Today I visited the newest member of the west end ramen district: Marutama Ra-men. It is the second new ramen place with the kanji character ‘maru’ in its name to open in the west end the the past few months – with the other being Maruko. Unlike Maruko, Marutama comes to us with more of a ramen lineage. It is a the first North American branch of a modest chain of ramen restaurants that originated from Japan. Although the ramen-ya only has four branches in its native Japan, it has more than double that number of locations (10 including its Vancouver outpost) internationally.

The restaurant is located on a side street (Bidwell). Its location is not obvious to pedestrians and drivers who are moving along Robson. If not for the restaurant’s online buzz, I would be totally oblivious to its existence.  Judging by the people waiting outside the restaurant and the fully occupied tables inside, I was not the only one that was brought to the restaurant by the buzz.

The restaurant is well-equiped to take on the onslaught of diners. Its interior consists of communal tables, counters, and two-tops that can easily accommodate parties of all sizes without any reconfiguration.

The kitchen was also quite efficient. It took only a few minutes for my wife, son, and I to receive our food after we placed our orders with our server. My wife and I both ordered the tamago ramen – which is their signature Marutama ramen with an added soft-boiled (slow boiled) egg. My wife ordered her ramen with the spicy soup and I opted for the mild soup.

The spicy soup didn’t look all that different visually from the mild soup. My wife actually lowered her flavour expectations of the spiciness of the broth immediately after she laid eyes on it. She thought that the soup would be yet another spicy-in-name-only ramen broth, but she was mistaken in her assumptions. The soup presented her with an immediate spiciness that was bold and totally unexpected. The spiciness was felt on my wife’s first sip, and on every subsequent sip. My wife thought that the spiciness was the icing on the cake to the tremendously flavourful broth.

The broth was not only tremendous, it was amazing, fantastic, yummy, delicious, tasty, unctuous, not-too-oily, hot, creamy, smooth, deep, complex, and a lot of other things. It was very enjoyable. It was enjoyable on its own, with the pile of brilliantly included seaweed, with the tender, flavorful, and not-too-fatty meat, with the perfectly boiled egg, or with the equally perfected boiled noodles. The latter two elements were so good that they deserve a bit of further elaboration.

The egg. What an egg it was. Was it the best local ramen-accompanying egg I’ve had? Yes, it was. It had a beige colored skin that manifested itself flavourwise with a balanced sweet soy taste. The sweet soy flavour reminded me of kakuni, which just so happens to be one of the few standalone side dishes offered on the restaurant’s menu. The egg white was perfectly snappy. Biting into the whites revealed the most amazing component of the egg: the yolk. The yolk was slow boiled to an absolutely perfect consistency. It was solidly  gelatinous when I first bit into it, and parts of it started to slowing flow down onto the whites after half a minute. The yolk was thick and rich, like manna from wherever manna comes from. The yolk was perfectly enjoyable by itself, along with the flavourful and snappy whites, or mixed into the already rich and creamy soup. The egg was a great.

The noodles. I loved them. They were of the straight and white variety- which I adored. They had bite. They were thin, but they had a firm bite-y bite that out al dente’d the most perfectly al dente pasta. They never lost their bite-y-ness no matter how long they were soaked in the soup. But I did not let them soak in there for too long. I made quick work of them. My teeth did. My wife and son both mentioned that the noodles had a very distinct eggy flavour absent from all other local ramen noodles. I didn’t notice. I was busy enjoying their texture. The texture of noodles made in-house — in this little section at the front of the restaurant:

The noodles were so good that my son, who never eats noodles, actually wanted a bowl for himself after he had a mouthful of mine. He preferred them over his cha shu gohan (BBQ pork rice).

The cha shu goan was actually brilliant on its own. The rice was teeth-bouncing and not too dry. The pickled spicy daikon juliennes on top were a fresh, bright, and crunchy contrast to both the rice and the pork. The chopped up BBQ pork was moist. It was also flavourful. It had the exact same sweet soy flavour of the egg, but amped up a few orders of magnitude. The bowl of rice was all flavour and all texture. It was delicious. It was also larger in size than other cha shu gohan side dishes (bowls) sold at other local ramen places.

There is actually one slight complaint I have about  the ramen from Marutama. For the $10.25 the restaurant charged for the bowl of tamago ramen, the portion size was miniscule. I finished noodles, soup, seaweed, egg, scallions, and pork slice in less than five minutes — and I was taking my sweet time enjoying it. I still felt hungry after the bowl. I actually ordered a second bowl and that also did not fill me up (frame of reference – me: 5’11″  140 lbs ). Of course, part of my wanting more of the ramen was due to its extreme tastiness. But the portion size of the ramen was definitely on the small side (which is in contrast to the larger-than-usual-portioned cha shu gohan). I think I’ll try ordering the $18 bowl of ramen the next time that I visit the place. Hopefully, it will have a portion size large enough to satisfy my appetite.

