Tonight I was left alone at home with nothing to eat, and Mike suggested I get some Indian. As the kids, who don’t like Indian, are not home, that seemed like a good idea.
Favorite India is my favorite Indian restaurant, so it’s very fortunate that they are both in the area and deliver here. I’ve been ordering from there since it opened several years ago, and I’m seldom disappointed. This time I wasn’t.
I ordered my usuals, lamb korma, chicken tikka masala and a mixed grill (yes, I was alone, but they have a $25 minimum for delivery). All three were good, the sauce in the lamb korma, in particular, was excellent, very creamy, very deep and balanced. The tikka masala was also very good and balanced, with a hint of acidity. The mixed grill was a little on the dry/overdone side, however. My sweet lassi was good, a bit watery but I expect that’s from the ice melting while I waited to drink it. The kabuli naan was particularly good today, filled with nuts and cherries.
In all it was a very good meal and I’m stuffed and have lunch and dinner for tomorrow! 🙂
Month: July 2007 (Page 2 of 3)
Mike finally returned to me a few restaurant reviews I wrote early this year. He edits them for me, as he thinks my prose is definitely in need of help. These are:
Adagia is nice restaurant in Berkeley with a dining room that looks like an Ivy League cafeteria. Good food too.
Le Cheval is a popular Oakland Vietnamese eatery, its food wasn’t as good as I remembered, though.
Spettro is another popular Oakland restaurant, this time eclectic Italian. I liked it.
Fringale is an upscale French Basque restaurant in the city. Our dinner was good if uneven.
and finally
Angelinas has become our favorite place for a pizza with the kids, not in the least because they are very child friendly.
I first tried Beringer wine when I went wine tasting at their impressive operation in Napa many years ago. They give a great tour of their facilities – or at least they did back them – but their wine seemed inferior. Outside the winery, it’s certainly affordable. Last night I wanted to drink some wine with our steaks (steaks two nights in a row, courtesy of Costco’s large sizes), but I didn’t want to open another bottle of expensive wine (and for me expensive is anything over $10), so I decided to open this Beringer bottle that somebody had brought us. It wasn’t that great.
It didn’t have much of an aroma to speak off, and the taste itself was very mild. Low on tanins with a bare hint of oakiness. It did improve when drank with the steak, assuming a complimentary role. I’d drink it again, but with food.
After our trip to the wine country, Mike and I seem to be getting into wines. We’ll see how long it lasts. But we’re happy with our half a dozen collection of good quality reds, 3 sweet wines and 2 sparkling. Not very much, specially if we start drinking it up. Alas, wine is not hard to find 🙂
Last night we opened a bottle of Tobin James 2002 James Gang Reserve Zinfandel. We had won it the previous day at a charity raffle.
It had a very strong fruity aroma, and was somewhat sweet, with a strong hint of plum. It was smooth, somewhat acidic, and really nice to sip by itself. It also went well with dark chocolate, marrying in your mouth. I thought it might be too fruity/sweet for the red meat we were having that night, but they went very well. The wine dried up and let the taste of the meat win over. Very good. Mike liked it too.
As you know, I recently took a trip to the wine country and the mendocino area. Here are the restaurant reviews from that trip.
Mendo Bistro is a bistro in Fort Bragg, Ca, which lets you chose what you want to eat and how you want it cooked.
Timber Cove Inn Restaurant is the restaurant of the hotel of the same name located about 15 miles north of Jenner, California. There is nothing else in the area so the restaurant gets away with charging ridiculously overpriced but still good food.
Solbar in Calistoga offers high-end interpretations of American Cuisine and mostly gets it right.
La Hacienda is your typical Mexican Restaurant in Cloverdale
We had a great lunch at the Mendocino Hotel Garden Room in a beautiful bee-filled garden.
And a disappointing lunch at the the Station House Cafe in Point Reyes Station, with extremely underseasoned food (but in another beautiful garden).
As you can discern from my postings below, Mike and I spent three days traveling through the Napa Valley, tasting wine and relaxing. We had a few really nice dinners, and more conventional lunches. But as I swore to review everything about the trip (to make it even more fun for me), here are my notes on our Wine Country Lunches.
Sunday we were in Napa and had lunch at Giugni’s Deli in St. Helena. This is our favorite sandwich shop in the whole world. *Every* time we come to Napa, we go eat there. Napa may be filled with culinary delights from north to south, but we will never know them because I will never have lunch at a place other than Giugni’s. It *is* that good.
On our third day in the wine country, we tried the wineries in the Anderson Valley in Mendocino. I had never been to this part of California before and enjoyed the wine tasting experience very much. None of the wineries we visited were as beautiful as those we’ve been to in Napa, Sonoma and even the Russian River, but they were nice, friendly and relaxing experiences.
We started at Yorkville Cellars a small family winery that sells organic wines. It’s run by an English lady and it’s been there since 1986. They mostly sell at the winery, local shops and restaurants. We’d had organic wines before and had not been particularly impressed by them, so Yorkville pleasantly surprised us. The tasting room itself was small but featured a veranda with picnic tables and a view of the vineyards. They had a very friendly black lab greeting you. Tasting was complimentary and they gave us good sized pours.
On the second day of our wine country trip, we headed to the Russian River Valley. I’d been there only a couple of months before, when my friend Lola treated me to a wonderful girls-weekend-out for my birthday, and I was eager to go again. I found the wineries in the Russian River Valley more relax and more friendly than those in Napa, and I was there purely for relaxation (OK, and wine tasting too).
Last time, the helpful manager of the West Sonoma Inn, where we had stayed, had recommended we go tasting at the wineries on Olivet Road. We hadn’t managed to do it, but it made sense to try them on our way from Calistoga. So there we headed.
This week Mike and I took a mini-vacation to the northern California wine country. We spent three days wine tasting, in Napa, the Russian River Valley and Mendocino. Of necessity, we visited only a few wineries, but you can read my notes from them. Alas, I’m in no way a wine connoisseur and I’m completely unable to taste any of the dozens of flavors experts can discern in wine. Berries? mango? licorish? I can’t find them. So don’t take my reviews too seriously. In reality all I can say is what I liked and what I didn’t like, which may be very different from what you like. I tend to like full-bodied wines, neither light or heavy in tanins and with a well defined oakiness (which I didn’t find at all in this trip).
Anyway here is my report from Napa. Reports from the Russian River Valley and Mendocino will follow.
Last night we got take out from New Hong Kong. I always order the same things, orange chicken, szechuan beef, sesame chicken, orange chicken, and then I’m a bit disgusted by the gooiness of it all. This time I decided to try something different and got the crispy chicken ($6 for half a chicken) and the ginger beef ($6.50). I also got the pork buns, chicken chow mein for the kids, and an order of free fried wontons.
The pork buns were good, as usual. They are steamed and they have a pretty high ratio of bread to stuffing, but they are good none the less. The friend wontons are crisp and very good with the sweet-n-sour sauce they came with. Pure fat and a guilty pleasure. Can’t comment on the chow mein ’cause I didn’t try it. But both the crispy chicken and the ginger beef were very good. The chicken was moist and had been nicely spiced (but it wasn’t spicy), and it’s skin was almost crispy enough. As it was, you could skip it and all that fat. The ginger beef had a light ginger flavor, and was nicely complimented by the green onions. The one problem is that there were just too many scallions and too little beef. Still, I’d order both dishes again.
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