I discovered Trader Giotto’s Gnocchi al Gorgonzolatwenty years ago, when my oldest was a toddler. She loved them then and still loves now. And so do I.
Pasta often has problems surviving the freezing and heating up process, and Trader Joe’s solved this by freezing the pasta in little slices, which it then intermixes with the gnocchi. As they defrost, the melted sauce coats them.
This dish, as you can imagine, is on the heavy side, but the sauce is delicious. It doesn’t have a very strong Gorgonzola flavor – otherwise my kids wouldn’t like it – just enough to brighten the sauce. It’s ridiculously caloric, so something to eat only once in a while. It sells for $3.50
We’ve been eating at the original Taqueria Los Pericos in the Pelton Center in downtown San Leandro for as long as we’ve lived in San Leandro, now more than twenty four years. It’s been our default taqueria all these years, and the offerings haven’t changed much. Indeed, my review from the early 00’s is just as timely today as it was over twenty years ago. The only thing that has changed are the prices. We probably don’t eat there twice a month now, but periodically get take out.
I always order a large special quesadilla, which comes with a large tortilla and includes your choice of meat, cheese, sour cream guacamole, lettuce and pico de gallo. They cost around $15.50, which is outrageous, but they are large enough that I split them over two meals.
I prefer these to burritos as I don’t like either rice or beans in my burritos.
In the photo at the top, the special quesadilla is on the right – you can see its size in comparison to a bean and cheese burrito (middle) and a small super quesadilla (left).
Last time I got a carnitas special quesadilla. The carnitas tend to be flavorful, not too fatty and stand up well to the other ingredients.
My other favorite is the carne asada special quesadilla, though the beef can be a bit fatty at times. It’s also very flavorful.
These are not out of this world quesadillas, but they are good and familiar.
Mike usually gets a small super quesadilla, which consists of a medium flour tortilla filled with the meat of your choice, cheese, sour cream and guacamole and folded in two. In the photo at top, the small super quesadilla is the one at the left. He likes it with pollo asado, grilled chicken. It’s around $8 now which seems absurd as it’s really quite small.
My daughter always order the bean and cheese burrito (the one in the middle on the photo at the top of the page). She likes it well enough, often asks to go to Los Pericos, but doesn’t think it’s extraordinary. It’s around $7.50, but she usually can’t finish it.
We often get the flan ($5), though we really should know better. If we’re lucky, it’s a competent and tasty flan. Too often, however, it’s absorbed the flavors of the fridge. In those occasions, it usually tastes musty. Last time, however, it had a disquieting cleaner flavor. I really should just remember not to get it from there.
All meals come with chips – they’ll add little bags with them to your take out orders or you can get them from the counter. They have a sauce bar where you can pick up different sauces, including pico de gallo. They also have pickled veggies and limes. Their chips are on the thick side, but pretty good as they ‘re fresh.
Los Pericos no longer has a website and they are not active on Social Media. You used to be able to order online through ChowNow, but they’re no longer using that service. That means you need to order through Doordash and GrubHub an pay higher prices and added fees, or go to the restaurant and order in person. As I didn’t keep my receipt from my order, I’m estimating prices here based on those posted at the GrubHub site.
Taqueria Los Pericos 101 Pelton Center Way San Leandro, CA (510) 352-7667 M-Su 8:30 AM - 9:30 PM
P-nuff was another item I saw on Shark Tank and decided to try. I found them at Amazon for $8.25, and while I’d normally not pay that much for a snack, I do want to try as many Shark Tank featured food items as possible.
This was another failure.
The peanut puffs are basically peanut flavored Cheetos. Instead of corn meal, these are made with ground navy beans and rice, but it’s the same concept. The ground cereals are mixed with oil and puffed.
They are supposed to be peanut puffs, but the peanut flavor is very subtle. This is not surprising as roasted peanuts are the next to last ingredient – salt is the last one. The peanuts do give the puffs a slight peanut aroma, but it dissipates quickly. It’s not bad, but it’s also not particularly delicious.
This was sold as a healthy snack, but I’m not sure I’d call it that. It has about half the fat and twice the protein that Cheetos, but it’s only a little bit less caloric. It has the same amount of carbs as Cheetos, but more fiber and, surprisingly, twice as much sugar.
I’m sure this is a great snack for vegans, but not something I’d buy again, even at half the price.