Earl’s took a dual-pronged approach in promoting their ‘steak redemption’ event. First they bombard you with posters without pictures.

Then they give you a menu supplement with pictures (which I forgot to take a picture of). As you can see from the posters (or maybe can’t see), they make some bold and enticing claims. I totally identify with the red poster; I’ve had way too many ‘meh’ steaks at steakhouses. I was totally ready for a ‘mmm’ steak. I was in need of a steak redemption – especially when the steak was of the bone-in, 16 oz. variety.

I was a little surprised by the thinness of the steak when it arrived. Usually, if a restaurant serves a 16 oz. steak, they concentrate the 16 ounces into a compact and thick cut. The thick cut has the benefits of being more flavorful, juicier, and giving the diner more concentrated beef flavours in every bite. Thinner steaks are usually served by non-steak-focused restaurants who are not equipped with ovens with high enough temperatures to deal with thicker steaks…which…I guess…is a category of restaurants Earl’s belongs to.

I really shouldn’t worry. The white poster said that they have, “identified the perfect combination of thickness and higher heat cooking…”.

My first cut into the steak revealed that it was cooked perfectly to my specified temperature of medium rare. The meat was red but not raw. It was not as firm to cut through as the slightly more firm medium temperature and it did not have as much fiber and fat resistance to the knife than the slightly less cooked rare temperature.

My first bite into the first piece that I cut off of the thin 16 ouncer revealed that the steak was very well-spiced. It was so ‘well spiced’ that my taste buds registered mostly salt, pepper, and spice flavours; I could hardly detect any beefy flavours at all. Like it is sometimes with wine, I had to leave my second bite of steak in my mouth a little longer and mix it with a bit of oxygen to tease out its beefy flavours. Once I started to get hints of beef, I began to regret ordering the steak. I did not detect the sweet, grain-fed, fat-interspersed, and high-quality meat I expected from a redeeming steak. I detected flat, skinny, and lower-end-chain-quality beef.

The steak was a huge disappointment. In no way did it have any redeeming qualities. In fact, after eating it, I felt that I really needed a steak redemption. The steak was totally not a ‘mmm’ steak. It was a ‘meh’ steak. The steak even tasted worse than the minimally-aged Canadian-prime beef from Costco that I regularly put on my backyard grill. My faith in the high standards of local chains diminished by about 5% after this meal. Besides another steak redemption, I think I am also in need of a local chain redemption.

But that was years ago. I have spent the past five years eating bland-tasting, west-coast-wanna-be-pizza that is light years behind New York or Neapolitan or even Greek pizza (disagree with me all you want, but that is the truth). Finding New York style pizza is next to impossible in Vancouver, but finding a decent Neapolitan pie has become quite easy with the recent explosion of local Neapolitan pizzerias.

My favorite local Neapolitan pizzeria used to be The Bibo, but the lackluster pizzas that I had there on my most recent visit had me looking for a new favorite.

My search for an exemplary local Neapolitan pie brought me, my wife, and my kids to Famoso yesterday. Famoso is a chain, and I was hoping that the pizza they offer would at least be equal in quality to the pizza offered by the branch of the Neapolitan chain I used to live next to.

The restaurant is quite new, and it has a fresh, cosmetically unblemished interior and open kitchen to match.

We arrived at the restaurant at around 6 P.M. and were not surprised to find that we had to wait 15-20 minutes for a table (which is why I had the spare time to take pictures of the interior). Once we were seated, we took a quick look at the menu and decided to order two adult pizzas, one kid pizza, and a meal-sized salad. Since the restaurant required customers to make their initial food orders at the counter, I walked up to the counter to put my order in.

The restaurant was quite busy, so it took around twenty minutes before we finally received our order.  The first item that came to our table was the Margherita pizza with a supplement of Italian sausage.

After the Margherita pizza, we received the ‘new world’ pepperoni and mushroom pizza.

The two pizzas were decent tasting. They were as good as the pizzas from the chain I used to frequent, but they were no better. My wife thought that the tomato sauce tasted generic, I thought that they tasted like canned tomatoes. The fior-de-latte cheese was nicely moist, regularly-melty, and disappointingly lacking in chewiness. When combined with the basil included with the Margherita pizza, the cheese tasted gamey. This gamey flavour was unexpected but not unflavourful. The crust was the most enjoyable component of the pizza. The non-edge portions were thin and enjoyably chewy, and the perfectly-sized edges (crust) were even more teeth-bouncingly chewy. The other components of the two pizzas were typical. The Italian sausage that we added to the Margherita pizza was more texture than flavour; the pepperoni was thick, oily, and tasted maybe a smidgen better than garden-variety pepperoni sold at your local supermarket. The mushrooms were mushrooms; they tasted like cut-up-then-roasted fresh mushrooms.

