No Encores at Everyday Beijing - San Mateo

The only thing I learned after a month on cardiology is that I don't understand cardiology. The concepts are so abstract they might as well be rocket science, and to this day, I can only hear a regular rate and rhythm.

I understand the Silicon Valley cities about as well as I understand cardiology, and I understand the sub-par Chinese food at Everyday Beijing even less. Take the classic Scallion Pancake, for example. It's crisp and full of scallion, an unmistakable Chinese classic that co-exists on the list of #stuffwhitepeoplelike. But despite the generous helping of frying oil, it's about as dry as an over-diuresed CHF exacerbation.

But in the case of CHF, at least I know to push lasix. Everyday Beijing has the basics down with the Beef Cartilage as well. But just bread-and-butter medicine, this bread-and-butter Chinese dish was way too easy to forget.

I can do some basic CHF management, but the EKGs elude me entirely.If I'm holding the EKG right-side up when I try to read it, you should already be impressed. I learned those peaks and depressions about as well as Everyday Beijing learned Ma Po Tofu. The tofu was bland without ground pork, and the signature Szechuan sauce was about as interesting as rule out ACS.

It's sad when the best thing is an afterthought of a side, but sadly the Garlic String Bean was like my cardiology fellows - the only thing I actually enjoyed.

You're probably asking yourself, shouldn't an internal medicine resident understand a little cardiology? The answer is a very embarrassed yes. After Everyday Beijing, I was asking myself, shouldn't an authentic Chinese restaurant know how to make Szechuan Boiled Fish? The answer is also a very embarrassed yes. The oil-and-water broth was an assault with an abrasive black pepper finish.

I don't understand how I managed to miss cardiology in a field that requires so much of it, but I understand even less how Everyday Beijing survives in city where Chinese competition is keen. I should probably brush up on the heart, but don't worry, I have a plan. Next time I have a long layover at SFO, I'll be reading my Dubin over a Chinese lunch...in a restaurant that is NOT Everyday Beijing.

Yellow Fever - Torrance

On the east coast, people thought I was exotic. They looked at me and saw eyes that would forever elude them, a language they could never learn, and a cuisine they could never crave. Their frank curiosity was inescapable, even in Boston and cosmopolitan NYC. When I moved to the west coast, I was in for quite the culture shock. I stepped off a plane and no one stared. I walked into a restaurant and no one gawked. I walked through Chinatown and no one asked for directions. When people spoke, no one was louder and slower, and best of all, no one asked where I was "FROM FROM". 

Ignorance can be as ugly as the Ugly Rolls, but it can also be a lesson learned. Take a bite of what you perceive as strange, and you might see what you're missing. The ugly rolls are truly aesthetically impaired, but they're full of fragrant pork.

Asians are as common as palm trees in SoCal, and practically everything comes with some far-east flair. Yellow Fever is the embodiment of #stuffwhitepeoplelike...except Asian. Think Lemonade, the world's whitest chain. But while Lemonade sacrifices flavor to remain painfully healthy, the Shanghai Bowl delivers guilty pleasure in moderation with refreshing vermicelli and irresistible pork belly bits.

All cultures come together on the west coast, and there are few better fusions than the Parmesan Furikake Fries. American frites, Italian cheese, and Japanese seaweed and fish formulate a far-east bowl of bar food.

Take a lesson from SoCal and catch yourself a little Yellow Fever. Some cultures are just contagious, and Asian is one you want to contract. White people beware, there is no vaccine for this kind of yellow fever.

Fancying Father's Office UPDATE - Culver City

If you grew up in SoCal, you went to school with an Asian guy everyone hates. That well-rounded kid who made not just A's but 100 percent on every physics exam, whose mellifluous prose punished your languished libel while seamless symphonies flowed from flawless fingers on at least three different instruments. You were friends but you wore a smile of feigned friendship, a mask for the constant competition, basking in the red-hot glow of mutual resentment and admiration.

If your friend was chef Sang Yoon at Father's Office, you probably lost to him every time. It's not enough that he provides the best bang for your beer, he also bangs out the best burger in town.