This Shark Tank product tastes just like graham crackers
Since I started watching re-runs of Shark Tank on YouTube, I’ve been intrigued with trying some of the products they’ve featured. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority does not seem to have made a commercial success and/or are not easily available.Oat Haus Granola Butter, however, is available at Target – and while it’s $8 price was steep, I figured I’d get both the pleasure of eating it and the pleasure of reviewing it. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be true.
I like granola, and while I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting, I thought this granola butter would taste like granola. Instead, it just tasted like graham crackers mixed with oil. I’m not a huge fan of graham crackers, so this product is just not for me.
Alas, my children didn’t like it either. While they like graham crackers more than I do, they did not like the chalky, gritty texture of this granola butter. I think someone noticed this as a minus in the show as well.
The granola butter is made with oats and sunflower oil, and while it has some sort of emulsifier, it doesn’t seem to work. The can comes with a thick layer of oil on the top that you have to mix in before consuming (unless you like eating oil). Unfortunately, you have to mix it in every time.
Unfortunately, but for the few minutes I spent writing this review, this was a total waste of money.
Birria, a Mexican dish of goat or beef marinated and stewed in a sauce made with vinegar, dried chilis, garlic and herbs, is having a moment here in the US. Quesabirria tacos, tortillas filled with birria and melted cheese, are suddenly all the rage and have been added to the menus of both Mexican restaurants and taquerias all over the place, while people try to recreate them at home. It’s thus no wonder that Trader Joe’s would come up with its own, frozen beef birria.
I tried it last week and I was unimpressed. The beef just lacked flavor.
The beef comes in large boneless pieces swimming in sauce. While you have to heat it in the plastic bowl it comes in (it’s frozen, after all), you do need to transfer it to a different plate to shred it. Obviously this is still less work that making your own birria, but I’d preferred if the meat was pre-shredded. That might also have helped it draw some of the flavor from the sauce. The sauce wasn’t super flavorful either, but a bit better than the bland beef.
Now, the beef does work well if you are going to add more flavorful elements to your tacos. I didn’t have any shredded cheese at hand – and I wasn’t about to chop anything – but I added some commercial sour cream and guacamole (not usual for birria tacos) and they were better.
The 16oz dish was $8, which doesn’t seem too bad, but I wouldn’t order it again.
Impretzively Fudged is another new Ben & Jerry’s flavor destined to not last for long. The creativity of their ice cream stuff seems to have long gone down the hill and they are now just simply mixing ingredients from their other flavors, not tasting them but hoping one will catch on by magic.
This flavor consists of chocolate ice cream with fudge-crusted pretzel pieces and a pretzel swirl. Basically, it’s a salty and crunchy chocolate ice cream. The chocolate flavor is too strong to let any of the mild pretzel flavor come through, but the pretzels and the pretzel swirl do contribute a light saltiness. I wasn’t a fan of it because I’m just not a fan of chocolate ice cream – but as a fan of salted caramel, I appreciated the salty flavor here as well. And I do like crunch in my ice cream, so that was a plus. Still, I do find chocolate ice cream boring and I won’t finish up the tub (not a bad thing)
Trader Giotto’s, aka Trader Joe’s, Fettuccine Alfredo is just that, fettuccine alfredo. It tastes like you expect fettuccine alfredo to taste. It’s not an espectacular fettuccine alfredo – it’s frozen, after all – but it does taste as close to home made as you can expect a frozen product to taste. It probably has as many calories as the home made kind, but I won’t look and confirm that.
I’m not a fan of thin crust pizza, but obviously carbs are bad for me so I could enjoy pizza more often if I could convince myself to go for the thin crust. California Pizza Kitchen might just convince me to do that.
I’d always liked California Pizza Kitchen, though I can’t remember going to an actual restaurant since my 22-yo was a baby. It’s not surprising, the only one in the East Bay is in Dublin, and if I’m going to go that way, I’m going to go to Zachary’s instead (and not for the thin pizza). Their frozen pizzas, however, are manufactured by Nestlé (a very problematic company). I didn’t realize that when I ordered this one, or that they also make DiGiorno and Tombstone pizzas). Hopefully I’ll remember and avoid them in the future.
These pizzas were on sale at Safeway last week for $6 (regular price is $10) and as we didn’t have particularly high temperatures forecast for this week, and I didn’t realize they were made by Nestlé, I decided to give them a try.