My picky son wanted a pizza with pepperoni and sausage, but without cheese or tomato sauce. We ordered exactly that for him – in a kid sized pizzetta.

He liked it.

For our meal-sized salad, we ordered the eponymous Famoso salad.

The greens were fresh, the pizza-dough-bread was pleasantly chewy, the dressing was sweet-but-not-too-sweet, and the crispy prosciutto strips packed an intensely spicy punch along with serving as  the primary salty flavour component of the salad. The combination of  sweet, salty, and spicy was okay-tasty. In other words, the salad was slightly above-average-tasting.

Let’s see…above average salad, generic pizza sauce, garden variety sausage, supermarket pepperoni, okay cheese, good crust. Good Crust. Better crust than my last pizza at The Bibo. Hopefully, I will find a better all-around local Neapolitan pizza (the chances are good since there are quite a few places I have yet to try out). If not, I’ll have to make Famoso my pizza fix because of its teeth-bouncing dough.

New York bagels: excellent. Montreal bagels: excellent. Boston bagels: good. Toronto bagels: good. L.A. bagels: mediocre. Vancouver bagels: mediocre. Conclusion: bagels suck on the west coast.

After visiting the newly opened Rosemary Rocksalt on Lonsdale in North Van this afternoon, I am going to revise my conclusion. New conclusion: most bagels taste like dirt on the west coast, but there are a few gems within this sea of dirt. Rosemary Rocksalt is one of them (a gem, not dirt).

The bagels sold (and made) at Rosemary Rocksalt are the real deal. They are indistinguishable in flavour and texture to the regular, everyday, and high quality bagels found in New York, Montreal, and to a lesser extent in Boston and Toronto. Regardless of flavour of variety, each bagel sold at Rosemary Rocksalt has nicely crunchy skin with an enjoyably dense, doughy, and chewy interior that is correctly devoid of air or air bubbles. Each bite of their smaller-sized bagels feels substantial and each chew feels pleasurable. Even though they came from the same recipe, I think that the bagels I had at Rosemary Rocksalt tasted somewhat superior to those from Siegel’s.

In terms of variety, Rosemary Rocksalt offers 10-12 different types of bagels.

Their selection is nowhere near as broad as what my wife and I are used to. My wife was especially disappointed that they did not offer the non-traditional-but-wildly-popular chocolate chip bagels. We took consolation in the fact that they did have our other favorites in the cinnamon raisin bagels and the sesame bagels.

We visited for  lunch, so we opted to have the sesame and cinnamon raisin bagels become top and bottom bread components of the sandwiches that we ordered. My wife had jalapeno and smoked meat filling (jalapeno melt sans melted cheese) stuffed between her sesame bagel.

We ordered plain smoked meat to be sandwiched between our son’s sesame bagel.

The smoked meat bagel came with mustard, which was not indicated on their menu board. Since the sandwich was for our son, and since he can not tolerate any amount of spiciness, I brought the sandwich back to the counter and politely inquired if they could remake us a sandwich without mustard. The people behind the counter not only complied with my request, they did it with huge smiles on their faces. They also remade the sandwich extremely quickly. Very impressive service.

I also had a smoked meat bagel. But I had the large sized sandwich instead of the regular size that my son had, and I chose the cinnamon raisin bagel as my bread component. I ordered the sandwich as a daily special – which meant that it came with a side of French fries.

My daughter went ultra-orthodox and chose plain bagels as the base for her club sandwich.

My daughter thought that her club sandwich was yummy, tasty, delicious, and everything in between. She said that the cheese was rich, the turkey tender, the smoked meat flavourful, and the lettuce and tomatoes fresh. She was also impressed with the thickness of the entire concoction; she was unable to take one bite of the entire sandwich that included all of its ingredients no matter how hard she tried.

My wife liked how the spicy jalapenos matched with the tender and flavourful smoked meat. She also liked how the slightly sweet flavour of the  sesame bagel contrasted with the just-right-saltly smoked meat.

My son thought that his smoked meat was too fatty.

