Urban Belly and a Detour

After Hot Doug's, we made our way back to the el stop via a path that would take us by Urban Belly. But then we came upon Carniceria Guanajuato and had to swing in. Why, by the way, is there a big Mexican community in Chicago? One would think that somewhere warmer would be a whole lot more comfortable?

Bastard Consultant and I immediately gravitated towards the aquarium displays of crispy fried chicharrone. But what really made us swoon was something that I don't have a picture for. It is pig's skin that has been slowly cooked until the tough ingredient has become gelatinous, sticky, and infused with the cooking broth.

It is: God Crack. Seriously. Every time a bit of the heavenly substance touched my lips, my eyes widened in wonder. God. How can something taste so amazing before one has even started chewing. Just from the moment it hits your tongue. God Crack.

God Crack that we ate huddled in the doorway of a closed real estate agent's office. Because it was cold. 40 degrees cold. Even though it was May. I swear, if it weren't some of these recent food finds, I'd be seriously depressed about this town.

After we had had our fill of surprise Mexican market delights, we made our way to Urban Belly, where we got the Asian Squash & Bacon dumplings, which though a touch too sweet, are pretty good overall.

The real reason why I wanted to come was to check out the Rice Noodle with hominy, kimchee and spicy pork broth. I had previously tried the Urbanbelly Ramen and been none too impressed. But Art Smith had gone on and one about the Rice Noodles in The Best Thing I Ever Ate.

Okay, this is a lot better than the Urbanbelly Ramen. The broth is fantastic, though the need for the hominy was debated amongst the Bastard Consultant and the Pesky Pescatarian. I like it well enough, though I guess it's not utterly critical.

Carniceria Guanajuato, 3140 N. California Ave., Chicago, IL

Urban Belly, 3053 N. California Ave., Chicago, IL

Urban Belly

Urban Belly is a little restaurant tucked into the Avondale neighborhood of Chicago, serving Asian inspired meals.

This was my first meal in Chicago with a foodie I could trust, and indeed, it makes a difference who one hangs out with.

Which isn't to say that everything was a hit however. The Urban Belly Ramen was heavy on the star anise flavors of pho, which resulted in a broth that tasted too savory and not the appropriate base for the ramen-style noodles. Maybe I'm an unyielding conservative at heart, but I automatically associate thin rice noodles with the aromas of a good strong Vietnamese pho-style soup. The sweetbreads, which were a special, also failed to be a complete success, but that didn't stop me from finishing them off. The sweetbreads were fried and coated in a thick sweet and spicy sauce, that made the whole dish reminiscent of Sweet & Sour Pork common on many Chinese restaurant set menus. The strong flavors overwhelmed the delicate sweetbreads, and frankly it wouldn't have made much difference if the restaurant substituted pork for sweetbreads.

Our other two items were fantastic. A pork belly fried rice topped with fried shallots was good and greasy and salty.

The best item was this Asian Squash and Bacon dumplings. The citrus sauce was a nice light accompaniment to the sweet squash and salty bacon.

Urban Belly, 3053 N. California Ave., Chicago, IL

Post-Thanksgiving Break-Down

How was your Thanksgiving? I zipped back to San Francisco, and I have to confess that Thanksgiving meal, food-wise, was a small disappointment, but it was great to see family. Usually, we do shabu-shabu for Thanksgiving at a family friend's place, as our own extended family is often out of town.

This year we stayed at home and had some family over. My dad cooked, and he upped and went rogue on me. Not wanting to do shabu-shabu I can handle, my dad's Chinese cooking is fantastic. Note the qualifier on Chinese cooking though. Dad decided to make a more traditional Thanksgiving meal, except he isn't entirely clear on what that entails. He knew there was supposed to be a turkey, but not wanting to grapple with that hurdle, he bought a half-turkey from a Chinese butcher. You know, those Chinese butchers that usually have half the carcass of a roast-pig hanging in the window, alongside some mahogany-colored Peking duck and glistening poached chicken?