The BBQ chicken pizza tasted just like I remembered from long ao. I enjoyed the flavor combination of sweet (but not too sweet) BBQ sauce, chicken, red onions and cheese. The dough wasn’t too crispy, and it served the toppings well. Being so thin, it only required about 12 minutes in a pre-heated oven.
A pizza is large enough to serve 2 if you add a salad. At under 15-oz, it’s not a super great value, but probably better than filling yourself up with carbs. I’d get it again if it wasn’t made by Nestlé.
Low participation and limited deals made for a disappointing week.
For years now, large cities around the country – including our neighbors San Francisco and Oakland – have run “restaurant weeks,” where local restaurants serve specially discounted offerings to attract new (and returning) patrons. Usually, restaurants offer a prix-fix menu at a deeply discounted price, with offerings for lunch and dinner – though restaurants for which that model doesn’t work have other promotions.
San Leandro is probably too small a city to have a “restaurant week” – we only have three upscale restaurant, and I daresay the plethora of mom & dad restaurants around probably operate with thin margins. I have to give it to the San Leandro Chamber of Commerce for at least giving it a try, but the San Leandro Restaurant Week ended up being a bust. Few restaurants participated and among those that did, most had extremely lame deals.
Only three restaurants offered the usual 2 or 3 course prix fix deal. Horatio’s, our waterfront steakhouse, had a great 2-course lunch for $25 and 3-course dinner for $40 which we happily partook of. Paradiso, where we’d dined recently, offered its $45 3-4-5 prix-fix menu, usually only available from 4 to 5 PM, all day during restaurant week, though they did add on a 20% service charge. And Tequila Grill had a 2-couse meal for $35 which included a choice of one of three appetizers and entrees; by choosing the two most expensive dishes, you could save $8 over regular price.
Bust most of the restaurants that participated instead offered a modest discount on a few specific dishes, often just one per day. And some weren’t discounts at all. On Tuesday, we went to Habibi’s Birria for their restaurant week $2.50 tacos, only to find out they have that deal every Tuesday. Emile Villa’srestaurant week special menu offerings were the same price as those in their online menu. If you chose the most expensive items in Fieldwork Brewing‘s offering of an appetizer and pizza for $32, you could have ended up saving $9, but if you chose the cheaper options, you would have ended up paying more than by ordering without the deal.
Some of the restaurants were in my list of places to try, but their deals were so disappointing that I didn’t bother going that week. San Gaspar, where I went once over fifteen years ago and had been planning to return, had a single dinner promo, chile verde for $15 (regularly $19) – something that I didn’t find appealing. Zenti Bistro, which was greatly recommended on a local San Leandro group, offered just their chicken chipotle sandwich for $16 – as their menu is not online, I don’t know how good a deal that was, but the sandwich didn’t appeal to me.
But the absolutely worst deal of all had be that offered by Le Soleil, once my favorite restaurant in San Leandro but one I haven’t visited in many years. Rather than discounting a meal, Le Soleil offered that for any amount over $50 that you spent, they would give you a gift card worth 120% that amount – so if you spent $50, they’d give you a $60 gift card. The catch was that you could only use that gift card for 10% of the value of your future meals at Le Soleil. This basically means that if you went to Le Soleil twice and spent $50 each time, you’d save a whole $5 in both meals combined. No thank you.
The problem with the San Leandro Restaurant Week wasn’t just the lame deals, but how clunky and difficult to use the website was. There was no indication on the webpage what deals were offered by each restaurant, if you clicked on the name of a restaurant you were taken to their website, but with a couple of exceptions, their websites didn’t mention Restaurant Week at all. Only by clicking around at all graphics, did I manage to find their list of deals. More attention was paid to a silly game that required you downloading an app and then uploading a photo of your receipt for a chance to get the cost of your restaurant week meals reimbursed. The good news is that probably very few people did it, so you probably do have a good chance to win.
Now, all this complaining aside, restaurant week did work for me in that it made me finally go to Habibi’s Birria, where I fell for their tacos and learned about their ongoing Taco Tuesday promotion and that it sent me back to Horatio’s and reminded me how much I’d enjoyed the place back in my early days in San Leandro.
This local steakhouse is still chill decades after our first visit.
