Shophouse Visited 11/27/11 2 Forks

Shophouse 1516 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036

I usually don't review fast food places, but ShopHouse was something I had been wanting to try and it's a bit unique to the restaurant scene, so I just had to review it.  It's the Southeast Asian "spin-off" from the founders of Chipotle (say what you will about Chipotle but sometimes a good burrito bowl just really hits the spot) and the only location open is in Dupont Circle in DC. 

The set-up is the same as Chipotle.  You walk in and you choose your concept - so a rice (brown or jasmine) or noodle bowl or a banh mi.  Then you choose your protein (chicken satay, grilled steak, pork and chicken meatballs or organic tofu), vegetables (chinese broccoli, spicy corn, thai basil eggplant, or green beans), sauce (tamarind vinaigrette, green curry, or spicy red curry) and toppings (papaya salad, cilantro, pickles, toasted rice, peanuts, and crispy garlic).  My mom and I decided to get a brown rice bowl with corn and long beans and red curry, a noodle bowl with organic tofu, eggplant and long beans and a bahn mi with pork and chicken meatballs.  At first it didn't look like a lot of food but in true Chipotle style, the bowl itself was extremely filling and had to take half of it home.  My first impression of my noodle dish was that the tofu was very disappointing.  It was chopped up so fine and tiny that you could barely taste or see it.  Most Asian places use bigger pieces of tofu and marinate it to give it flavor.  If they hadn't told me this was tofu I would have never realized it and coming from an Asian who has had tons of tofu in every variety, that is a bad sign.  The noodles were pretty decent but the whole bowl just tasted exactly like what it was, a bunch of random Asian ingredients thrown together but with no cohesion or flavor profile.  The eggplant was extremely smoky and spicy and it really overpowered my bowl.  The chicken in my mom's dish was fine and more flavorful than my dish but again it tasted like a stir-fry that I could have made on my own. 

The banh mi was also disappointing.  The bread was completely hard and I decided to just skip it entirely.  The only thing that made this a "banh mi" was the shape of the bread and that it had pickled veggies on top.  Otherwise, there's was no pate, ham, pork, cucumber, large bunches of cilantro, or daikon.  They did use a spicy mayo that went well with the pork and chicken meatballs but other than that, there wasn't much spicy or kick to it.  I will say that of all the meats we tried, the pork and chicken meatball was the best.  It was moist and flavorful.  

Overall, I like the concept but it needs to be refined a lot more.  In general, it's harder for Asian ingredients to just be thrown together and just work like Mexican food.  A lot of these flavor profiles just don't seem to work together and the quality of the food was below the Chipotle standard.  But I am hopefully because I do love Chipotle deeply and love Asian street food, so hopefully they can get their act together and make it work.  Total bill for 2 bowls, 1 banh mi, and a ginger ale $24.

Photo Credit: Yelp

Lotus of Siam Visited 11/14/2011 3 Forks

Lotus of Siam 24 5th Ave., (between 9th St & 10th St), New York, NY 10011

Lotus of Siam has been on my short list for a while since so much had made about this original Las Vegas restaurant coming to NYC.  Apparently the one in Legas is legendary as a total divey, mom and pop restaurant but with amazing, cheap Thai food with a menu that goes on for pages.  But then the NYC partners who helped to bring it here changed the whole vibe and philosophy of the place that the Legas chefs cut ties with the partnership and left.  Now I haven't been to the one in Legas but I can kind of see what they were talking about.

The restaurant here is pretty fancy and nice, not at all a dive and the menu looked like an upscale bound book.  The dishes were not your typical Thai food, they all had a slightly fancy twist to them (you won't find shrimp dumplings or fried tofu on this menu).  Instead of drunken noodle with your choice of chicken, shrimp, or tofu, it came with either soft shell crab or sea bass.  I'm actually not opposed to the more upscale tilt of the food, but what was completely shocking was the price!  The entrees were all almost $30 per dish and the appetizers were $12-$15.  Given all the terrific, authentic Thai places in the city at very reasonable prices, I really don't get why a Thai place (granted it's nicer and offering slight higher quality food) would charge x3 the prices of other places.  Now don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem paying that kind of money for food, but it's just on principle that I don't think Thai food falls in that category.  Some foods that I would pay a lot of money for are: sushi, steak, lobster or game meats. 

