East Bay Skylines

Koja Kitchen in Berkeley & San Francisco

Koja opened up a new location in the Inner Richmond neighborhood of SF, on Clement. I've been to the Berkeley location multiple times, getting the same thing (a Pork Koja). We decided to try some new stuff.

Short Rib (Beef) Bowl: tender short rib beef with mild chile, scallion, sesame. Kim Chee and Mixed Greens on the side.

Umami Fries. Waffle fries, miso coconut pork, aioli, masago, green onion, fried shallot, red sauce. The latter is a chile sauce that gives this dish a slight kick, IMHO. Other folks might find the heat pretty high. Sublime. 

Beef Taco: Korean beef, nori, sauteed onion, fried shallot, red sauce, japanese major, sesame vinaigrette. The contents of the taco: utterly divine. The tortillas themselves? Your basic corn tortillas, not warmed up or charred in the least. The closest thing to a miscue I've experienced at one of the Bay Area's best new chains.

I still think their Kojas are the best thing. Check them out:

http://kojakitchen.com/restaurant-menu

Amazingly great cuisine, especially for a small chain calling itself Korean & Japanese Reinvented.

Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley. Some great bookstores still around, some great record stores. Plus People's Park nearby. So: kind of grungy.

But here's the place at hand. We'd been there once before. We were amazed.

Sorry my photos are fuzzy. OK, here's the deal. This place represents the best of the future. Not just great ingredients, and good execution of traditional cuisines, but reinvented. There's a bit, just a small bit, of El Bulli here--just barely--just a whiff of high tech gastronomy. But this Koja pictured above, hey, it's like eating a burger or a sandwich. Familiar. But those "buns" are toasted rice. Great crunch. Every ingredient--pork, rice, mayo, arugula, fish roe, was the appropriate temperature. New and innovative without dumbing it down. This might be the most exciting cuisine happening in the Bay Area. And this Koja was only about $7.

Robin had the "Bowl" with chicken, kind of a quasi salad. She thought it was good, but we both had Kojas before. The Koja is definitely what to get here. We'll be back, with more reporting. If you live here, you've got to try this place. If you visit the East Bay, go to Moe's Books, Amoeba, then have lunch here. Seriously.

Bears Ramen House

So there's this courtyard on Durant off Telegraph in Berkeley, just south of the Cal Campus, and Robin and I finally went to check this place out today. 

Apparently pretty slow when we got there, around 1:30, well after the Lunch Crush.

Tiny place.

The few staff are moving fast.

Back there, the lady in pink is making fresh ramen noodles. This is why you want to go.

You can just make out the pile of ramen next to the left elbow of the blue shirted dude. 

Ramen with Kimchi, Spicy Pork and Squid.

Perfect balanced flavor and texture. I noticed some joker on a Yelp review said you can make this dish for 99 cents in your dorm room. Right, pal.

Rubio's

Rubio's Salsa Bar. Shockingly good chain restaurant.

Here's Robin's Balsamic Shrimp Salad. I thought the portions were ample, and a bargain for the $7-8 range.

This is their Shrimp Bacon Avocado Salad. Couldn't believe how good this was. Everything tasted very fresh.

 But the highlight was the sauces. Chipotle on the right, Picante (mostly chile Arbol & garlic). These taste like what I try to make. In other words, perfect. Taco Cabana has *nothing* on these guys.

Definitely California style salad--enough dressing that there's still some halfway through eating. Not so much dressing that the spring mix is drowning, unlike my former roommate Hoarder Mike who would pour a whole bottle of Kraft Ranch Dressing on a salad this size.

Gumbo: Without Using A Recipe

I've made different versions of Gumbo thousands of times. The best version I've ever had was in New Orleans, where I had to ignore the fact I was some sort of vegetarian back then. Most versions I've had since then were pretty mediocre, and the Gumbos I made in one kitchen suffered from the fact I had to use pre-made Roux, thanks to a restaurant owner who doesn't know how this stuff works. On the other hand, I've been lucky to know some chefs who've given me some vital pointers, some of which I'll share.

This morning I had no idea I'd be doing this, but I saw some Okra (called Gumbo in various Bantu languages) at the Vallejo Farmer's Market that looked especially nice. Note the green hue, darker than normal. I suspected (and I was right, judging from the final product) that these were riper and fresher than usual. Always important with Okra: get the small ones only, because the larger ones get very fibrous. I know this from growing them in Austin. It's about the only thing that thrives in August heat (along with some chiles), but they'll get too big fast if you don't keep up with them. I went ahead and bought some nice looking tomatoes, and about 9 Thai chiles. The organic garlic (which we grew) and onion I already had on hand.

