L'Atelier

Once again, Joel Robuchon provided me with an amazing foie gras experience: mini burgers composed of seared foie gras, sauteed sweet peppers, a ginger sauce and brioche buns. Rather than sitting through a six-course dinner at Joel Robuchon at The Mansion, as I did last time with six companions, I squeezed my single self between Europeans at the counter of L'Atelier, Robuchon's more casual restaurant that is located right next to the fancier digs in the MGM Grand hotel. When my waiter served me my foie gras burgers, the French quartet who sat to my right whispered in awe. "It's beautiful!" one of the Frenchies told me. "It's foie gras!" I replied. I know I'm going to make a run for the Nevada border to Joel Robuchon's doors once California bans the production and sale of foie gras in 2012. Political correctness be damned; I'm addicted to foie gras. Following the foie gras was a seared halibut served under a clear ravioli skin brightened with dots of green basilic oil. I also received a little red pot of pureed potatoes, which my waiter informed me were Robuchon's specialty. I would have ordered a stew-size container of the potatoes. They were divine. Unfortunately, I was too slow to capture a picture of my dessert: a white chocolate sphere filled with yuzu ice cream and surrounded by raspberry sauce. If there is one thing I like more than foie gras, it is yuzu, a Japanese citrus that tastes like a lemony orange. This was definitely my lucky night. The ombre orb was white and red, symbolic of the yuzu and raspberry. As soon as the waiter set the ball in front of me, he poured the warm raspberry puree over it. Gold foil fluttered under the weight of the scarlet sauce before the entire ball imploded, ultimately turning into a delicious Death Star.

By George!

LIke many cities, Las Vegas is trying to spruce up its downtown district. One of the sentries of gentrification is Triple George Grill, which has one foot in the past with its extensive list of martinis to be sipped before, during and after a bloody steak dinner and another foot in the present with a giant TV screen blasting the latest professional sports game above the bar. Passing on the martinis and rib-eye steaks, I opted for a glass of pinot grigio and the Shrimp George. Six plump prawns were stuffed with crab meat, grilled to a golden brown and plopped atop a creamy wine sauce. The mashed potatoes were chunky and buttery. I didn't like how the white and green beans were undercooked. My friend Eileen later told me, when I described the meal to her on the phone, that the new trend is to eat overly crunchy beans. The bourbon bread pudding I had for dessert balanced out the extra bite of the beans. Eggy and mushy, the bread pudding was comforting. Next time, I'll make sure to bring my own flask of Maker's Mark to give the pudding a little more zing.

Viet Peeps in Reno

I supped on bun bo hue, or Hue-style spicy beef noodle soup, at Saigon Pearl. I had to support the Viet peeps! The lone waiter insisted on speaking English to me, even though I heard him bantering with the cook in Vietnamese. I felt a role reversal from my childhood, when my parents spoke Vietnamese to me and I responded in English. Saigon Pearl’s food was authentic, right down to the four cubes of coagulated cow blood bobbing in the chili-infused broth. Not even Viet restaurants in L.A. offer those protein blocks or chanh muoi, lemonade seasoned with a whole lemon preserved in salt.

Enomatic

I discovered my first “enomatic” wine serving system in Reno, Nev. Actually, I found three of them at the Vintage Wine Shop, which, despite its location in a strip mall, is a laid-back haven for oenophiles in northern Nevada. The enomatic is Italy’s answer to Japan’s beer-vending machine. I inserted a pre-paid card into the enomatic, picked whichever wine I wanted to taste and pressed a button above the wine bottle. Two tablespoonfuls of wine trickled automatically into the glass. The machine didn’t render the human drinker completely useless as I had to participate somewhat by holding my glass under the metal tube through which the alcohol was dispensed. Each tasting of wine was priced from 99 cents to $10.99. While most of the bottles were set merry-go-round style on a circular platform, some – the riesling, sauvignon blanc and pricey Opus One -- were stored in a refrigerated case. My favorite was Trentadue’s chocolate amore, an Italian red wine flavored with natural chocolate essence, that danced slowly on the tongue before giving a chocolate curtsy.

What's It Gonna Be

This music video is so subversive that it's genius. Mike, the white boy, reminds me of a cross between Jack Black and Robert Redford. Yoshito, the Japanese foreign exchange student, must be minoring in dance, with a focus on Michael Jackson moves, if his performance is any indication. Questions flowed with the giggles: Is Mike wearing a toupee? What's up with the mylar unitard?

Perfect Euro Supper

Sorina -- my pal, a Romanian journo-rocker chick and one-fifth of our band FAB -- has moved to Berlin for a two-month jaunt in Europe. During her downtime from researching the plight of high-rise dwellers in the former communist district of the German city, she's assembling and eating the perfect Euro supper (as seen here), hopping across the Norwegian border to hang with a touring rock band and asserting her right to camp anywhere she damn pleases in Sweden. She's also chronicling her adventures on a blog that muses about love, death and everything in between.