But that being said, the food was actually very good and I wish I could give this place a higher rating because the food was delicious.  Jenn and I split the Northern Larb ($12), I got the Sea Bass Drunken Noodle ($28) and Jenn got the Crispy Duck ($26).  The main reason we ordered the larb was because I had made it while I was in Thailand last year and I was curious to try it here as I haven't had it since last year.  It was listed under salads but it clearly was not a salad (and I don't recall it being salad-esque when I made it).  It's basically minced pork with lots of chilis, basil and other Thai herbs and spices.  It was spiced perfectly...you could definitely taste the heat and the pork was cooked with not too much oil.  But due to the minced texture, it was really hard to eat on its own and instead of lettuce cups they gave us some weird hard cabbage that didn't seem edible.  What was really the star of the meal was the main entrees.  I wasn't sure how they were going to incorporate sea bass into a drunken noodle dish, but they essentially lightly battered and fried a huge piece of sea bass and put it on a bed of sauced noodles.  There were no veggies or other ingredients mixed in to the dish, but that turned out to be fine.  The dish was most definitely the highest end drunken noodle dish I've ever had.  The fish was tender and cooked to the right texture and the noodles were perfect...I most definitely didn't miss not having other ingredients on the dish.  I was surprised at how incredibly filling it was.  Normally any dish that has sea bass is tiny and not filling but I could barely finish the dish.  I also tried Jenn's duck and it was amazing.  Nice and juicy on the inside and very crispy but not dry on the outside.  But what was the killer was the sauce. The Penanag curry sauce was good enough on its own.  I could have just had a bowl of white rice covered in the sauce and I would have been perfectly happy. 

So I'm torn that I had to give this place only a 3 when the food was close to a 4.5.  What really just docked this place were the prices and the fact that I could barely hear or understand our waiter.  I mean talk about a low/soft talker.  I was 3 inches away from him and could barely hear him.  One big mistake Jenn and I made was not getting an entire bottle of wine.  Instead, we stupidly ordered 6 individual glasses at $12/glass where we probably could have spent much less to get the whole bottle (although I will say that they did end up just pouring the rest of the bottle and giving it to us).  Luckily Jenn had a Living Social discount for $50 off, but the meal still cost us $62/pp (they included a 20% tip without telling us).

Photo Credit: Yelp

Potjanee Visited 11/12/11 3.5 Forks

Potjanee 48 Carmine St., (between Bleecker St & Bedford St), New York, NY 10014

I'll keep this review short and sweet because it's one of those solid Thai restaurants that would totally be a good neighborhood go to for me if I lived in the West Village.  The space is pretty small so you can hear almost everyone's conversation but it wasn't so bad that I had to yell across the table like RedFarm. 

The menu is pretty robust with lots of options and a lot of it was spicy!  I was in the mood for a broad noodle so I ended up getting the drunken noodle with shrimp ($10.95) and started with the beansprouts and tofu appetizer ($6).  Beansprouts and tofu is really such a basic and easy dish but if done right is super tasty.  They put a lot of sauce on top of it (almost a bit too much) but the flavors were really strong and the combination of the fresh crunchy beansprouts and soft tofu was just right.  As for my drunken noodles, I had asked for my noodles to be not too spicy but they still had some noticeable heat to it, but it wasn't to the point where my mouth was on fire (or maybe I'm finally able to take spicy foods!).  The shrimp was very plumb and fresh tasting...sometimes in a lot of place the shrimp can be kind of tough, dry or overcooked, but this was cooked just the way I liked it..almost a bit undercooked but not in an unsanitary way.  The noodles were nicely sauced and packed a lot of flavor and not too oily.

What I liked about this place was that the waitstaff was super friendly and they let me and Aarti sit there and talk for almost 2 hours and never pressured us to leave or put the check down before we were ready.  The one slightly weird thing about this place was that there was a live jazz band.  WTF?  So bizarre and out of place.  Total bill $20/pp with tip and tax.

