Nyonya, New York Chinatown

I like the decor, I'm a big fan of flat hard chairs, for some reason.  The place is cash only - as if the six square blocks of Chinatown is a null zone where your credit card no longer works.
Stangely, the service was very coffeehouse - they just brought out the occasional dish as it finished cooking.  We got our appetizers last, but I won't complain overmuch - through all the confusion, we got a completely extra dish that we didn't order.
The roti was the fluffy kind that you so often find in malaysian restaurants - it gets chewy as it gets cold, though.  The hokkien mee was good, but not as strong in flavor as you expect hokkien mee to be. Lobak was good and crunchy. Chow kuey tiao was only "okay". Curry mee was really good.  Roti telur was a bit flat also. I guess a number of the dishes were underseasoned.  Chendol was covered with the brown coffee-ish goop moreso than coconut.  Maybe we should've let it melt to a more chendol consistency first

Fenton's Creamery

This has got to be the most massively overpriced eatery ever, and remember, I've just been to Las Vegas. 15 bucks for a tiny crab sandwich that's made out of canned crab? 2 extra bucks for really poorly made curly fries? 11 bucks for an appetizer? This is crazy criminal. The sandwiches come standard with 'chips and pickles' - plain chips out of a bag, and somewhat funny-tasting pickles. This is the kind of low quality food I can get in a campus cafeteria; I'm not thrilled about eating it on campus, but at least it's cheap student food. The very idea that it's priced at 12+ dollars per sandwich is pretty much offensive. Their food is outright poorly constructed, and their ice cream is just not that special. Think about it. For 15 bucks, you can buy three jugs of high quality ice cream and create the biggest sundae this side of God. You do not need Fentons to put it in a tiny dish and then claim they're giving you "huge" scoops.

The place was packed, and it's arranged as you'd expect a creamery to be arranged, and therefore, there's absolutely no sound barriers. My throat is hoarse this morning from having to shout to be heard all night, and singing happy birthday to other patrons no less than 4 times in one hour? I felt like I was working harder than the servers.

Fenton's must be another California dream like In and Out. It's like they've never had real, home made ice cream, and the taste of 'just okay' ice cream just impresses the heck out of them and it develops a wholly undeserved reputation. Look, guys. You can get real ice cream for less than half of that price. You can make your own concoction for less than half of that price. The crowds, the atmosphere, the endless fake birthdays, no amount of ice cream can be worth that. And especially not a $15 dollar ice cream.

Red Mill Burgers

Apparently something close to famous in Seattle, my hero Adam Richman ate there once, and that is always good enough recommendation for me.

True as advertised, they had some kind of Great Wall made of bacon sitting ominously in the kitchen, for reasons us lesser being probably couldn't hope to understand. There was also a picture of some employees showing off this slightly peppery bacon bunker to the press, cleverly disguised with bacon mustaches. The bacon-stache! A new classic.

Fortunately, fame and TV specials seem to have not given these good folks a license to phone it in. The burger was good, the atmosphere was good, the portions were good (on the burgers, anyway. The shake, fries, and onion rings are small-ish) and the prices were not too terribly out of control. Oh, it was expensive for a pair of burgers, fries, onion rings, and a shake, but at least it was still high quality. Nan opted for a double-bacon double-burger, and that thing was probably better material for bench pressing than casual lunching - he was food coma'd for the rest of the day. I got a Bleu Cheese and Bacon Burger, and it was very fine, if messy.

North Beach Pizza

Decor is better than average, and there is parking, which is not something to dismiss easily, but the service is crazy slow and not worth the wait. Maybe it was the time of day we tried to eat there? Whatever it was, it's just pizza and pasta, there's no real reason lunch should take two hours! We should have been tipped off by the fact that there was no one there except retired-looking folks sipping contentedly at coffee and chatting idly.

The food tasted fine, don't get me wrong, but it was extremely simple. In that kind of time, I could have made pasta myself from scratch. And next time, I guess I will.

Battle Royale: BBQ Ribs, Round 1

So our usual large-get-together-location is Everett and Jones, in the Jack London area. But lately we've started to think that maybe we, as extremely big eaters (as well as big tippers!), deserve ..... service. And, what if there are better ribs out there (as Yelp! tells us there are) and we've just been contenting ourselves to pig out in an institution of yesterday's ribs?

Loathe to fall into a 'rib-rut', as it were, we decided the best thing to do would be to scientifically assess what we may have been missing out on. Scientifically, as in, a side-by-side test of ribs. So we each went to a different take out place, got a rack of ribs, and brought them to a neutral location to taste-test.

Contenders: KC BBQ, T-Rex BBQ, and Phat Matt's.

Testers: X, R, @, $, A, and N

(Let me sum that up by saying one of my friends (@) is a little bit insane, and during the planning and scientific hypothesis phase of this plan, insisted that we must all be abbreviated.)

Consensus: Phat Matt's. Runner up, KC BBQ.

Details:

T-Rex BBQ was an interesting place. It was a high-quality-looking establishment, with fancy decor and nice flat screen TVs. Like some kind of super up-scale sports bar. They definitely smelled like they had a good smoker going, but the ribs we got were dry. That seemed to indicate that it was too hot, violating the basic principles of "Low and Slow" passed down to us from our BBQ forefathers. The rest of the menu looked interesting, so I may go back there and check it out, just based on cool decor. Ribs had a faint taste of a vinegar rub, and came with some pretty good potato salad (if you ask me) and sauce on the side. I suppose they deserve another chance, in case it was just that day the smokers were set too strong, but dry ribs are not promising. Also, it was the most expensive of the three contenders.

