Osteria Mozza - Seven Years Later

Though it's only four miles away from home and I pass it every time I drive to my Century City office, I hadn't thought about returning to Osteria Mozza since our visit there in 2011.  But a spur of the moment decision to have a nice dinner near home tonight led to this return visit.  We were lucky to snag a 6:30pm reservation, as the days after a Monday holiday are apparently relative slow restaurant days.   From past experience we knew that Mozza's pasta dishes are small in size, so for two people it would take two pasta dishes, an appetizer, and a main entree for a filling meal.

The evening started with a complimentary ricotta cracker which was shockingly tasty.

Our appetizer was equally tasty--mission figs with pancetta and dandelion leaves, though I could have done without the latter.

First pasta was the sweet corn cappellacci, which was cut up into small bits.  The pasta and filling was good but the sauce was off.

The second pasta, the orecchiette with sausage was spot on, the highlight of the meal.

And the main entree was the duck confit with pear mostarda and sweet corn in side containers.  I thought the pear/mustard sauce was strange, not to mention overly spicy.  The crispy duck was excellent, though perhaps a tad too salty.

Not bad for an unexpected meal of about $100.

Capital Seafood To Open In Former New Port Seafood Location on Beverly Hills Restaurant Row

Immediately after my Menuism article on the recent explosion in authentic Chinese dining on L.A.'s Westside went online, I found out that another San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurant chain, Capital Seafood, was planning to move into the abandoned New Port Seafood location on La Cienega Blvd., next to Lawry's on Restaurant Row.  The episode involving the New Port Seafood's tenure in Beverly Hills was one of the low points in Westside Chinese dining.  Back in 2014, the Westside cheered with the announcement that one of the biggest dogs in the San Gabriel Valley would be headed west, giving the Westside a chance to prove that they could indeed support a signature, authentic Chinese restaurant.   And indeed, everybody thought the Beverly Hills New Port Seafood would be like shooting fish in a barrel, so much so that I deliberately stayed away from the restaurant for its first few weeks, not wanting to fight the crowds.  As things turned out the crowds at New Port Seafood never did get out of hand, and by the time I showed up a month after opening, the restaurant was pretty much dead.  A handful of other visits over the years was similarly met by the same circumstances, just a handful of customers, mostly Chinese, testament to the fact that the food there was indeed pretty comparable to that at the wildly successful San Gabriel location.  New Port Seafood closed down in 2017 with barely a whimper.

With the spate of significant Chinese restaurant openings in 2018, both with actual openings like Din Tai Fung, Gu Yi, additional branches of Northern Cafe and Tasty Noodle House, and planned openings of 85 Degrees, Hai Di Lao and Sichuan Impression, the added announcement of an opening by Capital Seafood appears to be just another addition to the sudden golden age of Westside Chinese dining.  Indeed, the initial word was met with the expectation that the Westside Chinese food gold rush was accelerating even more.  However, since then, doubts have arisen on a couple of counts.  

First of all is the realization that all of the big Westside Chinese food success stories have been of non-Cantonese food, and the one crash and burn, New Port Seafood, has been Cantonese food.  While the pioneering Chinese food openings on the Westside by Qin West and Northern Cafe near the UCLA campus were propelled by a desire to serve the ever growing Mainland Chinese student population at UCLA, the clientele for the new Westside Chinese restaurants certainly is not limited to the student group, and seems to have tapped until a previously underserved population of non-Cantonese diners on the west side of town.  Could it be that there is already enough pre-existing Cantonese food on the Westside, such that Capital Seafood may meet the same fate as New Port Seafood.

Then there's Capital Seafood itself.  It is well established with branches in the San Gabriel Valley and Orange County.  But certainly it is not in the top tier of Los Angeles area dim sum, and indeed their remaining Irvine branch in the Spectrum was much much less than what I expected and does not have particularly impressive ratings.  Of course, it is possible they could build off of their higher quality Arcadia location, which purveys dim sum from a menu, not a cart.  But at this point, I think we need to be cautious as to our expectations as what this all means for Westside dim sum and Chinese food.   