Photo Credit: Yelp

Shima Visited 11/11/11 2 Forks

Shima 188 2nd Ave Frnt, New York, NY 10003

I'm going to be honest and say that my review is totally biased by the fact that I saw that they had a health rating of a C before I walked in.  I think if I hadn't seen that the review might have gone up by a little bit but probably not by much.  A bunch of us decided to go here only because it was across the street from the movie theater and we needed to be in and out in 45 minutes.

The menu is your standard sushi menu with lots of roll combinations, bento boxes,  and udon noodles.  I ended up getting a river roll (eel with salmon on top)and a east village roll (salmon, white tuna, tuna, salmon roe on top and spicy mayo) and a miso soup.  The rest of the table got some other rolls and Aarti got a vegetable bento box.  The first sign that our meal might be difficult was that the waitress clearly did not understand anything we said.  She had to ask at least 2 or 3 times what we ordered.  Now I'm trying to be nice and English clearly was not her first language but it just really makes for a really painful ordering process if the waitstaff doesn't have a firm grasp on what the customers are ordering.  Aarti had asked for a side of spicy mayo and jalapenos and the waitress just kind of stared at her, so we clearly knew she wasn't getting that. Usually when one orders miso soup you'd think it would come out very quickly.  But here we must have waited at least 15-20 minutes for soup to come out.  Now I know that most places have the soup pre-made, all they need to do is spoon it out!  Then one of the other girls had ordered a tuna tataki appetizer and the waitress brings out tuna tartar, so we had to send that back. The rolls came out and we started diving into them and half way through they finally brought out her appetizer.  Now if I were to judge this place just on the 2 rolls I ordered, I would have said that they weren't half bad. They clearly weren't amazing or super high quality but they were your standard fare sushi that was just ok.  But I tried the rainbow roll and something was a bit off about it.  Plus when the tuna tataki finally came out the girl said it was a bit funky and chewy.  Those are 2 works you never want to associate with fish or sushi. This was when the C rating started to flash in my mind and it just kind of turned me off to the whole experience and made me wonder what was going on in the kitchen.

The total bill ended up being $35 which frankly is too much money for non-super fresh ok sushi.  Granted we did have some beers and wine but still, I could have had a much fresher, cleaner, and generally nicer experience at Kanoyama that's literally across the street.

Photo Credit: Yelp

RedFarm Visited 11/1/2011 4.5 Forks

RedFarm 529 Hudson St., (between 10th St & Charles St), Manhattan, NY 10014

Ok, this review is waaay overdue (a week behind), so I apologize if it's not written with the accuracy that I would normally write with.  I have been trying to go to RedFarm for a while but due to its no reservation policy the wait is always ridiculous (90+ minutes).  So this time, my friend Nancy and I decide to go at 6pm on a Tuesday.  Even then by the time we were half way through our meal, the place was totally packed.

For those that know me, I generally am against "new age" Chinese places that aren't run by Asians and that aren't located in the dingy dirty belly of Chinatown or Flushing.  RedFarm is the complete opposite of how I like my Chinese restaurants: located in the trendy part of the West Village, clean, and with hardly an Asian waitstaff in sight.  Plus I also can't stand to pay a lot of money for good Asian food. So you'd think this would not be a place I would enjoy.  But I have to say I really really loved my meal.  If I was still giving 1/4 forks, this place would be a solid 4.25 Forks but I'm willing to round up to 4.5 Forks this time.

