I put a bunch of new restaurant reviews online. Many of them are from my trip to the wine country this year, so I decided to create a web page exclusively for restaurants in Napa & Sonoma. It’s available at http://www.marga.org/food/rest/napa.html. Mike (who edits my reviews) still owes me a few more, but for the time being here is what I have:
Bear Republic Brewery Co.
Good burgers at this famous Healdsburg eatery
Bistro de Copains
An upscale restaurant in Occidental managed to serve me a cold steak
Howard’s Cafe
Also in Occidental serves a pretty nice breakfast
KC’s Downtown Grill
Good coffee shop food in a dead town, Windsor.
Ravenous
Good food and a relaxing dinner at this Healdsburg gem
Sunflower Caffe
Great gourmet sandwiches in a funky patio
And coming back to the bay area, I posted a pretty old review of:
Sonoma’s
A San Leandro restaurant that unfortunately does not live up to its potential.
and a more recent review of:
Verbena
Good food in an office building in downtown Oakland
Author: marga (Page 56 of 112)
Today at noon Mika and I found ourselves at Zocalo, with an hour to wait before picking up Camila from daycare. We hadn’t had lunch, and Mika was hungry, so we studied the alternatives in the area (Bancroft & Dutton). There is Paradiso, which is good but expensive; Villa Portofino, which is not open for lunch, Al Attles’ California Cheese Steaks, where Mike and I had had lunch yesterday, and the Cornestone Cafe. Clearly, the Cornerstone Cafe was our only choice (OK, we could have walked a couple of blocks and eaten at Mae’s Soul Food or Tuttle’s Sea Garden, but I didn’t think of it, and I don’t think Mika likes fried fish/chicken anyway). So to the Cornerstone Cafe we went. All in all, we had a nice meal and I’d go back with her there again.
The Cornerstone Cafe has a pretty short menu, it includes some salads, soups, pastas and sandwiches, as well as daily specials. They also have a brief kids’ menu, heavy on angel hair pasta. Mika had the plain angel hair pasta, with butter and Parmesan ($3). She was very happy with it, and ate every single bit. The portion was a bit small, but it did come with bread and butter.
I once again tried the burger, this time with cheddar cheese and avocado. I ordered it medium rare, and it was a bit overdone. It was moderately juicy and it tasted better than I remembered. In all it was fine, better than what you get at most coffee shops, but not particularly great. I didn’t like the fact that the burger was ready at least 5 minutes before the pasta, and they let it sit in the counter so they could serve both together. They really should work better on their timing.
The burger comes with your choice of salad, fries or something else. I went for the fries and I didn’t like them. They were a bit dry and unseasoned.
Mika had a fresh-squeezed lemonade, which she liked, but found too sweet. I had a coke.
We ate at the counter and service was great. The waitress and the guy behind the counter kept checking on us, and making conversation with my little girl.
Best of all was the bill, $15.50 for the two of us. That’s definitely a bargain for that type of restaurant. As I said, yesterday we ate at the Cheesesteak place and spent over $22 – granted it was for two adults, but still.
Cornerstone Cafe
600 Dutton Avenue
San Leandro
510-562-2535
Original Review
I just checked them out and Castro Valley Adult School has a bunch of cooking classes – some also very affordable ($40 or so). They are mostly on pastry, but they have one on pastry & one on sauces. I’m probably going to take the latter. I hear that they do have a room with multiple kitchens for these classes. Info at:
http://www.cvadult.org/culinary.html
I’m more than pleased to announce that the San Leandro Adult School will have four cooking classes for the fall semester. The classes will be on Indian Cooking (9/13), Malaysian Cooking (10/4), Thai Cooking (10/18) and South East Asian Cooking (11/8). They are all taught by Jenny Sim, a Chinese woman from Malaysia, who lived in Thailand for a long time. You may recall (or not), that I took two classes with her (on SE Asian and Malaysian cooking) last year. I enjoyed them a lot. And they have the advantage of being *only* $35 – which is /very/ cheap for a cooking class. The classes include all the food, BUT they don’t have a kitchen at the adult school – so the instructor has to bring an electric wok and a camp stove.
Anyway, I’m planning to take the four classes – every time you cook different dishes. If you want to take them, you can register online at http://www.asaonlinereg.com/sanleandro/Classes.asp?txtAction=LoadSections&txtCourseGroupID=3&txtCourseCode=1425.
Earlier this week I noticed that a small cheesesteak restaurant had opened on Bancroft near Dutton, and today I had the opportunity to go give it a try. It was an OK experience, it’s a place I’d go back but not rush back to.
Al Attles’ serves hoagies and rice plates, and on this occasion both Mike and I had the steak & cheese hoagy ($8). We also ordered a portion of onion rings ($3.25).
The onion rings were fine. The breading was less flavorful than what I would have liked, and they weren’t served with ranch dressing, which I would also have liked, but they tasted as if they were made with fresh oil. They weren’t greasy, which I did like.
The hoagies were also much less greasy than those served at other local establishment. The meat was mostly lean, the vegetables (grilled onions, green peppers, lettuce and tomatoes) fresh, and the sandwich quite large. It was a bit unwieldy, however, and the meat kept falling off, so I mostly ended up eating a veggie sandwich. The flavor was fine, the meat (when there) was a bit overwhelmed by the other flavors, but all in all, I liked it. It didn’t awe me, though.
