Anger Burger

I feared another visit to Beau Legs.  The first time was almost certainly a fluke, and I am a big fan of carrying torches for things too-good-to-be-true, for decades if necessary.  Still, I’m tired and have a long day ahead of me tomorrow and the part of my brain that runs on fryer grease was atrophying, so I risked it.

I needn’t have worried.  Everything I said about Beau Legs last August is still true, and more so.  The “Captain Platter,” a basket with battered halibut, cornmealed catfish and tilapia filets, clam strips and breaded shrimp were in danger of being outshone by the perfect french fries and really irritatingly excellent hushpuppies.

One order was enough for my dad and I to share, even if I did confirm to myself that nope, I still don’t like cornmeal fried fish anywhere near as much as I like it battered.  I’m sure that Beau Legs would let me substitute them, too, since each piece is hand-dressed and fried to order.  The clam strips weren’t quite as soft and sweet as last summer, but seafood, like all agricultural products, changes with the season.  Maybe by summer they’ll be dreamy again.

My dad and I agreed that next time we’re sticking with our respective favorites (battered halibut for him, clam or oysters for me) and an extra side of hushpuppies.

The proprietress was handling the front of the house solo as she was last time, and when the crowd had a lull she came over and asked me, “You like clam chowder?”  I love it, I told her.  She came back with a sample cup of it and would you be surprised if I told you it was excellent?  You shouldn’t be.  I’m just not sure how I’m going to fit in a bowl of it along with my oysters and hushpuppies on my next visit.

My poor dad.  So, we’re driving around Olympia and he says to me, “I want banh mi,” and lo, there is a giant sign off 4th Ave. at Little Danang that reads something like “Vietnamese Sandwich $3.99″ or some such business, and I tell him: “The pho is pretty good there, let’s try their banh mi.”

I’m gonna tell you right now: keep driving.

I was about to call the above photo Warning Sign #1, but then I remembered the part where we sat for 20 minutes while our sandwiches sat on a counter top while the guy working talked on a telephone and wouldn’t take our money.  So then Warning Sign #2 would be the above.  A cornmeal-rolled hoagie roll is not a baguette.   And can we all just give a collective indignant gasp at, is that motherfucking lettuce?!

Well at least it has cilantro — WHAT THE FUUUUUCK.  Where’s the cilantro? Where’s the pickled veg?  THE CUCUMBER?

Okay.  Deep breath.

Okay, no, screw that noise.  These guys robbed us for $8 and then kicked us in the necks and then stole our money and then gave us rabies and painted “ANGER BURGER SUCKS” on the moon.

I’m a pretty grumpy curmudgeon most of the time, but particularly when it comes to coffee.  Truly.  You don’t really know me, I know, but trust me when I say that everything from blenders (JUST GO TO ARBY’S AND GET IT OVER WITH) to music (WILL THAT JOHN MAYER CD FIT UP YOUR ASS?) make me crazy with rage; I actually drink more tea than coffee just because no one can make coffee right.  And so when I say that Olympia Coffee Roasting Company is my top place to get coffee in the world?  I hope you understand how serious I am.

I mean, to be fair, there are several reasons why I prefer Oly Coffee above all else.  My favorite baristas work there.  I don’t feel like I’m queuing up at other Costcoesque oversized mega-cafes.  Also, the coffee is always perfect.  Perfect.  This is true.

I think much of this can be credited to the above fellow, Oly Coffee’s roaster and the man with the only surname I’ve ever jealously coveted: Oliver Stormshak.  I say this with genuine respect and love, but before Oliver was there the coffee was mostly great and occasionally just good.  After?  Well, like I said: there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

Of course, none of this would exist without Kelly Ziniewicz, who I’m fairly certain bleeds coffee when cut.  It might be the secret to their coffee, now that I think about it.  I’m a little sorry that I only have this water-logged photo of her, but not too sorry.  She’s at the grand opening of Oly Coffee’s second location on Olympia’s westside, and it wouldn’t be Olympia if there wasn’t a sudden downpour.  Rest assured that the queue of people lined up for espresso merely tightened their ranks and ordered larger drinks.

And then there’s this guy.  The less said about him the better.

There are many other people who make the coffee happen (somehow I didn’t get a single photo of Mike Elvin in focus) that I haven’t mentioned, but they’re no less vital.  They just escaped my camera today.

