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The most idiotic sales pitch EVER!

I usually don't blog about non food stuff here, but this is just too good to pass up.

Tonight, Actual and I went to enjoy the Active 20-30 #1 Spring Party. It's a huge party for charity and we had a blast, as usual.

At one point during the event, Actual along with Work and Hotel Girlfriend decided to take a group trip to the restroom area (aka, fleet of portopotties). On the way back they spotted some sort of incident and decided to stay where it happened and try to clean up the mess.

Being left all alone left of the stage, as usual I decided to stand there and start sending out inane tweets. While I was doing this, some weird possibly Asian guy started talking to me.

Asian Guy: Hey you look lonely.

Me: ...

AG: You don't have to be alone you know.

Me: Uh, yeah whatever. I'm here with my girlfriend.

AG: I don't see you here with anyone.

At this point I'm trying to figure out whether he's some sort of gay hustler, or maybe he's trying to sell me something, or both.

Me: She's going to the bathroom. She'll be back here soon. What do you want?

AG: I don't see her here.

Me: That's nice.

AG: What if I told you there was a way you wouldn't have to be alone? Would you be interested?

Me: No.

AG: I have a way for you to get all the chicks you want.

Me: I'm a famous food blogger. Even if I were single, which I definitely am not, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have a problem finding someone to tag.

AG: I don't really believe that. You just can't accept the truth.

So now I'm at once amused that I'm having to deal with some Neil Strauss reject, and also pissed off that all the girls are taking so long on their potty break that I have to keep dealing with this Amway wannabe.

Me: In any case, I'm not interested.

AG: Tell you what. I'll come back here in 10 minutes to see if your girlfriend is back here. If not, I want you to sign up for [I don't remember which scam he said]

At this point I made a 180 and tried to walk away. He sprinted in front of me and kept talking.

AG: I know you're embarrassed but you don't have to be. I can help you.

Me: I seriously don't need your help.

AG: I've heard that all before. There's no shame in using the system.

I made another 180. He blocked off my escape again.

AG: I don't know what your problem is. Go to [somethinghereIdon'tremember]spanishfly.com

Me: I'll remember to not do that, but ok, thanks. Bye.

AG: I'm going to make sure you sign up! Don't you want to have more game than the rest of these tools at this party?

Me: I'm dating the girl of my dreams, so that's not very relevant. In any case, between my degree, my job and my local hilarity-fame as a food critic, I'm not sure whatever you're selling is going to improve things in any measure. 

AG: Of course it will! You're here alone...

Me: Right. And obviously you're not listening to me. Is there a "listening to that thing attached to your potential vagina" section of that program you're selling?

AG: No need to be an ass...

Me: Seriously, why are you still talking?

AG: I can help you...

Me: You already have. I can't wait to blog this. 

AG: WHATEVER! CHECK OUT MY WEBSITE!!!

I walked away at this point, happy in the knowledge that tonight's blog post had essentially written itself with the help of some tool so incompetent he couldn't sign up for a mainstream MLM "independent business owner" opportunity.  

Pretty sure this guy will show up again trying to sell something else. Good luck to you, bro. Some nights I'm out of material, and heroes like you give me something to write about.

The Original Pancake House and the Boss' Breakfast Curse

Today it was Myra's birthday. Normally we would have jetted off to a fun Asian place for lunch, but Myra and Actual had an important call during lunching hours so we decided to make it birthday breakfast instead. We all decided to head out to the Original Pancake House. Although true OPH snobs will tell you that the only two good OPH locations are the original in Portland and the branch in Las Vegas, I've been to at least 6 and they've all been good.

This morning also provided an opportunity to once again see if my Boss would be hit with his Breakfast Curse. My boss Brian LOVES breakfast. For some reason, every time we head out to breakfast something strange happens. There's always at least one food item that comes in a strange format that's completely nonstandard or just plain strange. Even though it keeps happening to him, it's completely not his fault. Brian always orders very standard breakfast fare, unlike me. Would Brian's breakfast have some strangeness to it? Stay tuned.

The first thing to the table was a Dutch Baby ordered for everyone. This is a crepe like pancake that has been allowed to puff up in the oven then settle down into a tasty deflated form. It's extremely moist and eggy on the inside.

Generous amounts of lemon wedges and butter are provided to prep the Dutch Baby for consumption. No syrup is necessary on this one!

This is Work Girlfriend's portion. Yes, it's really as good as it looks. 

Even the butter is awesome here. I assume it's whipped farm fresh AA.

