cook: dining out disappointments

You know you're on a vacation away from home when you're eating a salad not made by yourself. On my first night in Pasadena, I was disappointed by my salad from a Thai restaurant. I was expecting shallots, mint, cilantro, and scallions. Well there was only spring greens and coriander in my salad, and I certainly couldn't taste any lemongrass, galangal, and makrut lime leaves in my protein. Where was the toasted rice powder in the dressing? Instead it tasted like salty lime juice. And I ordered an appetizer of fried crab & cream cheese wontons. Huh? Isn't that a Chinese hors d'oeuvre?

The restaurant is called Daisy Mint, but where was the mint? Below was the egg of my dreams, my destination dine on this SoCal trip.

According to one blogger's post: The Slut chef fills a small glass jar (think handleless mason jar) about halfway with creamy, buttery “potato puree” (aka mashed potatoes). Then he cracks a fresh organic egg on top of the mashed potatoes, seals the jar closed and sets it in a warm bath of water (a technique Cailan refers to as “sous vide”). An hour later, he removes the jar, opens the lid–revealing a perfectly poached egg atop warm mashed taters–and sprinkles a little gray salt and chives on top. He sets the jar in a cardboard serving dish, adds a few crispy baguette toasts on the side and hands that Slut over to a drooling patron. To clarify: Customers don’t wait a full hour after ordering The Slut. Clearly, the staff is making them throughout the day. Right on! Send me there pronto.

Unfortunately when I arrived at Eggslut in Glendale this morning, they had sold out of the signature dish. Waaaaah. I had no idea then what to eat. I wanted just that little gourmet bite. And the menu was overwhelming. I saw egg salad on a brioche bun, and I do love a delicious egg salad if I can't eat my gourmet poached or herb baked eggs in cream. And so I ordered a lunchtime sandwich and the hash browns.       

Right?!? How could those potatoes not be delicious? Well here's what I got.                            

And it was all underwhelming. The egg salad was just okay, bland in fact. I eat a low sodium diet, but those hard boiled eggs needed a sprinkle of gray salt. The ratio of egg salad to bread would've been okay, but even the brioche was not flavorful and therefore the whole sandwich was too damn bready. Maybe they should've omitted a couple of the egg whites. And the hash browns were perfect in texture, but they didn't have enough truffle or rosemary flavor. Sigh. I told Cecilia, and so when I get home, I'm going to cook Cailan's recipe from his Amboy cookbook I checked out from the library. And I know I've got those teeny, tiny mason jars somewhere in my cupboard. My day at the Getty Center was thankfully more rewarding. Not having finished breakfast other than the hash browns, I was starving when dinner time rolled around. I finally decided on El Portal off the main drag of Colorado Boulevard because the Indian restaurants I had wanted to dine at weren't open yet for dinner. I started with a blood orange margarita.                  

I'd been sweating all day, and so that margarita and a glass of water were so refreshing. I got indecisive though at my entrée. I finally decided on Yucatán Trio.    

I wolfed Cochinita Pibil, pork marinated in achiote and lime juice, wrapped in a banana leaf and roasted (I loved it); Mayan Poc-Chuc, pork grilled with garlic (also yummy); Yucatán tamales, shredded chicken with a bit of epazote and achiote, folded in thin masa and all wrapped in banana leaf and steamed and then finished with a thin tomato sauce (meh) because I was so ravenous. Everything tasted wonderful when I first dug in, but toward the end of my meal, I was finding all a bit too salty, and I was decidedly not into any kind of tamale and made a note to self to not ever order tamales. I did love the black bean soup which I spooned over my rice and wolfed down because it was so reminiscent of the black beans and rice I ate in the school cafeteria of my Puerto Rican girlhood. And so the lesson of dining during my travels is to lower expectations. I am so okay now with a Mexican pizza at Taco Bell or a Veggie Delite at Subway while on the road. The pandemic has made me such a better cook than even some of the ethnic restaurants I used to love when dining out. And so one of the things I look forward to when I return home is expanding my repertoire in the kitchen.                               

But in the meantime I’ll live off calories provided as part of my hotel stay.