The menu is heavy on the dim sum/small plates and has just a handful of large dishes.  Nancy and I split the shrimp and snow pea leaf dumplings ($10), the okra and eggplant curry ($17) and the wide noodles with shredded roast duck ($16).  Price-wise I was appalled but after trying the food, it made me think that I generally pay this much at other more bland restaurants so I was willing to not over think about what I was paying.  The dumplings came out perfectly steamed in a cute square bamboo container.  I've had tons and tons of dim sum before in my life and while this was x3 what I would normally pay, you could taste the extreme freshness of these dumplings.  They were steaming hot but you could literally taste that they just wrapped and steamed them right before serving them.  They were amazing.  The curry and rice noodles came out at the same time and the serving sizes were huge.  Definitely more than enough for 2 people, I might even say it was enough for 3 people.  The noodles were wide rice noodles but cooked with just the right flavor and not oily at all (these type of noodles tend to be very greasy in many Chinese places) and the roast duck was incredibly tender and indeed shredded into the right size.  I couldn't stop eating it.  Of the dishes, the curry was the more disappointing dish, but still good.  I just think it's hard to eat curry on a plate with chopsticks.  But the eggplant and okra were tender but not mushy (which can be easily done with both veggies) and the curry had a definite kick to it but not too spicy.  For those of you who are into curry, it was close to a yellow curry not a red or green one.  We ordered 1 small rice bowl which was pretty small and made it hard to sop up all the curry in the bowl.

All in all, I though the food was really spot on.  My one complaint is that the communal seating makes it a bit difficult to maneuver around your seating area and it's almost impossible to hear your table mate.  I was literally screaming at Nancy by the end of dinner.  RedFarm made me a believer that despite having pre-disposed notions about what you don't like about a restaurant, sometimes it can really surprise you.  Total bill: ~$35/pp.

Photo Credit: Yelp

Yuba Visited 10/31/2011 3 Forks

Yuba 105 E 9th St., (between 3rd Ave & 4th Ave), New York, NY 10003

I originally had Yuba on my list because I had read about their Uni risotto dish.  Other than that, there's no real discernible reason why this was on my list of places to eat.  Aarti and I actually wanted to go to this other sushi place in the East Village but it was closed on Mondays, so we decided to give it a go.  There's nothing really special or fabulous about Yuba, it's your basic standard sushi place in the E. Village (which were are tons of in that area).

The one good thing about this place is that they actually had a lot of vegetarian options.  So if you happen to need to go to a sushi place that's veggie-friendly, I would recommend this place as a good compromise.  They even have a vegetarian combo set which yo don't really see very often.  Aarti got a miso soup ($3) to start, corn tempura ($7) and the shitaki avocado roll ($7).  Of course when it was time for me to order, you'd think I'd get the Uni risotto but it was $25 or $31 if you wanted truffles with it.  If I was splitting it with someone, I might have considered ordering it, but since I wasn't starving and Aarti couldn't share it with me, I opted to get my stand-by spicy roll set ($16).  I didn't try the misso soup but Aarti had mentioned that it was good (your standard miso) but had some tofu skin in addition to the regular blokes of tofu, which was different but tasty..  We both tried the corn tempura and it was really delicious.  They basically took a bunch of corn kernels, formed them into a patty and then very lightly battered it  and served with taro and shiso.  It tastes exactly like what it sounds like: corn and light tempura batter. Then I got my spicy roll set next and when Aarti's 1 roll didn't come it was clear that they had forgotten to place the order (I think there was some confusion over it because Aarti originally had ordered shishito peppers but they were out of it and the waitress might have just forgotten to write the roll order down too).  The roll set came with spicy tuna, salmon and yellowtail, so you standard spicy combinations.  I was a bit annoyed that it didn't come with a soup or salad (is that a new trend these days?!) but there was more than enough rolls to make up for it.  These spicy rolls were the kind that had the large chunks of fish and then covered with spicy mayo instead of the chopped and mixed version.  I prefer this large pieces of fish if the fish is fresh.  I'm not saying my rolls were bad, they were actually quite satisfying, but there wasn't anything to write home about.  If I lived around the corner or any where close to delivery, I am pretty sure I would order this combo a lot.

Next we ordered the Yuzu cheesecake ($9) for dessert.  This was pretty blah and not exciting.  It was a bit dry and crumbly which is not how I like my cheesecakes.  I prefer for them to be moist and more firm (ok that sounded kind of sexual and gross, sorry!).  We didn't even finish it and the waitress was like "You can't leave until you finish your dessert!".  All we could do was smile and say we were full.  All in all, this place was fine and could be a nice local joint if you lived nearby.  But since I don't, not sure how often I would return but I am still dying to try the Uni risotto at some point!  Total bill was $31/pp with tip and tax.

Photo Credit: Yelp