Five LA Burgers

by Erik Olsen on

Hey, I know that the reach of the In N Out hamburger chain extends well beyond the borders of Los Angeles. I GET that. But the company has been a victim of its own success, and the fact is it STARTED in Los Angeles.

And so that is why I have some rather large gripes about why the Double Double was NOT featured on this list from Fodor’s of five Best LA Burgers. I am biased. I live in New York now, but I still literally dream about In N Out’s Double Double, made, preferably, with grilled AND regular onions. Yes, I am salivating right now.

But I will say that the list did mention several burgers and burger joints I’ve never heard about before. The Father’s Office burger in the restaurant called Office in Santa Monica (an old haunt) took me by surprise. Never heard of either of them, but the description of savory “dry-aged beef topped with a savory mix of blue cheese, Gruyere, arugula, bacon, and caramelized onions, all stuffed into a French roll”, well, that sounds pretty fine. Add to that the fact that you can indulge yourself of this burger in a bar, and thus enjoy a fine lager while you gnaw on seared animal flesh.

One of the burgers on the list is familiar to any Los Angeleno. The Tommy’s burger gets a nod for the sloppiest burger, and indeed it is. Slathered in chile and topped with mustard and relish, the Tommy’s was a favorite among many of my high school friends. Myself, though, I never really took to it, and have long felt the Tommy burger is vastly over-rated.

Another high-ranking burger is the one served at The Counter, a downtown joint that apparently offers a vast and sprawling array of choices for toppings, styles, etc. I’ve never had one, but I have a hard time believing anything could trump the burger that, right at this very moment, dances in my head like a sugar plum. That wonderful, drippy, saliva-inducing Double Double.

http://www.fodors.com/wire/archives/002521.cfm

Most Expensive Sushi Restaurants

by Neil Woodburn on

Some time, shortly after winning the lottery, I want to travel the planet eating the world’s very best sushi.

Thankfully ForbesTraveler.com has anticipated this upcoming moment in my life and has just published a guide to The World’s Most Expensive Sushi.

Want to guess the price and location of the first place they mention? I’ll bet Sacramento, California didn’t come to mind. And yet, this is where one can order a $200 Ferrari Jewel Bako Roll. Sit down at Taro’s by Mikuni and for just $100 a bite, the Ferrari Jewel Bako Roll will make love to your palate with Beluga caviar, smoked salmon, Kobe beef, and a sprinkling of gold flakes. Wow.

I’m not sure I’ll be traveling to Sacramento any time soon for sushi, but I would love to visit the far more exotic locations—such as New York, Geneva, Vancouver, Milan, Tokyo (of course) and more–that Forbes Traveler features in their slide show of expensive sushi joints.

Masa, in New York City was the most expensive on the list at $800 for a meal. After reading the New York Times review, I just might have to commit some larceny to round up the cashola to eat there. Or win the lottery. Larceny would be a lot more fun, though.

Eating your way Through the Ethnic Neighborhoods of Los Angeles

by Neil Woodburn on

One of the great things about living in Los Angeles is that one can travel the world without ever leaving home.

A recent LA Times article by Cynthia Dea and Jessica Gelt explores this very concept–from a culinary point of view.

Like many big cities, Los Angeles has its share of ethnic pockets where those from far off lands congregate to live and eat.

Perhaps the city in which you live has its own China Town, for example. Well, Los Angeles has its own China Town, as well as its own Korea Town, Thai Town, Taiwanese Town, and so many more.

The World on a Platter focuses on just four such areas and the very best restaurants that each has to offer.

Taiwanese Town: located in the city of San Gabriel
Little India: located in the city of Artesia–home to “the second-largest Indian and Pakistani population in the U.S.”
Japanese Town: located in the city of Gardena
Ethiopia Town: Between Olympic and Pico boulevards in West Los Angeles. Yep, there are about eight Ethiopian restaurants all within a block of each other on Fairfax Avenue. Where else in the world are you going to find this? Other than Ethiopia, of course.

