A Blast From The Past--The Return of the Sheephead

 

A blast from the past is this pair of sheephead from Elite Restaurant in Monterey Park.   

 

In the late 1980s and 1990s we in Los Angeles gorged ourselves on steamed sheephead.  California sheephead was a junk fish that sold for 10 cents a pound.  But in the 1980s the Chinese seafood restaurant craze crossed over from Hong Kong to the US and Canada, and California Chinese chefs discovered that sheephead, considered by locals as ugly tasting, was a superior variety of fish when steamed live, Cantonese style.  

 

However after more than a decade of glorious dining, this unwanted junk fish turned into an overfished endangered species later in the 1990s with limitations placed on catch size.  Furthermore, sheephead are hermaphroditic, fish that turn from female to male as needed to balance the population.  However, with the larger, male fish being caught for consumption, the new converted males are smaller, and less attractive for dining.  

 

Consequently, sheephead pretty much disappeared from Chinese restaurant menus in California for quite a while.  They’re back on the menu in some restaurants but aren’t the attraction they used to be, perhaps because two smaller fish don’t have the punch you get from one bigger one.

 

Of course, as you may have heard, Elite Restaurant had a serious kitchen fire a couple of weeks ago.  When I posted that event on Instagram, there were snarky remarks such as "insurance time!" and comments on how bad business has been recently at Elite.  Sadly any time a Chinese restaurant burns, everybody's initial reaction is to wonder whether the fire was deliberately set to save a fading business through fire insurance proceeds.  And clearly there have been enough of true examples of this happening in the past to justify considering these events automatically suspicious.   

 

On our last visit to Elite, the dining room was totally empty on a Thursday night, though two private rooms were occupied.  However this is not necessarily alarming because this reflects a trend going back more than five years where your larger dim sum/Hong Kong style seafood restaurants do an excellent business for dim sum, but pare back at dinner time, even on weekends.  For example I’m not sure whether there was even a waiter on duty at Elite when we were there, or whether the manager doubled as waiter, as in the private room the manager brought in the dishes.  

 

It is hard to figure out why these dim sum palace type restaurants do such a massive business at lunch but are so quiet at night.  Most plausible explanation I’ve heard is that the next generation Chinese Americans, known as the “626 Generation “ in the San Gabriel Valley are all into dim sum, but would rather go someplace else for dinner that is more casual, more economical, more trendy, or perhaps not even Chinese.  Thus dinner time at these restaurants is left to the old folks like us.  Furthermore a similar pattern extends beyond the San Gabriel Valley, as informants have indicated that that the bustling dim sum lunch/sparse dinner crowd phenomenon is also present in Chinese communities across the country.

In the case of Elite, I would be surprised if this wasn't just a kitchen accident.  With Chinese restaurant food being prepared at such high temperatures, and with all the grease and oil flying around, the chances of a kitchen fire in a Chinese restaurant are much higher than other types of restaurants.  Meanwhile empty dining rooms at night are currently a fact of life with sit down Hong Kong dim sum and seafood restaurants and are part of the equation in operating such a business.  Shortly before the fire, Elite had been named to the Los Angeles Times prestigious listing of the 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles, which was sure to bring them an influx in business.  And finally, insurance companies are well aware of the checkered history of Chinese restaurant fires, and nobody is going to get an insurance payout unless the facts clearly support an accidental event.

 

Mocking The Sound Of Chinese and Asian Languages

So a video has gone viral of Purdue Northwest Chancellor Thomas Keon speaking at the school's commencement breaking into Asian sounding gibberish after the prior speaker had made some reference to nonsensical made up language.  Keon subsequently apologized, but the controversy lives on, not only for what he said, but also from the reaction of people in the audience who found this funny.  

