restaurants – Page 3

berkeley food #8: kurry klub

1700 Shattuck Ave
Berkeley, CA 94709
(510) 849-4983

Jackpot! Monday lunch was had with Jen, a third-year Berkeley undergrad who knows plenty of good places. We were going to go to Cheesboard Pizza, which she claims is her favorite place in town, but they’re closed on Mondays, so we decided on Kurry Klub instead on the way back to campus. It’s a little Indian place, as you’ve guessed, and it has very nice interior of carved wood with all-wood tables and carved chairs. The have a $7 lunch buffet, and it is incredible! I spent most of my time putting korma over basmati rice, but I also tried some chicken curry and paneer. It was all wonderful, served with naan and accompanied by a very attentive staff who kept our glasses full of water. The korma was my favorite–creamy but not too heavy. The curry was also great: spicy but manageable (I mellowed it out with some yogurt). For those of you from Austin, I would compare the quality of this buffet to the Clay Pit–it’s that good. I’ll definitely be frequenting this place.

berkeley food #7: la val’s pizza

2516 Durant Ave.
Berkeley, CA
510-845-5353

Despite the name, I didn’t have the pizza. It’s only so often that I can get in the mood for a food so greasy as that, and since we just had some last Friday, I couldn’t bring myself to order it. Val’s seems to be a local tradition of sorts, with multiple locations. The one I visited, again, was on Euclid since it’s close to Soda hall where I’ve been spending so much of my time.

I ended up ordering the pasta combo special, which offered me any pasta on the menu with garlic bread and drink for $5 (plus tax). So for my $5.43 I got shrimp linguine. It was alright. Served kind of tepid, drowning in oil. The shrimp were thrown in along with some tomatoes and an absolute boatload of olives (why?), all seemingly as an afterthought. There was no cohesion to the dish. It was linguine which happened to have other stuff in it. The garlic bread was good though meager, and clearly prepared well ahead of time. I’d say the highlight of the meal was the lemonade-sprite cocktail I mixed as my drink–I haven’t had anything but water recently in order to keep costs down.

In short, this was a fast-food Italian place and pretty unimpressive. I’ll probably go again to try the pizza, but otherwise no thanks.

As a footnote, I really have been doing things other than just eating lunch while at Berkeley. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll work up the gumption to give a full report.

berkeley food #6: stars veggie

1805 Euclid Ave.
(510) 548-8895

A lot of interesting veggie food here. The place seems to focus on fake-out meat, like Mongolian beef or philly cheesesteak. I ended up getting the “ham” and cheese crepe and a vegan carrot-cake muffin. The crepe was made while I waited, and the staff seemed very enthusiastic and dedicated. The place was tiny–maybe 8ft wide, so most of the seating was in the back. I settled in with my book and ate. The crepe was great, very fresh, though it was a little sweet which leads me to believe they use the same crepe mix for sweet and savory. I don’t know whether this was a faux pas or a stylistic decision, but I do know that in the joy of cooking, they specify that for savory crepes no sugar be added. Still, it was good if slightly greasy. On closer inspection the veggie ham looked more like pork shawarma meat than anything else; it was kind of salty, which is in character for ham, and the tomatoes and lettuce that flanked it were fresh and crisp.

It was, however, tiny. My stomach was barely primed by the time I finished it, and even after the carrot cake (which was very good for vegan, but no match for real), I was left with hunger pangs. Leslie can attest to my ravenousness last night when I got home. We decided from now on I should bring some backup calories on my culinary adventures in the form of powerbars or somesuch.

I may give this place another visit, but it would cost me $15 to fill up on their crepes. Maybe the rice bowl would be more substantial?

berkeley food #5: stuffed inn sandwiches

1829 Euclid Ave
Berkeley
510-849-0378

Today is the first day of classes, though I don’t have any to go to until tomorrow. Still, there’s always something to do on campus, and today it was pick up my fellowship stipend check and go to a group meeting of a professor I’m considering working with.

