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The Chomple Book is coming! SLOWLY

So a bunch of you have noticed that I haven't been posting as much lately. Other than the fact that I haven't had very many interesting meals lately, it's mainly because I've been working on the Chomple book! Ok, it's not really the Chomple book, or at least it's not going to be called that. It will have a witty title, that's for sure.

The book is a food book masquerading as my memoirs. Or maybe it's my memoirs masquerading as a food book. Either way, it sounds like my food blog, but if I decided one day that I was going to go on for hours and hours about random stuffstuff. 

Although I don't have any completed chapters to share with you yet (that I consider completed anyway) the outline is pretty set. About 8 of the chapters are nearing completion, so there's a lot to go. I'm pasting it below, along with a brief blurb about what each one is about...

And I know a lot of you out there are writers and editors, so if you think I should reorder these from their quasi-chronological quasi-decreasing level of bitterness order, let me know.

1. Full Speed Blogger- I get chased through the streets of Dallas by a Chinese waitress that wants her 15% tip
2. The Greedy Nibble- Where I discuss how I became so selfish about food, mainly because my mother thought "nibble" meant "hugest bite possible" and I decided she was a selfish, rotten woman and that I needed to protect my food, also about how I feel Buddhists are just as selfish as everyone else, but just more pretentious about denying it.
3. The Pizza Phoenix Rises- Incident where I dropped a pizza box on the ground and my father thought it was ruined even though I dropped it straight down and it didn't open. Long discussion about my parents' long-term apparent disconnection with reality.
4. I Have Tree Trees- Relearning how to speak English once I entered school. Realizing what all the other kids are eating 
5. Apple Thief- I steal an apple during a tour of an apple orchard/processing plant. Discussion about the state of this nation's food distribution system.  
6. Ong-Bonk the Thai Hyperactive Monkey- I get turned off to sweets and stimulants forever after having to deal with a family friend's child.
7. Life With Snorks- How Asians of every tribe banded together as a community in a sea of Wonder Bread (literally, the Wonder Bread factory was right there). 
8. Cafeteria Maven- Why do I love cafeteria food so much, when I hate other crappy food so severely? Also a long rant on the worthlessness of most public schools.
9. Well, the Flavor is Done- Finding out meat tastes good after trying steak that's not well done. Long bitchfest about how much I hate well-done meat and how people who order it should be given a pair of Keds and some ketchup 
10. Disgustingness Bell Curve- Why American food sacrifices eye-opening moments in the name of avoiding vomit-inducing ones. How the cuisines with the best food also have the worst food. Talking about the two times that food caused me to immediately vomit upon ingestion, both Thai and both cooked by my mother. 
11. Ramen World Tour- My extensive travels with my family as a child, and all the ramen I ate because they were cheapskates.  
12. Buffet of Blah- I learn about how American families eat dinner by eating at my friends' houses, coming to the sad realization that maybe all food tastes boring, just in a different way. 
13. Burning Dollars to Save Pennies- Serving spoiled/bug infested food, buying up the reduced for expiration rack at the supermarket, feeding your child nothing but spinach soup for a week. These are the crimes of my cheapskate mother, who once bought three coats in one day for the hell of it. 
14. Cylindrical Postcards- I become addicted to canned food, which is the only way I get to taste things from other cultures. I start a graveyard of empty food cans in my basement to hide the evidence of food sins from my mother.  (this is the infamous Chef Boyardee chapter) 
15. In the Company of Asians- My mother throws awesome dinner parties and everyone assumes she's a great cook. They didn't have to eat the 12 disasters that came before the good version. Discussion about the funny/scary things Asians really think and say to each other when not in public. Relate how my friend Cara told me our collective Asian parents will gang up and hunt me down for publishing this chapter. 
16. It Do the Best!- I realize that despite being a brilliant engineer, my father has a rather narrow worldview. Talking about the time I see him walking back and forth with his camera that has a zoom lens; when I tell him to use the zoom lens, he says he is. Figure out he has no idea what a zoom lens does. When I ask him what it does, he says "It do the best!". Discussion about my parents' "engrish" and language problems in general. 
17. It Try Do the Best- Mulling over that my parents really did mean well, they just were crazy. 
18. You Can't Eat the Lampshades- A long meandering trip through the dining habits of my parents. Avoiding places with nice decor and service because they don't want to pay for either. My father ordering the most boring dish on the menu in case my mother orders something inedible and she needs a backup plate (which happened often).  
19. You've Been To Cleveland?- I start to realize there's more to life than cow manure and frozen dinners 
20. Only Evil Tamales Come From a Jar- Ohio is a cultural wasteland with crappy food. I find tamales and love them. Later in life, Mexicans mock me. I realize I wasted the first 18 years of my life in cultural hell .
21. Made With Love and Propane- Discovering the South as I attend college in North Carolina. 
22. Just Call Me Rachael Ray- I learn to eat for a dollar a day on the streets of Southeast Asia. 
23. That's Princess Boring to You!- I have a relationship with a high-class woman that has the palate of a saltine. 
24. You want Baby Back Ribs, Boy?- The chain-restaurant and passive-aggressive racism capital of the world: Dallas, Texas. 
25. Put the Peanut Down- Meeting my girlfriend and resetting her expectations of Thai food. Discussion of where Thai restaurants go wrong. General grousing about how all Thai-American dishes contain peanuts. 
26. The Smell is a Liar- Discovering my girlfriend is anosmic (no sense of smell). Finding out how many foods actually don't taste good and use smell to cover it up. Thinking back to all the times that my mother ruined a dish adding onions or foul-smelling aromatic herbs saying "this for smell".  
27. Californiyum- California is amazing, and Californians have been here too long to realize just how good they have it. Reprogramming my girlfriend to realize what life in the rest of the US  is like. Wondering whether my parents are guilty of child abuse for choosing to raise their son in Ohio. 
28. Have Green Card, Will Infuriate- Why is it that if a restaurant is owned by foreigners, the likelihood of them messing up and then treating you like crap for their mistake is increased 1000%?  
29. Welcome to My Shack- Understanding roadfood. 
30. Crowdsourcing Yod- Learning to trust aggregate online reviews. Starting a food blog. 
31. That's Mister Food Blogger to You!- Realizing I actually have power.  