There was no stuffing. No mashed potatoes. No gravy.

Instead, we had a ying and yang carrot and celery soup. Roasted cauliflower and green beans, which sounds delicious, but dad likes his cauliflower on the crisp side, so let your visions of deliciously charred and tender cauliflower slip away. He roasted some lamb, which was quite nice, but all-in-all I would have preferred a table laden with garlic and black-pepper crab, shrimp and egg stir-fry, a big heaping plate of seafood noodles, Chinese broccoli wok-cooked with cured pork-belly, some steaming bowls of wonton soup, and drunken chicken. Mmmm, that would have been so good.

Well, there's always Christmas!

Lao Sze Chuan: Wiser and Better

I went back to Lao Sze Chuan with my mom, and since she can speak Mandarin, we were able to get the wonderful suggestion of getting a bowl of crushed Sichuan pepper (also known as "numbing spice") to add to our dish of ma po tofu.

As you can see, we opted for a heavy hand in sprinkling the spice. My mom kept on talking about how I was going to get a sore throat from eating a dish with so much "fire," but she didn't stop me, and for that, I am grateful.

My mom ordered a spicy sour pickle and fish soup. Mmm, now doesn't that sound appetizing? Not quite. But it's a unique flavor and oddly soothing.

Getting a table at the restaurant was quite a deal. A middle-aged, slightly pot-bellied Chinese man with Grease-style slicked black hair and accountant eyeglasses was in charge of the wait, and it was mild mayhem. The restaurant has a second level that you can only reach from an exterior stairwell, so he'd run up to check the table availability, run back out to the second level walkway, and then shout down to us standing in the courtyard below: "NUMBER FORTY-TWOOOOO, NUMBER FORTY TWO!!!!"

I was determined that my mom taste the ma po tofu, so we waited it out and eventually got a table on the ground level and would spot towards the end of our meal, the chef Tony speaking to a white couple at a table near us. I was torn between uneasy curiosity as to why Tony wasn't sweatin' it over a wok in the back, why the white folks got to chat and greedy, gluttonous me had to just eavesdrop rudely, and finally, general indifference about either because I had dinner to eat.

Lao Sze Chuan, 2172 S. Archer Ave., Chicago, IL

Queens Food Crawl: Parting Thought

As we walked away from Jackson Diner towards the subway, we saw this restaurant, which to me typifies the range of offerings in Queens: a Himalyan-Chinese-Japanese restaurant.

An Epicurean Tour of Asia

It's important to cultivate friends with the proper priorities when developing a social circle. My friend recently took a year off and traveled through Asia and South America. He chose to celebrate his return to the States with An Epicurean Tour of Asia. Yay me!

I ate bags of these Indonesian nut chips while travelling in Bali, munching away while watching episodes of House M.D. on my brother's laptop.

This Chilled Curry Cauliflower soup hailing from Indian was a bit thicker than I would have preferred for what turned out to be another one of this summer's boiling hot days, but the soup was creamy and cold and slipped down my throat.

The homemade pot stickers turned out to be amongst the best of the menu. Since they are so readily available frozen or on many a restaurant menu, it's easy to forget how delicious these can be under the proper cook. Oftentimes, the skin is too thick or the filling too salty, but these were wonderful gyoza that lived up to all of their pot sticker potential.

I'm tempted to poach this menu item for my own summertime party coming up as the cool and spicy cucumbers were a welcome relief to the humidity.

The poached chicken with scallion and ginger were less successful, though my opinion is heavily biased by my general disdain for white chicken breast.

Ditto on the wine chicken.

The Singapore noodles were another reminder that there are variety of simple and strongly flavored dishes that I should pursue making at home. Sadly, I had to dash before the coconut ice cream arrived, which I heard went quickly -- obviously.

Makin' Lunch

My brother and I visited a temple in Bali, and I snapped this picture when I peered into the kitchen for the restaurant adjoining the temple.