There was a monstrous line at the check pick-up, and it really should have gone through EFT, but luckily I had a book with me for just such occasions–Black Sun Rising by CS Friedman. It was recommended by Les–unsuprisingly, CAMERON HALL is scrawled on the inside cover. After about 45 minutes in line, I got the check, which is supposed to sustain me until January, and went on a hunt for a new restaurant.

The place I found is on Euclid, a street on the north side of campus neer the EECS building (and the Goldman School). It’s called “Stuffed Inn,” and serves soups and sandwiches. I went for the deluxe $5 stuffwich; it contained (at least) ham, turkey, roast beek, jack cheese, lettuce, tomato, sprouts, mayo, onion. All piled into whole wheat. Stuffed indeed. The staff was great–all smiles. Most of the people who came in seem to have regular sandwiches that the guy behind the counter remembered. The sandwich was delicious: very fresh, and almost enough to fill me (but not quite). Since the place is so close to Soda and Cory, I imagine I’ll be back.

This weekend was a blast. Saturday I planned on having Jeff, George, and Phil over for a simple dinner, but it turned out Josh (another UT->Berkeley transplant), Lisa (Josh’s SO), and Stefani (of RHPS fame) showed up to, enough to force me to make the red pepper and wild mushroom lasagna that was so delicious. Everyone was fed, and dessert was also excellent–George and Stefani brought strawberries, ice cream, and a delicious reisling dessert wine. I also learned and was bested in “big twos,” a game of asian origin, according to Phil.

Tomorrow: class.

berkeley food #4: saigon express

2045 Shattuck

Today I decided to go up to campus even though the only thing I had to do there was pick up my free laptop (IBM Thinkpad T41) from ITS (this was the purpose of attending the IT orientation yesterday). I’m not exactly sure what I’ll do with the computer, but I’m installing Gentoo Linux right now because I’m curious.

For lunch, we went to a Vietnamese place called “Saigon Express.” It was your standard college noodle house. In its defense, it was very clean, well-lit, and spacious, with curteous staff that spoke pretty good english. All the food was out on display, which is always a good sign. I got a dry vermicelli bowl with chicken, and George got spicy beef phó. Mine was alright, I guess it was pretty much in line with your traditional noodle bowl. As usual in Vietnamese places, the meat was a little sketchy, with plenty of skin and gristle to avoid (or boldly scarf, I guess). I didn’t get remotely full, partly because I got annoyed at the bad meat and partly because there just weren’t that many calories to be had among the bean sprouts and cilantro and whatnot. Maybe I’m just not a phó guy, but I wouldn’t go to this place again.

berkeley food #3: ann’s kitchen

2498 Telegraph Ave
Berkeley, CA 94704
510-548-8885

Yesterday, after my IT orientation, George drove up to Berkeley to have lunch. We walked down telegraph again, and this time chose our lunch spot based on a recommendation from someone that George accosted on the street. The place is called “Ann’s Kitchen,” and it looks like it’s been there for a while. It’s a breakfast-all-day+sandwiches kind of place, which usually suits me pretty well, and we were told it was cheap, which is always something I’m in the mood for. I decided not to get breakfast, but instead a BBQ sliced beef sandwich with home fries and lemonade to drink. The sandwich was pretty tasty–much better than what I had at Smart Alec’s. There were no apologies at this place for grease, or pretentions of health food. The sandwich was big, but not filling (for a Bryan). The home fries were everything they should have been, which is to say fried and covered in oil. Yum.

