Check out these beauties.

Tu Lan

Greasy spoon meets Vietnamese noodle house at San Francisco’s legendary Sixth Street landmark, Tu Lan. Scuttling in off the gritty street, past the riff raff and into the cramped little dive, overwhelmed you rarely notice someone ushering you to a free seat. As you walk in the open kitchen is on your left with a classic diner style yellow countertop running along side it. To the right of the grill is a stack of dry chow mien noodles that reaches to the ceiling. Once graced by the presence of Julia Child, Tu Lan has forever memorialized the event with a picture of the culinary legend eating a bowl of their noodles on the cover of every one of their yellow laminated menus. Assortments of utensils are on the table for fork and chopstick users alike. Their iced coffee is served with flare; a drip coffee filter full of dripping coffee rests on top of a glass with condensed milk at the bottom. After the coffee has finished dripping you pour the concoction into a glass of ice that they provide and enjoy full caffeination. If the old-fashioned charm of the place doesn’t get you hooked, the enormous servings, the crisp vegetables, the zing of fresh ginger, and the cheap prices will. Eat here. It will save your life.

HI-TECHNICAL * EXCELLENT TASTE AND FLAVOUR

“Black Black”, the famed Japanese chewing gum, came into my life at age twelve in a big way, on a trip to Japan with my Hawaiian auntie Amy and my cousin Tori. We stayed on the US military base in Yokohama with Amy’s brother and his family. Having been to Japan before, Amy showed me what was what. “Black Black” was what. It scared me in a number of ways: 1) while not being legitimately black it’s slivery grey color is dangerously unheard off in the gum world of light green spearmint and cinnamon reds, which means that it is not a normal gum, which means that it is probably bad, 2) Like the black gag soap that I left in the guest bathroom for visiting relatives, I wondered if the gum would leave black stains on my teeth, and 3) “Black Black” sounded satanic or heavy metal, two things that a young impressionable girl like me was scared of at age twelve. But I felt adventurous, so I tried it, loved it and chewed “Black Black” the rest of the trip. It became a symbol of the true extent of American globalization; a dramatic West meets East and then share a teriyaki burger together at McDonald’s sort of symbol. “Hi-Technical, Excellent Taste and Flavour,” just the sort of absurdity that populated the food court at the Yokohama mall; when eating a bowl of Ramon I heard the distinct cry of “Rawhide” coming out of the stereo speakers, not to mention the life-sized replica of Colonel Sanders himself testifying for the authentic Kentucky taste of the Japanese salmon sandwich that could be purchased right then and there. I loved it. The hodgepodge of familiar and the unknown, re-contextualized pop culture, like some strange MTV video. To this day when I chew “Black Black,” I taste a perfect amalgam of all this: bean curd and noodles, ginseng, rawhide, green tea, KFC, the incense I put in front of the big green Buddha, karaoke in the living room, and seaweed.

YES, CHEWING!

Czech Carp

Carp. As a fish it never interested me and not because of its uncleanly reputation, the fact of the mater is I barely knew of its existence until my winter trip to Prague when I happened to drop into the middle of a national fish obsession. In the days leading up to Christmas, Carp appear in the Czech streets. Suddenly becoming in season, like long awaited winter persimmons or rainbow chard, the fish are transported from fishponds in Southern Bohemia into cities and townships where they reside in large plastic vats. These vats are packed so full of Carp that there is no extra space for them to swim. Their fish lips pucker smack up against the plastic, and their bodies are completely motionless except for the metered movement of their gills. Arguably, the “flying” fish at Pikes Market get more exercise than the unfortunate Czech Christmas Carp and the proverbial “sardines in a can” have a more comfortable accommodation. Yet each fish purchased is meticulously scrutinized over, like the search for the perfect Christmas tree. “This one’s to fat, this one’s too skinny, that one’s missing an eye.” The Carp’s mysterious whole-hardy following provoked my culinary curiosity. Perhaps the United States is missing a Christmas dinner of true divinity. Jesus did use fish to feed the poor. Maybe a departure from gluttony is in order. The abandonment of our overstuffed Butterball birds in turn for a lighter fare, the other white meat.

The traditional Czech Christmas dinner starts with fish soup (of the Carp variety) and a basket full of bread. Knowing that the main dish would be more than enough tradition to sustain my Christmas Carp curiosity I opted out of the appetizer and went straight for the entrée. When the fish dish arrived, there was a gasp of shock at the table. Where the gasp came from I am not sure. Cultural sensitivity prevented my lungs from actually inhaling any unordinary amounts of air, but its utterly unattractive appearance was surly the cause of such a stir. Bland, drab colors and a mound of dome-shaped potato salad formed by the distinctive mold of a cafeteria-style serving utensil, which recalls to the refined epicurean the utter repulsiveness of trough style cuisine that plagues all children in the American public school system. The Carp, covered in flour, egg and breadcrumbs, was fried in oil on par with the most common fish frying practices. And that was all. No garnish of redemption.

Like the presentation, the overall meal was insipid. The potato salad tasted like supermarket potato salad; a soft flavorless substance covered in mayonnaise with the occasional crunchy and sweet piece of relish. The Carp, oh sad horrible bottom dweller that it once was, was awful. I had such hope, such high expectations, only to have them tumble down around me as I ate. While not bland by any means, the carp had a pungent old-fish-left-out-in-the-sun character. With more bones than meat, I spent most of my meal searching for slivers of fish, that once found, I had to force down my throat while holding back the urge to gag. I gave up on finishing the Carp about halfway through the meal and focused on the potato salad. But soon the potato salad was dulling my senses, I had to stop and regretfully throw in the napkin.

