“As long as you’re out here in the East Bay,” said Daveena, at whose place I was staying overnight, “you really have to go to Kopitiam for Hainan chicken rice.”

Hainan is in southern China (remember that plane incident?), but Hainanese chicken rice is part of the local culinary canon in neighboring Singapore, and also apparently pops up in Malaysia and Thailand. Purists value equally the chicken, slow-cooked in hot water that is never allowed to boil, and the rice infused with chicken broth and fat.

I’d tasted the dish with anthropological interest, but not much more, at L.A.’s Savoy Kitchen. (The word is that the Vietnamese Dong Nguyen gives Savoy tough competition.) The plain chicken seemed bland, desperately in need of its dipping sauce — and you know desperation is never appealing.

It certainly didn’t seem worth a 20-minute drive. But after a couple of hours of traipsing through shop after shop in chichi Rockridge reminding myself, “Don’t buy. Don’t buy. Economy! Fiscal goals!” I started to think that settling down to a comfort-food type meal with a book could be quite nice — and cheap, to boot.

So I drove to Lafayette, which in the middle of a weekday on a broad highway proved to take a painless 15 minutes (that 5-minute difference has great psychological weight) and found myself in what seemed like small-town America — rolling hills and strip malls. Not exactly where I would expect to find an authentic Asian dish, but this is California, where small-town and suburban demographics aren’t necessarily what you might expect. In L.A., there are no great Chinese restaurants outside the suburbs.

Kopitiam, a small Singaporean cafe-restaurant in one of these strip malls next to Trader Joe’s, is a contempo-chic place that manages to be attractive to Western sensibilities without making sacrifices in the kitchen. The clientele was mixed, and I noticed several tables of white people confidently ordering chicken rice or other dishes like regulars. A man who I presumed was the owner greeted me like a long-lost relative and hovered over his patrons with tender solicitude.

And the Hainan chicken rice: sublime. It’s tender, juicy and flavorful even without the dipping sauces (although I particularly liked the ginger sauce). No skin, bones or any kind of gristle — just the pure, sweet meat. I read in one of the numerous newspaper articles on the walls that they use organic chicken. The rice was savory, glossed with fat, but not heavy at all. And unlike many comfort-food meals, the modest portion didn’t weigh in my stomach afterward.

If I ever wanted to try this dish at home (which is far more than 20 minutes from Lafayette), I’d start with the recipe on Chubby Hubby’s Singapore-based blog.

Kopitiam Restaurant
3647 Mount Diablo Boulevard
Lafayette
(925) 299-1653

Last weekend I went to my first Giants game at AT&T Park, where the food may be as much of a draw as the game — its concessions were described in a recent NYT article as a leading example of upscale food in ballparks.

Wes, however, was dead set on a Sheboygan brat. He had no idea what that was, but a poker buddy had recommended it, and that weighed far more heavily with him than the NYT’s rave for the crab sandwich.

And it seems that no one goes to AT&T Park without getting the garlic fries. Whenever you tell someone in the Bay Area that you’re going to a Giants game, their response inevitably includes an appreciative mention of the garlic fries.

With all these food options on my mind, I was startled to arrive at the park and realize how new and gorgeous it is. The red-brick building perches right on the edge of the bay. It was a beautiful day, and the water reflected the blue sky, white sails glided across it, and we could see the Bay Bridge in the near distance. Just behind right field, boats were hovering in hopes of catching a home run ball. Our nosebleed seats were perfect for taking it all in.

First at bat was the Sheboygan brat. It was a fine sausage, meaty and spicy, and I was glad of the sauerkraut and cooked onions. It would have been better with mustard, though, and the bun was like a cotton ball. You’ll notice the garlic fries, just behind the brat, come with mints — very wise. I was surprised that these were just okay (though later I read that you should wait till the 3rd inning or so, to be sure you get a fresh, hot batch), then surprised that I had been surprised — after all, how great could garlic fries be? They were basically like what you’d get at one of those Disneyfied mega-brewpubs like Gordon Biersch or BJ’s. Tasty enough, good with wine, but no big deal.

And while of course there’s beer, there is also a selection of vin de Californie.

Still, the scene isn’t all classy — I caught a guy vomiting on one of the ramps.

It took a while for me to recover from the fries and bratwurst, but I was determined to get that crab sandwich. My friends Moupali and Chris, sitting in a different section, tipped me off that the crab stand was near the giant Coke bottle (which is actually a slide for kids — very family friendly, this place is).