Azteca de Oro Tortilla Factory: My new tamale supplier!

I've been a fan of tamales since I was 13. The problem is, I didn't grow up in an area that had any tamales.

I had gone to the grocery store with my mother one day and was wandering their "ethnic" aisle. Basically every single food that had something remotely to do with people that weren't exactly white was relegated to this cramped aisle at the end of the store. As this was where the soy sauce was (and we needed some) we were in the aisle when I noticed a strange looking jar. It was glass with a gold top, and inside were these red and white tube looking things. The label read BEEF TAMALES. I asked my mother if I could try them. She told me to stop trying to waste money and kept walking.

Two weeks later I rode my bike over to the grocery store and bought the jar (this is how I ended up trying most new foods). I snuck the jar into the house in my backpack, and later that night opened it. Stupidly, I pulled one tamale out and tried to bite into it, not realizing that they were each wrapped in paper. I also didn't get a chance to heat the tamale, as any microwave sounds would cause my mother to come bounding down the stairs demanding to know what I was eating and why.

Despite being from a jar and room temperature, I loved these tamales. The spicy beef, that half cake half aspic texture that only masa can make... it was wonderful. I ate the entire jar in one sitting and later that weekend snuck the jar out with some office trash.

Over the next few years I probably consumed 100 of those jars. I'm pretty sure I was the only one buying them at the grocery store.

When I got to college years later, I was hanging out with a group of people after a class when we started talking about food. To the utter shock of the two Mexican guys who were there, I mentioned that my favorite food was tamales. They asked me how the heck some corn fed Ohioan even knew about tamales. They even went as far as to confirm that I wasn't talking about Hot Tamales, the movie theatre candy.

Their excitement was short lived when they found out that the tamales I was talking about came out of a can. The next day, they drove me out to a construction site where it was rumored the best Mexican catering truck set up shop every day. One of the guys walked up and ordered three tamales. When he brought them back, I told him those were the wrong tamales, the real ones had paper and not that crazy yellow stuff on the outside. He (bless his heart for his patience) explained that real tamales were made in corn husks. 

He handed one to the other Mexican guy but didn't hand me one. He said that Team Mexico had to confirm that the tamales were good before I could have one, that my palate for tamales had almost been completely destroyed by the jarred product and that they weren't going to risk any more damage. They tasted and approved, so I got one. 

It was amazing. The texture of the masa was similar but much more satisfying. The filling of the tamale was not like the mystery meat in the jar, it was savory and delicious and had an actual texture. I ordered 6 more tamales and ate them all there on the spot.

Since then I've probably consumed 1,000 kinds of tamales from different places. I've ordered tamales in every Mexican restaurant I have set foot in, stopped at every taco truck, spoken to every lady wheeling around a cooler. I drove the entire Tamale Trail in Mississippi and ate 240 tamales in one week. 

Obviously, tamales are one of my favorite foods. And yet, even though I live in California, I have never had a reliable source of spectacular tamales. Until now.

We first spotted this place last week. The proper name of this place is Azteca de Oro, but the sign just says Tortilla Factory. The sign should say TAMALE HEAVEN. Seriously.

One of their cases full of sweet treats. Actual got the thing in the lower left. This thing was CRAZY. It's a plastic cup filled with chunks of tres leches cake, whipped cream and strawberry topping. Actual has stated she's only going to buy these one at a time, as they're so good she's going to eat every available portion if there's more than one.

More baked goods...

The entire front wall is stacked with baked goods as well! We usually try to eat one of everything at places we like but it's going to take a while here.

Pig shaped cookies. Yay!

And finally, the tamales. I got a dozen beef tamales. The lady informed me that they were now making their third batch of the day (I guess the rest of the neighborhood figured out where all the good tamales were) and that I would have to come back in 20 minutes to pick them up. A short trip to Dollar Tree later and we were back to get our piping hot tamales right out of the steamer.

Of the 1000+ tamales I've ever consumed, these are easily in the top 10. They might even be better than the ones I got on the Tamale Trail, but it's not fair to compare an actual product to a fading food memory. 