Horatio’s seems frozen in time – very similar today to when I first reviewed it 24 years ago. The bar has been remodeled and an extra dining room added, and new, less whimsical chairs added, but the nautical theme remains as does the basic architecture of the place. What has changed is the San Leandro marina, at which Horatio’s is located. The impossible cost of continuing to dredge this part of the bay has long made it unworkable and there are no more sailboats to see through the window. The mooring columns on the piers, bare and alone, reminded me of the Berlin Holocaust memorial. Alas, all grim thoughts were pushed aside, as I watched a raft of ducks pass by and then return and got into a good natured argument with my husband about whether a particular creature was a duck or a goose.
Horatio’s has always been a surf & turf sort of restaurant. I think once upon a time it might have been independent, then joined a local chain that included other marina-based local restaurants such as Skate’s, and is now part of Landry Inc., which owns massive chains such as Bubba Gump Shrimp, McCormick and Schmick’s and Morton’s. Still, Horatio’s seems to be operated as a stand alone restaurant and, as mentioned above, its feel hasn’t changed.
We went to dinner there on a Wednesday evening as part of the San Leandro Restaurant Week. Horatio’s had a 3-course menu for $40, which included 3 choices of salad, 4 choices of entrée and 3 of dessert. It was a very good deal, particularly as one of the entrée choices was prime rib, usually $46.5 by itself.
The meal started with bread. Horatio’s bread has gone through several iterations throughout the years, and the current is a light, country style bread smeared with garlic butter. It’s delicious. We couldn’t resist eating it all, though we managed to reject the offer for a second serving.
I started my prix fix meal with the Romaine Caesar salad (regularly $11.50). The crisp torn pieces of romaine come with croutons, parmesan and house made dressing. Mike found it generic and was happy he didn’t order it, but I enjoyed it. I felt that the long pieces of shredded parmesan really made the difference. The portion was rather large, so I wouldn’t complain about the regular price.
Mike also felt that his New England clam chowder (regularly $10 for a cup) was pretty generic. He enjoyed it, but didn’t feel there was anything special about this version. He’s have it again, however.
We both had the prime rib (regularly $42) and enjoyed it. It was served with a scoop of mashed potatoes and little cups of horseradish sauce and au jus. The prime rib was perfectly cooked medium-rare as we ordered it, it was tender but with some pull and pretty flavorful. I’m not the biggest fan of prime rib per se – I much prefer a pan-seared rib eye steak – but this was a nice steak, even if not comparable to the one from the House of Prime Rib which we visited recently. I did like their mashed potatoes, which were flavorful and not dry.
Mike ordered the crème brulée (regularly $12) which was as delicious as ever. Horatio’s has always had a very good crème brulée, I’m not sure what their secret is but it’s always been a favorite. It’s a large portion, good enough to share, and it’s now reasonably priced. When we first visited, over two decades ago, I was appalled at paying $9 for their desserts, almost half the price of a dinner entrée. Now they’re less than a third. In any case, I’d order it again.
I was way too full to eat my own dessert, a molten chocolate cake ($12 regularly), so I had it to go (extra 25-cents charge) and gave it to my daughter. I did have one bite, however, and it was absolutely delicious. This flourless cake has an intense, but not overly sweet, chocolate flavor and rather a light and melted consistency to not have any flour. The somewhat sour cream it was served with, as well as the fresh berries, helped cut through the richness. Once again, I was very impressed.
Service at Horatio’s was very good. Our waiter, Charles, was efficient, convivial, friendly and helpful. It reminded me us of what good service should be like. He refilled water and Mike’s soda ($5) repeatedly, offered us extra bread, and settled an argument over which were the prettiest ducks (mallards, I won) .
Reservations were easy to make and we were promptly seated.
We used to go to Horatio’s quite a bit back in the day, given the dearth of “date” restaurants in San Leandro, but we hadn’t returned in years. San Leandro Restaurant Week did their job of reminding us about Horatio’s, and I think we’ll be returning back – probably just walking in and eating at the bar as we used to. They have a happy hour from Mondays through Thursday from 3:30 to 5 PM that might be worth checking out.
Horatio's 60 Monarch Bay Dr San Leandro (510) 351-5556 SUN - THU: 11:30 AM - 9:00 PM FRI - SAT: 11:30 AM - 10:00 PM
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