It happens that way sometimes.  Your friends suggest that you go a restaurant because it is amazing and will change your life forever, and instead you fly back to Los Angeles.  Just, make sure when you finally make it back to Seattle, they drive you, otherwise you’ll never find it.  Unless you can read Chinese.

Just for informational purposes, NW Tofu Inc. is open Moday-Sataday7:am-5:30pm.  With Wensday off.

It depends on what kind of risk-taker you are, but if I have one piece of advice to offer, it’s to disregard what the menu says and just order stuff.  If my friends Sean and Junko hadn’t made it clear that the “salty soy milk” was where the party is at, I can assure you I not only wouldn’t have ordered it, but I would also have erased the words from my memory in order to preserve my sanity.  But more on that in a minute.

The vital part of the story is here: salt and pepper tofu.  Somehow, NW Tofu has managed to coat their silky, pudding-smooth made-fresh-daily tofu with a paper-thin crust, not unlike a perfectly ethereal potato chip that just happens to have tofu inside.  It doesn’t look or taste like any other fried tofu I’ve ever had, but nevertheless steals the show out from under the rest.  It’s like you’re sitting there, watching the ice-skating on the Olympics and thinking, “You know, I’m not ashamed to say I like this,” and then all of a sudden someone comes out on the ice on stilts with fire shooting out of the top of their head and you jump up and shout “I FUCKING LOVE THIS SPORT.”

Below here we get back to the salty soy milk.  It’s a little like saying that a big pot of Irish beef stew is “cow juice”.  The “salty soy milk” is a pot of a kind of soft tofu porridge, seasoned with green onions, pork, pickled Chinese vegetables and topped with pieces of what is commonly referred to as “Chinese donut,” but isn’t sweet.  The fried, chewy bread soaks up the hot milk and transforms into a rather astounding dumpling-like blob, both tender and rich.

In an attempt at risk-taking, we also ordered what was listed on the menu as I believe “tofu sheet hot pot,” and even though we asked our charming server what was in it, we were still startled to find it had not just tofu sheet (which turned out to be similar to Japanese yuba, or tofu skin, but was fresh and creamy-white instead of yellowish and chewy), but every single kind of specialty tofu that NW tofu makes: fried, tofu studded with fresh and pickled vegetable and the incomparable “spice tofu,” a chewy, dryer tofu strongly impregnated with five spice seasoning.

As we were leaving, our server suggested we go back and see the tofu being made.

It took me a while to understand that those buckets held the whole last batch of fresh tofu, and if you ordered a pound of it to go ($.80) (that’s EIGHTY CENTS if you didn’t catch that), they just walked over to the bucket, dug out a cube and tossed it into a plastic sack for you.  I imagine it makes its way into the cooler eventually, but at 10:30 in the morning it was fresh from the bucket and still warm from being made.

This tofu below was a different kind, pressed thin and textured.  I don’t know what it was used for.

They line the wooden boxes with cloth:

Drain the steaming hot soymilk from the cooking tank:

And then ladle it into the boxes where the liquid starts to drain out:

The cloth gets carefully folded over the top and the whole round starts again:

I’m leaving out some parts, but that’s pretty much how it rolls.  Hot, fresh tofu made daily.  I was disappointed that I couldn’t take home one of their half-gallons of fresh soy milk since I wasn’t going straight home and then had a long drive ahead of me.   Of course, I was clutching my soy bean bloated belly while I lamented this loss of yet more soy bean product, but still.  This is Anger Burger.  It wouldn’t be the same if I didn’t at some point think I was going to die of a burst stomach.

When I am in charge of reorganizing Los Angeles, I’m going to put a great deal of effort into making various Asian-Towns radiating out from a central point so that any any given time you can be a 10-minute walk away from the Asian restaurant of your deepest desire.  Until then I rely on trucks like Phamish to feed me.

I think we can all be adults here and agree that there are better banh mi in Los Angeles – but not better by much, and certainly not easier to get to.  In this, Phamish kicks ass.

Today’s bread was a lot crustier than it has been on previous visits, and I think I need to request extra vegetables from now on because there were only a few lonely slivers of pickled carrot and radish, but otherwise I can’t be made happier for $6.  Don’t mess around with any of that grilled meat, either; kids who know go for the “Vietnamese Deli” sandwich with slices of ham and pork loaf.

It’s a little messy.  You might want to eat it outside.

