mamster

I haven't had that exact Dahlia steak sandwich, but I did have one. I can't remember exactly what the supplementary ingredients were, but it was on toasted sliced bread and it was very good--it's not a Philly-style sandwich but one in which the steak is carefully trimmed and cooked before being sliced. It was a great sandwich but if you specifically have a Philly craving, it won't do. Now, where to go for a Philly? I have a couple of firsthand recommendations and a piece of hearsay. I should add that I've never been to Philadelphia. The place on the Ave that turned into the Thai-ger room moved into the sports bar place across the street, near the southwest corner of University and 45th. Unfortunately, the bar is totally sleazy, but the sandwiches are still good (assuming it's still there--I haven't had one in a few months) and there are lots of options if you're not a purist. You can add mushrooms, pizza sauce, barbecue sauce, various cheeses, etc. I think it's called Dan's Cheese Steaks. Philly's Best at 23rd and Jackson serves a good sandwich that I've heard many people compare to a true Philly. Finally, I've heard a lot of recommendations for Philadelphia Fevre at 23rd and Madison, but for some reason I've never made it over there myself. Maybe I'll do so tomorrow; it's not like 23rd and Madison is far from my house. They also serve some unusual variations, like Sukiyaki. Come to think of it, I've had a few bites of the sandwich at Cafe Campagne, too. It's comparable to the Dahlia one, but not quite as good, and I would recommend that if you want a meaty sandwich at CC, go for the superior lamb burger. Best of luck and let us know what you find.

It may be difficult for a newspaper to fully reimburse travel writers (a lot of them write about their family vacations, it seems), but I can advise that papers who want to keep their restaurant reviews independent and unbiased should reimburse promptly and in full--it's easy to reject freebies that would have been free anyway. Critics are like judges. Judges make a good-faith effort to avoid behavior that will get them entangled in a case they might hear, but they are allowed to have a life. If they sense the slightest conflict of interest, they should recuse themselves from the case. Anyone who reads the Pacific Northwest board knows that a regular on there is a local chef and a buddy of mine. Obviously I wouldn't review his restaurant, but I might recommend it to a friend and make it clear that I know the chef. I don't see any ethical problem there.

It was Aoki on Broadway. Sneaky me!

No, I was sitting at a table and got a platter-type arrangement. I now realize this was silly--I'm kind of a sushi newbie, as I'm sure you can tell.

There's space for two in the front window, two two-tops in back, and a communal table for maybe eight. So I guess that makes seating for twelve, as small as Thai Tom. We went at noon and nabbed the front window, and I've never had trouble getting a seat in the past, but it would certainly be easier if you went early or late.

I don't expect it will surprise anyone to hear that I had a great lunch at Salumi, in Pioneer Square, today. I met my dad (who works downtown) there. He had the porchetta sandwich, which consists of sausage-stuffed butterflied pork on a baguette that has been slathered with a garlic-herb oil. Peppers and onions are optional but recommended. It's a pretty incredible sandwich; the pork is juicy (the sausage and oil keep it plenty moist) and really tastes like pork. I had the same meat, but baked into a lasagna with peperoncini and cheese. Do I need to go into detail about how good this was? While in line we got free samples of hot soppressata and garlic salami. Outrageous bursts of flavor. Maybe next time I'll get the salami sandwich. If anyone here hasn't tried the place yet, let me know, and I will meet you there. They're open for lunch Tue-Fri from 11-3.

It was a strange thing, Jinmyo. I hadn't been to this place before, but I've had it recommended by people I trust, and both the fish and rice were great. Just this one little nostril-incinerating problem....

I like the word "Quiddler," but what the hell is it? If it's a fun word game, I need to know.

PerfectCircle, welcome and thank you so much for this helpful post. I'm curious to hear your opinion of the Banh Mi 88, if you've been there, since it's the only one I've tried. That will soon change.

I've had black pepper ice cream at a restaurant--it was excellent. I'm all for ice cream experimentation. I've enjoyed bay leaf ice cream, pandan leaf, chocolate chili, and so on. (See my post about La Casa Gelato on Canada.)

I hear they hunted him down for his taco al pastor recipe.