Three Monkeys

Our last meal in Ubud was at a place, that remarkably, I remember: Three Monkeys. We went because Lonely Planet said that they had good Vietnamese summer rolls. My brother loves a good summer roll. Three Monkeys does not make amazing summer rolls. Don't go.

We ordered coconut juice with lime, which turned out to be young coconut juice and really not satisfying when what you were hoping for was a tall glass of sweet creamy coconut milk with beads of condensation running down the sides of the glass.


By now I had really given up on Indonesia food, so I tried the Singapore soup noodles. Not enough kick, but there was enough potential there that I want to go to Singapore and try some of their food. See, that's the thing. Really amazing cuisine is good enough that even poor renditions will still permit you to see the potential. A crap tarte tatin is still pretty good, so you know it's worth it to find a really phenomenal one. Though I guess those Costco croissants really give no indication of how amazing a fresh buttery croissant from a little Parisian patisserie can taste.


My brother decided to play it safe and went with the nasi goreng (more fried rice), but it had these bitter greens in it and he gave up on finishing his dish until I plucked all of the offending vegetable out of his platter. My brother is a grown man, but he still knows how to manipulate his big sister.

Three Monkeys, Jl Hanoman, Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

Another restaurant in Ubud

Maybe I'm not a true devotee of my passion. I mean, I spent a lot of time in Bali eating at restaurants designed for tourists. Like this one, where I ordered some green veggie juice. It had celery, cilantro and green apple in it and made me feel ridiculously healthy and virtuous.

And look, I'm not truly adventurous, because we ordered, yet again, a Tom Yum Soup. I wish Indonesia would consider adopting Thai cuisine as its own.

Boring grilled meats.

Well actually, this fried rice wrapped in either grape or lotus leaves (I'm going with lotus) was remarkably good. One of the better fried rice dishes of my life. It had a little kick in it, was super aromatic, and I found myself digging in the folded crannies of the leaf looking for the stray kernels.

Chicken wings weren't so exciting. But I love the skin so much, I don't really regret ordering it.

Somewhere near Monkey Forest Road

Oh crappers, this is what happens when you don't write things down. We went to this restaurant somewhere near the famous Dirty Duck restaurant in Ubud, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was. Dumb kid brother, you reading this? Do you know where we went? I bet DKB is not reading this. Loser.

Stir fried broccoli and garlic. Do you ever feel a bit duped when the waitress brings out a dish you could easily make and easily make better? It's not the restaurant's fault: they said it was just broccoli with garlic. I'm the fool who ordered it.

The fried noodles in Indonesia tend to be on the sweet side, and they often included a slightly bitter dark leafy green that DKB did not appreciate, and one meal I found myself diligently picking out every single piece with my chopsticks, just so he wouldn't give up on the entire dish.

Even halfway across the globe I'm a sucker for fried calamari, and this time my weakness resulted in a delicious plate of crispy seafood.

Had the most difficult time figuring out what kind of fish was in this dish with chili from Lombok, an island just east of Bali. The waitress solved the problem by bringing out the fish, and after observing that it did not look like anything I had seen scuba diving a few days before that was likely to be over-fished, I acquiesced to having it cooked up for my consumption.

These pictures are all out of order. Soon you're going to start having to suffer food photos taken on manual mode without flash in my new attempt to not be the totally obnoxious food paparazzi at the restaurant.

The prior picture is of a crab soup and this one is of a corn soup, which was better than a crab soup, but both had too much cornstarch for my taste.

Did I just inappropriately switch tenses there? I'm pretty good at knowing when to use a semicolon and how to identify passive, but the switching of a tenses always trips me up.

Somewhere near Monkey Forest Road, Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

Venturing Across the Street

Not surprisingly, when dumb kid brother and I did venture across the street from our hotel, we had one of our better meals. After scuba diving one day in Pemuteran, our dive guide took us to this restaurant facing the tiny street across from our hotel. Their Tom Yum soup was steaming hot, sweet, sour and spicy, just as I had barely dared to hope.