This incident has triggered a forgotten memory of mine dating back about 50 years ago, when a local radio disc jockey. Roger Carroll at KMPC, started speaking words of fake Chinese on the air.  While that was something that was much more likely to happen 50 years ago than it would be today, I still found it distasteful and wrote a letter of objection to Roger Carroll, who I was otherwise a big fan of.  Around 6:28pm in the evening a couple of days after I had written the letter, my phone rang.  The voice on the other end said "David R. Chan?  This is Roger Carroll from KMPC."  He said he was calling in response to my letter, and his call was in part an apology, and in part of an explanation that he hadn't realized he said something said something offensive.  I replied that while it may not have seemed offensive to him, it in fact was offensive to myself and to others.

A funny sidelight to the call was that I noticed when it turned 6:30pm, and said to him "Shouldn't you be going on the air?"  He said "just a minute," went to his microphone and said "Good evening, this is Roger Carroll on KMPC" (or however he started his show every night), and then returned to our conversation.  It's funny I hadn't thought about this incident in decades until seeing the Purdue video tonight.  But I do remember "David R. Chan?  This is Roger Carroll" as if it happened just yesterday.

What We Ate On The Boat--Discovery Princess On The Mexican Riviera

It was nice to go on an ocean cruise for the first time since early 2016 on the newest ship in the Princess fleet, the Discovery.   After our luggage arrived we headed for the buffet to check it out.  One major difference from our previous cruise is that we were no longer asked to use hand sanitizer before entering the dining room area.  Now, you were requested to actually wash your hands at the conveinently located sinks before walking in.  I think this was as much intended to deal with norovirus, as well as COVID and whatever else is going around.  Correspondingly, when we got to the food, there was no self serve–everything was served by ship personnel, including drinks. Passengers who attempted to serve themsleves when there was no server at hand, were quickly admonished.   However, about three days into the trip they abruptly went fully self serve.  Not sure whether that had to do with reaching a point where there was unlikely to be any kind of outbreak while the cruise was in progress, to make it faster to get your food, or what.  Another interesting change was the addition of purified water machines for people to fill up their own water bottles, extremely important when leaving the boat for an excursion.  In the past, the cruise lines would try to sell you bottled water at exorbitant prices as you disembarked in port, and now they were giving the water for free.  The water machines touted how many thousand plastic bottles were saved by the machine, so I guess being green was deemed to be more important that creating a revenue stream.

The food itself was a mixed bag, whether in the buffet, in the Juneau dining room, or in the Sabatini Italian specialty restaurant.  For example, a couple of outstanding buffet items were the vanilla French toast and the salmon farfalle.  On the other hand, there was little for me to eat at breakfast (no turkey sausage or similar low cholesterol breakfast items as were common on past cruises), and many dishes were too salty or too sweet.  On the plus side, there were plenty of sugar free desserts at lunch and dinner.  There was a theme every night at the dinner buffet (from Brazilian to Asian to American) which did not track what was served in the dining rooms.

Asian food in the buffet was largely bad, but the lo mein and Chinese egg noodle dishes were quite good.  And everyday at noon they would have cook to order ramen, where the Asian passengers would line up in anticipation of the counter opening.  The first time we had it, the ramen was quite good.  The second time it wasn’t.

 

The pork chop suey was a blast from the past.  Not a good blast though.  Actually it bore no resemblance to the real (??) pork chop suey, as there were no bean sprouts.

 

One of the few items in the breakfast buffet I could eat was the salmon and other raw fish items.

Some items sounded more interesting than they turned out to be, such as the fish stew/bouillabase which was mostly shells.

 

The desserts in the buffet looked good, but they largely tasted the same.  This cake extravaganza was impressive looking though.

Dining time in the Ketchikan, Skagway and Juneau dining rooms (a bit incongruous for a Mexican cruise, but the boat was built to visit Alaska) was completely flexible this time–you didn’t have to sit at the same table at the same time at dinner.  Rather you would make a separate reservation for each dinner.  On the plus side, this was a better to deal with varying daily schedules.  On the other hand there was something nice about sitting next to the same people every dinner.  Once again the food was a mixed bag with both good and bad dishes.  This was a good chance to try duck a l'orange, a dish which I seldom eat.

 

There was a nice beef dish almost every night in the dining room, most of which were pretty good.

Escargot wasn't very good.

A nice dish was the veal scallopini.

