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October 1, 2006
Bay Area dining last week...
I got out for a couple of good meals last week while teaching in Santa Clara. I was at a hotel in Sunnyvale that was around the corner from a brewpub, Faultline Brewery. Faultline styles itself as a bit more upscale than most brewpubs, and the prices on the menu reflect that. Still, the beers were only $4/pint, so what the heck. It was Hump Day, and I was thirsty. :-)
I started with a bowl of their Cream of Mushroom soup. It's always interesting to get a dish like this, where your first thought might be a can of Campbell's rather than a "good" soup. Let's face it, Cream of Mushroom is the filler item for many a casserole recipe. A restaurant that serves such an item usually does a good job with it just to prove that there's life after the can. Faultline came through; it was a good broth with lots of sliced portobello mushrooms swimming in it. I had their "Koelsch" lager with the soup, a nice light beer. It was listed as a lager, but it was more of a pilsner. My entree was the NY Steak, which was a 12oz strip. They cooked it right, but if I had to do it over again, I would have skipped the sauce, which was a stock/wine reduction with horseradish. It wasn't bad, but it was really more like just OK. The baked potato was done right, and the steamed veggies on the side were a good complement to the steak, mostly green beans and onions, a combination that I enjoy. I switched to the stout for the steak. It was billed as an "Irish Stout," but it really wasn't all that heavy. They poured it fast, which means it should have come back very un-settled. When the waiter set it down, however, it was already drinkable. Not that it was a bad beer, mind you, but it was on the light side for a stout. It was definitely more along the lines of a full-bodied porter. Since I was walking back to the hotel, I decided to "drink" dessert, which was a couple more pints of the sout. Obviously it wasn't all that bad, in spite of my criticism. :-)
After class was done on Friday, I invited greeklady to join me for a beer or three--she was having a rough week. She picked me up at the hotel when she was done for the day and we went back to Faultline. Rather than order dinner, we decided to pick on appetizers. We got three. We ordered their Dungeness Crab Cakes, and their Salmon-Stuffed Hush Puppies. Being a consummate Cali chick, greeklady didn't know what a hush puppy was, so this was interesting. The Crab cakes were a bit stringy--I don't know if Dungeness crab has a particular season or such, but they were just so-so. The mango salsa served over the cakes was very yummy, though, and balanced out the deficiencies in the crab itself. The hush puppies looked just like the classic ones you'd find served at a Southern catfish restaurant, but they were indeed stuffed with sushi-grade salmon and served with a spicy cream sauce as well as a medley of sliced mango and tangerine. The sauce and the fruit were almost better than the hush puppies, which were pretty good on their own!
For beers, I had their medium-bodied lager as well as their brown ale. The lager was good, but the brown ale was the best of all the beers I tasted on either evening I was there.
We were still hungry after those appetizers, so we got the Seared Ahi Tuna Roll. It was very good. They take a classic sushi tuna roll, then dip it in tempura batter and deep fry it just long enough to crisp up the batter. The fish is still essentially raw, since the heat doesn't get that far into the roll. They then cut the roll in quarters, serving it with tempura sauce for dipping, along with wasabi and pickled ginger a la a classic sushi presentation. I'll definitely be ordering this next trip.
On the in-between night, I drove up to Alameda to have dinner with khanadasc. She picked the Ocean East restaurant on Webster St., one of her favorites. I was running late, so she already started in on the pot-stickers. Being the sweetie that she is, she left me a couple. :-) For an entree, I went with the Sichuan Shrimp. They were good-sized, 15-count shrimp, butterflied, then stir-fried and served with a moderatly-spicy sauce. It's interesting to order Sichuan stuff outside the New Orleans area, because the level of spiciness tends to vary a lot more. I think Chinese restaurants in New Orleans know they're catering to a market that likes hot food (just look at how much Popeye's chicken we consume), so they rachet up the heat a notch or two. Maybe what they serve at Ocean East was more authentic, it's hard to tell. Either way, the shrimp was yummy. They were served with stir-fried celery. I'm not a huge fan of really-crunchy celery, but it went well with the spicy sauce. We picked pork-fried rice for the side dish, since Jenn's not a big seafood person. The traditional fortune cookie was dessert (before we headed over to Starbucks, that is).
Happy hour with greeklady on Friday was the warm-up for going up to Castro Valley to meet some more LJ-friends at the Palomares Cafe. I didn't eat, but the burgers that my friends were finishing up when I arrived looked pretty good. I'll have to come up a bit earlier next trip and try them out. They also have this scary-hot blonde chick who DJs karaoke on Friday nights. I totally recommend the place for a fun way to kick off the weekend!
Posted by YatPundit at October 1, 2006 6:42 PM