Rollin Out the Beef Rolls at 101 Noodle Express

It seems crazy that I've gone all these years without making it to 101 Noodle Express, but man am I glad I made it. I hit the Alhambra shop, though there are several branches in the San Gabriel Valley and even a few mall locations.

The thing to get here is the beef roll (pictured above) and after having it this weekend, it is something I'm going to be craving. Marinated beef with a sweet cilantro sauce wrapped in a Chinese pancake. This is everything you want in a snack: savory, sweet, salty and greasy with the added flavor boost of cilantro. It's hard to explain how good this thing is.

There are other good dishes at 101. The dan dan noodles are slightly spicy and are especially good with a few scoops of 101's cilantro sauce that you'll find on the table. Lamb soup with cabbage is a funk-o-rama with big slices of liver and hand pulled noodles. The liver isn't great...it's cooked to dry consistency, but all of that flavor is in the broth and the noodles are nicely chewy. Dumplings are okay, but nothing special and the fried ones tasted a tad off, like they were fried in old oil.

But the thing here is the beef roll, and that's what I'll be going for in the future, possibly pretty regularly. Oh, and they have a pork roll too. Next time...

101 Noodle Express
1408 E. Valley Blvd
Alhambra, CA 91801
(626) 300-8654

RIP Pal Cabron

I am saddened to report on yet another restaurant closing in my neighborhood. Pal Cabron opened with much fanfare and seemed destined for success. It was a spinoff of the popular Guelaguetza Oaxacan restaurant and it had fabulous cemitas, including my favorite La Muy Muy, a pork milanesa with pickled peppers, quesillo and the papalo herb on a big, fresh sweet bun. I was seriously obsessed with this place for several months after it opened.

I still need my neighborhood cemita fix so I guess I better start checking out the local cemitas trucks.

Rest in peace cabron.

Whiskey Wednesday: Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit

I haven't reviewed a Turkey in a while, so I thought I'd give Kentucky Spirit a spin. It's Wild Turkey's single barrel bourbon at 101 proof.

Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit, 50.5% abv ($45)

The nose is syrupy sweet, candy corn, caramel and toffee. The palate is less candy and has a nice richness to it with a good dose of wood, and a bit of a perfumy quality. There's a nice long finish with a good balance of sweetness and wood.

Choosing between this and Wild Turkey's Rare Breed, which is a bit cheaper, I'd probably take the Rare Breed which has such great balance, but this is a decent bourbon as well.

A Philly Diner in Tahoe

Completing my Northern California sojurn was a trip to the North Lake Tahoe area, centered in Truckee. Now, I've been to Truckee many times over the years and consider myself pretty familiar with its offerings, but I'd never made it to Jax Diner.

Jax is literally an old, east coast style diner in that the train style building originally housed a Philadelphia area diner dating back to the 1940s. It was shipped to Truckee in the 1990s where it now sits attached to a larger building.

Everything at Jax is homemade from the thick toast to the parmesan dusted potato chips to the crunchy potato salad. The day were there, there was a meatball sandwich special which had thick, moist meatballs on homemade rolls with a nice, tanky tomoato sauce. I was less impressed with the Philly cheese steak in which the beef got a bit too dry and I longed for more peppers.

The shakes at Jax, as one would hope, were excellent. Thick and cold and served with the extra in the metal cup with plenty of malt in the malteds.

We had lunch, but I'm guessing the breakfasts here are great. This will definitely become a regular stop for me when I'm in the Truckee area.

Jax Diner
10144 West River Street
Truckee, CA 96161
(530) 550-7450

Auburn Pie Stop: Ikeda's

There aren't too many reasons to head to the city of Auburn at the base of the Sierra foothills, but if you are heading to Tahoe or Reno from the Bay Area, you pass through Auburn on Interstate 80. And just off the Foresthill Road exit is Ikeda's, an old grocery store and food stand where you can get burgers and fries, high end beer and wine and all manner of homemade sweets (brittle, pretzels and nuts covered in all sorts of goo, caramels, etc.). But what you really need to get are the fruit pies. Ikeda's makes fruit pies and cobblers that are hard to beat. They have them all year, but in the summer, they are made with the seasonal fruit that grows in the Sacramento Valley. There is peach, strawberry rhubarb and all sorts of berry. My last trip I picked up a razzleberry (raspberry and blueberry) crumble. The fruit was fresh and the crust and crumbly bits on top are sweet and flaky. Now that's good pie.

Ikedas
13500 Lincoln Way
Auburn, CA 95604
(530) 885-4243

Whiskey Wednesday: Crown Royal Black

After Japanese Whisky, Canadian Whisky might be the whisky that we in the US are most deprived of. If you read Davin De Kergommeaux's excellent blog CanadianWhisky.org, you will see reviews of all sorts of fascinating Canadian Whiskies, very few of which are available anywhere in the US. Now, Japan is one thing given the distance, but it seems silly that we can't get all of the great whisky being made just north of the world's longest undefended border. For this reason, I get very excited when I see any new Canadian product, so I was happy to review Crown Royal Black.

Diageo owned Crown Royal is, of course, the top selling Canadian Whisky in the US. The newly released Crown Royal Black is higher proof (45% vs. 40%) and was matured in charred oak barrels to give it a more bourbon-like profile.


Crown Royal Black, 45% abv ($23)

The nose on this is very bourbony with doses of corn and rye spice. The palate is less distinctly Canadian than I would expect. It does start off quite sweet, but there is some significant rye in there that emerges and grows stronger. In some ways, it does taste more like a sweet bourbon, albeit a very sweet one, than a typical Canadian Whisky. The finish has some ethanol notes. This is a very approachable whisky, and the stronger rye presence adds some depth to the usually very sweet and one-dimensional Crown Royal flavor profile. It's a pleasant drink and definitely a step up from the regular Crown. It's the type of drink I would definitely order if it started popping up in hotel, airport and other bars with limited selections.

San Francisco Coffee: The Long Blue Line

So I spent a week in Sonoma but was fairly lazy about going anywhere else (hey, I was on vacation). We did one day in San Francisco visiting friends, but I had as my one food goal a visit to the legendary Blue Bottle Coffee. I've been hearing about Blue Bottle for years, but had never been. In fact, I hadn't been to the Ferry Building since its early inception as a gourmet food court, which predated Blue Bottle's stand there.

The only day we went to San Francisco was a Saturday, so I knew we would be facing a zoo, but I decided I wasn't leaving without a cup of that famous brew. There were three separate Blue Bottle lines at the Ferry Building, two inside and one outside at the farmers market, all about the same in length. The lines didn't look terrible, not much longer than a Sunday line at the Silverlake Intelligentsia, but they were painfully slow. It took nearly an hour to make it through.

And suddenly I was that guy, the dumbass who spent an hour on a Saturday waiting for a damn cup of coffee amongst food tourists and suburbanites in between their purchases of salumi cones and $60 bottles of olive oil.

I had intended to only order coffee, but once I got to the counter I also grabbed a waffle, since everyone else seemed to, and after an hour, I was pretty hungry. It was one of those hand held European waffles, hot of the grill and slightly sweet, nothing I'd rush to order on my own, but a fine accompaniment to the coffee.

And the coffee was a great, the service was friendly, the latte art was beautiful. Was it worth an hour wait? Was it better than the best coffee in LA? These are questions that are just too painful to ponder after an hour in line.

My advice? Try the coffee, but go on a weekday.