Alaska without the Cruise Ship Part 11: The Joys of Filling your Stomach in Juneau

by Neil Woodburn on

Alaska without the Cruise Ship is a 17-part series exploring the ease and advantages of touring Alaska on your own steam and at your own speed.

Juneau and the area which surrounds it is a feast for the senses, especially my two favorites: sight and taste.

Towards the end of every day, after cramming our heads with beautiful scenery and sights of amazing wildlife, we would turn our focus towards making our stomachs just as satiated–a very easy and rewarding task in Juneau.

The Hangar on the Wharf
The city has a number of casual places to eat. The Hangar on the Wharf, for example, is the perfect place for a tasty halibut Cajun sandwich, a side of fries, or a handful of other pasta, seafood, burger and sandwich items. The restaurant, as implied by the name, has an aviation theme and is decorated with propellers, model planes, old photographs of local pilots, and other aviation knickknacks, including menu items such as Plane Caesar Salad and the Bi-Pane Special. The atmosphere is light and airy and the food is basic and simple but also very delicious. The best thing about The Hangar, however, is that it is located right on the dock and is the ideal location to sit and watch the cruise ships pull in to Juneau. It was a bit foggy the day we visited, but that made it all the more alluring as enormous vessels suddenly appeared out of the fog and pulled up to dock.

Silver Bow Bakery
A few blocks away, tucked into a side street, is quaint little Silver Bow Bakery. This mellow little café sees far less tourists and is the perfect place to hole up with a good book and a cup of Joe. The breakfasts (waffles, bagels, fresh baked breads) and “hearty sandwich” lunches are cheap here and the desserts phenomenal. The back room of the café also doubles as a movie house, with art films and other favorites projected onto an eleven-foot screen. This is where the local writers and artists tend to congregate–at least the day I visited. A handful of people were sitting around scribbling in notebooks or tapping away on their laptops, a steaming mug of coffee at their side.

The Twisted Fish
At the other end of the spectrum, the most expensive and upscale restaurant in Juneau is the Twisted Fish. This dockside restaurant located near the tramway has the regular litany of steak and seafood options with a few surprises thrown in. The salmon in filo pastry dough, for example, turned out to be a unique variation on all the fish steaks I’d eaten already. It was the first time I ate salmon in Alaska–halibut had been my fish of choice up until visiting the Twisted Fish–and it was delicious.

The warm wooden interior, was rather noisy, and full of tourists, but was still a very enjoyable location to dine away the evening and sample from southeast Alaska’s largest wine selection. With the exception of some rather lackluster desserts, the Twisted Fish served up the best food we had in Juneau.

Gold Creek Salmon Bake
Perhaps the most touristy place to eat in all of Juneau is the Gold Creek Salmon Bake. I doubt any locals actually visit the place, but nonetheless, I still highly recommend it.

The Salmon Bake is an all-you-can-eat affair. For those of us traveling Alaska without a cruise ship buffet at our disposal, this was our only chance to really stuff ourselves silly. And we did a great job of it.

The Salmon Bake is just a few miles outside of town and easily accessible by a large bus that picks up diners from the dock and whisks them into the forest to be stuffed and gorged. And when I say forest, I do mean forest.

The Salmon Bake is located outdoors, alongside a meandering stream and sheltered by a thick canopy of trees. Wooden picnic tables and old pieces of mining equipment from the gold rush days decorate the eating area–which is much more of a campground than a restaurant–while gentle, forested hills on either side block the outside world from penetrating into this peaceful sanctuary.

Just past the entrance is a barbeque pit manned by two cooks busily tending to an array of salmon steaks sizzling away. The alder wood smoke and subtle hint of cooked salmon floats gently through the air, permeating the already pleasant atmosphere with a sense of homey comfort.

In addition to the fresh salmon, the $34 entrance fee also includes all-you-can-eat barbecued chicken, tasty ribs, rice pilaf, baked beans, a couple of different types of salad, and corn bread. Lemonade is also provided but wine and beer are extra. What makes this all so wonderful, however, is that after the meal, diners can grab some marshmallows and roast them over a campfire as the perfect conclusion to such an amazing place.