Here's my entry into the breakfast race. Corned beef hash topped with two eggs poached easy. Hollandaise on the side. This was supremely good. It says a lot about how good their poached eggs are that I got them instead of fried eggs.  The eggs at OPH are fried in clarified butter. Seriously folks, that's hard to turn down.

This is a spinach, feta cheese and sundried tomato omelette. These things are huge. Definitely not a three-egg omelette. I'm thinking they must use a half dozen at least.

Ham and cheese omelette. Similar size to the other one.

Work Girlfriend decided to spring for the Eggs Michael. Think eggs benedict, but swap the canadian bacon for sausage, then instead of hollandaise use mushroom gravy. It's amazingly good. 

Actual's blueberry pancakes topped with blueberry compote. 

So, you must be wondering: how did Brian's breakfast turn out?

It started with his usual order of a large chocolate milk. More than one place has messed this up before. One diner we were at once brought him his drink with chocolate syrup dripping all over the outside of the glass. Yet another place we ate at brought him not chocolate milk, but COLD HOT COCOA with whipped cream on it. His chocolate milk was thankfully actually chocolate milk. The thing pictured below is their large. The salt shaker next to it for size comparison is only an inch high, so you can get the scale of how small their large is. We saw their "small" and it looked like a double wide shot glass.

And then there was his breakfast entree. He got a ham and cheese scramble. Now, note that this is the after picture and not the before picture. Let me show it to you and then we'll discuss it a bit.

First of all, they put waaaaaaaay too much cheddar cheese on his scramble. That pile in the bottom right is ALL cheese except for the little piece of egg in the foreground. This is just the cheese that he pushed off the top of his scramble when he got it... there was a lot more that he actually ate. This was about 3x the amount of cheese any sane chef would have put on this dish.

And then there was the ham.

Near the end of the meal, Brian was giving his plate a strange look. He told me that the ham tasted strange, but he didn't know what the problem was. Myra tried it and made a strange face then told me to try it. I figured it out right away. The ham that they were using was hickory smoked. Now this was weird to begin with for two reasons: 1) using a smoked ham in this kind of dish is definitely not standard, 2) hickory smoke is sort of an odd choice for ham. But it went beyond that. The amount of hickory smoke (or liquid smoke) that was applied to this ham was on the level of gas station beef jerky. It was that strong. The aftertaste of the ham was seriously almost identical to a hickory flavored beef jerky. How very strange.

If any of you have breakfast suggestions in the Roseville, CA, please let me know. I need a place that won't do strange things to my Boss' breakfast!

Naruto Girl vs. Food

Note: Quit sending me messages asking me if Naruto Girl is single. First of all, I have no idea whether she's single or not. Secondly, she's 15, so unless you are one of the younger readers of this blog... HANDS OFF! 

Today began with a hilarious meal at a hot dog place, followed by Work Girlfriend's daughter going to battle with some delicious food in Old Folsom.

I began the day with a very restricted breakfast budget due to my own bad planning. I had oatmeal. It was ok. Actually, with the amount of salt and butter I put into it, it was much more than ok. Then again, by that point it was very much not healthy for me, so I should have just gotten something unhealthy for breakfast in the first place. 

For lunch, Actual and Work tagged along with me to Parker's Hot Dogs. This isn't your usual hot dog place. They use very delicious hot dogs, and have recently started adding fun things to their menu in order to capture the large local lunch crowd that has recently needed new places to eat after a spate of closures.

This is my soda and one of the regular dogs. Both were delicious and just what I was in the mood for.

Along with my combo I got a spectacular basket of fries. They look mundane but they were perfect.

Actual's seasoned fries. I don't like seasoned fries. Actual does and said that these are very fine specimens.

Remember what I was saying about their interesting menu items? This was a DBLT. It's a sandwich containing a sliced hot dog and then the BLT part. It smelled amazing. I'm not sure how it tasted as Actual didn't let me have any.

After work, the three of us picked up the kids at Work Girlfriend's house and headed for Old Folsom. It turns out that Work thought we were going to a totally different pizza place. We instead headed for Chicago Fire, a happy and authentic Lou Malnati's clone. I mean clone in the most awesome way, as now that I know about this place there's no reason to go to Chicago for pizza.

This is Naruto Girl studying the menu. Silly girl. She doesn't realize that being on the chomple.com staff means that you don't get to order for yourself anymore.

Work Girlfriend, realizing this gaffe, attempted to correct her daughter's behavior. It didn't work.

Greek fries... fries with garlic... cheese... err... lots of stuff. They were really good.

Pizza came at some point. It was jawesome.

And now... Naruto Girl vs. Food.

Tara Thai: It's just like being in Thailand, except you can drink the water.