Giving Up My Shot At Video Stardom

If there's anything that being that being a Z-list celebrity has demonstrated to me it's that media opportunities are very uncertain and unpredictable.  For example I shot scenes for a number of episodes of a Canadian documentary series called "Confucius Was A Foodie," but was completely left on the cutting room floor.  And when Good Morning America called for an interview, it took a few hours to resolve insurance issues between GMA and management of the office building where I worked, such that by the time things were ironed out their film crew had gone somewhere else, never to return.  

On the other hand there was the experience with my 2½ hour interview with the film crew from "The Search For General Tso," where the project seemingly disappeared and the social media announcements went silent.  I had presumed that they were unable to get financing to complete the movie.  Then one day I received a message that the film had been completed and would be premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Or the time I was hastily contacted by Nevada Public Radio to discuss Chinese food on the air, the very next morning.  And there was the time I received hundreds of Tweet requests about Chinese food around the country right after one of the articles about me had run, and a couple of my responses showed up as news articles the very next day.

Then, despite the old Junior Woodchuck saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity, there are the instances where I've turned down media opportunities.  On two separate occasions I was approached by a reality show whose premise was to embarrass food critics by having them try to replicate dishes they had commented about.  That one was a nonstarter with me since I don't cook and I really don't do food reviews in the traditional sense.  Nevertheless they made a second request after their first season, and once again I declined.

It was a much tougher call a couple of years ago when I was contacted by Dolly Li, then a producer for AJ+, the US video production arm of Al Jazeerah.  She was doing a three part documentary about Chinese food in America and asked whether I would be the local guide for her segment about Chinese food in the San Gabriel Valley.  On the one hand this sounded like a wonderful opportunity for public exposure, but on the other hand being neither a pretty face nor even a resident of the San Gabriel Valley, this didn't sound like a good match.  Consequently I suggested to Dolly that she contact Clarissa Wei who I thought would be a better choice, as she lived in the San Gabriel Valley and actually gave organized Chinese food tours there.    I did caution that Clarissa was in her world travel mode and I wasn't sure if Clarissa would be in town when Dolly came down from the Bay Area to do her shooting.  Dolly indicated that her superiors preferred somebody like myself who was not a food critic per se, but who could put Chinese food in a larger context, but that she thought that Clarissa would make a good interviewee.  

However, a few days before filming began Dolly called back to say that her superiors agreed that Clarissa would be a good choice to be the local host for the program, and that their filming dates fit right into the narrow window of time where Clarissa was back in Los Angeles.  So they did the location shooting in the San Gabriel Valley, and Clarissa and Dolly became such fast friends that they both moved this year to Hong Kong to help lead the South China Morning Post's Chinese food project called Goldthread 2.  The AJ+ series became a rousing success and I received innumerable messages from people recommending me to watch the video, necessitating me to reply that I was a consultant on the project, and while not being mentioned in the actual credits to the San Gabriel Valley episode, I was acknowledged on the YouTube page for that video.

So just think.  If AJ+ went with their original plan, or if Clarissa hadn't happened to stop over in Los Angeles just when they did their filmshoot, I might be a video star today.  Or more likely, the San Gabriel Valley segment would have bombed because I had none of the San Gabriel Valley insight and connections that Clarissa had.  And Clarissa and Dolly wouldn't be working together in Hong Kong today.  

Shanghailander Palace--Hacienda Heights' Loss Is Arcadia's Gain

Shanghailander Palace in Hacienda Heights has risen into the upper tier of Shanghai style food in the Los Angeles area in the five years they have been in operation.  Consequently it was a shock to their clientele when the food there recently fell off a cliff, and all the familiar faces in the restaurant were gone.  But no, it's not that the owner sold the restaurant and a new owner brought in a new crew.  Rather, the owner opened up a brand new branch in Arcadia, and relocated the Hacienda Heights crew to Arcadia. 