I could go on and on about these tamales, but I'm going to go eat a few of them before Actual wakes up. A dozen tamales doesn't go very far when they're this good!

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The odd, strange experience of Buca di Beppo 2.0

Actual, being Italian and loving white people food, wanted to go to Buca di Beppo today. So we went.

It was... strange. Spectacular at times, crazily bad at others. 

Obviously the restaurant consultants have been here and deposited their "improvements".

I'll say first out that as usual we had a phenomenal waitress. If there's anything Buca does right, it's hiring waitstaff. Our waitress was freaking awesome and kept us entertained (and fed) the entire time. The only thing about her that annoyed me (and this is not her fault) is that the scripts they are giving the waitstaff are even more obnoxious than before. Before they changed their scripts, Buca waitstaff were at the high end of obnoxious and classless when it came to pushing addons. They are worse now. During our service, I counted 9 different "Can I start for you/Can I get for you" little innocent pushes for addons. It's not subtle. People spend tons of money at Buca, there's no need for this. Buca, stop forcing your waitstaff to act like they're serving at Friday's. It's a disservice to your restaurant and your waitstaff. You guys hire the most engaging, vivacious, fun people in town, and your sales scripts just piss off your clientele. 

And then there's the new olive oil.

If you've been to Buca in the past, you should find this all a bit odd.

What Buca used to do was bring your table a basket of bread. They would take one of their oval plates (or more than one) and fill it with great extra virgin olive oil and delicious balsamic vinegar. You could add salt and pepper to your taste. The evo and balsamic were left on the table so you could make more bread dip if you wanted.

Apparently this was too much for Buca.

The new and improved process begins with one bread slice per customer. So we got a bread basket with two whole pieces of bread. Then came the dish of evo you see in the above picture. Like Guy Fieri's Temple of Vomit, the evo is not left at the table like it used to be at Buca. You have to ask for more, not to mention that there's no balsamic. Oh, and you have to ask for salt and pepper shakers too--they aren't on the table by default anymore.  The funny part is that the dish pictured holds more evo than the old dish ever did, which means their cost cutting measure, by volume, is not very successful.

But that really doesn't mean anything until you taste what Buca is now passing off as olive oil. 

Extra virgin olive oil, the good stuff, tastes grassy. Grassy is that fresh olive flavor that good evo has. Bitter is the taste that bad evo has. Not just straight up bitter, but metallic bitter. Bitter in the sense that putting vegetable oil in a rusty can would result in a similar flavor provile. When evo goes rancid, or you press the worst, oldest olives, you get straight up metallic bitter tasting evo. It's sounds like a subtle difference, but it isn't. Even the most basic palate can detect the difference between grassy and metallic bitter.

I have personally tasted upwards of 200 varieties of evo, including evo right out of the press. I can tell the difference. Actual, being anosmic, has a better bad evo detection system than I do. Having no sense of smell, Actual has an extremely sensitive palate when it comes to foods like evo.

We both agreed. The new olive oil at Buca is fucking disgusting. It's wretched. That shit should not be served to human beings.

After we told our awesome waitress that the evo was off, she brought us new evo and said that the chef had even tasted it, and said that the flavor profile was intentional. She said it was indeed more "olivy" than most other evo. There's grassy and then there's disgustingly bitter. This was disgustingly bitter. Actual likened it to putting a Brillo pad in her mouth. Buca being a chain restaurant, obviously corporate procurement has decided this evo is "good enough". It is NOT. SHAME ON YOU.

This alone made us doubt whether we even wanted to be eating there. Honestly, if any Italian restaurant served me cringingly bitter evo so bad that I wondered if it had turned, I would walk out. Especially if they told me it was that way on purpose. Super especially, if the head chef agreed.

We stayed, though. And I'm glad we did. The waitress told us that the recipes at Buca had been tuned up to be more bold and flavorful, and that was definitely true.

First up was the antipasto salad. Great as usual.

Next was an order of chicken saltimbocca. In English, this dish translates to "crack-infused meth with opium garnish and heroin extract designed to be as addictive as possible to Actual". This dish is phenomenal. We only wish they brought the veal version back.

And my contribution, a Buca Large order of their spaghetti with meat sauce. The spaghetti was phenomenal as always, but the sauce was a concoction of super megaton flavor. This was definitely better than the meat sauce they had before (which was already good). I could eat this sauce out of a bowl with a giant spoon.

Keep the sauces, lose the olive oil. Please.

Don't travel around the world and then eat at McDonald's

I have spent a great amount of my life traveling, and when I'm in a new city the first and sometimes only thing that I want to do is find local food and eat it. I want to know what the true locals eat, and eat it where they do. It's an obsession of mine, and one that has led to many delicious experiences.

Unfortunately this is not always possible. Quite a bit of the traveling that I have done was with my parents. My parents do not believe in spending money while on vacation; instead they believe that you are only there to go sightseeing and that food is a waste of money. Outside of my parents, I have more than a few times been graced with the company of morons that either don't care about food or have the palate of an anosmic monkey.