Phamish should also win an award for doing iced coffee right.  Too many times I order ca phe sua da and am handed a giant cup of lightly sweetened coffee.  Oh no you di’int.  This shit should hurt when you drink it, too strong in both coffee and sweetness to be thirst-quenching, but deliciously potent enough that you can’t stop drinking no matter how bad the chest pains get.    Phamish’s came halfway up a 16oz cold cup full of ice and tasted like murder, and it was worth every slightly overpriced penny.

I forgot to take a photo until I was nearly done.

It was my luck that Get Shaved was parked nearby as well, easily second only to the best shave ice on Earth.  Azuki beans with guava and passionfruit for me, please, though afterward I wished I’d added Tiger’s Blood¹ as well.  I can’t express enough how incredible it is to find someone doing shave ice correctly – I’m terribly sorry if you’ve only ever had the granular, sickly-sweet crap that gets dense and hard by the time you get halfway through.  This stuff is the texture of actual, fluffy, you’re-eight-years-old-again snow.  Let’s close our eyes together and think about it for a moment.    Man.  Now you want one and I want another one.  We’re a sad pair you and I.

¹ Tiger’s Blood is strawberry-orange with a faint whiff of coconut.

Other burgers exist elsewhere in the world, but no other city did for the hamburger what L.A. did.   The burger is an Angeleno, and we’ll cut a bitch who says otherwise.

In my lap, driving home in a thunderstorm.

L.A.’s transformation of the burger was magnificent and total; a crude nosh for the poor reborn, in classic Hollywood style, into a necessity for the hip and trendy.  All the irritation of today’s L.A. over the scenester nature of Kogi-mania already happened double-fold in the burger-joint car culture of the 40’s and 50’s.

Tommy’s cheese is under the chili, god bless them.

And I’m profoundly disinterested in getting into a Best Burger debate — I think it’s a shame that anything topped with arugula or roasted red pepper coulis is lumped in with actual hamburgers, which means about 50% of you are now challenged to fight me.

Try to ignore what the chili does to the paper boat.

Burgers are for picking at in the late summer sun, or gulped down drunkenly in a car while your sober driver looks on in awe and disgust.  I think that straying from that original soul of the burger is disrespectful – this is fried meat held between two pieces of bread so that you can eat it with your hands.

Though, the eating with your hand part becomes a bit of a joke when eating a Tommy’s burger.   At Tommy’s, when you order a cheeseburger you get what you’re looking at above.  A massive splat of super-thick chili paste — much more condiment than soup — over a thin, griddled burger with tomato, pickles, onion and mustard on a contradictorily tender and sturdy bun.

Unless you have Crohn’s disease, in which case your tomato-less burger gets the red badge of shame.

And when they say the chili is thick, they mean it.  It sort of turns my stomach to think of eating this stuff on its own, though such activity is encouraged by the signage begging you to take home a pint.  It’s made with roux, so the longer it sits the more it forms into shapes architecturally disturbing for chili.

Don’t let any of this dissuade you.  Tommy’s has the potential, on any given day, to be a perfect burger.  The chili is mild (oft misreported as bland) and not as Greek as I expected given Tommy’s heritage (see: Cincinnati chili), but the ratios are golden.  As with almost every burger I’ve ever met, a double would be pushing it too far, though I understand that many people have the palate of a toddler and can eat piles of unseasoned ground beef without complaint.

Ultimately, Tommy’s is but one God residing in the burger Olympus that is Los Angeles.  It just happens to be Zeus.

I’m ashamed at how little I am exploring Los Angeles.  Part of it is being without a car, yes, but… really that’s no excuse.  Which is how I found myself on a subway full of people wearing no pants, realizing that I am actually less than an hour away from Chinatown by public transportation – which, I might add, is also the same amount of time it would take me to get there were I driving myself.  This is where I demurely slap myself in the forehead.

We wanted to go to Empress Pavilion, a well-known Los Angeles dim sum joint both loved and hated in equal measure.  Online reviews expound of the bitchiness of the cart servers (um, have you ever had dim sum before?) and the quality of the food, while others insist they had the best dim sum of their lives.  It doesn’t matter: I wanted to try it.  And of course they stopped serving just before we would have arrived.

