. And then it happens. The first little domino is tipped, flips the man into the pan which cuts the string on the iron hovering over the open tube of toothpaste…well you get the idea. Mrs. EOF orders a Thai iced tea and I notice that they have whole young coconuts on the menu. If you’ve never had a young coconut all to yourself, you are missing a piece of the grand puzzle of decadence. Sweet, thin coconut milk is just the side benefit. What makes them so amazing is their tender, young, gelatin textured flesh. It’s like it’s insides are coated with an astoundingly light and airy coconut custard of delightfulness.

And so the death knell came. “Well, our freezer went out, so let me check and see if we have any.” Wait, what? Your fucking freezer is down? Isn’t that where all restaurants keep the lion’s share of their perishables, only to be thawed for use on the same day? Shit! Half the menu is seafood! And why in the hell are the coconuts in the damn freezer? This does not bode well for our intrepid eaters.

They discovered that they do indeed have some left as the server brings out our appetizer (to be enjoyed with our waters) of Roti Prata. As it arrives, I understand why he seemed perplexed at us only ordering one. For $2 you get one piece of a weird naan-crepe like affair with a coconut curry dipping sauce. For all I know, the bread could have been a poorly mixed tortilla thrown on a flat top. A little flaky, kinda chewy, but not terribly impressive. Really, the appetizer is all about the coconut curry sauce. That stuff is tasty enough to make a straight man happily gobble down a cock and ask for seconds. But great sauce does not, a great appetizer make. All it did was harden my resolve to learn curries so as to avoid this shade of ridiculous in the future.

Dick in the ear #2: The drinks arrive. The Thai iced tea is pretty straight forward and what I expect. Chai tea extract mixed with some soy milk over ice. Not exactly innovative, but whatever. The real embarrassment was the young coconut. It comes with it’s little baby dome chopped off and a straw tossed into it’s depths. Not exactly the Jaques Pepin school of plating, but again, whatever. I’m giddy with anticipation. And so, I lift it’s little lid and scoop out the first bit of…hey! This shit is hard as hell to get off the shell! And it’s…it’s fucking hard! What is this crap?? Maybe the milk will…taste like the fry cook was soaking his toes in it! Mother. Fucker.

You know what enters into a kitchen refugee’s mind when they hear the freezer is out? Oh shit, what is the manager going to try and save, despite the loss of quality and potential risk to the customer? Most often, the contents of a restaurant’s freezer is worth over ten times more than what they have in their safe. And so, if it looks like that stuff is going to have to be trashed, whoever is doing the books will do their damndest to make full use of whatever they think they can squeeze past their customer’s blunted palates. Well Mr. Mangosteen Manager, you picked the wrong dude to try and slip shoddy coconuts past. And your sins are only compounded by the remainder of the meal.

Somewhat foolishly, despite a strong gut feeling and some fairly strong proof that this is going to all go to shit, we order fairly robustly. Her, going with their Daddy-in-Law’s Fried Rice (beef basil fried rice) and the Laksa (coconut curry soup with shrimp, ramen and surimi) and myself with the sambal udang (prawns in chili sauce) and the Hot Hot oelek tofu. And we wait…and wait… Then I hear bellowed from the kitchen “I NEED LAKSA!”. Nothing like a well behaved kitchen enhancing the eating experience by making sure I hear every call and every plate up. I especially liked how they would double their volume if the lone server didn’t immediately abandon the customers they were helping.

So they’re down soup and we’ve got 3 sautee dishes. Do you think that they either waited to make the sautee’d food or remade it if it had been sitting too long? If you do, then you have a poor sense of foreshadowing and likely should seek out some reading comprehension classes. But wait we did, after we had been given soup bowls 20 minutes before it was prepared. It, however, was fairly tasty. The base of the soup is the same curry that we had with the mutant naan bread.  So as aforementioned, it could make penises taste good enough to fill up on. Hell, it was tasty enough that I didn’t get TOO depressed at the sight of krab (surimi fish paste, flavored and formed into crab shape) in the soup. Though again, looking at the components, once I learn how to make the curry, I’m sure I can toss a couple shrimp, some scallops and a block of ramen into the broth at home. The basil fried rice wasn’t awful, but I’ve had much better. The basil flavor was getting lost in the mushy rice and what little beef there was, didn’t bring much flavor to the party. And those were the best 2 dishes.

I apparently, struck out. Given my recent obsession with all things spicy, I wanted to line up for the hottest stuff they had. And (according to the menu) they had dishes that use my absolute favorite Asian chili sauce, sambal oelek. It’s hot, but not the type of spicy that makes you dive for the milk or hate your best friend forever for letting you take a bite. It’s got that wonderful pungent punch without the overly vinegar taste that most hot sauces have. Great on pizza, great on steak, great on burritos.

