more than a food blog

I was late to join the others  (Tinx, DJ Deer, Simon) in Maui by two days, which had the nice consequence of getting picked up by them at the airport.  However, there was an unanticipated side effect of getting picked up when my flight arrived at 2 pm, because the others had waited for me to eat lunch and were extremely hangry (hungry + angry).  Tinx had already picked out a place near the Kahului airport called Da Kitchen, and after hangrily roping my neck with two leis they bought at Costco (awww. also, so THAT’S why there were two!), was trying to navigate Simon, and both of them were failing and yelling at one another, while DJ Deer just looked at me in the back seat, frightened and also hangry and whispering “See what I’ve had to deal with?” to me.

After we circled around, we finally found it.  Da Kitchen has super high marks on Yelp, so we had high expectations.  But – FOILED!  A LONG LINE!  I used all my nice mommy skills to keep everyone’s moods from hitting habanero status, calling on my powers of distraction (“Don’t you have to pee?  I have to pee.  Let’s all use the bathroom first.” “Wow, would you look at that!  A big plastic wave and surfer on the wall!”  ) and were eventually seated safely.

In a way, I’m glad it happened like it did, because the menu at Da Kitchen was classic Hawaiian, which is just the perfect epitome of food you’d want to eat when you’re starving.  In fact, recounting this is making me starving, which is good since I’m headed to Chipotle in thirty.

We all got plate lunches, which came with two scoops of rice and potato mac salad or green salad.  Me: Kalua pork – “slow cooked pork shredded from da bone;” Tinx: Combo Plate – Kalua pork, chicken long rice, steamed white rice, pork lau lau and Lomi salmon in a banana leaf; Simon: Chicken Katsu - chicken breaded in panko batter and served with a special Japanese BBQ sauce; DJ Deer: Teriyaki chicken – boneless chicken thighs marinated in teriyaki sauce and charbroiled.

Tinx’s is pictured top, and it was all lies – there was no lomi salmon.  But the rest of it was awesometastic, even the least fatty-fat-fat part of it which was the chicken long rice.  It was a soup filled with noodley, glass-like substances with a great chicken-ey broth that was somehow heightened by the experience of eating it with a fork.

Immediately above was the most rib-sticking and soul-nourishing dish, Simon’s katsu.  Gosh, the more you cook shit (meaning, the discrete number of separate times you cook shit, not the total length of time, though maybe also the total length of time) the more delicious it gets, no?  I’m sure you can imagine how vibrantly the pleasure centers in a person’s brain would light up given the combo of starvation + what you see above.  Better than drugs, people.

My Kalua pork was also better than drugs.  This was true melt-in-your-mouth (have you noticed that M&Ms don’t ever melt in your mouth?  That’s such bullshit.) experience, with the strands of soft, soft pork squishing out a porky, fatty juice with each bite, which I dragged through their sauce (some sort of sweet & savory concoction) over and over again.

Above is lumpia.  Basically a banana spring roll, all fried toasty goodness.  Simon called it a turon.  I don’t know but I trust him.   The most most most ingenious part of this was that we found out that the sauce, which was making us twitch because it was so sweet, so creamy, so vanillalicious, was…melted ice cream!  Genius, genuis!  It made us smile like this:

Da Kitchen
Triangle Square
425 Koloa St. #104
Kahului, HI 96732
808.871.7782

In ­­ honor of Hubert Keller’s performance on Top Chef Masters (which I did not watch because I do not have a TV yet in SF, but will buy off of iTunes tomorrow), I am blogging Fleur de Lys, his restaurant in SF that Tinx and I blew our entire cable refund ($78) and several percentages of our respective non-existent (both transitioning right now to new things; me to a postdoc that won’t pay me till October 1^st, her to law school check out her baby new blog www.legallyginger.com) salaries on. They have either a three-, four-, or five-course meal option which starts at $75 without a wine pairing.

But I’m getting waaaay ahead of myself. When I made the reservation and they asked, “Is this for a special occasion?” I lied and said it was Tinx’s birthday. I then hit myself for coming up with a lie that was so easily verifiable, but then again, fancy places don’t card, so perhaps we were in the clear.

Just in case, though, we laid it on thick when we walked through the door. The hostess said, “Happy Birthday Katrina” and I said, “Yeah! You’re getting old! HAHAHAHA!” and she’s like, “YEAH I AM GOSH WOW HAHAHAHAH!”

The décor of FDL is … awful. It’s old school gaudy which I think was supposed to make it cool, but the whole thing was terribly claustrophobic. The main dining room had a huuuge canopy that was bolted in the middle of the ceiling with curtainy stuff hanging down, reminiscent of those parachute games you did in elementary school when everyone scrambled in and sat on the inside edge of the parachute and waved at each other across the chute until the material came down down down and covered all of you. Like that. Except bad and not fun.

We were seated at a lovely table next to a stuffy couple with bad fashion sense (he a silk handkerchief in his blazer pocket; she in a cute dress but ruining it all with a claw clip in her hair). That was all fine and well. The next couple seemed fun and really excited about the food. Until shit went down, but that comes later.