The best part of the meal, though, was the lemonade. I’m an amateur lemonade aficionado, and I like to boast that at the least I can tell if lemonade came from a powder or frozen concentrate. This stuff, though, was clearly the real deal. Lemons, crushed into water, with assloads of sugar poured in. Magnolia Cafe in Austin also has good lemonade like this, but they serve it without sugar, so you have to sit there for five minutes dissolving about a cup of sugar into your glass to reach the diabetic-shock-inducing level required for truly good lemonade. Not at this place. The stuff came sour enough to make even George wince a bit and sweet enough to register on my jaded scale. I’d go back just for another glass.

berkeley food #2: smart alec’s

2355 Telegraph Ave
Berkeley, CA 94704-1615
(510) 704-4000

Well, I’m here today for my first official day of grad-studentness (for real, this time). Morning was your fairly standard miscellaneous information dispersal exercise: get this account here, that one there, here’s how to get paid, here’s how to register, whatever. After it let out I hit “The Missing Link” bicycle coop for more grocery-toting equipment–hopefully it will be put to good use. Then I set out to find what would be notch 2/100 in my Berkeley eatery belt. I was going to go to Intermezzo Cafe (as suggested by Nicole), but it was swamped for lunch with a line out the door, and I realized I’d been there before with Leslie and Clare. So I hit up a self professed “Health Food Fast Food” place also on Telegraph called “Smart Alec’s.” I got the basil chicken burger combo, which consisted of basil spiced baked chicken, basil mayo, tomato, lettuce, and red onions (I skipped those). It was middling… everything was fresh, but kind of bland and not really remarkable. The fries that came with it were the best part of the meal. “Air baked,” whatever that means, but presumably it would mean that no boiling in oil was involved. The little paper tray liner claimed that someone had voted them Berkeley’s best fries–I don’t think I’d go that far. Maybe the best “air-baked” fries. Anyway, you couldn’t argue with the price: under $6 for the entire combo (sandwich, fries, drink), and that wasn’t the cheapest there. I did walk away with a full stomach but I didn’t feel gross like I’d had a load of fast food, so they did at least succeed there. I’ll keep it in mind for times I’m in the area and short on cash.

berkeley food #1: ethiopia restaurant

2955 Telegraph Ave
Berkeley, CA 94705
(510) 843-1992

Yesterday, George and I went up to Berkeley to investigate the local climbing gym and take a class at Berkeley’s only ashtanga yoga studio, with plans to get dinner somewhere afterward.

The climbing gym was very nice. 45-foot lead walls, many, many routes, a complete attached fitness center, showers, everything. Along with the niceness came a nice pricetag: $60/mo. I suppose if I’m able to get down to it several times a week that will make sense for me, but a lower student rate would have been nice. We didn’t actually climb, since there was no time before the yoga class started at 5.

7th Heaven was great. It had all the things yoga studios that I’ve seen in the bay so far lacked. Multiple rooms, nice, hard-wood floors, heaters, a broad selection of classes. The classes run $12 a pop, or $10 if you’re a student. A reasonable discount, I guess… I paid $8/class at Yoga Yoga in Austin. Unfortunately, the ashtanga class we came in for had been cancelled, so we went to a “Vinyasa flow” class instead, which was good, but not quite as punishing as I’d like.

After yoga, wiped out and ravenous, we started trolling around Berkeley for a restaurant. What we found was Ethiopia Restaurant. The place was nearly empty when we walked in, and it never got much fuller. I always feel a little out of place eating Ethiopian, because I seem to inevitably be part of the only white table in the place. Still, the waitress was very nice and conversational, helped us pick something from the menu where our experience flagged, and came back several times to check on us. We ended up with a family-style combination of two combinations: vegetarian and meat. I don’t know exactly what it was called, but it was basically a huge plate with about eight different things on it ranging from mild lentils to spicy red lentils, spicy chicken, cabbage, spinach, and lamb all spread over a giant piece of injera bread. There were no utensils–just an accompanying basket of little rolled-up slices of injera you use (we guessed) to just scoop the different things up, curry-style. The food was delicious. It went across the whole range of spicy to mild, and it all had a slow-cooked taste and heartiness that really hit the spot after yoga. I also tried an Ethiopian Bedele beer, which I’ll just say was yummy because I’m really not qualified to describe beer in more complex terms.

It ocurred to me during dinner that I would probably be eating at many, many different and great restaurants while at Berkeley. So I decided to set a goal: before I graduate, try to eat at 100 different restaurants. And I’m going to try to write a little about each of them up here when I do. So consider “Ethiopia Restaurant” #1 / 100.