Use this list as a guide of what to eat when you hit any of these cities, as well as what NOT to eat or do. Luckily I've gone back to most of these cities since then and enjoyed myself.

Boston, MA

The culprit: my parents

What I should have eaten: CHOWDAH! Oysters. And anything at one of my favorite restaurants on earth: Durgin Park (dear tourists, quit packing this place).

What I ended up eating: The remaining part of a five pound brick of imitation crab legs (see below).

Cape Cod, MA

The culprit: my parents

What I should have eaten: Overpriced seafood (sorry, it's the cape, gonna happen)

What I ended up eating: We found a seafood store and in the back they had these huge five pound shrink wrapped bricks of imitation crab legs. My parents bought me one of these and said "just eat this when you hungry". Also we had a bulk pack of cup-a-soup if I got bored of the "krab".

Dallas, TX

The culprit: a big fat Texan lie

What I should have eaten: Something somewhere else

What I ended up eating: Mostly crap. While it is true that Dallas has more restaurants per capita than NYC, what they don't tell you is that most of them are chain restaurants with nearly identical menus. This is no surprise considering that many of the huge restaurant chains are headquartered in Dallas. The food situation in Dallas has improved immensely in the years since I've been there, or so I've heard. Anyway, if you've ever wanted to know why I hate chain restaurants so much, spend a week in Dallas.

Disney World, FL

The culprit: my ex girlfriend, and the girl I was dating before her

What I should have eaten: Disney actually provides a large number of very good dining options, as much as I don't want to admit it.

What I ended up eating: On both trips (one with each person) they found my choices for dining to be unacceptable (my favorite restaurant was the Norwegian place in Epcot). The most stupid incident occurred when one of them came with me to the Norwegian restaurant, looked around at the food and said "looks weird" and just sat there eating nothing, after I paid for her to eat there. Meatballs are weird? As a result I ate most meals at the hotel buffet. 

Mysterious Border Town, Cambodia

The culprit: my extended family

What I should have eaten: Back before Cambodia/Kampuchea had normalized relations with the rest of the world, you could enter their border town commerce areas from Thailand. This was sort of like peeking into a hermit kingdom like North Korea is today. I totally wanted to try Cambodian food while we were there.

What I ended up eating: A bag of potato chips.

New York, NY

The culprit: my parents

What I should have eaten: The list here goes on forever. A great pastrami sandwich. Any of the spectacular restaurants in town. A hot dog from any of the papaya vendors. A pickle. Smoked fish. Arepas. This list could be an entire post on its own.

What I ended up eating: Meal after meal of instant ramen cooked in our motel. McDonald's. 

Montreal, Canada

The culprit: my parents

What I should have eaten: Smoked meat sandwich. Bagel from St. Viateur. Poutine. Anything from the hundreds of awesome french bistros in Montreal.

What I ended up eating: Chef Boyardee my parents packed from home. For three days straight I ate that stuff.

San Francisco, CA

The culprit: a piece of human garbage and the boy she imported from Washington state

What I should have eaten: SF is one of the best food cities in the universe. Take your pick. A must eat is always an authentic Mission burrito.

What I ended up eating: One of the worst meals of my life happened at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Because nothing screams quality food like a chain restaurant based on movie intellectual property. Then, even though we were in the undisputed burrito capital of the world, the piece of human garbage demanded we drive to SAN JOSE to eat at some chain taqueria. 

Tokyo, Japan

The culprit: my parents

What I should have eaten: Sushi. At least one Kaiseki meal. A tonkatsu at Tonki. 

What I ended up eating: McDonald's. Meal after meal of plain soba noodles, which are the cheapest menu item on any Japanese menu. The best food I had on that trip was from when we bought package tours and the meals were included. My parents bemoaned this the entire time, at one point asking the tour operator if we could get a credit for not eating and just sit on the bus while everyone else dined. 

Yellowstone National Park, WY

The culprit: my parents

What I should have eaten: Any of the game offerings that you can find right outside of the park in mom and pop restaurants

What I ended up eating: Meal after meal at one of the park-run cafeterias, where I dined on shoe leather with a side of creamed mystery vegetable.

The story of "apology cookie"

Worst meal ever. And I mean EVER.

This happened about 10 years ago at a restaurant in Akron, Ohio named Peking Tokyo. 

As you might have guessed from the name, this place was a combination Japanese and Chinese restaurant. When you walked in the door, the hostess yelled out CHINESE OR JAPANESE at your party, and you had to answer as quickly as you could otherwise she would completely lose it and start pacing back and forth until you answered. I think she was OCD, but I really can't be sure from my brief encounters with her.

This restaurant was actually a good 20 minute drive from where we lived. The reason we went there was that back then (back then being mid 90s) the only Japanese restaurant within 100 miles (that wasn't in a mall food court) was this place. Now, the really funny part of all this was that the Peking side of the restaurant was always filled to the rafters and the Tokyo side was almost always deserted. I guessed back then it was because Japanese food was scary to the midwestern crowd. 

Every time we went there, I asked to eat on the Peking side. Every time I was denied... except once. It was actually really good, but my parents just scolded me the entire time for eating stupid American Chinese greasy dog food. So that was the end of that. 