On the walk back to my pension, post Carp letdown, I puzzled over my initial disappointment with enlightened humor. Tricked by my American dream of European grandeur, I assumed that the traditional Christmas Carp was a delicacy of refined European taste, when in fact it resembles something more like post-war American green bean casserole. Traditional American foods taste like cardboard but they have a special charm. They remind me of the days when America was moral, clean and in Technicolor. Quaint and absurd, I keep coming back to pineapple upside-down cake and grandma’s potato casserole, not because they are tasty, but because they are the epitome of kitsch Americana that I love. Tradition is tasty. It must be the same for Carp. Perhaps it is a leftover from an era of wartime thrift, like spam in America. After years of eating Christmas Carp maybe I too could love it with the same fervor as the Czech people. Maybe next Christmas, Carp will taste more like spam.

Taste of Place

8:00 pm, first Friday in September. Oakland Art Murmur. I wove my way through the crowded Mama Buzz Café, occasionally looking over my shoulder to make sure my friend Jon hadn’t been engulfed by the waves of people pressing upon us. I pushed myself forward, searching for some small corridor of space in which the two of us could squeeze from the coffee bar into the gallery to look at this month’s selection.

Jon has newly relocated to Oakland from the California Central Valley. We both grew up there, but I have been living in the Bay Area for around five years now. I feel a certain responsibility as “city mouse” to introduce him to urban life, culture, and the flourishing hip-ness that envelops concrete. Unfortunately I hadn’t been doing a good job at my introductions. The Oakland Art Murmur was my reconciliation.

Jon is a fledgling photographer, full of potential but lacking confidence. The Murmur was the perfect opportunity to introduce him to the Oakland scene. The streets were as crowded and full of excitement as inside the galleries. Squinting my eyes, all the people spilling out onto the streets, mingling among the grit and the graffiti transformed the cityscape into one giant gallery. We roamed. Discussed the work, its political-social-emotional-symbolic-bullshit implications. I put on cosmopolitan airs.

As I was looking at a nature illustration at the Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, Jon tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I had been up stairs yet. “No.” I hadn’t. Knowing I have an obsession for all things food related he mumbled something about an artist getting people to eat dirt and said I had to see it.

The stairs were in the back of the gallery. We walked up and turned left. In front of us there was a crowded bar. An young man with curly black hair and dark eyes was setting a wine glass full of diluted dirt in front of a man and a woman at the far end of the bar. Jon and I, bellies forward, up against the bar, peered down upon a square white plate with several French Breakfast radishes and slices of zucchini. Beside the vegetables stood three large beakers of soil labeled with the name of the vegetable that was grown in the soil, the name of the farm that the soil was from and where the farm was located. It was all very scientific. Right down to the bartender’s lab-coat inspired starched apron.

I noticed right away that two of the beakers held soil from T&D Willey Farms, an organic Community Agriculture based farm located in my hometown, Madera, CA. My dad is friends with Tom Willey and has been cooking with Willey’s vegetables for years now. Every Tuesday night when the weekly vegetables in the T&D Willey Farms box were distributed, he would invite our friends over for a night of friendly libations and experimental cooking, using the seasonal vegetables found in the box as the base for the meal. Tuesday nights became so infamous that within our circle of friends that Tuesday night is now colloquially known as “Willey Box Night”.

Soon we were being served our own glasses of delectable dirt. The bartender scooped some of the soil from the T&D Willey radish beaker and placed it in a wine glass. Then he poured in a small amount of water to stimulate the earth aromas. As he worked he began to explain the process. First we were to smell the soil and develop an impression of the flavors present, much like smelling a glass of wine. Then we were to taste the radish and explore the relationships between the radish and the soil.

I swirled the dark soil with the ostensible skill of an enologist, raised the glass to my nose and took a deep and resolute sniff. Underneath the smell of a first rain there was a distinct spicy character that tingled my nostrils. I tasted the radish, smelled the soil and suddenly I understood. My mind distilled the intangible spicy scent into the distinct form of a radish. I watched, before my eyes, a slide show of soil and radish in their previous life together, radish nestled in the arms of the warm soil. My mind zoomed out from beneath the soil to above ground, from their happy home with their friends’ worm and ant, to the whole farm, and then all of Madera and my own home. I couldn’t help but feel deeply connected to the little radish now resting in my tummy. We grew off the same land. I grinned.

The artist, Laura Parker, is a San Francisco based artist and a good friend of Tom Willey. Her work often focuses on agriculture, the environment and social structure. It was her intent to provide a space for public dialogue about the origins of food and the process in which it is grown. “Soil, the medium of every farmer, makes up the palette that creates the distinction among growers. It differentiates between farms; between the family farm and agribusiness, sustainable practices and non-sustainable ones, the caretaker and the cavalier.” (Parker, Taste of Place pamphlet, 2007)

It is precisely these issues, which Laura Parker’s work evokes about the relationship between the taste of the place where a food is grown and that of the food itself, in Parker’s case soil and a radish, which I will elicit in my vivid personal tales of the origins of food. However, I will not only focus on the flavors of soil but rather the entire place of origin, including the geographical and cultural landscape. Be it a story about Matsutake mushrooms or cranberry pancakes, I will divulge everything, all the hidden secrets and all the subtle flavors will be revealed. And I guarantee that if you read this blog, food will taste better.


Oakland, California.