Random food thoughts - Street edition

Don't know where I'm staying yet. Probably gonna find a place on air b&b. I know the first few days I'll actually be staying in San Jose and commuting (not my choice). But I believe my office will be near Mission St and 4th St.

Recs are very much appreciated. Thanks bruddas.

Oh, and I literally like every type of food there is, even vegan. Def prefer peasant food to the fancy stuff though. My favorite meal is rice and beans.

A lot to do in the South bay (SJ and surrounding areas) if you have a car, otherwise, better stick to the city.



pickpackpockpuck said:

Don't know where I'm staying yet. Probably gonna find a place on air b&b. I know the first few days I'll actually be staying in San Jose and commuting (not my choice). But I believe my office will be near Mission St and 4th St.

Recs are very much appreciated. Thanks bruddas.

Oh, and I literally like every type of food there is, even vegan. Def prefer peasant food to the fancy stuff though. My favorite meal is rice and beans.

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I've heard good things about Vietnamese food in San Jose. Unfortunately have never been, but I grew up in Garden Grove as a child (which has a big Vietnamese community), and have heard that San Jose's Vietnamese food is as good as Garden Grove's.

Thanks for the recs via PM, cyc. That's a big help.

Oh damn, I loooove Vietnamese so I'll check it out while I'm there.

SJ has good Viet and Mexican food. The surrounding suburbs have random specialty shops like ramen, hotpot, Taiwanese snacks etc. There's mostly mandarin/Taiwanese people on the peninsula and only mainland canto people in sf.



dieworkwear said:

I've heard good things about Vietnamese food in San Jose. Unfortunately have never been, but I grew up in Garden Grove as a child (which has a big Vietnamese community), and have heard that San Jose's Vietnamese food is as good as Garden Grove's.

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My house has the best viet food. Yall don't even know

said every viet household ever

there's a swd travel thread that started just a few weeks ago; one of the only discussions on it so far is san fran.

http://www.styleforum.net/t/402162/streetwear-denim-travel-recommendations#post_7230230

We also have an entire subforum about this stuff. A lot of CM guys travel a fair bit, and eat well, and would also have good recs. Most of them don't even bite. Our we have the random food thoughts thread.



LA Guy said:

Locanda and Delfina are also both good. Located if you like meat. It is one of @Parker's favorites. We had to wait for our table, but they comped us wine, and the food was very American-Roman, in a good way.

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What is American-Roman anyway? I understand NA pizza, wich is an interesting thing in itself but it is not typically Roman, do you mean like American variants of pasta dishes?



g transistor said:

:^)

the great thing is that it's almost true. With Viet cuisine no one knows what the **** they're doing. There's been so much influence from not only the French but also the Chinese that there's very little in terms of "traditional" recipes like in some other cultures. Especially with refugee families in America, every home does pho or bun or canh chua differently with different ingredients and flavor profiles that "authenticity" becomes a really weird thing, even if you go to Vietnam and have the food there. I make stuff differently from my mom, who made it differently from her mom, who made it differently from her mom. It's pretty cool, actually.

make me some korean food and i'll trade you some viet food, tho. I probably go out to eat Korean like 100x more than I do Viet

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Duck recipees with oranges come from France cuisine and seem to be relatively constant, pho though it's more like everyone has their own secret coca-cola recipee. Well that's from my own experience and I am not Vietnamese.

Fuuma said:

What is American-Roman anyway? I understand NA pizza, wich is an interesting thing in itself but it is not typically Roman, do you mean like American variants of pasta dishes?

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Well, I think that the best way to describe it would be through the restaurant itself, which is pretty illustrative of the differences. Osterias in Rome are typically pretty ristic places. Even the "Americanized" versions are often only well decorated by the standards of the 1980s. They feel like someone Italianized a Ponderosa steakhouse. On the other hand, Locanda has beautiful, professional, waitstaff, and the hardwood floor is emaculate. The lighting is uniformly warm - I think that they must have hudreds if not thousands of edison bulbs in there. And while you sit on high stools, they are all uniform and artfully minimalist, as if you showed a Craftsman style furniture maker a popular, and told them to make a version of that. The reclained aluminum table tops are also nicely and professionally aged.

So it is with the food. The portions are the same as they'd be for any "nice restaurant", and the presentations are artfully rustic. The meats are all well seasoned and well cooked. But it feels a lot more thought out than a place in Rome The seasoning, especially. It's much more herbal. In a lot of Roman places, it's salt, pepper if the cook is feeling fancy (you probably wouldn't call them chefs), and olive oil. Maybe a bit of garlic, depending.

It's definitely different from something that arose organically. Which is sorta what Americans are good at anyway. Take something from somewhere else, and add value to it. I like it, but at the same time, I wish that there were places with similar styles of food and less ambition, that would never make their way into a food magazine.

Yeah, pho is a pretty recent development for how it's pretty much considered a national dish and it's kind of funny when people say they want "authentic" pho, when the majority of the bowls people have had are MSG laden, spice packet broths. Lots of soup broths in Vietnamese food takes a lot of influence and technique from French cuisine, and my parents still make a heavily pot-au-feu inspired dish very often. I've also found that there's a really high amount of variance of French influence in Vietnamese restaurants, and my American friends seem to enjoy the more heavily French influenced style while my family prefer the less French influenced flavors and styles, leaning more towards Chinese cuisine. Probably just a regional thing from where we came from, though.

What are some of the clothing items that y'all have held onto the longest and are still wearing? It's been about 10 years now since I actively started caring how I look (which meant cropped Paul Smith peacoats and True Religion jeans at the time, but that's beside the point...) and I still have a couple items that still see weekly use. Shrink the time scale to five years and there's a lot more. Do you guys think about how long you can wear a given item, or is it all about what looks good right now?


On a side note, is pho better in the south or north? This is the best street pho I've had, from Bat Dan St in Hanoi. I've never been to Ho Chi Minh City, but I think I'll head there this summer to compare pho.