I loved the fattiness of the smoked meat. I loved its juiciness, its thinness, and most of all its smoky unctuousness. The smoked meat was amazing tasting. At no point during eating the smoked meat bagel did I feel that the meat was too oily or too smoky or too salty or too hard to chew or too easy to bite through. Every component was just right. To me, eating the stacked together thin slices of smoked meat was very similar to eating perfectly shabu-shabu’d Japanese Wagyu meat dipped in light ponzu in Japan – except that the smoked meat was much more flavourful than the more-expensive-than-gold Japanese beef. I was totally in my happy place while eating the smoked meat bagel. The bagel was very good and the smoked meat was amazing. Although the combination of the two components was very good, the sandwich was not ultimately more tasty than the two individual components; It only tasted as good. And that was good enough for me.

Bagels, smoked meat, and sandwiches were not the only things that my family had at Rosemary Rocksalt. We also had their rouglachs. A review of the sweet pastries will be forthcoming in another post…In the meantime, I’ll end with this: The bagels and smoked meat ROCKED at Rosemary Rocksalt. If I were giving stars for my reviews, I would be giving this place one star out of four (this is a great rating since I wouldn’t even assign one star to most of the restaurants I have recently visited that gave me a positive dining experience).

…I was so excited about the smoked meat and bagels that I forgot to mention the fries. They were solid. The fries were crispy-crunchy on the outside and not too mushy on the inside. They had distinct potato flavours and were well-salted. I liked them; my wife liked them; my daughter liked them; my son liked them. The fries were good.

I’ve known about The Red Wagon for quite a while now, but I have not visited primarily because I was weary of the potential wait I would have to endure. Another reason that has prevented me from visiting the restaurant was that it was not located anywhere close to the areas I frequent on a daily/weekly basis.

I took the opportunity of the May long weekend to finally visit the place. The kids both had Friday off as a pro-D day, and I was hoping that visiting the restaurant before 11:00 A.M. on a weekday would mean that my family would not be subject to a 60+ minute wait for a table.

I hoped right. We barely had to wait 7 minutes for our table. We were also lucky enough to arrive at a time when they started serving items from their all-day menu along with their breakfast items. This was convenient for all four members of the family since my son was craving a burger while my wife, daughter, and I wanted to have breakfast/brunch dishes.

The three breakfast dishes we ordered were all based on the eggs/meat/potato/bread setup. My daughter ordered the simplest variation with two eggs, bacon, potatoes, and sourdough toast.

My wife went a step up and ordered the Trucker, which added two pancakes to eggs, sausage links, potatoes, and brown bread toast.

I couldn’t decide between the pulled pork pancakes or the pork belly, so I ordered the super trucker. Along with two eggs, potatoes, and toast, the dish came with pulled pork pancakes and a slab of pork belly. I also substituted regular syrup with the optional Jack Daniel’s syrup.

I’ll relay my daughter’s thoughts on her dish first. She thought the scrambled eggs, the fried potatoes, and the bacon tasted pretty much like eggs, bacon, and potatoes served everywhere else. She liked her sourdough toast and finished all four of her slices before she finished anything else on her plate. She thought that the toast was pretty good, but she thought it was still far from great-tasting.

My wife said that her over-easy eggs were undercooked; the egg whites arrived in a very runny state. She then stated that the potatoes and sausages were generic. She liked the brown toast. She thought that the bite-y bits in the slices of toast gave them an enjoyable mouthfeel. She was less impressed with her two slabs of pancakes. She thought that they were too thick, too dense, but not soft enough.

In contrast to my wife’s dislike of the pancakes, I actually liked the pulled pork pancakes that were on my plate (disclaimer: I do not like pancakes. I almost never order them at breakfast places). I liked their thickness, and I liked that they were dense. I liked that they were not mushy when doused with syrup like most other pancakes. I liked their slight chewiness, and I liked how the pancakes tasted with the sweet, a bit dry, but not too chewy pulled-pork on top. I liked the pulled pork pancakes because they did not taste like pancakes. Take that for what you will.

Like the pulled pork, the crispy pork belly won’t win prizes if served on its own. It probably wouldn’t even be considered a well-executed dish. The skin was not crispy enough, the fat felt unpleasantly fatty, the lean meat was way too dry, and the entire slab of belly looked like it was sunburned.  But when eaten together with the snappy egg whites and runny yolks, the dryness of the meat became more than acceptable and the lack or crispiness of the skin was forgotten. When eaten with the plain-tasting potatoes, the fattiness became a value-added textural element. The fat and the skin also added an unctuousness that made the entire combination of the eggs, potatoes, and pork belly quite tasty. I thought that the flavours and textures I experienced with the combination of these three elements roughly approximated that of a roasted pork hock dish.