The Tokyo side was actually a very good Japanese restaurant--up until I moved to California a few years ago I was unable to find another reliably good Japanese restaurant. Well, mostly reliable...

The worst meal ever happened on the Tokyo side.

The errors started right from the beginning when my father ordered a beer. The waitress disappeared for a good 15 minutes and came back with a Sprite. My father was all "Uh this not beer" and she scurried off again and came back with a Coke. At this point my father gave up on getting his beer and asked her to bring him some water. Five minutes later my dad had a pot of hot tea. 

I'm going to say right now that at times I was convinced we were on Candid Camera or some other show like that, but unfortunately we weren't.

The waitress then took our orders. I ordered a tempura combo. I also ordered five or six kinds of nigiri sushi and specifically said NO WASABI (I despise artificial wasabi, which is what 99% of restaurants in the US serve). My parents both ordered a sashimi platter. Hopefully the incompetence of this waitress would be confined to the drink orders. 

The first course was the customary bowls of miso soup. She walked up with three bowls on her tray and put them down. Except there was a problem: my mother's bowl had about five drops of soup in it. My mother pointed this out. The waitress looked at the bowl and said "Oh, sorry, I spill. Maybe pick up wrong bowl from another table. Sorry." AND THEN SHE JUST WALKED AWAY. My father and I were actually laughing out loud at this point (and we're both very grumpy, we NEVER laugh out loud) at just how ridiculously this was all turning out. 

My mother was peeved about her soup and was scowling. My father goes "but she spill, it ok, or maybe pick up from other table... who know?" I thought my mother was going to slap him silly. Eventually my mother just reached over and took my soup, leaving me with the "oh, I spill" bowl. Now that it's my problem, I flagged down our waitress (who was doing a lot of walking around considering we were the only customers in the place) and asked her for a bowl of soup. She goes "One soup per dinner, one dollar extra bowl!" I'm all, uh, no, this was empty when you brought it. She goes "Oh, yes, I spill, I remember." AND WALKS AWAY AGAIN. Now my father and mother were laughing at me. Figures.

Then my nigiri sushi arrives. As you have probably correctly predicted, it's all wrong. Instead of the tuna and salmon that I ordered, I got octopus and some unidentifiable fish. I also smell some wasabi which is completely wrong. Lifting up a piece of mystery fish I found a LOG of wasabi, I'm talking the size of the crap you squeeze out of a Play Doh fun factory. I told the waitress that the sushi was wrong AND it had wasabi. She nodded at me and left, and came back with a bowl of wasabi. I handed her the entire order and told her I didn't want it. She says okay and walks away with it.

At this point the owner lady comes out asking me why I sent all that sushi back. I tell her the order is completely wrong down to the logs of wasabi that are sitting like timebombs in each piece. My parents try and tell her about the horrible service we are getting but she's not listening to a word (or she doesn't understand them). The owner lady scowls at me and says "Next time think before order." WHAT? Before I had a chance to throw my drink at her, she walked off.

At this point I was ready to walk out of the restaurant, but my parents told me not to be impatient(!) and to make it through the meal like a well behaved Asian kid. So we stayed.

Next up was my tempura combo. Or as interpreted on that day, beef teriyaki. I was just happy to get edible food so I downed it, not knowing whether I would see another morsel of food until we left.

She showed up a few minutes later with a sashimi platter that she put in front of my father. We were all impressed that she managed to get one of our orders correct. She looked at my mother and told her that her food was coming out next. Well if you think another sashimi platter was coming, you would be wrong. She comes back with California Roll, the one item in a sushi bar that an Asian wouldn't be caught dead eating. And not just a few pieces, but enough to feed about three people. 

By this time even my parents were pissed off (my parents were rarely angry at anything except me). My father starts yelling at the waitress, and when the owner comes over to see what's wrong, starts giving her an earful too. The owner lady finally says "Ok, free dessert, ok?" and both of them run off.

???

Ten minutes later the waitress drops off a plate of lo mein on our table.

We. Seriously. Surrender.

My father asks for the check. The waitress comes back 15 minutes later with a check for, I kid you not: $1,815.00. He tells her it is wrong. She disappears and the owner lady has the check in her hand, with the $1,815.00 scratched out and $50.00 written in its place. Ok, this was the mid 90s, the meal would have been under $50.00 if it has been correctly served. My father tells her this is totes not going to work.

Dad: This meal horrible. Everything bad. No way we are pay fifty dollar.

Owner Lady: THIS YOUR BILL! I ALREADY DISCOUNT! ALREADY CHEAP!

Dad: I don't think so. This meal horrible. You should not charge.

Owner Lady: YOU EAT FOOD! YOU PAY! PAY FOR FOOD! IF NO EAT THEN NO PAY BUT YOU EAT!

Dad: I pay for sashimi but that it. Everything else wrong.

Owner Lady: WHY YOU SO CHEAP?!? OK YOU PAY TWENTY DOLLAR AND I NOT CALL POLICE!

Dad: Are you innard? (innard was his word for retarded)

Owner Lady: YOU PAY FOR DINNER. YOU PAY FOR DINNER! AND TIP TOO!