Instead, we walked over to CBS Seafood (there’s also an ABC Seafood and one must assume an NBC Seafood and a FOX Seafood as well), where we got the full on Whitey Treatment.  This is to be expected.  We are whiteys.  But our friend Justin was, how shall we say, very dehydrated?  And was literally begging the waiters for a cup of water.  We had to ask 5 different people and waited 10 minutes before water came (there were only three other tables of customers).  Then we waited another 10 minutes to order three small dim sum plates.  Then we waited another 10 minutes to get it.  And I think the point at which you can’t get food quickly enough to keep from getting hungry between servings, it is time to leave.  I don’t often get whiteyed-out of a joint, but it does happen occasionally.

Luckily, Justin also has an iPhone, which means that we were made abruptly aware of our proximity to Philippe’s, a Los Angeles institution.  Philippe’s is pretty inarguably the inventor of the French dip sandwich, as well as beloved for their housemade superhot mustard.  And none of us had been there.

The rumors of the tremendous lines were well-founded.  The girl in line in front of us informed her friend that it was “usually much worse than this,” which, I don’t know about you, but there’s not a lot of this shit I’ll endure for any ol’ sandwich.

Which, sadly, Philippe’s was.  I must amend that to say: it was a pretty good sandwich.  The above is lamb (we got one with cheese and one without, to split) and while the meat was good and the bread was great, you don’t dip your own sandwich in au jus, it is done for you as you order, meaning that even if you eat right away — which we did — the result is a soggy, slimy bun.  The meat is also not quite warm enough to melt the cheese, something I didn’t anticipate being so disappointed by.  If I had waited five minutes in line I might feel differently, but after 40 minutes and being elbowed by a group of oversized, drunken sportsfans¹, I’ll probably turn it down in the future.

On our walk back to Central Station, I noticed a cart selling churros.  Not just any churros.  The ones they fill with dulce de leche (or custard or strawberry) when you order.

Oh my god, that was good.  That might have been the best three dollars I’ve spent in recent memory.  It seems baffling that I could fit them in after dim sum and a lamb sandwich, but I have a special extra stomach just for deep fried sweets.  I’m a miracle of science.

¹ At one point the guy behind me tapped me hard on the shoulder and said in an unfocused daze “Are you gonna order?” I stared at him and his friends, unsure what the fuck was going on. You see, we weren’t at the front of the line. “I… will?” I said. He seemed satisfied and we waited for 15 more minutes.

I told my friend Hatherly that I was trying to cut some fat out of my diet and addendum’d myself by saying “But I’m not counting calories or anything,” to which she slyly replied: “So you’re not totally L.A. yet.”  No, not totally.  And: I am still alarmingly pale, have two inches of grey root growout and don’t currently have a car, so if being an Angeleno were a swim lesson, I’d be in Tadpole Class.

This is all an awkward lead-in for having dined at Golden State, a restaurant of recent inception located on good ol’ Fairfax right across the street from the legendary Canter’s Deli.  I believe their claim to fame is locavorism, though not so much as an ecological movement as a taste one – go with what you know.  Unfortunately, motivation means jack squat to me, so I’d like to get down to the food.

When I saw a muffuletta on the menu, I knew I had to order it.  There are a few things generally off about this, the first of which is the obvious: muffulettas are not a Californian food. When I was in New Orleans I went to what I thought was the source, the Central Grocery but found the supposedly ground-zero sandwich to be uninspiring and dry, not to mention that when I was trying to eat it I was approached by no less than seven aggressive panhandlers, one of which who finally drove me off by shrieking “YOU BITCH!” in my face.  Ah, New Orleans.  Later a reliable source confirmed my suspicions: Central Grocery muffulettas are for tourists. Which is all to say that Golden State’s muffuletta was many times better than Central Grocery’s — an admittedly easy feat — but also just an excellent sandwich.  The portion was generous (only half is shown above), the bread soft and the olive chop was zesty without overwhelming the salami.

Our friend Jes went with a classic chicken Caesar salad, and we immediately commended the rarely found small dice of the romaine pieces.  Except.  The chicken slices were absurdly large and Jes was unable to cut them, resulting in her going feral trying to gnaw on the pieces without shoving an entire fillet of breast meat into her mouth.

Mike had what is listed on the menu as simply “Burger,” a bacon-cheeseburger with arugula.  Because it isn’t the kind of burger I like (the thin and unadorned kind) I don’t have much of an opinion on it.  Mike seemed to enjoy it.  The fries were too crispy to our taste, but we fall into the underdog soggy-fry constituency. The accompanying house-made curry ketchup was excellent.