White pepper is the key to all Creole & Cajun cuisine, in my opinion, something that's gotta be French influence. Much better to have whole peppercorns to grind up fresh. I ground this up and threw it in towards the end of cooking.

First for the Roux. Maybe I should have taken more shots, but there's not much to it. My initial attempts to make Roux in the 90s were failures because I didn't understand the Science. Butter is very traditional, but a chef I greatly respect, Steve Chaney, a few years ago suggested to me that plain cooking oils like Peanut Oil work great. The best Roux I've ever made used Rendered Bacon fat. Here I'm using a combination of butter & safflower oil. Melt the butter on low heat, add a bit of flour in there, then start stirring around, making small circles with whatever utensil you use. You are cooking the flour. The general rule of thumb is you want to make a lighter colored Roux for Seafood Gumbo, and darker one for Chicken and/or Sausage Gumbo. The longer you cook the Roux, the darker it gets.

But I'm not cooking this to get a James Beard Award for authenticity or whatever. I just like richer flavors, even if I'm using lighter ingredients like seafood. This Roux's not even that dark. Anyway, you can see I'm adding the onions right in there to saute. Works really well, sauteing the onion with the Roux. You definitely want caramelized onions--in fact, I got some of 'em pretty charred.

See those black bits? Charred onion. To that I added about half the Okra I bought today, a couple of tomatoes, and some water. On the Science of this: the Roux acts as a thickener, and so does the Okra, so if you're at this point getting worried, don't. This got plenty thick even if it didn't seem so at this juncture. After this cooks a bit, just simmering with a light boil, for a few minutes, that's a good time to taste it. Another reason I don't use recipes, by the way. Any cook or chef who knows what she or he is doing will taste. OK, I might use a recipe for baked goods, but when's the last time I made a cheesecake? So I tasted this, and figured out (though I could guess, from experience) what and how much to add.

Sure I like chile for the spice, but I also like to taste other things. So I de-seeded these chingaderos, then threw them into gumbo. Nice flavor.

OK, I needed to add salt. Seafood gumbo? Why not a dash or three of Three Crab shrimp sauce? How about a boned & finely minced salt-cured anchovy? Good music for this? Tom Waits' Mule Variations.

And I wanted a little citrus for balance, so I threw in the juice of a slice of Meyer lemon I happened to have around. 

Nice, now it's getting thick, on low temp.

Rough chopped garlic, shelled shrimp and cleaned & chopped squid. These all go in at the end. Barely cooked.

Once the squid starts to curl, that's far enough. I had turned it off earlier, but you get the idea. Nothing ruins a good Seafood Gumbo like overcooked seafood. For folks who've never been to New Orleans, plain white rice is the most common side carb side, though I have seen people use crackers (I used multigrain, which is frightfully inappropriate), and, apparently this is an "only in Louisiana" deal, some folks put a scoop of potato salad in their bowl and put gumbo (or jambalaya or etouffe or whatever) on top.

With all the fresh ingredients, this Gumbo has a bright almost sweet flavor. Sorta like the difference between eating Corn on the Cob from corn you got at a grocery store (even WFM), and corn you picked fresh from your own garden.

Underground Construction by Market

This construction is taking place at the intersection of Ellis and Market. Pretty sure this is connected to that project that's had Stockton closed from Union Square to Market.

Right nearby, on the street: business as usual.

Louisiana Fish & Chips

This is one of those hybrid places in Robin's neighborhood that I've been meaning to check since I moved to Vallejo nearly two years ago. Jeff and I used to do our laundry at the laundromat nearby. I used to sometimes get Sherman MCDs at the discount tobacco place next door. Robin's old housemate used to get food from this place.

I'm not sure how many changes of ownership this place has had, but it's definitely owned and operated by a Korean couple now, and has retained some of the Louisiana cuisine from the previous place (note they have stuff like gumbo here), and possibly it was a burrito place even before that. I'd never eaten there until about an hour ago, but I had looked in, and had some sense of their menu...

And here's the new element. Lots of Fries dishes.

They might as well do Poutine.

I'm sure they're Superbad. This should have been a warning to me because...

It seems that every dish comes with Fries. Glad it didn't come with the delicious KimChi.

OK, so I got an Oyster basket, a Chicken Wing basket and a side of KimChi. Didn't expect all those superfluous fries. Which explains all the ketchup packets I was wondering about when I first opened this up.

OK, well, the Chicken Wings and Fried Oysters though were great. Very light batter on the Chicken Wings--perfect. The only possible improvement on that dish is to do what San Tung does with (i.e. tosses with their sauce and chiles). And absolutely spot on fried oysters, using a corn meal batter. Fantastic.

The KimChi was great too. Only ate about a dozen fries, then put them back in the bag & into the trash can out front. They might still be warm.