Although I only meant to drizzle the Jack Daniel’s syrup on the pulled pork pancakes, they partly contaminated the area of the plate inhabited by the pork belly. The edges of the meat that slightly touched the syrup turned out to be surprisingly tasty. The noticeable alcohol flavours and the subdued sweetness of the watery syrup worked well to bring out some of the porky-ness of the belly that was lost when it was overcooked by the kitchen. The syrup was also a nice, not-too-sweet-and-not-too-thick pairing with the pancakes. I was as impressed with its ability to not mush up the pancakes as I was with the ability of the pancakes to not allow themselves to be mushed up. I was less impressed with the syrup’s $2.50 (or was it $2.75?) price tag.

…I was almost going to end this post without mentioning my son’s burger. Here it is:

I had a bite of the burger courtesy of my son’s generosity. The bread was nicely toasted; the cheese on the patty was barely detectible in terms of flavors; the patty was thick with pleasant beefy flavours, but it was way too dry. The burger tasted like a thicker and slightly more flavourful version of McDonal’s Angus Third Pounder. The fries that came with the dish looked like extra crispy double-fried chips; they tasted like limp and shriveled heat-lamp-nutured fries. My son liked them. I didn’t.

If this post was written by either my wife, my daughter, or my son, the conclusion would be that The Red Wagon served very, very generic diner food. They would probably consider the food on par with a place like Denny’s. But since I am the one writing the post, and since my food tasted pretty good, I would have to conclude that The Red Wagon is superior to Denny’s. It is on par with other local mid-range weekend-brunch-serving restaurants. I’ve definitely had both more refined and much tastier diner fare in other cities I’ve lived in and visited. In terms of the local dining scene, however, I can’t say that I’ve had better (another disclaimer: I have visited less than 10 local diners since I’ve moved here).

I do, however, have a problem with sitting next to someone who drives a Ferrari in a restaurant. My beef is not with the Ferrari driver, but with the server that I share with her/him. The server will inevitably be too busy chatting up the Ferrari owner to pay any attention to my table. This has happened to me a few times before, and it happened to me again at Golden Szechuan. Our server was so enamored with the Ferrari driver the next table over that he barely had time to answer the questions I had about some of the dishes on the restaurant’s menu I was interested in. I was going to ask him a few questions about the different fish dishes on the menu, but he cut me off mid-first-question and said that I should just order the Barracuda because it was ‘special’.

He failed to mention that the dish was $58. Fifty eight dollars might be chump change for a Ferrari driver, but it gave me minor sticker shock when the bill arrived. The fish itself was actually more than decent. It was rather good. It had a delicate and extremely tender texture that had a more refined mouthfeel than the silken tofu that came as an accompaniment to the fish. The sauce that the fish and tofu swam in had a spiciness that was tempered in a way where the heat was distinct and detectible, yet never overpowering and always playing second fiddle to the texture of the barracuda. The sauce was also more complex than the sauce that usually comes with szechuan fish dishes. Not only was there numbness from flower peppers and spiciness from red chilies, there was also saltiness, sourness, and intensity from the included preserved mustard greens and ginger. But even with the great flavours and amazing textures of this dish, I did not think it was worth the $58 they charged us for it. If you add up all the chopped up pieces of fish in our dish (bucket), I bet the total amount of fish meat would be equivalent to about half a dozen anchovies.

After making the fish ‘recommendation’, I could sense our server growing more and more impatient by the second. He had his eyes focused on the Ferrari parked right in front and took the rest of our order down without making eye contact,  and promptly left. I asked him if the items I ordered would be too much for the four of us (me, my wife, my daughter, and my son), and, while simultaneously backing away from our table, he said that that it should be enough for two (he was obviously not paying attention to anything that I said).

We actually ordered more food than the table of seven that was equidistant from both our table and the Ferrari table. Here’s what we ordered:

Szechuan cold noodles

The noodles had a nice and stiff and bite-y texture that tasted enjoyably doughy. The sauce was a bit of a letdown. It was not as spicy as we had hoped it would be and it was strangely sweet. The spicy cold noodle dish failed to deliver in the flavour department.

We also had the hanging slices of pork with cucumber.

The spicy-looking sauce that was placed below the hanging slices tasted similar to the spicy cold noodle sauce – which means that it was disappointing. It was kind of spicy, crazy oily, and unpleasantly sweet. The texture of the slices of pork was even less enjoyable. Even though they were thinly sliced, the pork was super tough and crazy hard to bite through. I’ve had the exact same hanging pork dish in both Taiwan and China, and the thin slices of pork I tried in both countries were prosciutto-like in texture with the sauce spiced and salted in a very tasty manner. The dish at Golden Szechuan was similar to their Asian counterparts in looks alone; it was totally inferior to them in terms of both textures and flavours.

No trip to a Szechuan restaurant would be complete without an order of mapo-tofu. We ordered mapo-tofu, thus our trip was complete.