The crab sandwich comes from the stall on the right — I hear the chowder from Pier 44 is not bad either. There’s also Caribbean bbq, but that will have to wait for the next game, as will Dippin’ Dots, the ice cream of the future.

I was confused by the signature Crazy Crab’z sandwich and the regular crab sandwich, which sounded the same, but was told by the rather impatient counter lady that the “crazy” sandwich was hot. I guess that explains the $5 markup, although after all that my sandwich wasn’t hot, which was crazy. The crab filling, though, was fresh and sweet, bound with just a little mayo. I set aside the leaden toasted bread and scooped it up.

Next time, I’m heading straight for the crab stand. I think the cold sandwich is a better buy if the bread is good ($10.50 vs. $15, if memory serves), but the hot sandwich could be worth it if you can get one actually hot. If sandwiches are a no-go, there’s also crab salad ($12), although unfortunately it’s adulterated with celery.

The Burmese sure love to mix things up. Seriously, at a Chowhound lunch at Mingalaba, almost every dish we ordered involved tableside mixing. It’s nice for once to have some idea of what ingredients are in an exotic and unfamiliar dish, but what’s with the national passion for blending?

Chowhound poster Moomin once wrote:

“Thoke” is an important syllable to toss about freely when composing a Burmese menu. The word means “mix.” Anything in which a variety of ingredients are mixed can be a “thoke.”

Salad is a thoke. An ice-cream sundae is a thoke. Fried rice, given enough ingredients, could be a thoke. You get the idea.

In Burma there is no specific cultural tradition of a mixed green salad. But, in Burmese American restaurants there is ALWAYS a salad section on the menu. In these cases what is generally being served is a wide selection of thoke.

Fermented tea leaf salad is just this kind of thoke, closer to Indian chaat than anything from an American salad bar. Mingalaba’s version surprised me at first, using ground tea leaves instead of the whole ones I’d had at Golden Triangle in southern California. Pungently sour and funky, it’s not for the faint of heart, but in moderate doses it’s quite tasty.

Young ginger salad, shown at top, is more clean-flavored and refreshing.

I first heard about this place from my friend Daveena, who raved about the palatha (aka, in other parts of the world, paratha or roti). I adore these rich, flaky pancakes and sometimes buy frozen packages of them from the Thai supermarket to pan-cook at home, even though they’re inevitably as thick as a dinner plate.

Mingalaba’s palatha is really wonderful, flaky and tissue-delicate. The bottom sauce is a lovely coconut milk curry, the top is like Indian dal but not very flavorful.

The big surprise was how a shrimp, garlic and chile condiment I’d never heard of could transform ordinary green beans into a thing of deliciousness. Balachaung! The word is like music to my tongue. Long after the green beans were eaten, I was picking crispy bits of fried spice paste off the plate and eating them.

I also really liked the surprisingly soothing mo hing nga, a fish chowder with rice vermicelli …

… and the house noodles with chicken in coconut-curry sauce, enlivened by wisps of kaffir lime leaf.

Mingalaba
1213 Burlingame Avenue
Burlingame
650-343-3228

I totally forgot to post about this, but a while back I bought some sea beans from Far West Fungi’s little storefront at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. I’ve been fascinated by these things ever since I discovered them at Fairway in Manhattan (go Harlem!). These weird little sprigs of vegetables are crisp like green beans, but instead of releasing sweet vegetable juice, they’re decidedly salty.

I couldn’t find any recipes that sounded appealing, so I had to use my imagination. My imagination, it turns out, is rather dull and logical, and it works like this: Since the beans are from the sea, I assumed they’d pair well with fish. Since they’re salty, they require something to balance the salt, maybe something that ordinarily would require salt itself, like potatoes. And there it was. I did a mini test of cooking methods, pan-frying a few sprigs and steaming a few (hey, a small paper bag cost me $8!), and sauteeing turned out to be the better choice. I used just a little butter/olive oil (I forget which) and kept the cooking time short, tasting now and then till the beans were still crisp but a teensy bit caramelized. Meanwhile, I was steaming some French fingerling potatoes.

Piled together, this was a winning combination. My instinct was right: The beans’ saltiness went perfectly with the starchy potatoes. Be sure to use a type of potato that would taste good plain, not the generic white potatoes. Yukon Gold is good, or any farmers’ market potato.

We ate the beans and potatoes with fish in beurre blanc, but I realized that they would go really well with steak — an unexpected twist on the classic manly meal.
I also theorized that sea beans would go well with tofu braised in a mirin-sweet sauce, but I haven’t quite figured that out yet. Perhaps next year… the season for these is supposed to be pretty short.