Dad: I'm give you twenty dollar. Then we leave.

Owner Lady: I DO YOU BIG FAVOR TWENTY DOLLAR. THAT A LOT OF FOOD. YOU STOLEN.

Dad: Just take money.

She took the money and ran off. We got up and started walking to the door, where we encountered owner lady again, standing there with a red box of Chinese cookies.

Owner Lady: APOLOGY COOKIE

Dad: Huh?

Owner Lady: THIS GIFT. YOU TAKE APOLOGY COOKIE.

Dad: We don't want. We leave.

Owner Lady: [now blocking our exit path] TAKE APOLOGY COOKIE FOR APOLOGY!

At this point my father and I pushed her aside and started walking out. When she put her hands on my mother and tried to stop her to take "apology cookie", I won't lie, I (nicely, I swear) put owner lady in a chair and told her not to get up, and that if she did, I would be calling the police and the food inspector. This finally shut her up. 

Last year, I was wandering the local Chinese supermarket when I sighted an honest to goodness box of "apology cookie"... or at least the cookies that she called "apology cookie". They were pretty good. Nice and buttery.

Eastern Empire: The buffet that isn't.

Back in middle school, my friend Matt was relating a story to me about what happened on a recent family vacation. They were somewhere in the mid-Atlantic coast when they realized that they hadn't eaten all day. The entire family was getting weak and cranky and it was obviously time to locate some sustenance. Unfortunately for their cheapskate father, there was nowhere in that small town to get cheap food. Nope, if he wanted to feed his family, Matt's father was going to have to take them all to the one restaurant in town: the fancy calabash seafood buffet.

Now, a calabash seafood buffet usually doesn't cost an exorbitant amount. It's mostly a bunch of fried seafood and sides. No big deal. Not this calabash seafood buffet, oh no. Mind you this is back in the early 90s, and this buffet was $22 a head, well above what Matt's father was even remotely willing to pay for a meal. But, in the face of full family mutiny, the family paid their money and entered the buffet.

Don't get me wrong, a good calabash seafood place is fantastic. My personal favorite is Crabby Mike's, which I encountered during a road trip through South Carolina. 

Anyway, they got into the restaurant and Matt's father instantly started gorging himself on the most expensive items on the buffet. He told his family that he was determined to get his money's worth at any cost. When he noticed that the rest of the family was eating "normal" food, he kept eating even more as he felt he needed to even out the loss he was taking on the other three family members.

In the end, Matt's father felt that the family as a whole had gotten their money's worth, mainly through the food that he personally ate. Unfortunately, he was also so full that his wife had to drive them to the hotel, where he promptly collapsed into bed and moaned about indigestion for the next 12 hours.

I know a lot of people like this. To them, a buffet is some sort of challenge; an "I dare you to eat your money's worth before you get full!" This really doesn't make sense to me. Most of these people don't have an issue eating at normal restaurants, where they are generally unconcerned with whether or not they are getting their money's worth. And even if they are concerned, they're not using the same metrics as they do at a buffet. All food being equal, what a buffet value nut (henceforth called BVN) judges as ten dollars worth of food at a buffet is exponentially more in volume, calories and cost than what they will determine as ten dollars of food at a normal restaurant. 

I know this, because I was raised by two of the most heinously obnoxious BVNs in the world: my parents. Actually, that's not entirely honest. Both of my parents are massive cheapskates in general:

• They refused to go to restaurants with nice decor or service, as in their mind you end up paying for the ambience and not the food
• They always order sashimi at sushi places because they don't want to pay inflated prices for rice 
• My parents didn't own a big screen TV until 1999. This was due to the fact that my mother refused to buy a TV that had picture-in-picture (note that I said HAD and not DID NOT HAVE). My mother felt PIP was a stupid feature and that she was not going to pay extra for something she was never going to use. Well, the problem was that every television in that era over 30" had PIP as a standard feature. So no TV for them
• Instead of getting me a nice school jacket (you know, the kind with the school name and logo on it and your name embroidered on the pocket) my mother went to a thrift store and found some coach's old jacket made of single-layer backpack nylon with the school name on it. When one of our neighbors pointed out the multiple failure points of this garment, my mother blocked out the rest of what the person said and only heard the line about the name being embroidered on the pocket. She then proceeded to stitch my name in single-thread yellow letters on the pocket. I of course refused to wear the jacket. Weeks later my mother had a bunch of friends over and she was showing them the jacket and bemoaning my refusal to wear it. Ten years later I was chatting with one of the women present at that gathering, and she told me "We all started laughing because we were sure your mother was just kidding. But then we realized she was serious. One of the other women told your mother that even a bum wouldn't want to wear that jacket. Another asked her if she secretly hated her child. Your mother looked very confused by all this. After everyone else left, your mother was still talking about the reaction to the jacket and started preaching about how white people love to waste money. I felt like slapping her, but I just left."
• My mother once let a pot of rice go bad. Instead of throwing it away like a normal person, she dug through the pot and picked out the pieces that to her passed the smell test, then fed them to me. Years later we were at a sushi restaurant and my mother was served spoiled rice. When she went to complain to the waitress, I said, "Uh, if spoiled rice is good enough for me it's good enough for you. Leave the motherfucking waitress alone and eat your spoiled goddamn rice, it's fine, remember?" I then told the waitress that my mother preferred rotten food and thanked her for working hard to fulfill my mother's culinary preference. But I'm not bitter  

I'm sharing all of this with you because unless you know me personally, you've never heard of The Macaroni and Cheese Incident.