This being a high-end Szechuan restaurant, there was an expected thicker sauce with more minced meat in the sauce than the mapo-tofu sauce served at local budget szechuan restaurants. The cubelets of tofu were of the silken variety, which is par for the course for mapo-tofu dishes. The sauce was what made this dish stand apart. It was spicy like every other mapo-tofu dish but it was numbing like no other. It was simply the most numbing dish, mapo-tofu or otherwise, my wife and I have ever had. After one spoonful of the tofu, my tongue was completely numb. I could not taste a thing. It was definitely an out-of-the-ordinary experience. But it was something I wanted to experience only once.

The Szechuan-flaovured chicken stir-fry dish that we ordered was also very numbing, but fortunately it did not paralyze my tongue like the mapo-tofu dish.

The chicken was very numbing and quite spicy, but neither sensation was so pronounced as to prevent me from experiencing the other flavours and textures present in the dish. The chicken was nicely deep fried. It had crispy skin and tender meat. It was also cubed to a size that worked well when eaten together with the crispy and totally edible red chili peppers. In fact, I would say that the red chili peppers in this dish were one of the very few chili peppers in local Szechuan restaurant dishes that were meant to be eaten; they were actually quite enjoyable. Not only did the red peppers pair well with the chicken, they also paired well with the crunchy and juicy green peppers. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had fried red chilies that matched well with stir-fried green peppers. This dish was one that was enjoyed by both me and my wife.

The final dish that we ordered was the XLB.

We would normally not order XLBs in a Szechuan restaurant, but we had to order this to suit the non-spicy palate of my daughter. Neither my wife, son, nor I tasted the steamed dumplings. My daughter thought that the XLB buns were merely okay-tasting. She said that the skin was too easily breached while being too tough at the creases. She also thought that the filling tasted bland and boring. The steamed buns were nowhere close to being the best versions that she’s had; they were close to being the most mediocre.

Golden Szechuan is supposed to be an upscale Szechuan restaurant. It certainly had the Ferrari-driving clientele as well as high-end ingredients (barracuda), but it ultimately did not have a skilled-and-creative-enough kitchen staff to pull off high-end Szechuan food. I would much rather dine at gritty, hole-in-the-wall Szechuan restaurants that serve  non-pretentious, down-to-earth, and amazingly tasty spicy dishes. Its a good thing there is an abundance of these restaurants in the lower mainland.

I’m a fan of Japanese pasta. I have it often when I am in Taiwan and whenever I visit Japan. Japanese ingredients such as miso and soy sauce match incredibly well with pasta in noodle form. The usual Japanese attention to detail and care in consistent execution lead to reliably high-quality-non-messed-up pasta at almost every Japanese pasta place I’ve visited.

I was quite excited when I found out through online chatter that a Japanese pasta place was opening up locally. The only problem was that the online rumors were not specific with a location of the place, other than that it was somewhere in the downtown area. As hard as I looked around while driving around downtown the past two weeks, I was not able to spot a Japanese pasta place that was on the verge of opening up. It was not until my car was backed up in a minor traffic jam on the far side of Robson in the West End that I finally saw that SpagheTei was taking over the space formerly occupied by Benkei. I immediately noted the restaurant’s location. I made sure to check to see if the restaurant was finally opened for business every time that I drove by it.

I don’t remember exactly when, but SpagheTei finally opened up some time late last week. I visited as soon as I was able to- which was for lunch today, Tuesday May 14, 2013.

I visited the restaurant with my wife and son. Each of us ordered a different Japanese pasta dish. My wife ordered the shellfish pasta.

I ordered the mentaiko pasta.

My son ordered the grilled beef.

The pasta base for all three of the dishes we ordered were spaghetti. Every single strand of spaghetti was cooked to a perfect al dente texture. My wife’s shellfish pasta came with clams, mushrooms, shredded nori, and a really light sauce whose elements my wife could only barely identify as clam juice, butter, and maybe (my wife was unsure about it) a bit of miso. The sauce was so light-tasting that it was almost flavourless. My wife enjoyed her shellfish pasta solely for the texture of the spaghetti.

My mentaiko pasta was no more flavourful than my wife’s shellfish spaghetti. There was a very small amount of marinated, supposed-to-be-spicy fish roe mixed in with the pasta. The minuscule quantity included was spread so thin that its flavours only manifested themselves in hints. There was none of the brininess and spiciness that usually accompanies mentaiko. There was only the slightest hint of fishiness, a fair amount of butter flavours…and nothing else.