I keep a couple dozen bar mop towels in a drawer. Those get a lot of play. I keep the Microplane on my knife rack; it gets used for cheese and zest. Good peanut oil is important in my kitchen. I buy the cold-filtered Lion & Globe brand in big plastic bottles, but I keep it in glass at home. I've had trouble with rancid peanut oil in the past, so now I keep a big glass bottle in the fridge and decant some into a smaller glass bottle for the cupboard. Another important part of cooking is beer, so I keep a bottle opener handy. I've already mentioned my Unicorn Magnum peppermill on the peppermill thread. Wilfrid, do a comparison of freshly ground with preground, and you'll never go back, unless you're tommy. Laurie likes to tell people that if they want to improve their cooking with hardly any effort, they can follow four easy rules: freshly ground pepper, kosher salt, butter not margarine, and hot plates for hot food. Maybe I should have let her jump in with that.

Today I had lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Seattle and got a sushi plate with six assorted nigiri pieces, a tuna roll, and some egg. The fish and rice were good, but on the nigiri pieces, the dot of wasabi affixing the fish to the rice was more than a dot--it was an exclamation point. I was actually in pain a couple of times. Obviously this was an error, but would it be reasonable to ask them to go light on the wasabi if I go back to this place? It would have been a perfectly good lunch without the seared nostrils.

That explains why your pants are on fire.

Does "longevity" refer to the shelf life of the can or to you after you drink it? Or both. Cabrales, thanks for the food court advice. I always appreciate a trustworthy tip and will try to have some food court adventures next time I'm in Van. The only place on my list that I didn't make it to was the President, at the Radisson Hotel in Richmond. Have you tried it? The friend who took me to Bo Kong is not a strict vegetarian, but he is violently allergic to chicken, and he can never avoid chicken broth at non-veg Chinese restaurants. I'd never heard of such an allergy before I met him, but it's quite serious, anaphylactic shock and the whole nine yards.

I forgot to mention that we did have some bubble tea at Parker Place; the same place that sold the tea also had a huge, gorgeous steamer full of herbal jelly, which people around us were buying for medicinal purposes. I'll check out the food courts on the next trip; I intend to head back up pretty soon and maybe buy a rice cooker.