Our server was weirdly intense yet hands off. Does that make sense? It was at least ten minutes until we were even initially approached (Tinx thinks this is just the way with traditional French service – they want you to enjoy the time and not rush you. Fine. Maybe.).

Ohhhh man. Who invited Debbie Downer to this post? In truth, this meal was JUST FABULOUS, as you’ll see beginning with the next sentence.

I counted and we had over 50 separate food items over the course of the meal, but you would never know that from their menu. A simple “white and green asparagus salad” that Tinx got actually meant: White and green asparagus salad dressed with cream of salsify, with foie gras and smoked duck torchon (with a slice of beet under the torchon) and Brioche in a teensy terra cotta pot (with a slice of cucumber under the pot) to drag through the salsify. It was so lovely to see this big, complicated, multi-part plate with nooks and crannies and smears and corners of pure deliciousness.

My simple choucroute appetizer was even more astonishing, arriving triumphantly with Choucroute fondant topped with Osetra caviar in a tiny leaf; seared duck “burger” and foie gras on a Brioche bun; wagyu beef tartare with white and black sesame topping; duck sausage with aged balsamic and special grainy mustard; and chickpea fries with smoked chipotle aioli dots to drag them through.

You know it’s fucking fantastic when the worst part of a plate is (a) the wagyu and (b) fries. Not that they were bad, they were just not thrilling in the way that the salsify fondant was, or the way the duck & foie gave up any semblance of trying to be solid and oozed onto my fingers right before I licked it all up! Even the mustard was crazy good.

All this was after our amuse, which was a fava bean and mint puree jabbed with a fava bean chip and parmesan chip, and a cream of salsify with lemongrass and smoked paprika oil; both served on thin slivers of cucumber which Tinx nommed immediately.

The winning flavor of the night was the salsify (salsa-fee). I had never even heard of it before then, but we looked it up in my McGee On Food and Cooking book and it’s a cousin of the artichoke (can someone say STINKY PEE!). Chock-full of umami and very luxurious-tasting.

I should note our wine choice – a bottle of Trimbach pinot gris from the Alsace region, where Hubert hails from. I had probably 80% of the bottle so allllll of this detail recollection is thanks to Tinx. She even remembered the “smoked paprika oil” from the amuse!

Onwards. For our mains, Tinx had beef cheeks; I had lamb. Which translated, in HK-land, as wagyu beef cheeks with pretzel crust on a bed of spaetzle with choucroute gratin and a cabernet poached mini apple, and a Colorado lamb duo: a loin with some sort of cinnamon sauce (which changed my mind re: my deep-rooted hatred of cinnamon) and a lamb terrine with pine nuts, Israeli couscous and harissa (North African hot red pepper sauce).

Partway through her main, Tinx said “Hmm. I bet this is forkable,” and discarded her knife permanently. Super tender. I barely remember how hers tasted except to say that the choucroute gratin was stellar – choucroute is also from Alsace so it showed up everywhere, for good reason.

As for my lamb – the terrine was also forkable; practically spoonable. Actually, definitely spoonable. Even one of those plastic-coated babyfood spoons would have been too hardcore for this lamb. You needed only to look at it and it said “you win” and slid apart into bite-sized morsels. The other lamb was perfectly cooked so that the fat that squished out between the almost-burney bits was like heaven juice. I was in the tipsy state of mind where the only terms that come to mind were ones like “heaven juice.”

We were a bit distracted from our food at this point because the couple next to us, out of nowhere, started a really intense whisper fight. She was mad at him for an unknown reason, and was giving him all sorts of hell. It was funny because she would alternate between a sultrily uttered “mmmm, this is SO delicious” to a “I’m just SO PISSED at you right now!” The whole thing went basically like this:

Her: [whispering] I’m just so PISSED right now!

Him: [whispering] I just want to know where I went wrong.

Her: [whispering] The fact that you DON’T KNOW!

Both: Nom nom nom nom nom.

Her: [whispering while half-getting up from her seat menacingly] I’m just so. PISSED. OFF. Hahahahahhahahaahhaha [weird inapropro laughter].

Both: Nom nom nom nom nom.

Her: [whispering] It’s just about BEING A GOOD PERSON. I just don’t know if you’re a GOOD PERSON.

Tinx and I were like, “Ummmm we can hear you.” Tinx went to the bathroom to excape the awkwardness and came back all excited about the bathrooms. Apparently the rolls of extra TP were wrapped with a cute Fleur de Lys ribbon. I asked her if she stole one and she said no. Disappointment.

She was also excited because she thought she heard Hubert in the kitchen (our awk server chick said that he was indeed in the restaurant that night; he must have been exhausted from SF Chefs. Food. Wine. Festival, but he was still there!) saying, “Take this out NOW” in a French accent. Well we can dream.

Which reminds me – there’s hilarious footage of HK DJing at the festival earlier that day. And that reminds me that the music at FDL was not fitting for fine dining – very Euro-DJ music that I have to admit I danced to in my drunken silliness.