The pasta base for my son’s grilled beef dish was supposed to be an afterthought, but it turned out to be the best tasting spaghetti preparation of the meal. It had the perfect balance of soy sauce, butter, and garlic flavours that made me and my wife steal forkfuls upon forkfuls of the spaghetti from my son’s plate (with his permission, of course). My son seemed to enjoy the grilled beef (with the brown rice we brought for him from home) as much as we enjoyed his pasta.

Our pasta orders also came with a slice of complimentary garlic-pesto bread and a third of a cupful of soup.

The garlic-pesto bread tasted fairly good. It had amped-down butter and garlic flavours that suited its diminutive size. The soup felt like it was made with a combination of hot water, some sort of animal-fat-broth base, and three strips of lettuce. It tasted a lot like the heavily MSG-laced soup served at Asian street food stalls.

Even though both my wife and I thought that our pasta dishes were all texture and no flavour, we are already planning our next visit. We will be taking both our son and daughter to spagheTei and placing four orders for pasta dishes prepared with the soy-butter-garlic sauce. If we’re not full after finishing our orders, we’ll order more of the same. I have no doubt that we will leave the restaurant satisfied.

My wife and I place The Bibo at the top spot in terms of tastiness among local Neapolitan pizza places that we have tried ( and which I have mostly neglected to write posts about ). If distance and time were not issues, we would be savoring their pies every time that we get a craving for authentic, Neapolitan pizza. But since we have two young children registered in various classes, engaged in a wide range of activities, and wishing to dine at their favorite restaurants (non of which are Neapolitan pizza restaurants) whenever they get a chance to dine out, and since The Bibo is an at least 30 minute drive from our house, we have only managed to make it out to the restaurant a total of three times in the past year. To make matters worse, there was a period of time in the past year that The Bibo decided to not open for weekday lunch service – which happened to be the only possible time that my wife and I can make it out to their location in Kits for a meal. Furthermore, they closed down altogether for a period of time in the name of ‘renovation’.

When I first got wind of their ‘renovation’, I thought it was likely that they would be closing down for good – since renovation is usually one of the excuses financially struggling restaurants give for closing down indefinitely. Fortunately, this was not the case. The restaurant opened back up after a short while and, to my surprise, started offering lunch service once again.

When my wife and I found out that they were once again opened for lunch, we suddenly got an overwhelming craving for Neapolitan pizza. And we immediately dragged our son with us for across two bridges for lunch at The Bibo even though he had been daydreaming about Korean short ribs for lunch.

Each of the three of us ordered a pizza. My son had the kid’s prosciutto pizza. My wife ordered the diavola pizza. I wanted to try the Boscaiola.

I’ll start with the good. The non-edge parts of the crust were crispy and tender; the tomato sauce had a distinct zestiness to it that matched well with the mozzerella, the crispy tender crust, and all of the ingredients in all three pizzas. The prosciutto in my son’s pizza was more like thicker cut back bacon, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. It had a substantial bitey-ness that paired well texturally with the crust. The spicy salami in my wife’s diavola pizza was likewise thick. Along with the thickness, the salami packed a delectable spicy punch. Its spicy flavours were bold and tasty; it was more flavourful than almost every slice of salami or pepperoni I’ve had on a local pizza.

I did not expect any element of the pizzas we ordered to have negative attributes or to be unenjoyable, but there were quite a few unsavory components. The sausage in my Boscaiola pizza was utterly flavourless, and the mushrooms were shriveled-up dry. The mozzarella was surprisingly dry, odorless, and rubbery – instead of being enjoyably wet, watery, gooey-snappy, and milky. The edges of the crust were way too thick and way too chewy – as opposed to being teeth-bouncing-but-not-jaw-straining and just-right-thick. I actually had to give up on eating a piece of the crust edge on one of my slices because of jaw fatigue.

My wife and I were mildly disappointed after eating the pizzas we ordered. We still thought that they still tasted good, but we no longer considered them to be head and shoulders above other local versions of Neapolitan pizza. As a result, we will be trying out other Neapolitan pizzerias the next time that we get a craving for authentic Italian pizza. I actually already have a few places in mind ( the Pazzarella food truck being one of them).

After I placed an order of the Ipoh bean sprout chicken at its namesake stall, I stood around to observe the food that other people ordered from the stall. The most popular item that came out of the kitchen by far was the laksa. It was on every other tray being brought to the counter. To my surprise, on the trays that did not have bowls of laksa on them, I did not see one single order of the bean sprout chicken. I seemed to be only person that ordered the dish. That was not a promising prospect.

As I was beginning to regret my decision, my order came up to the counter. I hesitantly walked up to the counter, picked the tray up, hung my head, and walked to an open table. The first thing that I did after I sat down was to try the soup, and to not try the chicken. The soup made me happy. It was the prototypical Asian-street-food light-broth-with-a-whole-lot-of-MSG soup. The soup totally set up the right frame of mind for me eating the steamed/boiled chicken with bean sprouts and rice.