We arrived at my friend Carol’s eco-conscious store a bit early for her summer solstice, but very hungry. Happily, the shop is right across the street from Mustard Seed Cafe, purveyor of my favorite turkey burger of all time. I’m not even a turkey burger fanatic, but in the years that I lived in this neighborhood, I never tried anything else at MSC because I just couldn’t stand not ordering it.

The burger is laced with tons of rosemary and usually very juicy. I prefer to pretend I’m eating healthy by getting it on an enormous bed of salad that includes some cooked broccoli, zucchini and pickles, but really I like how the juices trickle down and blend with the vegetables. Note that the red-onion garnish is grilled slightly, so that it’s mild and sweet.

Since I’m not likely to be dropping in for lunch very often now that I live in northern California, I tried to pry some cooking secrets out of our waiter, but I didn’t get very far. I was able to rule out additives: no breadcrumbs or crazy infusions, just turkey and chopped rosemary. Well, at least I know where to start.

Mustard Seed Cafe
1948 Hillhurst Ave.
Los Angeles
(323) 660-0670

Wes and I recently went back to L.A. for the weekend, where we stayed with a friend in Hollywood, putting us strategically close to my favorite Thai restaurant of the moment, Spicy BBQ by Nong & Family.

An article in the L.A. Times about regional Thai restaurants alerted me to this tiny, family-run place in (of course) a strip mall on a stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard where Little Armenia meets Thai Town. In fact, Spicy BBQ is right next to the reliable Falafel Arax, so if your dining companion isn’t in the mood for Thai, you can fall back on falafel or tongue sandwiches.

I gather that the friendly woman who always seems to be running the front of house is the chef and owner, Nong. She actually remembered me, even though I’ve only been in twice and my last visit was several months ago. I probably made an impression by ordering a ton of dishes for takeout and taking a double handful of the salted plum candies by the cash register on my way out.

Northern Thai food is the specialty here, and unlike some places where you have to sleuth to find out the house specialties, they’re proudly laid out in a northern-cuisine section at the end of the photo-illustrated menu.

The mild noodle dish of khao soi (above) seduces everyone who travels to the trekking capital of Chiang Mai. Nong’s version, declares Jonathan Gold, is probably the definitive one for L.A. The curry-and-coconut broth is smooth and savory, the housemade flat noodles as delicate as the fettuccine at Bella Roma S.P.Q.R. Nong showed us how a bit of red onion and housemade pickle, along with a squirt of lime, adds texture and piquancy to each soothing mouthful.

The zingy northern sausage here is my favorite Thai sausage so far. Check out the texture! They don’t skimp on flavorings- it’s practically bristling with kaffir lime peel, lemongrass and chiles.

The savory fried pork salad patties get their character from an unusual, earthy-tasting herb whose name I read somewhere, but forgot. Sorry. Despite the name, I believe they’re a bit different from the minced pork salad (laap or larb). I’ve had it before and it’s excellent, but it doesn’t have that herb.

Stuff that has underwhelmed: Pad see ew is Wes’ “safety” dish at unknown Thai restaurants. I’ve come to like it also, for the savory gravy blended with the flat rice noodles and the crisp-tender Chinese broccoli. But the pad see ew at Spicy BBQ, with tough beef and American broccoli, was the worst I’ve ever had.

The green papaya salad is unusual in that it includes grilled shrimp. Unfortunately, they’re kinda mealy, and the salad as a whole doesn’t have much depth of flavor. I asked for “spicy” and it definitely was not, leaving me to wonder whether I’d been gringo’d.

Green chile dip is okay, but not irresistible in the way that Lotus of Siam’s version is. That stuff was impossible to keep your fingers out of. It turns out, though, that mediocre green chile dip can be converted into a quite good chile verde soup. Just add broth, chicken and vegetables.

Spicy BBQ by Nong & Family
5101 Santa Monica Blvd.
(323) 663-4211

In Korean-heavy L.A., grill-it-yourself bulgogi or kalbi is as much a hometown food as tacos from a truck. So it might seem strange that when my mother, who is Korean and lives in Chicago, would visit me in L.A., she’d say, “Let’s get Korean food! But not barbecue.” Soups and stews are the things she misses, not smoke from the grill in every fiber of her clothes.

So I was surprised that she wanted to take me to a Korean barbecue house in Chicago. But her favorite thing at this place, she told me, was not the beef but the fried rice they make in the same stone griddle used to cook the meat, after you polish it off. It sounded like something I’d had, with pork, at L.A.’s fantastic Honey Pig.

