journeys east @ tulalip casino

tulalip, wa

website

derek's parents made reservations at journeys east for christmas dinner last year. an unusual choice, to be sure. food was delicious - a mix of different asian cuisines - derek's parents always know how to find good food. service had the right amount of christmas cheer. a nice spot for a fun family gathering. we even got to place a few bets at the roulette table on the way out.

bao dim sum house

los angeles, ca

website

cindy was visiting and we really wanted to get dim sum but didn't have time to drive out to the san gabriel valley. so we ended up at bao dim sum house in the beverly grove area. dim sum is decent, but with a lot of fancy touches that you wouldn't get at a normal dim sum joint. for example, the fried luo bo gao is gently served on a nice plate garnished with chopped scallions rather than getting a quick squeeze of hoisin sauce before being thrown on your table. everything was okay, but i'd much rather have a more authentic dim sum experience in the SGV.

shawn cafe

arcadia, ca

link to yelp

anthony was visiting so i decided it was worth traveling to arcadia to get good chinese food. it also helped that anthony drove the whole way. we met g and cindy c at the restaurant and let cindy c order the best options from the menu. and what a spread! generally my favorite taiwanese dish is a meatball covered in glutinous sticky gooey stuff and unnaturally red-orange spicy sauce. trust me, it's delicious. but this time, cindy c introduced me to a new taiwanese favorite - xiang chang (chinese sausage) sliced with sticky rice sausage. chinese sausage is great with everything (shout out to my mom's signature sticky rice with chinese sausage and mushrooms) but this was a nice twist, serving it with sticky rice in a similar sausage shape. grab one slice of each sausage, stuff whole into mouth, and enjoy.

capital seafood

arcadia, ca

link to yelp

met up with michelle and cindy c for dim sum in arcadia. so far! but it's worth the drive to see my far-flung friends and to eat yummy chinese food. the dim sum was pretty good, better than anything that i can get near my apartment in santa monica. but the best part of capital seafood is the fact that there was no wait at 12:30 pm on a weekend. incredible. plus, service was super friendly - they let me sit down and served me tea before the rest of my party arrived.

wong's king seafood restaurant

portland, or

website

home of chris's "bbq pork guy" (doesn't everyone have a bbq pork guy?). when in portland visiting chris and amanda, we go to wong's king for great chinese food. my favorite dish here is the enoki mushroom with chicken and egg tofu. i love egg tofu. i don't know why it's called egg tofu or how it's made, but somehow it's silkier and creamier than non-egg tofu. delicious! when visiting portland with my parents, we went to wong's king twice. after stuffing ourselves for dinner on saturday night, we went back on sunday morning for dim sum. so good.

fung lum @ SFO

san francisco, ca

link to yelp

chinese buffets are comfort food. when i'm travelling, it's often the only airport food i find appealing. the tofu + veggie stirfry and chow mein at fung lum in the united terminal at SFO are decent. pork buns are not good. egg tarts are bland and useless. i went on a limb this particular trip and tried the wonton soup with shrimp wontons. i won't do that again.

liang's kitchen

cupertino, ca

website

lots of great asian food in the south bay. derek managed to find another spot for taiwanese food. derek and i took his parents there for dinner. excellent beef noodle soup - ask for "ma la" if you want it spicy. but my favorite dish were the beef rolls - fried cong you bing (onion pancakes) flattened, filled with beef and cilantro, and formed into a roll. like a light flaky onion-y egg roll. there's other great stuff on the menu - hopefully we'll be back soon to try more.

hong kong flower lounge

millbrae, ca

website

back to millbrae to drop stacey off at the airport. first, however, we stopped for dim sum. hong kong flower lounge was recommended to us by april and lennon - and they know good dim sum. this place gets very crowded very quickly - so its best to arrive shortly after they open - anytime between 10:00 am and 11:00 am is usually safe. otherwise you could end up waiting an hour for a table.

giant multi-level complex with carts, trays, and food stations. we don't bother with the food stations - we prefer the food to come to us. all the usual dim sum favorites are excellent here - shaomai, ham sui gok, congee, deep fried taro dumplings, turnip cakes, tofu skin rolls, and egg tarts. if you're a fan of ma la gou - malaysian yellow cake - be sure to special order it because it rarely shows up on the carts.