My fears of a bad tasting lunch were allayed immediately after I bit into my first piece of chicken. The chicken did not have precooked-then-reheated flavours. Instead, it had light and never-too-gamey flavours. Texture-wise it was, at the same time, just-right bitey and lusciously tender. It was tasty either on its own, dipped into the included sweet spicy sauce, paired with the cilantro on top, combined with the crispy shallot garish, or partnered with the bean sprouts on top of the soy-based sauce.

The rice looked ordinary. It was not mixed with chicken oil or cooked with chicken broth like the rice that usually comes with Hainanese chicken. My first mouthful confirmed my suspicions of its plain, dry, and rather forgettable nature. I would’ve completely dismissed and abandoned the rice if not for the small portion size of dish. Because there was not a lot of everything on the styrofoam plate, I needed to continue eating the rice to prevent myself from fainting from hunger. As I started to mix the rice with the bean sprouts, crispy shallots, cilantro, cucumbers, and most importantly the soy-based sauce, I  began to appreciate the role it played amongst the other ingredients. The rice had to be dry to ensure that it did not become to soggy from sitting on top of the sauce. It had to be dry to accentuate the juiciness of the bean sprouts. It had to be plain-tasting so that the spotlight could be focused on the crispy shallots, the aromatic cilantro, and ultimately the not-externally-flavoured chicken. The rice was the way it is because it was playing a supporting role, and it played its role well.

I enjoyed every element of the bean sprout chicken dish that I ordered. It was tasty enough to live up to its being the headlining act of the Malaysian/Singaporean food court stall it came out of. If I had one complaint, it was that there was not enough of everything in the order for me to further enjoy. To thoroughly enjoy the dish, I might consider placing a double order of the bean sprout chicken the next time that I visit Ipoh Bean Sprout Chicken.

I have only dined twice at the Crystal Mall food court, and both experiences were completely underwhelming. The food was so bad that I almost completely blocked out my memories of the two meals in my mind. I blocked out the name of the stalls I visited as well as the names of the dishes I ordered. All I can remember was that the food was cold and that the flavours were unidentifiably suspect. I gave up on the food court after my second visit. I have never had food from the food court since then and I planned never to return unless a new stall opened up to great reviews.

But I had a change of heart yesterday. I decided to give the food court a few more chances. I reasoned that I shouldn’t be such a cynic and dismiss the entire food court just because I happened to receive bad food from two of its stalls. After all, there are more than a few reviews in the blogsphere by highly-regarded critics/bloggers singing the praises of the food offered by some of the stalls.

I started with Xu’s Wonton House – which seemed to be one of the better-reviewed stalls in the food court. I ordered two dishes: the XLB and the wontons in red oil (spicy chili oil).

The wontons in red oil tasted like wontons in red, lite soy sauce. The spice level of the sauce was very low, and so was the saltiness. Even though I knew that the sauce was in no way watered down, I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow some of the water that was used to boil the wontons made their way into the chili soy sauce and diluted it. The pork-based fillings of the wontons also tasted like they were flavour-deprived. While biting into the wontons, I was hoping that I would encounter scallion, napa, lard, or anything, ANYTHING that had a distinct and recognizable flavour; I never did. The best part of the wontons were their skins. They adhered nicely to the filling and stayed intact even when bumbled and mishandled by my clumsy lefty chopstick prods.

The XLBs were HUGE. They were, without a doubt, the largest individual soup dumplings that I remember having locally or anywhere else. I’ve never had any trouble stuffing any XLB in my mouth, but there was no way that this soup bun would fit. The XLB was so big that it actually took me three bites to finish each bun. There was also a lot of soup in each of the XLB. I was never able to suck all of the juices out of one bun without an excess amount dripping down onto my plate. The soup didn’t taste particularly unctuous or porky, it just tasted watery and bland. This blandness continued with the pork filling. Like the wonton filling, the XLB filling lacked flavours to the extreme. It also lacked any enjoyable textures. The filling was way too mushy from being inundated with too much soup. Unlike the skin of the wonton, the skin of the XLB was not its salvation. It was too tough and dry at the creases and it breached too easily at the sides. I was never able to not poke a hole in any of the five soup buns that I attempted to pick up with my chopsticks.

Xu’s Wonton House served me disappointing XLBs and wontons. This would normally be a deal breaker and discourage me from ever trying their food again, but I actually already have plans to revisit Xu’s because I want to try out their Chinese breakfast items (sticky rice balls, beef rolls, and egg pancakes). I’ll just be steering clear of their selection of dough-wrapped-minced-pork items.