Cho Sun Ok is a small corner establishment doing modest lunch business with businessmen, young couples and lunching ladies, all Korean.

They gave us a nice spread of panchan. These are side dishes, but it’s impossible not to pick at them when they arrive if you’re hungry, so they end up as de facto appetizers.

Unfortunately, the kimchi, the most important panchan of all, was utterly bland. “Too young,” pronounced my mom, but I disagree. I have a fondness for crisp, young kimchi, and in L.A. kimchi rarely comes fully fermented. No, this was flat-out flavorless.

Instead of a grill, the beef is cooked on a stone griddle slicked with toasty sesame oil. I can’t remember what cut we ordered — it’s just thinly sliced unmarinated beef.

But the beef was so lean, it overcooked really quickly. Most of what made it to my plate was dry, dry, dry. But it’s not about the beef, right? I waited.

Ah, the pièce de résistance. The waitress came by and dumped what was left of our vegetable panchan in there, stirred it around and left it to toast. It comes off more like a Korean paella than fried rice, with the crunchy toasted grains at the bottom. A real pleasure, and I only wish we could’ve fast-forwarded to it.

Cho Sun Ok
4200 N. Lincoln Ave.
Lincoln Square/Ravenswood neighborhood
Chicago
(773) 549-5555

I’m not really into restaurants of the moment, although sometimes I hear about a place that shone bright and brief until something fell apart in the delicate balance supporting it, and I wish I’d gotten there before it snuffed. But usually it’ll take me a few months to try out something after I hear about it. When it comes to Chicago, where my parents live and where my once-or-twice-a-year visits usually last only a few days, that lag time is considerably longer. I’ve been wanting to go to the casual, wine-and-small-plates Avec for years, and its more traditional sibling Blackbird for longer still. Finally, I had the perfect opportunity — an evening concert at the Symphony, just down the street, with my food-loving friend Alberto.

Avec doesn’t take reservations, but we thought we’d be fine walking in around 6:30 on a Thursday. We were wrong. The standing tables outside were full, and there was already a short list. But we lucked into a pair of counter seats right in front of the chef’s station.

He introduced himself, and it took me a while to realize that the four-burner stove that he was manning and the prep counter before us was where all the food for the restaurant was being made. One guy, one stove for the entire restaurant. Granted, the place is like an alley with seats (a very warm, chic alley), but watching his hands fly was a great show.

We started with a charcuterie plate. Wait, no — it’s Italian influenced, so this was salumi. Believe me, coppa by any other name tastes just as good. This was a really nice spread, and I was intrigued by the garnish of sliced cornichons with parsley leaves and slices of red onion. It was like a mini salad.

Crostini with English pea puree and watercress-and-arugula salad piled high, plus ricotta salata and lemon zest, was a recommendation I’d seen again and again on the local Chowhound board. It was simple, refreshing and delicious. There’s something really appealing about pureed peas, and they’re almost painfully simple. A few nights later I had dinner at a friend’s house, and she made fillets of salmon, beached on pea-puree islands in a sea of lemony broth. I’m also becoming fond of pureed pea soup (those frozen petits pois from Trader Joe’s are excellent) with mint.

Alberto and I loved the idea of olive-oil poached salmon with melted lardo, but I couldn’t make out the lardo itself by taste or texture. I’m not sure what I expected from thin slices of cured pork fat. Perhaps I was remembering the wildly flavorful lardo pizza at Pizzeria Mozza in L.A., but when I think of it, most of the flavor credit was due to the rosemary and the crust (it’s a glorified flatbread, but an amazing one if you like that), with the lardo just supplying an alluring richness. This was certainly a succulent piece of salmon.

We were swayed on dessert by the excitement of having the orange-and-cinnamon-scented cannoli made before our eyes, but it was kind of like, squirt, dip, plop. I preferred the grapefruit sorbet (right), which came on shortbread wafers like I’d had at St John Bread & Wine. I thought the palate-cleansing sorbet an odd match for buttery shortbread, but it turns out shortbread is an adaptable thing. Next thing you know I’ll be eating it with beef stew.

Still on my short list: Hot Chocolate and a return visit to Green Zebra.