But the dining establishment did not exactly knock things out of the park with this chicken curry. It tasted like it looks.

The real reason why DKB and I went back to this restaurant was for their rendition of Nasi Campur, which our dive guide had enthusiastically recommended. We turned down the opportunity to watch a full moon ceremony (and the accompanying obligation to acquire some sarongs) to instead stuff our face with fried goodness: shrimp chips, chicken, tempeh, even fried hard boiled egg. Culture-schmulture, I got hunger.

Oh, and you know what's weird about the fruit juices they serve in Bali? They have watermelon, papaya, orange, the usual tropical options, but they also have what is basically an avocado smoothie available, which is always accompanied by a drizzle of chocolate syrup! Falls into the weird enough I don't know if I even like it category.

Amertha Bali Villas - part two

We had dinner at Amertha Bali Villas twice. The second night we had a Tom Kha soup that was a bit too watery, and you couldn't taste the coconut enough, but overall it was decent.

The Vietnamese summer rolls were beyond awful though. They had huge sticks of cucumber and carrot that were wholly unappetizing, and were inexplicably served with a soy based sauce.

We both decided to try Indonesian entrees, and I opted for Babi Kecap, which is basically pork in a sweet soy sauce. The meat in Indonesia we had was universally more tough than what I've been used to consuming in America. I presume this is in part due to the lack of a large CAFO complex to raise protein in Indonesia. Tough pork aside, the dish was not good. I generally found that the sauces for the Indonesian dished we had lacked complexity and were too sweet.

My brother's choice of Beef Rendang was not better. Same problems of tough meat, overly sweet sauce that didn't offer a very interesting taste profile.

I'll say this for Amertha Bali though, they make a really good oatmeal for breakfast. It's a tad on the watery side, but it has a good amount of cream in it, and it's served with brown sugar and raisins for you to add to taste.

Amertha Bali Villas, Pemuteran, Bali, Indonesia

Amertha Bali Villas

We spent the first three nights at Amertha Bali Villas, and ended up eating a few meals at the hotel restaurant, as there wasn't much in the way of alternative food options on the narrow strip of road the hotel turned off from.

The food was passable, it would turn out to be among the better food we had during the trip, but it's still hotel food. I think this is a Tom Yum soup.

This Thai Beef Salad was pretty tasty, but I just wanted a whole lot more of it.

The curries though, were generally all poor. This shrimp and pineapple curry was watery and lacked a piquant kick.

Amertha Bali Villas, Pemuteran, Bali, Indonesia

Bali Snack Stand

When we arrived in Denpasar, Bali, we had a three-and-a-half hour drive ahead of us. Luckily, we weren't doing the driving as the roads are narrow, not well-lit, and the general traffic rule seems to consist of honking repeatedly while driving into blind turns and passing scooters.

Halfway to our destination in Pemuteran, in the northwest corner of Bali, our driver stopped at a row of snack stands, and we picked up some cassava chips. The kid at our snack stand tried to jump into the picture as soon as he realized I was taking photos. It would have been nice to interact with him more, but I was far more interested in dodging any mosquitoes frequenting the night air than cultural exchanges.

Singapore Airport

The best food we had during our nearly three week trip to Indonesia was largely outside of the country, and most often in airports. We had a twelve hour layover in the Singapore airport, and after a good night's rest in what turned out to be a great airport hotel in the attached Crowne Plaza, headed down to the food court in the basement of the airport.

We got two bowls of more than respectable congee, topped with scallion and slices of fried Chinese donut. I got the pork liver and century egg congee, whereas my brother opted for the more traditional sliced beef congee. Piping hot, it filled our stomachs and gave us strength for the journey ahead.

We didn't get too adventurous and just stopped by a Thai restaurant front and got some nice green papaya salad and some Vietnamese summer rolls.

The summer rolls weren't particularly exceptional, but it was still all tasty, and I could have easily spent a few hours in the food court going from shop to shop waiting for second, third and fourth food waves to come.