Interestingly the ship had items both in the buffet and in the dining room which were seemingly in short supply back home, like this iceberg lettuce salad with bacon (lettuce $4.50 a head back home).  Turkey, too.

The premium specialty dining at Sabatini Italian Restaurant was a clear upgrade from the dining room and clearly worth the $25 surcharge.  This is the Stuzzichino Della Casa with tomato, bell pepper and prosciutto.

I generally don't like western style lamb, but the grilled lamb skewers were great.

Calamari was meh.

 

The cheddar cheese fondue with celery was salty and gruesome.

But the pear and celery salad was good.

Linguine with seafood was excellent.

As was the pappardelli beef.

 

Mediterranean seafood pouch wrapped in paper was interesting and fairly good.

Sole picatta was excellent.

Certainly this wasn't the best cruise food I've had, but you really can't complain about round the clock all you can eat.

 

John Wooden Predicts BCS Semi-Final Losses By Georgia and/or Michigan

Of course not really, since John Wooden passed away in 2010.  However this blog has posted predictions several times based on the principles of John Wooden which have in fact come to pass.  John Wooden has articulated a truism of sports which strangely has never been acknowledged by the sporting public, yet keeps proving itself over and over again.  That truism is that a long winning streak can turn into a heavy and potentially insurmountable burden.  Time and time again there have been stunning upsets in sports, with the only common denominator being the fact that the losing team was undefeated.  In this regard, Wooden stated that a loss at the right time can be a good thing that actually insures a team's success because it serves like a reset button.  There are many examples of this at work, from last year's BCS championship game where one-loss Georgia avenged it's previous loss to unbeaten Alabama, as he predicted on this blog a year ago, the stunning loss by the 2015 Kentucky basketball superteam on its way to an expected 40-0 season, to the unbeaten UNLV basketball team that fell to Duke, to the unbeaten New England Patriots team that lost to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl, among many other examples.  And don't forget undefeated TCU's loss to Kansas State last week.

Of course Wooden's own UCLA basketball team seemed to defy this rule with a number of long winning streaks, which shows this is a subjective rule.  How long does a winning streak have to be for it to become a burden?  If a team is so much superior to everybody else (like some of Wooden's teams), even if a winning streak might be adversely affecting your performance, you still might be good enough to keep on going. But the fact is that a disproportionate amount of major upsets occur where the losing team had been undefeated, and that there are so few teams in major American sports that have an undefeated championship season.  So while everyone expects undefeated Georgia and Michigan to meet next month in the BCS championship game, don't be surprised if that doesn't happen.

Two Visits To Majordomo

Though David Chang's Majordomo opened roughly five years ago, I never had a chance to eat there.  First of all, until the pandemic, reservations were nearly impossible to obtain, and I'm not one to wait in line for food, be it an hour's wait at a restaurant, or having to fight to get a reservation to eat at the restaurant two months later.  And that aside, I would have preferred to share the meal there with the entire family, but I believe the maximum group they would accommodate was six persons.

However I recently noticed that post-pandemic reopening, there have been no problems getting reservations at Majordomo, so on just a few days notice I was able to get a reservation for two just days before my birthday in August, so why not?  Although Majordomo is located in what is technically Chinatown, it's in the far northern portion on a street I never heard of and obviously had never been, just a short ways from Lincoln Heights, with no signage visible from the street, so I wasn't absolutely sure that I was there until I made the last turn into the patio.  We got the latest available reservation at 6:30pm, but were delayed by traffic and other matters and arrived a half hour late.  When we called ahead about our dilemma they said there would be no problem, except that we would have to vacate by 8:30pm, which was fine with us.  Strangely, however, when we arrived at 7pm the restaurant was still half empty, even though there were no 7pm slots open when I made my original reservation.

The food was excellent from the get go.  The bing with eggplant and pine nuts was terriffic.

The heirloom tomato salad was out of this world.  Never thought something so basic could be so good.

I hate mushrooms, but the buzz about the mushroom crispy rice was so good that I ordered it anyway.  And it was as good as advertised.