Overall, the food is quite good. It wasn’t the best we had during our stay in Alaska, but combined with the great atmosphere, cool setting, and marshmallow roasting, the Salmon Bake was a great experience well worth our time. Sure, you could get a better tasting meal elsewhere for about the same cost, but as they say in the MasterCard commercials, the experience itself is priceless.

Alaskan Brewing Company
One of the greatest rewards of traveling is when an experience exceeds your expectations. This happened one dreary morning when a heavy storm blew in and instead of flying to an island to go bear watching, we ended up touring the Alaskan Brewing Company.

I’ve been on a handful of brewery tours before and have rather lost my enthusiasm for them. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all; only the free post-tour drink varies.

And so, I wandered into the brewery with arms crossed and a surly attitude for finding myself there instead of face to face with a bear out in the wilderness. And then Gordon started to speak. Gordon was our guide for the tour. This middle-aged Juneau local bore a striking resemblance to comedian George Carlin in both looks and personality. While this is certainly a plus for any tour guide, what really made Gordon pop was the passion he so clearly has for his job. This man loves his beer. And loves explaining how Mother Nature, along with some help from science, is able to transform simple hops and barley into a golden elixir of life. Indeed, Gordon gets positively animated explaining the reproduction of yeast as though it were the miracle of birth itself.

I had initially been quite surprised to learn that beer was brewed in Alaska and naturally assumed it must not be very good. I was completely wrong. Although the Alaskan Brewing Company is the only brewer in all of Alaska, it has won so many awards–such as “Best Beer in the Nation” in 1988–that I can’t believe that other crazy loons aren’t brewing beer up here as well.

I was able to learn just how good the beer is at the conclusion of the tour. Now, every brewery tour I’ve ever been on provides one, maybe two samples at the most with the $5-10 entrance fee. The Alaskan Brewing Company, on the other hand, was free to tour and had virtually unlimited samples to enjoy. And, they were tasty!

The samples were arragned like a wine tasting, from lightest to darkest. My favorite was the Alaskan Summer Ale, one of the lighter varieties, that was smooth and crisp and quickly became a staple with our meals the remainder of the trip.

The last beer we tasted, the darkest, was surprisingly funky. Alaskan Smoked Porter is a muddy brew that’s dark as night and just as disorienting. This utterly unique beer is smoked with alder wood–the same wood that is used to smoke salmon.

The result is a culinary disconnect; I’m drinking beer but it smells like fish. It didn’t actually taste like fish, but it was almost impossible for me to separate that hint of alder wood from all the smoked salmon I’ve had in the past. I gave it my best shot, however. I tried a number of sips, letting the beer roll around on my tongue and really trying to get into the spirit of it, but at the end of the day, I had to admit I simply didn’t like it.

I do recommend giving it a try, however; I can’t say I’ve ever had a beer as utterly unique as that Smoked Porter.

Yesterday: Salmon Fishing and Whale Watching in Juneau
Tomorrow: The Wonderful Wild West Town of Skagway

A Canadian in Beijing: “No Clamber Over”

by Ember Swift on

I’m from Ontario. It’s a relatively flat province in Canada with lots of rolling hills and some small mountains that most of my west-coast friends won’t even call mountains. That’s fair enough, considering they’re looking at the Rockies all the time. The first time I saw those magnificent Rocky mountains I was sixteen years old and I remember feeling as though I had never seen anything so intense, so breathtaking, so grand in nature. Every time I get the opportunity to go west again and look up at their majestic snow-capped peaks, I am awed all over again. They never get boring to me – this Ontario-born Canadian – and I always feel really lucky to see them again.

Now here I am in Beijing and I was only an hour out of town this weekend and I had a similar moment of complete shock. I knew there were mountains outside of Beijing, but I didn’t know they’d be so beautiful! Of course, they’re nowhere near as high as the Rockies (i.e. no snow and no cloud-covered peaks), but they’re majestic all the same. These mountains are lush and green and they hold beautiful “tan ?” (deep pools), waterfalls and teal-coloured lakes in their various stony crevices.