I spend several days last week in Vancouver, BC, and ate at a number of restaurants, mostly Chinese. Of course, I also made a stop at Vij’s for some of his remarkable Indian food and because whenever I’m at Vij’s I feel like a celebrity, even though nobody there knows me. Apologies in advance for the occasional vagueness in food descriptions; I was on vacation and didn’t much feel like taking notes, so I’m doing my best from my notebook. All prices are in Canadian dollars. Vij’s (1480 W. 11th Ave, 604-736-6664) has been mentioned many times on eGullet already, and I have little to add: the place is brilliant. They don’t take reservations, so our party of six waited in the bar for forty-five minutes. While we waited, we enjoyed free chai, little pooris, spicy chapatti, and wonderful cayenne-dusted cassava fries, crispy yet moist. Once we were seated, Vij himself took our order. If you look up "impresario" in the dictionary, there is a picture of Vij. If he had told me to go grab him a couple of 50-pound sacks of rice from down the street, or help him wash dishes, I would have thanked him for the opportunity. None of the great service would matter, of course, if the food wasn’t good, but it’s beyond good. One of our appetizers was a crisp cauliflower crepe; I don’t remember what was on it, but if you see it on the menu, get it. I had a black cod entree (called sablefish here; that’s the same thing, right?) which was nicely cooked and came with some sautéed beets. I’ve never before met a beet I liked, but these were fabulous. The best dish at the table was either the curry lamb lollipops (tender and crusty from the grill) or the saag paneer, creamy spinach with chunks of firm cottage cheese, served with more of those cassava fries. Rice and naan are included in the price of your entrée; the assorted freebies help make the customer feel like a monarch of some sort. The other important thing to know about Vij’s is that it’s cheap; there was no entrée over $24, and the portions are hearty. There’s an interesting flat-rate wine list (I think the bottles were are also $24, and all wines are available by the glass); I had a BC-produced gamay that complemented my fish perfectly. It’s one of the few non-Beaujolais gamays that I’ve enjoyed, and I enjoyed it a lot. The only thing wrong with Vij’s is the noise: it’s louder than heck in there. Hon’s Wun Tun has numerous locations around the Vancouver area. I went to the one on Robson street because there’s a 10% off coupon (and maps and addressed to the various locations) on Hon’s]http://www.shinnova.com/hons_on_robson/location-e.htm]Hon’s web site. I got an order of pork potstickers ($3, and several other fillings are available) and an enormous plate of noodles in XO sauce ($6.95) with assorted meats and vegetables (char siu pork, chicken, onions and peppers). The XO sauce, a spicy sauce made with dried scallops, is made in-house, and it gives the noodles a subtle coating whose heat sneaks up on you. The potstickers, also made at Hon’s, are excellent, with a good ratio of seared to steamed surface area. The place itself has a cool layout. A large central dining area is ringed with open kitchens along two long walls, and there are a lot of cooks. So lunch at Hon’s is never boring, even if you’re dining alone. A friend took me to Bo Kong (3068 Main Street, 604-876-3088), a vegetarian restaurant in Chinatown. (I didn’t write down any prices, but it was inexpensive.) I’m generally skeptical of vegetarian restaurants, but this one has a deservedly good reputation. We had a large plate of gai lan, which was a little tough and impossible to eat with chopsticks, but nicely trimmed and flavorful. Our other entrée was tofu masquerading as rolled chicken skin, served with vegetables in a brown sauce. The tofu was crispy and satisfying, and if I closed my eyes I could almost pretend there was some chicken skin in there. Other people at the restaurant were enjoying a variety of hot pot dishes that looked great; I’ll try one of those next time. On the way out of town we stopped in Richmond, which someone on this board called “Asia West.” They were not exaggerating. There are several malls catering to a mostly Chinese clientele, and they reminded me of some of the smaller malls in Asia. The malls have food courts, and some of the mall restaurants looked interesting (lots of steam tables, though), but we stuck mostly to the Osaka supermarket inside the Yaohan Centre (2600 - 3700 No. 3 Road). It’s a market comparable to Seattle’s Uwajimaya but despite the name, the Osaka has more of a Chinese focus. Because I don’t associate fish sauce with Chinese cooking, I was surprised to find Golden Boy nam pla, a premium brand of Thai fish sauce that I’ve never seen for sale in Seattle. I stocked up. Osaka also has a nice display of Chinese cleavers, a section of house and table wares, and a case of prepared foods that from a distance looks like the deli case of any North American supermarket, until you notice the huge bowl of squid. By the Osaka’s cash register, in prime impulse-buy position, was a box of cuttlefish snacks. The box trumpeted: “Chewing Gum of the Orientals!” They sell rice cookers at Osaka, but if you’re looking for one, try the housewares store on the second level of Yaohan. They had a 10-cup Zojirushi fuzzy logic model for $188 Canadian, which is almost 50% less than what they charge for the same model at Uwajimaya. After shopping we went to the Richmond branch of Vancouver’s famous dim sum palace, Sun Sui Wah (102 Alderbridge Place, Richmond, (604) 273-8208). (Incidentally, I ran into one of my classmates there, and when I got back to Seattle, I told another classmate about this, and he said, “Which dim sum place?” I told him, and he said, “Oh, Sun Sui Wah is great.” I guess everyone’s been but me.) At dim sum, the best cart always rolls by right after you’re full, so I watched fried squid and siu mai slip just out of my stomach’s reach. Before that, however, we had some great stuff. There were those pan-fried pork puffs that look kind of like duchess potatoes (anyone know was this piece is called?). An unusual scallop dumpling had a thin slice of scallop covering some fresh shrimp, steamed in a cup made of dough. Of course, it’s easy to impress with pork and fresh seafood. The gai lan at Sun Sui Wah was cooked to order on the cart in a boiling tub of salted water. Gai lan is supposed to offer a little resistance, but too often it’s served basically raw. This was a great cooked vegetable. We also had some steamed vegetable-mushroom dumplings and a big plate of wide noodles (kind of like the Thai pad si-ew) cooked with soy sauce and rolled up like carpets into chewy little bundles. The meal came to about $20 per person. Be forewarned that SSW in Richmond is closed in April and most of May for a complete remodel. The facilities were already pretty nice, so I’m looking forward to seeing it after the renovation. Thanks very much to anil, Fat Guy, and cabrales for making recommendations; now all my Vancouver friends think I’m some kind of genius at picking restaurants, and I owe it all to eGullet. I also made a couple of stops at La Casa Gelato, but I gave that its own thread.