Slanted Door Gone Straight

This was my first visit to the esteemed Vietnamese restaurant Slanted Door in its new – and third – location in San Francisco. I’ve eaten at both the original spot on Valencia Street in the Mission and the temporary location on Embarcadero Street that opened while the current venue in the renovated Ferry Building was being finished. While the latest incarnation in the Ferry Building is spacious and affords an incredible view of the Bay Bridge and ocean, the sleek and modern interior is impersonal. My sister likened the place to an airport hangar. The new space must be four times the size of the original restaurant. More hungry stomachs, more business. But opening the glass and steel doors to the trendoids resulted in a loss of warmth and camaraderie that I fondly remembered from the original Slanted Door. It’s true that the first location in the Mission district was a little ghetto, what with its dark wood furniture evoking an opium denim and the crack dealers who were wheeling and dealing a couple of blocks away. But my Friday night dinner party – with the Lioness, Hippie Dude and La Francaise -- made up for Slanted Door’s sterility. We feasted on green papaya salad, shaking beef cooked medium rare in a scallion swirl, catfish in a clay pot and and a cookie ladder set gingerly atop a bowl of sweet porridge of yellow beans and tapioca, among other delicacies that I picked from the tradition-inflected menu. The bottle of riesling (Schloss Gopelsburg from Austria) was a nice touch. My after-dinner tea, dubbed Hong Kong milk tea, wasn’t traditional at all. But I liked how the chef modified the recipe for Vietnamese iced coffee, which is made with a slow drip of chicory-roasted coffee and sweeten condensed milk, by mixing black tea with the gooey milk substance.

Cafe Claude

Scoop-hungry journalists often remind each other that if you snooze, you will lose a big story. Food-hungry, I heeded the motto when I placed one of the last orders for moules frites at Cafe Claude. In San Francisco for a bit of R&R, I washed down the mussels cooked in a creamy wine sauce, flavored with transparent dices of shallots and specks of parsley, with a chilled glass of Sancerre. The fries were cut shoestring-style, which is my favorite option for cooking potatoes, but they were a little too skinny to absorb the woozily delicious mussel sauce. For dessert, I shared a cup of dark chocolate mousse with the three fashionistas who joined me for lunch. The meteorologists were proven wrong when clear blue skies replaced the thunderstorm clouds they had predicted. So I walked off the rich French food before heading to my next meal with friends.

Hot in Herre

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Fun!

Firecrackers Exploding on My Tongue

Having nearly exhausted the menu of Fosters Freeze and hearing a piercing fax tone instead of a human voice when I called Blue Hen, I drove up and down Eagle Rock Boulevard in search of a restaurant that met my food snob standards. I settled on Mia Sushi, which offers valet service to patrons who don't want to park in the neighboring streets where liquor stores and low-slung apartment buildings abound. I decided to go ghetto and save the $4 valet fee for my food, pulling my car in front of a La-Z-Boy recliner discarded on the curb. Mia Sushi transcended the roughness of the neighborhood. The manager was friendly and helpful when I inquired about the salads. He recommended the firecracker salad, which was raw tuna served on romaine lettuce, julienned carrots, shaved daikon and fried wonton skins. For my to-go order, he separated the greens, red dressing and fried wonton skins in three different containers. What he didn't do was explain why the dish was called firecracker. I realized why after I shoveled the first forkful in my mouth. The dressing was made with Sriricha chili sauce. Despite my Viet pedigree, I'm a wimp when it comes to spicy food. For that one salad, I had to drink two tall glasses of water.

Voracious in Verona

Cafe Verona, where I had lunch Saturday with two of the FAB Five on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles, was Italian only in attitude and cooking. The waitress was quite pleasant in showing us to our courtyard table. Halfway through the meal, however, she turned into a not-so-fair lady. I couldn't explain the mood swing. Maybe I shouldn't have asked for additional bread to sop up the delicious puddle of sweet balsamic vinegar and peppery olive oil. Perhaps I was too aggressive in reminding her to bring the hot sauce for Peter, whose hand in the photo demonstrated the proper way to dip the chewy bread in oil and vinegar. The waitress's scowling didn't detract from my enjoying the parmesan polenta, two eggs cooked over medium and rectangular toast. In trying to explain polenta to my lunchmates, I searched for a metaphor from my Southern childhood. Polenta, I said, was essentially Italian grits. Made of pulverized cornmeal, the polenta is cooked with butter and water until it is creamy. Cheese transforms polenta from a bland carbohydrate into comfort food that smothers the tongue in goodness. I prefer cheddar cheese with Southern grits, but I think parmesan cheese is the ideal flavoring for polenta. All in all, the meal was a nice coda to the fun band practice that the FAB Three had earlier that day. Despite her funky attitude, the waitress was so efficient that she cleared the table before I could take the after-lunch picture.