I am moved by natural beauty.

(I took a lot of photos.)

The mountain we climbed was called: “Yougu Shentan 幽古伸潭.” The path rounded around a flowing stream filled with huge rocks and small waterfalls, mountain pools heated by the sunshine and picturesque views that took your breath away every time you turned around. And, you had to turn around regularly. Why keep your back to the beauty? It made for a slower ascent, but the view was always worth it.

Climbing was, of course, hard work. This was a tourist site, though, and it was set up well with resting spots equipped with sun awnings, railings on steep sections and lots of benches along the way. The “No Clamber Over” signs made me chuckle, too. I explained to my friend that the word “clamber” was technically correct, but it’s just such a strange way to request that people stay on the walkway side of the fence. “Don’t Climb Over the Fence” would more likely be on a sign at home. In fact, I haven’t seen the word “clamber” in print in a long time!

We didn’t bring any water or food with us, however, and made the mistake of assuming there’d be a vendor somewhere. About halfway up, we asked someone coming the other way and discovered that there would be no food at all for us unless we were to invade a stranger’s picnic! Of course, that was out of the question, but we were lucky enough to learn that a free flowing spring was at the top of the mountain and we just needed to get there to re-hydrate. Around the next bend, we found it.

As non-Chinese as it was, I washed my hands vigorously under the spout and then cupped them together and filled them up with water so that I could drink from the spring. I brought my cupped hands to my lips several times and felt refreshed.

I heard a woman exclaim “she’s drinking from her hands!” and I knew it was because here in China it is assumed that hands are very dirty. Perhaps this is a fair assumption, for the most part, but I didn’t have a bottle with me and this method is a way I have known to collect water since my childhood. Different cultures = different practices.

My friend, however, had a different plan. The fact that he’s Chinese meant that he wasn’t going to do as I had done and he, too, looked at me strangely as I cupped my hands together and brought them to my lips. I shrugged and continued. I was too thirsty to change my ways in that moment. When I was done, he leaned his whole face into the spout and took the water directly into his mouth. He came away from the spring with his whole face and part of his hair drenched but smiling. Different strokes for different folks! Either way, we both felt better.

At this point in the walk, we were too tired to continue and started to double back. This mountain path was not a circular one and so lunch was no closer to us the farther we walked. Food was becoming more of a motivator than scenic sights.

After getting back down to the foot of the mountain, we hopped on the bike and drove deeper into the hills where the roads wound around steep cliffs and rose and fell in switchbacks and hairpin turns. Around one corner, we saw a building that looked, to me, like an old gas station. My friend turned in and parked the bike right next to an empty outdoor table and asked the proprietor if we could have lunch there. They said sure and motioned for us to sit.

I was shocked. It didn’t look like a restaurant to me! There were three tables that were sitting in front of two cars. These cars were essentially in the parking lot (or where the pumps would have been had it once been a gas station, which it hadn’t) and then there was an L-shaped building that didn’t look like a restaurant in the least.

On closer inspection, this was indeed an eating establishment. One of those rooms housed some interior tables, one was the kitchen and one appeared to be living quarters for those who ran the restaurant. Simple and nothing fancy, but fully functional.

We ordered some vegetarian dishes, which included vegetables that grow on these very mountains. The food was delicious, the service was kind and it was the perfect lunch for two incredibly hungry hikers. Afterwards, I took several pictures of the surroundings not wanting to forget this nondescript building and its hidden hospitality. After all, it felt to me that we were pulling up at a personal residence and we were treated as such – just like long-lost guests.

This mountain top adventure more than quenched my thirst for beauty and my hunger for nature. I came away humbled by my insular Beijing existence over the past two months (not counting my foray into Shanghai, but that too is another city). I now know that all of this natural beauty is just a short drive away. I’ll be sure to take more of it in on my next journey to China.

Until then, I have lots of photos.