The grilled striped bass was actually not as good as the first three dishes, but it was still quite good.

And the cocktail.

Interestingly, there were still some empty tables even when we finished.  Afterwards we took a peek at what the surrounding buildings looked like.  Certainly an area in transition.

The August meal was so enjoyable that we returned three months later for Mrs. Chandavkl's birthday.

 

This time we had the beef shank bing.  The beef was a little too spicy for us but the bing was great.

 

The little gem salad with panko, bonito flakes, trout roe, anchovies and miso dressing was a crunchy delight.

 

The innocuous sounding boiled chicken was a true delight.  A whole chicken was slow boiled and served two ways.  First was the white meat served with chicken flavored rice, sort of a spicy version of Hainan chicken.  

 

The rest of of the chicken was rendered into chicken noodle soup with a hand cut Korean noodle that was very reminiscent of biang biang noodles.

 

Thanks to the friendly people at the table next to ours, we also were able to sample the short rib fried rice, a derivative dish of the whole plate short rib.

And as a birthday surprise, they also ordered the coconut rice pudding for us.  Such nice people!

Once again, the restaurant never did fill up completely.

 

A Night At The Bonaventure

Since the early 2000s, perhaps the premiere venues for Chinese banquets, particularly wedding banquets have been two Hilton hotels, the Universal City Hilton and the San Gabriel Hilton. The San Gabriel Hilton as a Chinese banquet site is logical given its location in the San Gabriel Valley.  The Universal City Hilton is less intuitive but can be traced to the ownership of the hotel by Taiwanese interests, plus a history of Chinese wedding and other banquets dating back to the 1980s at the fancy Fung Lum Restaurant in Universal City.  

Of course, if you are going to host Chinese banquets on a regular basis, it makes sense to have a Chinese kitchen in-house.  And if you have a Chinese kitchen, it's probably also a good idea to have to have a regularly operating Chinese restaurant in the hotel, which both the Universal City Hilton (Cafe Sierra) and the San Gabriel Hilton (Trinity Restaurant) have on premises.  So it is against this backdrop that I encountered the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles as a Chinese banquet venue.

I first learned of the Bonaventure's Chinese banquet facilities five years ago when I was invited to the annual dinner of the Southern California Chinese Lawyers' Association, at which there was a nice quality Chinese banquet.  I had wondered whether the banquet had been produced in-house or via an outside provider, but got nowhere with my inquiry.   So when I was invited to this year's SCCLA banquet at the same venue, I decided to dig a little bit deeper.  This time I found a one line blurb on the hotel’s wedding facilities website that says a traditional Chinese banquet is available.  Interestingly the website also noted to capability for Kosher, Indian and Persian wedding banquets, with the qualification that these are outside catered, giving the implication that Chinese banquets were prepared in-house.

Consequently, I was looking forward to a nice meal comparable to that at the 2017 SCCLA banquet.   We arrived late, so there were just scraps left from the appetizer plate.  Then came the beef with vegetables, which was a tasty dish.

 

However, things quickly went south.  The honey walnut shrimp was gruesome.

Here's the Chinese fried chicken with shrimp chips.  It would seem impossible to wreck shrimp chips, but these were soggy and bland.

The vegetable plate was a delicious as it looks.

And the grand prize went to the salt and pepper fish, which was like eating cardboard.

 

At this point I stopped taking pictures.  This was an absolutely laughable, terrible Chinese banquet.  My son did clear one thing up.  He spoke with a Chinese bartender who has worked Bonaventure Chinese banquets for many years and confirmed that the food is catered externally. (I do remember in the 1990s that the Bonaventure was Taiwanese owned at the time, and there was a nice Chinese restaurant there called Mandarin Cove, which was succeeded by Mandarin West, so there was once a Chinese kitchen in the hotel, which would explain the continuing banquets.)   But if one wondered how a Chinese kitchen could turn out such an awful meal, the answer is that it didn't.  Of course, now the question is how a professional caterer could put together a disaster like this.  And in any event, the Chinese banquet availability at the Bonaventure has been the best kept secret in town, and clearly needs to stay that way.