Artful Architecture

My friend Bruna tipped me off on a gallery reception yesterday at SciArc for an Argentine architect named Florencia Pita. "Imagine a Junya Watanabe ruffle pattern transformed into architecture in a shiny magenta 67 PETG," Bruna said, adding that she wrote a fairy tale to accompany the artwork. A big fan of Watanabe, I had to pop in for a visit. Plus, I was already wearing my blue suede boots, which made me feel as if I were a character stepping out of the woods in a Grimm fairytale. I wasn't prepared for the shock of pink waves that greeted me in the shoebox of a gallery space. My writer's mind brimmed with metaphors: tripe, Balenciaga's Victorian-inspired blouses for spring 2006, an accordion, cotton candy, a garden maze, etc. Pita, who is in her early 30s and has been teaching at SciArc for fewer than five years, said she came up with the idea for the vinyl and foam installation after seeing a fashion and textile exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt in New York. She supervised 57 students at the architecture school for the month-long project to cut, by hand, pink vinyl sheets that were attached together with metal screws and also to shape lavender foam that resembled sand waves left by a receding ocean tide. Clad in all black with a choker composed of pearl-sized laboratory glass beads, Pita had enough style and charm to get anyone to do anything. She said she originally wanted to have the pink sheets stand vertically in linear rows. On the gallery's smooth pink floor, however, the straight sheets fell over. So she decided to attach them at intervals and form curves that could defy gravity. The best view of the installation was from the second-floor catwalk above the gallery.

Thrilla from Manila

Max's in Glendale, Calif., promised 60 years of sarap, or good, to the bones. It delivered. With each platter of grilled pork knuckles and fried chicken skin and bowl of Technicolor taro ice cream, the Southern California outpost of the famous Filipino restaurant in the Bay Area provided something delicious to fill our tummies--if not to clog our arteries. The food can be a bit heavy, and one sitting at Max's will meet your salt and cholesterol quota for the month. But you can't forego the crinkly crispiness of the fried chicken skin, softened a bit after a dip in vinegar. I had fun and learned a lot (peanut butter to flavor eggplant and oxtail soup?!) when I relinquished all expectations in the comfy, unpretentious setting where pajama-clad toddlers walked to strangers' tables and peeked at what they were eating. I was also lucky to make my first visit to Max's with Missy, who recommended all the dishes that she loved eating at her parents' house and would be good for us to try. My friends and I were too stuffed to try our hand at karaoke held every Wednesday in the bar. Maybe next time I'll rock out with a mic in one hand and a chicken leg in the other.

Out and About

The past week was a social whirlwind. I was grooving and twirling from Hollywood to Santa Monica like a nocturnal banshee. After watching Irving bob their indie rocker heads at King King on Wednesday, I asked each of the five members to sign my copy of their new CD. They obliged, partly because I was introduced to them by a mutual friend who works with the keyboard player and mainly because my request helped boost their egos. I even played a practical joke and called the drummer (or was it guitarist?) some secret nickname that one of the other members divulged to me. On the following night, I saw a couple make out in a corner of Ace Gallery. Unfazed by the triple capacity of people who swarmed to the gallery to catch a glimpse of Dennis Hopper's white noggin and see his new exhibit of photographs and paintings, the lovers helped fog up the windows, on which visitors doodled non sequiturs and cheeky alien faces. Why should Hopper get all the creative license? Props to June-chan for capturing the two in flagrante delicto, as well as Irving on stage, on her cell phone camera.

Then, on Friday, J-Artist and I shook our booties to Ursula 1000's grooves at Zanzibar. Ursula 1000 is a New York friend whom I last saw in Tokyo two years ago when he and his wife were touring Japan to support his then-released album, "Kinda Kinky." His wife is the model with the sexy eyes on his new album, "Here Comes Tomorrow." I once played the title song from the older album for a musically gifted but pop-culturally obtuse friend, who asked what the hell it was. My response: "Bossa boogie!"

Not Enough Cooking Time in the Kitchen

Whoever came up with the idea to serve grilled pork chops with apple sauce was a genius. The version offered by The Kitchen, a shoebox of a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Los Feliz, would have been brilliant if the meat wasn't undercooked around the bone. That was truly disappointing. I told the staff member who cleared the table about the problem and he looked at me as if I were from another planet. I wasn't asking for a refund or a new plate, and I didn't want to press the issue as I was there celebrating a friend's birthday. But the waiter could have acknowledged my complaint and used it as a cue to revise the grilling time for the pork chops. Or else other customers who don't take pictures of their food and pay attention to the aesthetics of their appetite will become sick. At least the mac 'n' cheese and round potato latkes stuffed with goat cheese were perfectly golden.