Offbeat Eats

(Closed) After a bit more roaming around the Mission with Emily, we decided that checking out Mission Cheese would be a good idea for lunch, especially since they had opened only a few weeks before. Mission Cheese is actually quite a simple concept: a neighbor restaurant space with a menu focusing on, well, cheese, as well as raclettes, light plates, and sandwiches featuring cheeses. The idea is to find some really good cheeses and make sharing plates and sandwiches that highlight them…

My first morning in San Francisco, I decided that it was time to knock Dynamo Donuts off of my hit list. I had been craving a trip to Dynamo Donuts since reading about them on David Lebovitz’s blog almost three years ago. Luckily, it’s only about a mile away from Steve and Emily’s place, and they’ve been there several times, so it wasn’t hard to convince Emily to come with me for a trip to Dynamo. Located in the Eastern part of the Mission, Dynamo is a little bit of an odd fit, being located in a block that’s mostly various Latin American restaurants and stores. But being the Mission, this isn’t too out of place (if I had to pick the two major types of dining establishments in this part of town, “taqueria” and “coffee shop” are probably on the top of the list). It’s also a fairly subtle storefront, being basically just a short ordering counter and a door that leads both inside, and through to a nice patio in back (that’s easy to miss). But really, it’s about the donuts anyways…

In what’s looking to be an annual tradition, several of my online friends and I descended on San Francisco, CA for a “Death March”. The idea is to plan a really long (~20 miles) hike through an urban area, hitting a wide cross section of neighborhoods, sights (tourist and unusual), and such, and most importantly, stopping along the way to check out the food (you don’t have to feel guilty about street cart food when you are hiking 20 miles). Last year was Manhattan. This year was the much more challenging San Francisco. However, San Francisco had two reasons for me to visit aside from Death Marching. First, my college roommate Steve lives there in the Mission district. Second, San Francisco is filled will all sorts of greatly little quirky food destinations (some of which remain obscure and quirky, and others, due to services like Yelp, you can now share with tens of thousands of your best friends). So I had a short list of places I wanted to check out while in town, and Steve and his wife Emily also had several places they wanted to introduce me to. The first of these was Pi Bar.

Last weekend, we found ourselves heading up to Burlington, Vermont, for some light shopping and entertainment. One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about Burlington is that it has a good restaurant scene, with a lot of good-looking spots that I haven’t yet tried. One of these that I noticed on a recent trip was Asiana Noodle Shop, nestled into a basement on Church St. Opened back in 2009 in a fairly dark subterranean space with the office-supply-store vibe that seems to be common with many Asian places, the folks at Asiana converted what used to be a burrito shop into a noodle houlse with a very extensive menu of Asian noodle dishes, as well as a fairly extensive sushi menu…

Franklin Barbecue was the last, and the finest, stop on the Central TX BBQ Run. We now come to the last of my Austin trip food reviews. After two days of seriously gorging ourselves on BBQ and street food, for Sunday we had a relaxed pace. Sure, by this point I’d been to four different BBQ joints (some of my fellow travelers had been to seven by that point, including a second visit to City Market!) and sample food from at least a dozen street carts, but, surprisingly, I found myself a little bit hungry on Sunday morning. Our group rendezvoused for the last time at the hotel, and headed over to our last stop, Franklin Barbecue…

After finishing up at the Eastside Drive-In food carts, a few of us headed downtown to check out Austin’s Sixth Street nightlife, grab a few drinks, and check out a few more food carts. One of the places I had actually gotten several recommendations for was only a brief detour off of our Sixth St forays: Chi-Lantro Korean Taco BBQ Truck was set up for the night at 5th and Colorado. I don’t know exactly when they became common (I’ve been hearing about Kogi in LA for several years now, for example), but the Korean Taco truck has started to become a serious mainstay of the street food scene. And while ethnographically odd, it’s actually a combination that makes a fair bit of sense, with the nice spicy and savory, but not always conveniently packaged for street dining Korean food meets up with the handy tortilla to make something that’s just about perfect for street dining…

(Closed) My second course from the “Eastside Drivein” collection of food carts was from Bits and Druthers, a Union-Jack-painted trailer sporting a menu that was essentially fish and chips, and permutations thereof. I’m always a little bit skeptical of fish and chips joints, since my many travels (especially in England, which is pretty much the birthplace of fish and chips) have shown me that there’s generally a sort of “Fish and Chips Exclusion Principle” at work: Places that have good fish generally have lousy chips, and places that have good chips generally have lousy fish. Places that can do both well at the same time are actually quite rare…

(Closed) After a second day of driving about the Austin area sampling barbecue, and then washing down that barbecue with more Blizzards from the Lockhart, TX Dairy Queen, we again decided that, after a modest afternoon siesta, it was time to go seek out more food carts in Austin. After checking out the nice map of Austin food carts, we decided to check out some of the trailers along South Congress. So we piled into the cars and headed out. Alas, while we saw our desired street carts, the traffic was intractable due to the LoneStar Roundup Car and Custom show. So we ended up heading over the river, and then east of I-35, eventually finding what’s known as the “Eastside Drive-In” court of food carts, with eight or nine trailers all clustered around a central courtyard of tables…

First of all, let’s note that this isn’t a repeat review… the previous place was “City Meat Market” in Gidding’s, TX. This place is just “City Market” located in Luling, TX (which apparently bills itself as the “watermelon capital of Texas”, home of the annual “Thump Queen” pageant), but like so many of the venerable central Texas barbecue shrines, the name comes from a history of being a meat market well before it was a barbecue stand. Sitting on the main corner in Luling, TX, it’s one of the central attractions in downtown, taking up two modest store fronts on the main drag in town…

After a very thoroughly satisfying BBQ breakfast at Snow’s BBQ, the question came up regarding which BBQ joint we should do next. About half of our crew had been to City Market in Luling, TX on Friday, and decided it was worth a repeat trip, especially for exposing those of us that were late arriving on the BBQ Run. But the drive from Lexington to Luling is a long one, almost two hours long. We decided that it would be irresponsible to go on such a long voyage without some sustenance, so we decided to stop off at City Meat Market in Giddings, TX for some more barbecue…