Our crappy Ohio town had its fair share of buffets, and a brand new one opened up near us. They had a seafood night on Fridays and we went. The buffet was cheap, probably $8 a person, but my parents probably felt that this place was luxuriously priced (Let me note here, we were not poor by any stretch of the imagination. My mother drives a Benz. My apartment could fit into my parents' house four times over). What was really funny about this place was that they had one of those fancy round rotating buffets, where half of the circle faced the dining area and then rotated back into the kitchen to be refilled if necessary. These people actually had the rotation speed up way too high, probably to conserve food. It was going fast enough that you had enough time to take one scoop and barely get the serving utensil back in the bin in time. It was pretty funny.

I had the audacity to come back to the table once with macaroni and cheese on my plate. I thought my father's head was going to explode.

"WHAT THE HECK YOU DOING WHY YOU COME BACK HERE WITH STUPID IDIOT INNARD WHITE STUPID FOOD WE COME HERE EAT SEAFOOD AND PAY GOOD MONEY AND THEN YOU GET JUNK STUPID FOOD THERE SO MUCH SEAFOOD BUT WE GET GOOD VALUE EVEN MOM NOT EAT FISH ONLY EAT CRAB LEG BECAUSE CRAB LEG IS THE MOST EXPENSIVE BUT YOU JUST ACT STUPID GET WHATEVER YOU WANT LIKE YOU MCDONALD NEXT TIME WE JUST LEAVE YOU HOME AND EAT DOG FOOD"

Rearrange all that and repeat for TWO hours at max volume in the middle of a packed restaurant. This happened in the dark age before blogs. Nowadays, unless it causes you physical harm (and sometimes, even if it does) anything crappy can be turned into an entertaining blog post for your friends and family. No such option back then.

It's become a running joke amongst my friends at any restaurant to remark to me not to get macaroni and cheese. I always reply that I won't, that I understand the purpose of seafood night and wouldn't want to upset the group's value proposition.

All that being said, I'm pretty sure that I've discovered a buffet that would satisfy Matt's father and my parents.

But it's not really a buffet. 

Eastern Empire serves what they call the Cosmopolitan Oriental Dinner. They hand you a menu of about 50 dishes, from which you can order whatever you want, as many times as you want, for the low low price of 16 dollars. Each dish is actually cooked fresh in the kitchen. It's the best dinner deal in Sacramento.

Cosmo Girlfriend's dog wanted to go, but he was deemed too cute.

 

And here's Cosmopolitan Girlfriend posing with the menu. Yes, she's really named after this meal.

Potstickers came first. They're actually very good here.

Honey walnut shrimp. Two orders of these and you've already gotten your money's worth for the entire meal.

Cake Sister mocks the chow mein.

The scallops in wine sauce, followed by the scallops in garlic sauce.

Mongolian beef, which came with about 225% the spice level we were expecting. I loved it, but had to douse Cosmo with ice water to keep her from combusting.

Szechuan string beans!

This is what the table looked like 15 minutes in. Proper plate management is key!

Dessert came in the form of a fried donut strawberry thing.

Cake Sister declared this place "Yod's Mother Approved" when she noticed how some of the tables had folding chairs instead of real chairs, confirming that my mother would certainly enjoy this place as we definitely were not paying a decor premium.

It's the best value in town, seriously.

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La Provence: I guess everyone was in the mood for steak today.

So I'll say right now that there were no major hiccups in the service, and that the only minor hiccups were Barbie Girlfriend having to wait far too long for her Coke and the usual forever wait for our bill. On every trip we've made here before today (about 7) they've managed to have a major foulup on food, service or both. Not this time!

I think they know who we are at this point. Or at least know that Work Girlfriend eats approximately 50x the amount of bread of a normal diner...

Although there are a great many things on the menu at La Provence, apparently everyone but Actual was in the mood for steak. This is understandable here, as La Provence is one of the few places in Sacramento that manages to keep hanger steak on the menu year round.

You can read more about hanger steak here.

I got the hanger steak and substituted the garlic fries for a caesar salad. Their caesar dressing has enough garlic to kill the entire cast of Twilight (which is a good thing). The herby compound butter on the steak was wonderful as usual. Steak came nice and rare. Work Girlfriend had an identical plate except she got the garlic fries.

She really likes the garlic fries.

I got an order of winter squash risotto. Unlike last time, it came out WITH my entree. Unlike last time, the rice wasn't crunchy. And unlike two times ago, it was warm when it got to the table. Third time's a charm, I guess. I would definitely order this again if they could guarantee it would show up and be as delicious as this version, but I'm not going to chance ruining my memory of this one.