OK, onto our dessert course, which turned out to be a four-course dessert course. Here our recollection gets hazy because no one explained each component to us (we were told we would after I got back from the restroom but it never happened cry). Continuing with the HK style, my “poached pear” ended up being a dark chocolate ganache pyramid, a poached pear with three drops of berry sauce, blackberries and strawberries, almond ice cream on crispy popcorn, and a pistachio mousse on almond cake. Tinx’s “espresso chocolate mousse” ended up being a chocolate truffle fried in coconut (intense and melty), a grape covered in a thin bit of meringue and powdered sugar, cone of chocolate mouse in a meringue nest, and a couple other items we can’t remember. THEN came Tinx’s birthday treat, which was my pistachio mousse on almond cake, except a FROZEN version, which was terrific to eat in tandem with my non-frozen version. Finally, right before our check, some petit fours – a caramel chocolate tart, white and dark chocolate covered strawberry, fruit tart, sticky mini bundt, and a rolled, light as air butter cookie in a chocolate smear (pictured top).

We practically had to be rolled into our towncar that the restaurant provided to us (only $5 more than a cab would have been! And the driver [Roy] is also a PC repairman for his day job – very convenient!). In the car, we discovered to the other’s delight that we HAD both ended up stealing the TP ribbon – mine was tied in a bow around my panties, and hers was stuffed into her cleavage. Now they both grace my bathroom, prettily wrapped around my cheap-o TP.

I can’t believe I’m ending a post on fucking FLEUR DE LYS by talking about bargain toilet paper, but such is life when you’re me and blogging on MTFB.

Fleur de Lys
777 Sutter Street
San Francisco, CA 94109
415.673.7779

So my apartment in SF is in the douchey Marina area.  I was warned and heckled and hassled by many, on Facebook and over the phone and in person, to not live here.  I still can’t quite understand why.  I mean, a million cute restaurants one block from me, two movie theatres one and three blocks from me, respectively, my gym also three blocks, a killer view of the Golden Gate Bridge, three blocks to the water, walkable to Safeway, walkable to lululemon, walkable to MAC cosmetics, walkable to Real Food, and my own fucking parking garage!  I’m quite in heaven.

Perhaps the douchebags will come out at night, or hit me blindsided with their douchey tentacles one day.  I’ll be sure to let you know if I do.  Come to think of it, Tinx (who was visiting this past weekend) and I did hear my next-door neighbor (we share a courtyardy thing bordered by our bathroom windows) vomming something fierce into his toilet and his buddy saying, “Dude you’re gonna get some pussy tonight!” so maybe that is what people are talking about.

Anyway, adding to the cuteness of my new abode is Pacific Puffs, which just opened about a week ago.  It’s a cream puff place; very blogworthy and is, indeed, getting a lot of chatter on the interweb right about now.

Their website doesn’t list their hours, but Yelp has it as opening at 10 am seven days a week.  So Tinx and I rolled up (after passing it twice because of their incongruous awning and store curb appeal design – we were both expecting pink or something cute, and instead the awning is this royal blue color reminiscent of insurance companies, not bakeries) at 10:45, at which point the display case was empty and there was only a nice gal with a HUGE rock on her finger who said they opened at 11 and please come back then.

We killed time at the aforementioned lululemon, and went back.  We each got a Classic Sugar – “Our classic cream puff lightly dusted with powdered sugar instead of chocolate topping” and a Fruit Whip with Sugar – “Our fruit whip puff lightly dusted with powdered sugar instead of chocolate topping.”  We had it “for here” instead of “to go,” as I was operating on Beard Papas mode where every second that passes is a second away from divinity, but they seemed slightly flustered that someone would want to stay and eat.  Meg (the girl’s name was Meg) unceremoniously plunked the two puffs onto a napkin, which I had to dangerously balance on the way to the table.  Maybe they’ll get plates with time?  I mean, they really should, because the napkin move was super ghetto.  Not only that, but there are only two 2-tops in the store, so they only need to invest in 4 plates, maximum.

Anyhoo, the cream puffs.  The texture of the custard cream in the Classic was a bit weird.  Tinx and I separately came to the same adjective – grainy.  The taste was good and the choux itself was really awesome.  The whip in the fruit puff was standard whipped heavy cream; I think they could put the strawberries with their classic cream and have a real winner!  (Side note – Tinx got a chocolate one to go and she said “choco one didn’t poop out as much.”  Noted.)

Some info we gleaned from Meg: she runs it with her cute husband (I think he’s her husband?) and his brother (cuteness of brother unconfirmed); the recipe is from his grandmother; the puffs are baked offsite and trucked in; they are selling out every day; they are being courted by Coca Cola representatives (this we gleaned on our own with a little spywork).

Upon returning to the car (yes we drove; you can take the girl out of LA, but you can’t take the LA out of the girl; plus Tinx is a wuss but it’s just because she’s ginger and gingers have 20% lower pain thresholds!) I discovered a $53 parking ticket; a ticket I would not have gotten had the store been opened when we were led to believe it would be.  Damnitall.

However, I love love love the mayor of my new town, so I paid it willingly (and dare I say lovingly?  Creepy.)

*Note: I had it backwards on the pain threshold thing – see this article on the MC1R mutant gene.