yucca de lac

palo alto, ca

website

the stanford shopping mall is just one of those places where palo alto people tend to congregate. the mall, the dish, university ave, california ave, that's about it for palo alto hot spots. so we really shouldn't have been surprised when we ran into m+s there, the day after eating dinner with them at madera. palo alto is a small world.

yucca de lac has a very modern exterior with an appealing patio area - bright & sunny with comfortable-looking lounge chairs. according to its website and the description on the menu, it's a popular hong kong eatery. i've never heard of it before and after eating here, i can't imagine that it's actually popular in hong kong. it's basically expensive healthy-ish chinese food. my fried rice was decent but bland, hot & sour soup was pretty good but over-priced. there's a tiny chance that derek and i will eat there again if we're stuck at the mall and want to sit on a comfy lounge chair while drinking cocktails, but this is not a destination restaurant by any stretch of the imagination.

tenfu chinese restaurant

menlo park, ca

website

this chinese restaurant is within walking distance of our car wash spot. wash and wax is just enough time for us to walk to tenfu, eat lunch, and walk back. the restaurant gave us the english-language menu, but we noticed that the other table had the chinese-language menu. the english menu said "beef stew noodle soup," but thankfully it turned out to be normal beef noodle soup.

and it was surprisingly good - rich beefy broth, chewy dense noodles, and solid chunks of beef. i wasn't expecting a place so convenient to have such good food, but we'll definitely be back for the noodle soup. we were in such a hurry, i forgot to take a picture until i had slurped down all of my noodles. well, that's what the empty bowl looks like.

fu lam mum

mountain view, ca

website

fu lam mum is a pretty large dim sum restaurant, with the carts and everything. it doesn't have a very wide selection of dim sum, but they definitely have the basics covered. we ordered ha gow (shrimp balls wrapped in rice paper), shu mai (pork wrapped in noodle), lo mai fun (sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves), luo buo gow (turnip cake with pork) and ham sui gok (fried mochi dumplings filled with pork). sorry for the mix of cantonese and mandarin pronunciations, but that's how derek and i order dim sum.

each dim sum dish was okay - nothing spectacular and maybe a little on the greasy side for my tastes. the luo buo gow wasn't crispy enough and the ham sui gok didn't have enough pork in it. my favorite was the ma la gow (malaysian yellow cake) - which we had to make a special request for. it's extremely light, airy, not-too-sweet yellow cake, steamed in a basket. overall, i wish fu lam mum offered more variety, like the amazing spread we had at emerald in san diego. the search for quality dim sum in the south bay continues ...

su hong

palo alto, ca

website

you know a chinese restaurant is going to be good when you're handed menus written completely in chinese. derek and i considered relying on our limited chinese reading skills ("i think that says to-fu") but instead decided to play it safe and asked for english menus. su hong serves shanghai-style cuisine, which is one of my favorites as it reminds me of the food my mom makes at home.

we ordered "shi zhi tou" or "lion's head" meatballs. they were almost as good as my mom's and each meatball was the size of a baseball. it was an expensive dish ($16) -- but between the two of us, we only ate one meatball and the leftovers made excellent meals later in the week. the hand-shaved noodles were good, but our favorite dish of the meal was the crispy beancurd with hot garlic sauce (fried tofu). excellent crispy crust with soft, silky tofu inside. delicious.

a & j restaurant

cupertino, ca

link to yelp

craving a good bowl of noodles, we headed to cupertino village. a&j restaurant is a very basic chinese restaurant with a short menu. walk in, someone usually gestures at a table. it's the kind of restaurant where you don't have to order tea or water, they just throw it onto the table after you sit down.

we each order a bowl of noodles. derek gets the beef noodle soup. i usually do too, but this time i decided to try the tripe noodle soup. it was good, but not as flavorful as the beef soup.

663 bistro

seattle, wa

link to yelp

this is our new go-to chinese restaurant in seattle's chinatown. it's a rather ordinary looking restaurant, but the food is amazing. in fact, we had our rehearsal dinner here before our wedding in july. they served a traditional chinese feast with course after course, but their everyday menu is just as good.

my favorite is the "diced seafood on a bed of soft tofu." ignore the seafood. it's good, but the real star of this dish is the soft tofu - fried on the outside, creamy custardy melt-in-your-mouth consistency on the inside. i could eat the whole plate myself. if you need more than tofu, i recommend the crispy roast pork appetizer and e-fu noodles with lobster (some might consider the noodles to be the accompaniment, but not i).