Sushi and Barbie went for the hanger steak sandwich with french onion soup addon. This is honest to goodness french onion, made in a crock and finished in the oven.

Actual was too good for steak today. While I'm usually the one that refuses to order something that someone else has already ordered (or in this case, the entire table has ordered), Actual has no such hangup. She's not worried about looking conformist or seeming like a follower. She orders what she wants, even if the entire bus tour group next to us orders the same dish.

For Actual, the daily fish special was too much to pass up. It was a concoction of seared tongol tuna in some sort of sauce, served with asparagus. It tasted really good, but I'm sort of fished out right now unless I'm at Sakuran.

Some of you may know that I like to hit a convenience store after a good meal for a frozen drink and some snacks. It's a funny habit of mine. Because there's nothing more blasphemous than following up seared foie gras with a Slim Jim. In any case, I spotted this at the Circle K. I've never really heard of a corn dog being referred to in this way...

And that's it for this one. If you're north of Sacramento and feel the need for some authentic bistro food, check out La Provence. Just make sure you have a couple hours.

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From the Chomple cutting floor...

Lots of events don't really merit their own post and end up on our cutting floor. There have been a bunch of those lately so for your marginal entertainment I will take you through two weeks of Chomple history. We went to Anatolian Table, a local Turkish restaurant. It's very delicious. They have good bread. Work Girlfriend, the bread fiend, was nearly in tears when we ran out. Luckily they brought her more.

I got some sort of ground lamb kebab. Like most people, I equate this dish to wandering the streets of [insert large city here] and having it at three in the morning while bemoaning the closure of bars. Their kebab here is very good though--just as good as the famous Halal cart in NYC.

As you all know, I am an avid reader but only because I own a Kindle 2. I hate the feel of paper and books which the Kindle lets me avoid. Well, because I needed a booklight for the Kindle, Actual took me to the bookstore. This was a very strange experience, as my simple self does not really understand how a bookstore works and what happens in a bookstore. I was very confused at the huge selection of reading materials just sitting around. You see, I'm used to the algorithms at Amazon.com telling me what I want to read. I can't really make that determination on my own. The store was very scary. I wasn't sure what to do in that place. I wandered to the back of the store where they were selling music. I saw some stuff that I wanted and tried to stick the music on my iPhone but it wasn't working. People were looking at me all strangely and stuff. Apparently music used to come on this things called CDs which are plastic and the music is on them, but you need this thing called a CD player (one of my friends explained it as a really crappy DVD player that only reproduces sound... WHAT A WASTE... LOL... WELL I GUESS BUMS HAVE TO LISTEN TO SOMETHING). LOL at this place. Actual took the opportunity to teach me how to read an actual book. It was strange. Although I found this super awesome book by a very engaging and very popular lady. She is very smart and I hope she runs for President someday.

Back to food, we decided to restart the great hunt for sizzling rice soup that Actual will actually like. Actual has a curse where she has a preferred preparation for every dish that most of the time is not standard. The one place that will make it for her that way always goes out of business. So went her one source of sizzling rice soup. Pearl House came pretty close though. But not close enough.

At Actual's favorite hot dog place they had this hot dog BLT thing.

Work Girlfriend has a very cute dog.

We were served some absolutely fluffy and perfect tamago nigiri at Sakuran.

Actual had a divine version of honey walnut shrimp at PF Changs... it has a melon sauce and comes with balls of honeydew.

And lastly, we found out that the very German Cosmopolitan Girlfriend HATES German chocolate cake... because she hates coconut. So Cake Sister made Cosmo her own personal chocolate cake!

Fun with colorsplash

Once again into the madness of Sakuran Sushi!

No need to rehash the insanity of this place. World class sushi hiding in a strip mall north of Sacramento. 

Even Carnitas Girlfriend made an appearance!

On to the food!

This is my chef's choice roll. A cucumber roll stuffed with fish. They put extra ponzu in the sauce. So fresh tasting I felt assaulted.

Work Girlfriend's chef's choice roll came in the form of a spicy tuna roll covered in hamachi and mango.

Actual's chef's choice roll was a double wide deep fried roll. This came perfectly sauced. Now sushi chefs in California have the annoying habit of drowning their fish in sauce. Sakuran not only takes it easy on the sauce, their sauces are much lighter than the playdoh sauces you get everywhere else.

Carnitas and Ketel's chef's choice came as what we jokingly called the "Crunchy Supreme Roll". It's a fish stuffed roll covered in sauce and deep fried panko crumbs, so you get the crunch of a deep fried roll without heating the ingredients.

And as usual with Sakuran, then things went a little crazy...

Lightly seared tuna flower with more pieces shingled out like fish scales.

A wakame salad kicked up with fresh ponzu and shredded radish.

The chef's take on ceviche.

And, finally, some true craziness. The chef called this "Japanese Nachos". It's a fresh mint leaf, tempura battered and fried, then topped with a raw tuna tartare. This was CRAZY good. I told him he needs to put it on the menu immediately.

The best part was after the meal, when a guy at the sushi bar recognized me as the guy from Chomple. That was great! Usually people recognize the Girlfriends before they recognize me, but I guess plastering that picture of my face on every page is having an effect!