Now Chinese restaurants are notorious for establishing branch operations as soon as they can.  Sometimes this strategy is very successful, such as the large (though loose) Sam Woo BBQ chain has demonstrated.  Then again sometimes it isn't, as demonstrated by Liang's Kitchen, which expanded throughout the San Gabriel Valley, then to the Bay Area, and then to Flushing, New York, at a breakneck speed, only to crash and burn.  In setting up new branches of a Chinese restaurant, it is not unusual for personnel from an original location to be transferred to a new branch to get things running.  However, what Shanghailander Palace did in essentially transferring the entire existing operation to the new location and starting from scratch in the original location, may be unprecedented.  As a result, a planned gathering at Shanghailander Palace in Hacienda Heights was removed to the new location in Arcadia, with great success.  Of course it was helpful that most of us came in from out of the area, so Arcadia wasn't particularly inconvenient location wise.  Our dinner was very nice, and the only criticism was that the size of many of the dishes was a little sparse, some of which would be described as small plates in a non-Chinese restaurant context.

Dinner began with river shrimp with vinegar.

Next up was the ever popular Shanghai style deep fried fish fillet with seaweed.

Cucumber wraps with sesame sauce dip was different and refreshing.

Shanghai stewed duck was the next dish up.

Possibly the best dish of the night was the Shanghai pork belly.

Shanghai style ribs are always a favorite.

The vegetable dish for the evening was the "A" choy.  (Note that the Chinese character for A choy actually includes "A").

What would a Shanghai meal be without shen jen bao (tiny fried Shanghai buns)?

And of course, soupy xiao long bao.

Dessert #1 - Sesame ball soup.

Dessert #2 - Eight treasure sticky rice.

All in all, a nice dinner for about $20 per person.

The Playground In Santa Ana Is A Wonderland Of Food Variety

I don't get down to Orange County particularly often, particularly since the driving time to get there has expanded so much over the decades.  Consequently, except for the Chinese restaurants in Irvine, I have little exposure to any restaurants in the area.  In this regard a last minute visit to The Playground in Santa Ana was a revelation on multiple levels.

The Playground is the first restaurant I've been to that has such an extensive menu that changes every day, with the menu reflecting what ingredients are available that particular day in multiple categories, including meat, seafood, pasta, vegetables and so on.  At one time, getting a reservation at this restaurant was quite a challenge, but since a massive expansion was completed, there's now room for everybody.   You would think that with the volume of customers they have, plus a perpetually changing menu, that there would be quality issues, but everything we ate was superior, with each dish having its own distinctive taste.  

The meal started out with roasted cauliflower, as good as any version of cauliflower I've had (picture, unfortunately did not come out), along with a fig plate that was scrumptious.

Obviously the number of choices within each category is limited.  For example there were four pasta dishes listed.  The radiatori with pork was excellent.

From the meat section, the duck with farro was a real winner.  I actually liked the farro better, but that doesn't mean that the duck wasn't outstanding.  Rather is shows what a good job The Playground does with its accompanying sauces.

There are perhaps a handful of permanent items on the menu, and the signature item is the maple glazed pork chop, a slab of four chops that will give you a completely different perspective on pork chops.

The last entree we had was problem the least outstanding dish of all, the crispy sea bass.  But even here the tastes of the crispy fish skin, and the citrus flavored bread crumbs were memorable.

For dessert there was toffee pudding.

Roughly a year later we also tried the following dishes starting with the tempura asparagus which was quite good and makes you wonder why others haven't tried it.

 Wild boar ragu on pappardelle.

Oyster mushrooms.

A different kind of pork chop--this time with maple glazing.

 Also, sea bass with potato puree and pea butter.

The Playground was remarkable for the combination of flavors and the unimaginable playbook when taking into account the daily changes.   Where else, besides a Chinese restaurant with a menu of 300 menus, could you regularly go back and not eat the same dish twice?  There were so many other items on the menu that we would have loved to try.  It was also interesting to see a restaurant that clearly falls into the "casual" category serve such high quality food at about $30 per person.

Updating Mysteries of the Internet

Earlier this year I posted an article on some mysterious happenings on the internet, where a self-Google turned up random compilations of internet articles by and about me, interspersed with gibberish and references to other people named David Chan and Chinese food.   Beyond speculating that this was some sort of scam to visit the offending page, I really had no idea of what was happening.