kowloon tong dessert cafe

san francisco, ca

link to yelp

jason took all of us to this hong kong-inspired dessert cafe located in inner richmond (which is apparently where all the REAL chinese food can be found in san francisco - forget chinatown). after starting the evening at mums, this was a good place for jason, the steves, derek, and me to settle down and sober up before the drive home. it can get quite crowded on a saturday night, so we had about a 10 minute wait for a table.

standard hong kong desserts. the egg puffs were my favorite - like mini waffle balls. they clearly do waffles well here. the ice cream waffle sandwich was free because we checked in on facebook (another instance where derek's iphone triumphed over my blackberry). the waffle was appropriately thin and crispy and the ice cream sufficiently chilled - derek devoured these sandwiches. another one to add to the short list of desserts that derek enjoys.

southland flavor cafe

cupertino, ca

website

cupertino village is a complex with a ranch 99, a few bakeries, and several excellent chinese restaurants with strange names. southland flavor cafe? it's probably a literal translation of the chinese name, but a better translation would be "southern taiwanese cuisine." i wonder if i can make a career out of fixing chinglish. derek's parents happened to be in town while val was visiting from chicago, so we made a trip out to cupertino village. managed to pull tiffany away from her studies too for a mini family reunion.

my favorite (pictured) was the pork rice bowl which can feed a small army (or me) for about $6. another favorite was the beef noodle soup, served with the wide noodles that derek likes. the only downside to this place is that every other table orders the malodorous and aptly named "stinky tofu" (that's actually the english translation). the state of california should mandate "stinky tofu only" sections for taiwanese restaurants. we always try to finish our food quickly when we hear a nearby table say "chou dou fu" because that stuff is deadly.

emerald chinese seafood restaurant

san diego, ca

website

blogging ethics dictate that i have to disclose if there is a potential for bias in my reviews, so i have to tell you that steve's parents own this restaurant. i might be biased, but the food was seriously good. i love dim sum and emerald has all of my favorites, especially the stir-fried noodles that you don't always find at dim sum places.

shown at the bottom of the picture is the magical plate of noodles - magical because they were delicious and also because no matter how much i ate off the plate, there always seemed to be a massive pile of noodles left. other favorites were the pork shiu mai, congee, and hom sui gok (deep fried glutinous rice dumpling filled with pork). finished the meal with some egg tarts, of course, but watch out - the plates are hot! biased or not, if i'm ever in san diego again, we're going here for dim sum.

yank sing

san francisco, ca

website

strangely situated in an office building (rincon plaza) near the financial district in downtown, yank sing is a massive dim sum operation. at least on weekends, the crowd of dim sum'ers fills the restaurant and spills out into the lobby of the office building. jen and matt brought the kids and we found a perfect table in the lobby, underneath a ray of sunshine from the skylight above.

some of the dim sum options were better than others. we ate here a while ago, but i remember being a big fan of the shanghai soup dumplings and not such a fan of the regular pork dumplings. pictured is the fatty duck served in mantou pancakes - delicious. yank sing is a little pricey for dim sum, but it has a great atmosphere and quality food.

sam wo

chinatown, sf

link to yelp

a month before our wedding, derek and i made a very quick trip up to sf's chinatown to find me a wedding qi pao. did some quick yelp searching and found a place called L & G trading. derek picked a style he liked, in red (per tradition). i tried on the XL (sigh). it fit. we bought it. and we had plenty of time to find a spot for lunch.

we wandered around a bit and found sam wo, which is really a hole in the wall joint. menu looked good and very cheap. downstairs is a small kitchen and there's a very narrow staircase to a small dining area upstairs. ordered some wonton noodles, congee, and you tiao. the noodles and congee were standard, but the you tiao was surprisingly good. probably because it was freshly fried. apparently sam wo is popular with non-asians, not sure why, but maybe they know about the you tiao.

karendipity cooks: black bean orecchiette with spicy pork and broccoli

this is one of derek's favorites. another recipe from ming tsai's cookbook. this one is super easy to make. one thing to keep in mind is that you should chop up the broccoli into bite-sized pieces, otherwise it can become unwieldy.

not going to post the recipe, but i will explain my modification. the recipe calls for fermented black beans. as they do not sell fermented black beans in our whole foods, i had to go with the garlic black bean sauce. this sauce does not have as strong of a flavor as straight black beans, so i use more than the recipe calls for.