Service was very good. The small restaurant doesn’t have anything resembling ambiance, but it’s a cheese steak restaurant after all.
Al Attles’ California Cheese Steaks
571 Bancroft Ave.
San Leandro, Ca
510-639-3458
M-Th 11 AM – 7 PM
F 11Am – ?
Sa 12 – ?
I had a lot of mint left over from the Balti Lamb with Peas and Potatoes I cooked few days, and I wanted to use it up. So, of course, I went to epicurious.com and looked for a recipe that called for mint. Savory mint lamb chops is what I came up with. It was simple and got great reviews. The only minus is that it didn’t use that much mint.
Well, I made it last night and it was absolutely delicious. The lamb chops were tender and very, very tasty. You couldn’t taste the mint at all, but the marinade really enhanced the lamb flavor. In all, I loved them and I will for sure make them again. This time I served it with steamed broccoli.
I followed the original recipe closely, though I did not include the cayenne pepper, as my kids won’t eat anything spicy. The reviews also suggested that the chops were better without it.
Here is the recipe:
Mint lamb chops
Ingredients
Instructions
Trim the lamb chops of excess fat.
In a small bowl mix the olive oil with the mint, garlic, salt, cumin, coriander and black pepper. Spread the mixture on both sides of the lamb chops. Let stand for at least 10 minutes.
Meanwhile preheat the broiler.
When ready to cook, place lamb chops in the broiler and cook for about 4 minutes on each side for medium-rare. Serve.
As I said before, I’m done buying wines at Safeway. But before that realization, I got a bottle of Firefly Ridge Pinot Gris, which was supposedly 40% or so off (I think I paid $8 or so). Of course, now I know that Safeway gives inflated regular prices to off-brand wines they get in bulk, to then discount them heavily. Scammers.
Anyway, I couldn’t find any information at all about Firefly Ridge winery online. And all I can tell from the bottle is that the grapes come from the Central Coast and the winery is in Livermore and Ripon.
Now, as to the wine. It was crisp, light but with some body to it, easy to drink and with hints of fruit. It was almost sweet and almost bitter, but not quite. Its acidity came forward when drank in conjunction with some broiled lamb chops. In all, not an unpleasant wine, but not particularly interesting. I’d drink it, unless there was a better choice, but I wouldn’t buy it again.
Mike, on the other hand, didn’t like it at all, and was concerned at how much we paid for it. Live and learn.
This morning Michaela wanted to bake – which is pretty amazing because she usually disappears when Camila and I start making anything. She wanted to do it all by herself (or mostly, she still can’t read a recipe) and she wanted to make cookies. I barely had any ingredients – definitely no chocolate chips – so she suggested we make sugar cookies. I found this recipe on epicurious.com (my favorite recipe site), which had the advantage of requiring few ingredients. It did call for cream of tartar, which I didn’t have, but I substituted with lemon juice with perfect results. Indeed, the results were amazing. I loved these cookies and I’ll definitely make them again when the occasion calls for sugar cookies. Do note that they are a bit more crispy than your regular sugar cookie.
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup butter, at room temperature
- 1/2 cup vegetable oil
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup powdered sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp. vanilla extract
- 2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
- 1/2 tsp. baking soda
- 1/2 tsp. salt
- 3 tsp. lemon juice
- Water and additional sugar
Instructions
In an electric mixer, mix the butter with the oil and sugars until well blended. Add the oil and vanilla extract and mix well. Sift the flour, baking soda and salt into the butter/sugar bowl. Mix well. Add the lemon juice and mix once again.
Put the dough in the freezer for 20 minutes, or in the fridge for at least 30.
Pre-heat the oven to 350F. Grease two cookie sheets.
Place 1 Tbsp. of dough in your hand and roll into a ball. Place onto the baking sheet. Repeat until the dough is all used up.
Pour water into a small bowl, and sugar into another. Take a glass with a flat bottom, wet the bottom in the water and then press it against the sugar. Press the glass bottom on each cookie ball, each cookie should be about 1/4″ high.
Place the cookie sheets in the oven and bake until they start to brown, about 15 minutes. Cool down completely before removing.
It’s available at http://www.marga.org/food/int/canton/
My house is a mess. Always. Every day. No matter how much I clean, it’s always a mess. I say this as way of explanation of why I haven’t, and don’t see myself hosting dinner parties in the near future. I just can’t manage to both clean the house and have people over all in the same day.
I have, on the other hand, been very much in a cooking mode lately – so I’ve gone back to my international food project -, only now I’m following it by cooking single dinner dishes for my family. It makes it a little difficult to come up with a full menu – appetizers, main dishes, sides and dessert – but some of the cuisines I’m cooking don’t really lend themselves to mutli-course dinners anyway. I am hoping that by making the project part of my everyday cooking, I will start advancing it on it more quickly than in the past. After all, it’s taken me 8 years just to do 2 letters.
This past week I’ve cooked Balti cuisine and Caucasian cuisine. The former is a style of food cooking and serving created by Indian cooks in England – as far as I can gather, it’s very similar to what we get at Indian restaurants in the US. Next on the menu are Cantonese dishes – my first foray ever into Chinese food. I’ll also be cooking a couple of Awadhi dishes and may indeed go back to some “A” cuisines for which I didn’t have enough recipes to make a full meal.
Balti Menu
Caucasian Menu
Recent Comments