Shaw, shouldn't you be using your time to come up with appropriate taunts for when the Mariners play in NY? Like, "Our hot dogs can beat up your sushi," or something?

I forgot to add that I often put plastic wrap over the tops of the bowls before I put them in the fridge (Saran should hire me for a commerical, and I'm not talking about Suvir). Oh, and Malawry, Gladware containers rock. We have a large drawer full of many sizes, and use them a lot.

The "prep ahead" thread has already moved on to braising liquid and the like, not that there is anything wrong with that. To move back to MEP, what do you use to store your prepped ingredients? I have a set of Japanese-made blue ceramic bowls (the kind you see at a lot of Asian groceries, with designs on them) that hold about 24 oz each. Each one can hold a large diced onion, or a couple of bell peppers, a few mushrooms, some diced chicken for stir-fry, or whatever. For smaller things (minced garlic, spices) I used the little Pyrex bowls. For larger, I have some glass bowls. Since most of my cooking is for two people, the blue bowls are perfect for a whole lot of different MEP. I thought about getting some Lexan bins, but then I realized that the blue bowls have a distinct advantage: they have no corners, so they're easy to wash by hand.

The only time I went to Safeco, I think I must have already had dinner, because I just ate a bunch of peanuts. So I'm curious. BH, is Kau Kau the best place for BBQ pork and ducks in the neighborhood?

I don't remember which Pinkwater book had the onion-eater, but I'd love to reread it if someone comes up with the title. It reminds me of one of my favorite food images in a non-kids book, which is from John McPhee's essay about the Union Square Greenmarket. He spends a day packing 150,000 pounds of onions on a big farm, and at the end of the day... "I run to an unharvested row and pull from the earth a one-pound onion, rip off the membranous bulb coat, bare the flesh, and sink my teeth through leaf after leaf after savory mouth-needling sweet-sharp water-bearing leaf to the flowering stalk that is the center and the secret of the onion." Onions are already my favorite food, but I've never loved an onion like that. Sorry, off-topic, I know.

My planning acumen has been overstated. What kind of experience are you looking for in Seattle, Shaw? We can take you to a shmancy place; we can do some home cooking; or we can go to an unusual ethnic dive like the Malay Satay Hut. Up to you.

Fat Guy, Slaves of Spiegel totally rules. This delightful book is available with four other novels in a Pinkwater collection called 5 Novels. Many Pinkwater books include a scene in which the characters have their lives changed by good cooking; the description of Beanbender's Beer Garden in The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (also in 5 Novels) brings tears to my eyes. The book Confess-o-Rama by Ron Koertge features a main character who is both a serious home cook and a boy, and for some reason I found this endearing.

Here I am. There are a whole bunch of banh mi places around the intersection of 12th and Jackson, but the one I recommended was in the parking lot of the Hop Thanh supermarket, on the southwest corner of 12th and Jackson. It's inside the Video West store and it's called Banh Mi 88. I've tried three of their sandwiches and my favorite is the BBQ pork. Last time I went he was out of it (I went early, so probably it wasn't done yet), so I tried the beef and the charbroiled pork. The beef was kind of mushy and not very interesting; the charbroiled pork consisted of tasty, spicy meatballs and was great. There are several other flavors, too. Do let us know what you end up with. I went to an incredible Chinese supermarket in Richmond, BC, this week, the Osaka market inside the Yaohan Center mall on No. 3 Road. Among other great stuff, they had Golden Boy fish sauce, which is one of the premium brands that you never see for sale in Seattle. It's right down the road from Sun Sui Wah, a great dim sum palace. Definitely worth the detour from Vancouver.