The crazy part is that Golden State serves Scoops¹ gelato, a local super-favorite, and I was too full to eat any.  This is unacceptable.  I will be back.

¹ Scoops doesn’t have a website, but they are known for having a lot of dairy-free flavors as well as pulling off seemingly impossible flavors like popcorn, brown bread and fois gras (really!) as well as some of the more usual flavors. They deserve the fandom they’ve garnered, though the locals have gotten their American Apparel panties in a bunch over Scoops serving fois gras along side their vegan ice cream, to which I say: get a fucking haircut.

At work today we were too busy to take lunch breaks, so I ordered Chinese food from the place just around the corner.  The food there is unremarkable tasty Chinese take-out.  I like it because the lunch specials are crazy.  You get a take-out standard, fried rice, choice of four different soups, and choice of two appetizers.  For like six bucks!

But, You Guys!  That’s totally not the point!  When I finished scarfing down my food I ate my Obligatory Fortune Cookie. . .

And I got what may well be the GREATEST FORTUNE EVER!

Fuck yeah, it would.

Blah blah blah blibberty jimjam blah.

Look, everyone knows about Kogi BBQ.  Except my mom, I guess.   And maybe my cousin.  And sister.  Okay, everyone¹ back in Washington probably doesn’t know what I’m talking about, and it is for them I will do a little ’splaining. You see, it’s a taco truck, but it’s Korean, and while the food is good (more on that in a moment) it’s the way that it became famous that is so curious.  It was through Twitter.  They just Twittered where the truck was going to be and the people would come.   Just to be contrary (who, me?) I feel compelled to add that I think the whole “Twitter made them famous!” and “They’re the first viral restaurant ever!” talk is a side-serving of bullshit.  I mean, it’s well-meaning bullshit, but it’s just not good science.  Like, restaurants have never experienced overnight success before?  And add to that the not small issue that Kogi can drive to where the bars are? The only reason this hasn’t happened to a actual Mexican taco truck is because of language barriers (ooo, no she di’int!) and because in L.A., taco trucks are boring.

Anyway, I don’t want to analyze the truck.  I just want to talk about the food.   I figured we’d get a taco, because, well, it’s a taco truck.  We chose a spicy pork and found it to be quite lovely, though no moreso than a traditional Mexican taco — a good one, that is.  Still, at $2 it was a nice bite of food and certainly better than a lot of the gristle-tacos I get slipped around here.

Now, the kimchi quesadilla caused us some grief.  Mike wanted nothing to do with it.  I didn’t think I could eat the whole thing but I desperately wanted to try.  We compromised by Mike grudgingly agreeing to try a bite, which was all the leeway my guilt needed, so we ordered it.  Unfortunately, the walk home caused irreparable damage to the poor quesadilla, being as that I didn’t know it was going to come slathered in liquid.

So a tip to future Kogi eaters: order it without the soup on top (and without the mind-bendingly salty sesame seasoning, too) unless you’re going to slam your face into it toot-sweet.  Otherwise, I found it to be a beguiling mishmash of food – crispy (in places, and in theory), cheesy and rich and threaded with that lovely breathtaking crunch of kimchi all the way through.  Perhaps by design this is one of the better drunk-foods I’ve ever encountered.

Ah, and here’s our girl.  The short rib burrito.  This was a thing of beauty, my friends.  A truly and genuinely excellent burrito.  Not all overwhelmed with rice and beans and lawn clippings and newspapers and whatever the fuck else, but a simple, slender meal of soft, sweet beef, some seasoned cabbage, some… other stuff.  Honestly, I have no idea what was in this.  If I’m reading Kogi’s website correctly, all their burritos are technically “breakfast” burritos with egg and potato, but I can’t say that I tasted or noticed any egg or potato.  I honestly don’t care what was in it — I just want another one.

I have a habit of saying my name “Sunday – like the day” when I am talking to strangers.  Spelling it seems to confuse everyone.  The fellow at the Kogi truck just went, “Oh, okay!” like, yes, like the day between Saturday and Monday.  You know, the Lord’s day:  Sandely.

¹Except for my dad, who is a bigger webnerd than me and sends me emails telling me stuff that is going on in my own town even though he’s 1,200 miles away.