I'm going to lead off with my plea.

There are a metric ton of Thai restaurants everywhere now. I think my hometown even has a couple. Most of these are not family-owned. Of the ones that are, most of them aren't very good. And even the ones that are good aren't very authentic. Tara Thai is (now) one of the few family-owned Thai restaurants that's authentic and delicious. Like most restaurants of this category, they are kind of in an out of the way location and the crappy Thai places with brighter signs get more business. All Thai restaurants are not equal. If you live in my area, PLEASE GO TO THIS ONE.

Ok, that being said, there is sort of a checkered history between us and Tara Thai.

When it first opened, we were sort of miffed because they replaced what was perhaps the best Pho place ever to exist: Noodle 88. Eventually we wandered in after the anger subsided and found out that it was being run by Thai people and the food was delicious and authentic. We ate here at least once a week. The only thing I didn't like about it was that they were taking forever to get their liquor license, and we're talking months here. 

We liked this place so much that we had Girlfriend Actual's birthday party there, feeding her entire family until they were near explosive internal pressure. A couple weeks later we got takeout from there and it tasted horrible. All the flavors were off. Hmmmm.

A week after that we decided to go in and eat and talk to the owners to see if something was up. To our amazement, the entire staff had been replaced by a new crew of people... and they weren't speaking Thai. Well, that explained it. We stopped going to Tara Thai.

Two years later, Girlfriend Actual need a place to host a meeting for her club, and decided to have it there since we knew it was probably deserted and they could accommodate a party of that size. After the meeting I got an excited call from Actual who said that there were new people in charge and that the food was even better than the first incarnation of Tara Thai.

We decided to investigate.

On our first visit back we discovered that the new owners were Thai/Isaan (Isaan is a large tribe of people from the mountains of Thailand who have apparently spent the last 1000 years coming up with delicious recipes).  That explained everything.

And then I saw the specials menu hidden near the back of the restaurant.

As many of you may know, the title of my upcoming book is Give Me the Secret Menu. I absolutely love places that keep an off the official menu list of dishes that they are willing to cook for their more adventurous or traditional customers. And this place delivers.

Most of that menu may sound innocuous but it's really not. That dish up there that says "Fried bird" is actually a small, sparrow sized songbird skewered whole and deep fried. 

I ordered the roasted meatballs. These are roasted over an open flame while being continuously basted with a slightly sweet sauce. So good.

After a couple more meals we returned with Work Girlfriend's crew for a grander banquet.

This is the heavenly wings appetizer. Tara Thai does a much more traditional version of the dish than most places. The average Thai place overstuffs the chicken wings until they are the size of an apple fritter. Tara Thai does it the traditional way, yielding a much more appetizing result.

Next course was som tum, or green papaya salad. Even though I ordered everything "farang mild" or "white people mild" it's really not possible to make this dish completely mild and have it taste right. More spice than some people were expecting, but it was very good. The chef at Tara Thai isn't shy with the fish sauce.

We also got tom kha gai, or chicken coconut and lemongrass soup. Most of us liked it. This is one of the kids enjoying it while Jason ponders the som tum. Remember the kid on the left, he's going to be a famous chef someday!

Pra raam, stir fry in peanut sauce. We always order this when there are people new to Thai food around, as it's the dish that most deem least offensive. We've done Thai twice for Actual's birthday, and both times we had a near riot as people fought over it. No such riot this time, as there was plenty for everyone.

Gang garee gai, coconut yellow curry with chicken. This was a specific request from Work Girlfriend. Pretty standard Thai fare available everywhere, although Tara Thai's version has a more complex profile than the stuff most other places serve. I have no idea why the curry is being pondered here. Perhaps the potatoes were making a face.

The star dish of the night: lahd naa. I guess you could loosely translate this as poured on the face. This dish is the Thai version of stroganoff, except without cream. Stir fried vegetables and beef in a thick gravy and poured on wide rice noodles. This dish is inexplicably missing from the menu at most Thai restaurants, although almost all of them will make it for you if you request it.

The mango sticky rice was the entire reason half of the party was there. Poor Naruto Girl thought we were going to have to go to San Francisco every time we wanted it. The usual combination of perfectly ripe mango and sticky rice in coconut sauce.

Along with the mango we got deep fried banana eggrolls with ice cream.

The owner was so amused by how much Naruto Girl was fiending over the mango that the kitchen was ordered to comp Naruto a whole new order to go.

If you need Thai food in the Sacramento area, I highly suggest you make the trip to Tara Thai. Unless you're one of those people that only get Pad Thai and satay, in which case you need to expand your Thai horizons a little :)

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Bravo! Pastaria: Fighting McSnood one dish at a time.