More recently I encountered a more polished exemplar, actually entitled the "David Chan Chinese Food Blog" without the jibberish and including many illustrations from articles I had written, as well as articles written about me.   It was hosted on a website called Omniboo, which apparently created hundreds, if not thousands of similar websites on other food topics.  This probably indicates that these pages are automated creations using more sophisticated search engine technology than in past years.  Then I saw a similar page for the historic Paul's Kitchen restaurant in the City Market district of Los Angeles, with some really nice photos I hadn't seen.  Interestingly, the target of the page seemed to be for people who wanted to remodel their kitchen.

The fake Paul's Kitchen page was so interesting, I posted it on the Food Talk Central board, accompanied by a request for possible explanation of how and why the page was created.  The board's founder responded with a brief but telling answer--black hat search engine optimization.  While this doesn't explain everything I've wondered about in the past, it is a major explanation of the phenomenon which I had witnessed.   Essentially, there's nothing more valuable than getting people to come to your web page, from both a statistical point of view (the more hits the better) and for less honorable reasons (to attract people to a dangerous page, or at a minimum, a page they never otherwise would have searched for).   Black hat SEO describes nefarious strategies to accomplish the goal of getting web page visits.  

In the more primitive days of the internet, common tools to drive traffic included invisible text and stuffing.  Invisible text was a device where a search engine would register a "hit" for searched language, but that language itself was not visible to the reader of a web page.  This sort of explained the first internet mystery I encountered, when I saw that people had reached my blog via link from totally unrelated websites, but when I went to that website there was no reference to my blog page.  Now I say this sort of explains things, because it would make sense if I had done that to drive traffic to my blog, but this was actually done in the third party (often Russian) website.  Still I presume the concept of invisible text somehow explains what happens.

Subsequently I ran into websites which included my name and some of my works, along with jibberish mentioning many other topics.  This is probably an example of stuffing, where a wide variety of search terms are stuffed onto the webpage to gain a maximum number of hits.  Stuffing makes sense to me, particularly with my discovery that the stuffed website link would take me to different webpages depending on which device I was using to access the internet.  Where the Google search link would take me to a stuffed webpage mentioning my name on one device, the same link on another device would go to an advertising website, and the same link on yet another device would land on a porn site.  So that perfectly explains the gibberish websites.

Now the next generation of these fake websites is more of a puzzle.  The fake Paul's Kitchen page has a number of links on the side to subpages on the same website apparently selling various kinds of kitchen sinks (but I'm certainly not going to click on those links).   Meanwhile the fake David Chan Chinese Food Blog doesn't have any other external links, though there are links to other Omniboo food sites.  On the surface, I guess these fake pages are used to publicize the host page, but given all that is going on on the internet, who knows what the real answer truly is.

How I Became "Chandavkl"

One question a few people ask, but which I suspect more people wonder about, is how I adopted the name "Chandavkl".  Perhaps the most puzzling part is the "kl" at the end, which some people think refers to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, but which has nothing to do with it.  Actually, the origin is quite simple.  When my workplace computerized a couple of decades ago, they adopted a login system based on a combination of last and first names, which in my case became Chanda.  Later on, when it came to creating screen names for various purposes on the Internet, I thought I would honor my original employer, Kenneth Leventhal & Company, by calling myself Chandakl.  However, when I set up my first account name as Chandakl, I made some kind of error that rendered the account useless.  (Probably not really, but as a dinosaur I couldn't figure out away to simply change and correct the name.)  So I just opened another account throwing in the next letter of my first name, ending up with Chandavkl.  And so, Chandavkl was born.

I only recently recognized how fortuitous I was in messing up my attempt to use the Chandakl handle.  As it turns out, Chandakl is a very common name on the Indian subcontinent, while Chandavkl appears to be completely unique.  Consequently, while I can easily search for myself on the internet as Chandavkl, I'd have to wade through thousands or millions of unrelated hits when searching Chandakl.