Avec
615 W. Randolph St
Chicago
(312) 377-2002

I never look for Chicago deep-dish pizza, or Chicago hot dogs, wherever I’m living because I know I can get some of the best whenever I visit my parents. The best in my original hometown? I’m still trying to figure it out. My mom likes Giordano’s, but it’s grown into a full-on chain restaurant, and the quality really varies. My dad maintains an open-door policy towards all pizzas, regardless of origin. The original Pizzeria Uno, which invented deep-dish, and nearby Pizzeria Due, are pretty good but awfully touristy. (I notice the chain is now calling itself Uno Chicago Grill… wtf??!!) Then there’s Lou Malnati’s, a laid-back neighborhood restaurant that’s actually in our neighborhood and whose pies (butter crust, please) are favorites of many a local chowhound. Unlike many pizzerias, Lou’s is pretty nice to eat in, but a friend was coming over for dinner so we got takeout.

I’m pretty fond of all legitimate forms of pizza (while scorning the bastard Thai BBQ chicken pizza and its ilk), but there’s a particular kind of satisfaction to eating the deep-dish pizza, which you cannot hope to handle without a knife and fork. The sauce is chunky — when I was researching recipes, several said it’s just reduced, broken-up canned plum tomatoes — rather than the soupy consistency spread on New York pizzas. And while I enjoy the thin-yet-puffy crust of a N.Y. pizza, charred on the bare floor of an oven, it seems austere next to its butter-or-oil slicked Chicago counterpart, virtually fried in its pan.

By family consensus, we always get spinach stuffed pizza. “Family consensus” really just means that my mom likes spinach, my dad is fine with it, and now that I’m an adult I feel guilty about eating a hunk of cheese and bread without any redeeming vegetable. So I’m not crazy about spinach pizza per se, but Malnati’s impresses me — You can really tell that these were recently individual leaves of fresh spinach, and not frozen stuff. The tomato sauce is nice and tangy, and there’s a good amount of cheese.

But the crust just doesn’t thrill me, butter or no. I have a sneaking suspicion that I prefer the towering, cracker-crisp crust at Gino’s East. It was a suspicion that I’ll have to test out on my next trip, though — we had enough leftovers from this pie for the rest of the week.

Lou Malnati’s
958 W. Wrightwood (at Sheffield & Lincoln)
Chicago
(773) 832-4030

What do you do after, in an attempt to schedule a trip home to see the parents after having moved to a new town, in between friends’ weddings in the old town and an upcoming holiday you’d like to spend with your spouse, you accidentally buy a ticket departing on said spouse’s birthday?

Chocolate ganache may not exactly be a balm for all wounds, but it might be said to help a little of it. These buttermilk cupcakes from Sherry Yard’s cookbook are both rich and delicate, probably a result of the unusual procedure: You blend the eggs and sugar over simmering water, then whip them, off heat, until thick. The souffle-like cupcakes collapsed a bit after baking, leaving cratered tops rather than the typical smooth domes, but that just left more room for ganache.

Buttermilk birthday cupcakes
From Sherry Yard’s The Secrets of Baking
About 2 dozen cupcakes

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
4 large eggs
6 oz (1.5 sticks) unsalted butter, melted
1/2 cup buttermilk
2 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 and prepare some muffin tins.

Triple-sift the flour, baking powder and salt and set aside. Fill a medium saucepan halfway with water and bring it to a simmer over medium heat. Combine sugar and eggs in the bowl of a standing mixer, or a mixing bowl that will fit into the saucepan. Put the bowl over the water, making sure the bottom of the bowl doesn’t touch the water. (If you have a double boiler and no standing mixer, I don’t see why you shouldn’t just mix the sugar and eggs in the double boiler.) Stick in a thermometer and whisk steadily until the concoction is 110 degrees (2-3 minutes).

Remove bowl from heat and whip on high speed with standing or hand mixer 5-8 minutes, until the eggs have tripled in volume. The mixture will be thick and pale yellow, and form a ribbon when falling from a spatula. Turn the mixer speed to medium and ship for 2 more minutes, then add the melted butter.

Carefully fold in a third of the dry ingredients with a balloon whisk. Fold in a third of the buttermilk, then repeat those two steps until they’re used up. Blend in the vanilla.

Pour the batter into the muffin tins and bake 20 minutes, until the tops are golden brown and spring back when you touch them lightly. Let cupcakes cool in the pan on a rack for 5 minutes, then remove from the pan and let cool completely on the rack. Frost with chocolate ganache (below).

Ganache frosting
Makes 2 cups

8 oz bittersweet chocolate
4 oz (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup powdered sugar

Chop up the chocolate and melt with the butter in the microwave or in a double boiler. Sift in the powdered sugar and slowly stir it in with a rubber spatula until it smooths out.

Done! Use immediately, or at least within a couple of days. It may need to be beaten in a mixer to regain its pliancy after refrigeration.