I'm coining a new term today: McSnood.

McSnood is a combination of McSnoot and McFood. Generic, fast-casual clone food that costs way too much. You've all experienced it. In some rich or shopping-saturated part of town, a strip mall opens up that is styled with drywall and stucco to look like a small European town (or, for those of you with European travel experience, what an small European town would look like if Disney made it). The place instantly fills up with overpriced boutiques and McSnood restaurants. $10 carnitas burrito? OH YES PLEASE! I CAN'T WAIT TO SEE HOW MUCH BETTER REHEATED PORK TASTES WHEN I PAY TWICE AS MUCH FOR IT!

We've walked/drove by Bravo! probably over 200 times. In a McSnood filled location, we were not expecting any sort of decent food from any establishment there. We had previously eaten at La Costa Vida, which was a Chipotle except you had to pay $5 extra for your food to shrink and taste worse. Not a very good deal!

Many Yelp friends of mine were lobbying for me to go to Bravo! Pastaria, saying that the place was not a chain and was owned by a husband and wife team. They went on to say that Bravo! actually had tremendous food.... so off we went.

This is the exterior. Note the faux-McHamlet feel of the plaza they're in.
 

Rule number one of eating anywhere: always check out the specials menu. Girlfriend Actual got something off of their daily specials menu and it was phenomenal (you'll see it really soon).

On with the food. They brought out some warm and chewy bread while we were waiting. Now, frequent readers will know that I have been bemoaning the state of dipping oil in restaurants everywhere. The last few times I've had it, the oil tasted like motor oil and they were even stingy about giving it to me. NOT THIS PLACE. They had great herbed dipping oil and poured a full saucer of it. The bottle remained on the table with the balsamic and I'm sure I could have gotten more if I asked. A restaurant with priorities and attention to detail. I'm hooked.

The oil just sits quietly, whispering "you want more of me, I swear!"

Jody got some sort of green salad with her meal. The dressing tasted homemade and was very good.

On to the pasta. I got four cheese ravioli in garlic butter sauce. By garlic butter, they meant about 15 cloves of garlic in butter and white wine. This plate was amazingly good... I ended up eating about half of the garlic cloves.

One perfect clove of garlic.

Girlfriend Actual got their Pasta Suzanna. Fettuccine with asparagus, artichoke hearts, pine nuts and sun-dried tomatoes in a cream sauce. So this is what... six of Actual's favorite ingredients all in one dish? I think she was full halfway through but couldn't stop.

I've been dying for a good pasta place in town that wasn't a chain, and here it is. Highly recommended. There's no lunch menu, just one lunch special per day. So the prices/portions are dinner menu all day. Keep that in mind when deciding what the proper hour is to come check this place out.

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Golden Dragon: Sichuan Hot Pot in a Strip Mall

Wow. I lost the entire beginning of this post :(

The short version is that we found an authentic Sichuan Chinese restaurant in a strip mall that has a secret menu for their hardcore customers.

One of the things that's not even on the secret menu is the Sichuan hot pot. If you have ever been to a fondue place, Sichuan hot pot is like that middle portion of the meal where you cook meat and other ingredients in a spiced broth. At Golden Dragon, you need a minimum of four people to do a hot pot. So off we went!

This is Work Girlfriend saying that the dangerously hot side was for the two Asians present. That was actually a joke as Work likes spicy food as much as anyone else. Like a hot pot place in China, you can order your hot pot with a divider down the middle. The mild broth is on one side and the hot broth with the Sichuan of peppers is on the other. 

Girlfriend Actual made sure that everyone knew I was to blame if the meal turned out to be crappy.

This is the overhead view of the pot. Once again, notice the happy clear tomato cooking broth on one side, and the Danger Will Robinson bright red hot side full of Sichuan peppers. The funny part of all of this is that the Sichuan peppers are dehydrated, so as the meal goes on the hot side of the pot gets even more outrageously hot. By the end of the meal the hot side of the pot isn't even usable for cooking, but it makes a great dipping sauce.

Part of the entire loadout of ingredients they brought us to cook. From memory, this included fish, beef, fish balls, three different kinds of mushrooms, cabbage, tripe and a bunch of other stuff that I can't remember because my mouth was burning so much.

Some cookin' going on!

Cake Sister was enthused.

This was the state of the table about halfway through.

The heat eventually got to Cake Sister. She resorted to a mystery beverage to help her through.

Not something I would eat every day, but it's a good once in a while experience. Great with friends and a spectacular way to blow a few hours while chatting about how much your mouth hurts.

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