But not great in the hands of whatever chef was on shift at Mangosteen. First disappointment was the Hot Hot oelek tofu. It should have been called, Bitter Bitter plate of crap. The “crispy” tofu was already soggy and it’s just awash in onions. Nothing else, just onions. Probably 8-1 onion to tofu ratio. And the “hot” part was a joke! A child wouldn’t have been intimidated by the spice in this. And the flavor was downright crap. Here I’m expecting some nice pungent pepper flavor and all I get is a washed out sweetened burnt soy sauce. The coconut curry was hotter!

And the prawns? What image is conjured in your mind when you hear prawns? Big, meaty shrimp as big around as a working man’s thumb? Me too! But apparently whoever is buying for the restaurant seems to think that they’re more along the size of salad shrimp. You get bigger tails in a shrimp cocktail ring! Prawns my left nut. These sad little lumps of food borne illness waiting to happen had been languishing at an unsafe temperature for god knows how long, were rinsed off and sautee’d in the exact same wretched sauce and with the same lame ass accompaniment. And to add insult to flavor injury, they cooked the dog shit out of the poor things in hopes of not killing me and then left it to languish under whatever heat lamp they have hidden in the back, until the lost Laksa soup had at last been cobbled together from extract and canned goods. They were bland bits of flaky rubber that I would have been embarrassed to serve myself, much less look a customer in the eye and say “Yes, that is worth money.”

But Pook, you say, it can’t possibly get worse can it? Oh yes dear reader, yes it can. You see, having already sent back 1 item and finding myself with another 2 unpalatable messes, rather than send them back as well and have a pout, I simply asked for some plain sambal oelek to dip my food in. Such is it’s powers, that straight from the bottle it can overpower the flavor of shitty food. And I get…coconut curry sauce… What in the motherfuck? I’m not some rubeish redneck using imaginary Tennessee Thai terms for what I want. I asked for what was supposedly the main flavor component of my dish. For fuck’s sake, it comes in a JAR! It’s not like they had to make it fresh. So, try number 2. MORE OF THE SAME SHITTY SAUCE ON THE SHRIMP THAT I’VE ALREADY STATED WAS CRAP! Okay, now I’m wondering if I’m on another planet. If I go to a damn Italian restaurant and ask for more parmesan for my eggplant parmesan, I don’t get a look of constipated confusion.

Right when I think I must be mad or the label on the jar has been lying to me. Suddenly, amazingly…they fucking figure out that they offer it as a goddamn dip for their spring rolls!! Finally, I can grimace my way through potential food poisoning with something resembling some aplomb. At the very least, it was able to cover the semi-rotten flavor of the tofu and gave me something more interesting to chew than the old pencil erasers that were the shrimp.

Man, where do I start on the wrap up? If I had filmed dinner tonight from start to finish, I could make the perfect training video of how not to operate a restaurant. While I personally appreciate candor, telling a customer that the freezer is busted is a fast track to making a smart (smarter than me) eater run out the door and never come back. An even faster track though is for the kitchen to fulfill every nightmarish scenario running through my head. Seriously, trying to salvage bad shrimp? The chef should be fined and horse whipped. Just for ruining my coconut moment alone, they have earned my eternal nutritional enmity.

There is one tiny speck of light in all of this though. The server. Honesty may not be the best policy for a server with most customers. But with me it’s golden. It may have been a bad idea to mention to me that the freezer was out from a professional point of view. However, had I been wandering into that wretched coconut and pathetic shrimp without forewarning, my sense of disdain would have rapidly morphed into indignant rage. Probably accompanied by calls to the health department. They did their best to give me the hints that would have lead me to more pleasant experience. But I was more interested if the kitchen was so stupid as to sell inferior product. The poor thing was mortified, as I sat staring at the kitchen, politely waiting for them to figure out how to put jarred sauce into a bowl so I could cover their mistakes for them. They even offered to comp us a desert. Which would have been fine if they had forgotten our appetizer or something. But, since it would likely come from their own pocket, I wouldn’t hear of it. Then they upped the ante by offering us 10% off the meal. Again, I’m not down with that. My meal wasn’t 10% awful. It was 85% awful. And the restaurant shouldn’t feel that it’s ok in my book because I got a White Sale discount. (It’s a Labor Day thing) Plus, I hate the idea that folks might feel I’m pulling the ole scumbag scam to eat on the cheap. I’d rather leave with my dignity and pay full price and vow never to go back. But the pro pulled rank on me at the credit card machine and gave us the discount anyways. That’s a pretty stylish move in my book. If they ever quit, I’ll be overjoyed to have them as a server anytime. I hear there are openings down in the Tower District . So, by their magnanimous gesture we ended on a high note. And for that I’m thankful. Well, for that and the fact that I immediately ran across the parking lot and bought myself my very own mega-jar of sambal oelek. Now to learn curry!


-Pook