KC BBQ was much more of a mom-and-pop establishment. In fact, quite the hole in the wall, and I was glad we got take out. Sauce was sweet, but also spicy. Came with some little bit of beans and potato salad ($ thought it was good, I disagreed) and regular old bread. Most everyone besides me agreed it was a solid runner-up, but I was pretty 'meh' on them.

Phat Matt's was a memphis-style rack of ribs, and Mempihs-style may be the way to go. Rubbed down with what seems like a ton of brown sugar-based rub, and then drenched in sauce. The place is also very mom-and-pop, diner-style, and they didn't even have a box, really, just wrapped two stacks of dripping ribs in a ton of tin foil to hand over.

Round Two will involve Brick Pig's, Berkeley E&J, and Great American BBQ. Later, the Final Rounds will pit Phat Matt against the other winners in a cage-match, to-the-death showdown of ribs. We will try and actually go to the restaurant to judge service and atmosphere, too. For now, though, it's just about taste.

168

Taiwanese menu: very Taiwanese. Not much else to say about it.

Weekend mornings they have sweet and savory soy options, which are fine, but they run out of the flatbread quick, and the fried donut sticks are not the super fresh kind that I'm looking for - more on the twice-fried side. So, the hunt is still on. I saw some promising options in Chinatown...

Penang Garden

Food is.... alright. But the portions are way off. You can't give Malay-sized portions and then charge family-size prices! When we saw the coconut shrimp was almost $18, we thought it'd feed all of us - the waitress warned us that there were only 5 shrimp involved. For $18?! No thanks. And how does your tiny bowl of curry NOT come with rice? It doesn't even feed ONE person if there's no rice...

Fried bananas were fine, but too bad! Nan doesn't ever want to go back.

Barney's Burgers

Just a note to myself to remember NOT to get the shakes anymore. You want those malted shakes, I know, but don't. They're no longer the goodness you remember, and they're more expensive than ever. I don't know about the Solano Barney's, but the one on Shattuck appears to no longer give you the metal cup that contains the rest of your shake? Has anyone else noticed this?

No matter how good the shake, 2/3rds of a glass cannot be worth $4.85!

Ancharlee

Thai restaurant, just off San Pablo. Somewhat on the pricey side, but interior is nice and the food was especially good.

Penang curry - was the name of the dish ordered. Either they got that wrong, or somehow have decided to call beef rendang penang curry for convenience. That aside, it was very delicious beef rendang. Tender beef, creamy sauce. Maybe not enough rice for Nan, but is there ever enough rice for Nan?

Pad Se Ew - very good, not greasy at all.

Cheesecake Factory

So I know many of my more gourmand colleagues are not exactly in love with the place, but I am 100% bound and determined to eat my way through that cheesecake list. In my lifetime. I'm aware that it is pretty much deadliness bordering on a suicidal charge, but you can't just make a list like that and expect a person like me not to come 'round with completion on the brain. Join me in this delectably deadly maneuver, won't you? At least make sure I make it back after an evening of such dangerous undertakings.

So the crux of the problem is always this. Their portions are ludicrous. You hardly ever make it to dessert if you attempt to partake in a meal. So you either need to go in with a plan to make it to the dessert course, or go in for just dessert. Our plan today was to eat dinner early, and snag cheaper lunch portions instead of dinner/dinosaur-sized portions. Our other plan is typically to eat less than half and put the rest in a box. Once, I ordered a Cobb salad, since I thought that would work. You know what Cheesecake Factory thinks a Cobb salad looks like? Mount Doom. An entire head of cabbage and no less than three full avocados must be in that thing.

Regardless, even after ordering lunch portions, I was forced to yell at the guy who brought it out. "Seriously. I ordered a lunch portion." "That's it," he replied, and walked off. I thought to myself that all the busboys in that place must take a pre-interview benchpress assessment.

When time for dessert finally arrived, I proudly announced to our server that we had made it this time and that I'd like a Lemon Raspberry Cream Cheesecake slice. He nodded, and turned to Nan to ask him what he'd like. Nan was actually quite incensed by this. Why the hell, he asked after the server had scurried away from his withering gaze, would I want an entire piece for myself? Is it humanly possible to consume one of those on one's own? It's not like he looks like he usually eats 6000+ calories in a sitting.

And let me tell you, after a while of trying to stick to under 1200 calories a day, I couldn't even look that cheesecake in the face. I got sugar-shivers, which is pretty unusual for me, and had to leave the rest to Nan. "I'm going in for the kill, then," he said. I asked him who, exactly, was the victim in that scenario. "My waistline," he replied, stuffing the last bit in his mouth.

Fish and Chips (lunch portion): Four large fish portions, over large bed of fries, plus enormous lump of cole slaw. Softball-sized, at least. Really, actually, quite good fish and chips, considering we've had fish and chips in every establishment that claims to make them. Fish was battered thickly and fried crisply, chips were as good as any other chips out there.

Strawberry Lemonade: Seemed to be free refills? Or the server liked me.

Shepherds Pie (lunch portion): A sea of meat and mushrooms, with a lake of mashed potatoes. Obviously we were feeling 'English Pub-fare', and just as obviously, we don't even want to know what dinner portions look like. Tasted fine, but we barely made a dent in it. Also, it was not lamb - that is typical in America. Just beef and mushrooms.

Lemon Raspberry Cream Cheesecake: Quite good. Raspberry flavor was strong, as was lemon flavoring, so it's a tangy one to choose. Cheesecake Factory whipped cream is unique in that it seems very structurally sound. I personally like that. Soaked ladies fingers lined the bottom, but we're not positive there was any raspberry inside the cheesecake, just in the sauce that draped it.