Sang Yoon was brilliant, even when it comes to basics. Most people were happy producing a pretty good bag of gas-station pork rinds, but then you crunch on the thick, honeycombed, impossibly light bites of crackling Crispy Pork Rinds and you'll never go back to the bag again.

Every chef should know how to make a good vegetable, but he'll lace your crispy-char Brussels Sprouts with a heart-attack hide of bacon and step it up a notch. 

Basics can get boring, but even fish sticks will blow your mind if they have a little Sang-Yoon spin. The Salt Cod Fritters are a testament to creativity (because being a technical paragon just isn't enough for this overachiever), stuffed full of soft, salty fish, coated with just enough batter to flavor the fish and desalinize the salt. 

I'm kind of over salads. But even the simplest of salads can turn into a magnum opus. The Duck Confit Salad combines fatty, savory duck-in-its-own-fat with bitter-ish mustard greens and frisee, balanced by sweet figs and a softer vinaigrette.

Sang Yoon's culinary prowess probably made him the kid you beat up for his lunch money, except you'd rather steal his lunch. He may say he doesn't do desserts, but you'd think he was using his grandmother's recipe. The Ice Cream Sandwich changes all the time, and this wintery-themed ginger molasses cookie with pumpkin ice cream and toasted pumpkin seeds makes you want to let your hair down and belt out a few bars of "Let it Go". 

A lot of people like to think they're a jack of all trades, and even more people like to say they are. Competent at many things, master of none, I used to think that you could only truly master one thing...until I went to to Father's Office.

Smooth Sailing at Seikoen - Torrance

Boys have come a long way since high school. Gone are the days of who-can-grow-the-longest-patches-of-incomplete-facial-hair, JNCO jeans that sag to the knees and cargo pants let you sneak a 2-liter bottle of coke into the movie theater. Enter a new generation of boys-become-men who can be just as much of a man with clean, unbitten nails and designer jeans.

Korean barbecue has undergone a similar evolution. Enter Seikoen, the metro-sexual alternative to beefy slabs dropping with sweet-salty-savory sauce.

Good meat tastes like good meat no matter how you slice it, and a good man is a good man regardless of what he wears. But if we said we don't prefer clean-shaven or neatly-trimmed over scruff we'd be lying, so be sure to both savor AND admire the immaculate marbling of the flavorful Prime Rib.

There is something to be said about a flattering dress shirt, but it's nothing without the tie. This is why the Ox-Tongue is getting some serious lip service. The tongue itself is tender and thin, but it's the layer of finely-ground salt and pepper rub that seals the deal.

Thin slices of buzz-cut Beef Heart make chunky bulgogi look like the bowl cuts off yesteryear.

Even the thicker chunks of chewy Squid turn tender on the grill. Like a squid steak...if squid could be a steak. No tentacular fly-aways here - these slices are as clean as a set of cuticles status post MAN-icure.

I love my bulgogi, and nothing will take galbi's place, but I can't help falling for Seikoen's smoother, more delicate approach. The ingredients are subtle, but there are no sauces to cover up the imperfections, and believe me, Seikoen's stuff has none.

The Grilled Cheese Truck - Los Angeles

Anything can be called art nowadays, but we mostly lump it into two inadequately-descriptive categories: classic and contemporary. Same goes for dining. There will always be the classic, the paradigmatic, the iconic. If the statue of David were made of food, it would be cooked by the chefs at Per Se. Daniel and Craft revel in immortality, and replicas of Ruth's Chris hang in more hotels than Claude Monet. Then there is contemporary dining with all its creative curiosities. A melange of every ethnicity is served in restaurants without tables, and sometimes you literally have to catch your food as it falls off the back of a truck.

There's no doubt the food truck trend is here to stay. Roy Choi catapulted himself to fame from the back of his Kogi truck, and nowadays, you can find almost anything anytime if you know which truck to chase. Kogi was clearly the little engine that could, but unfortunately, it's spawned some sub-par clones, among them The Grilled Cheese Truck.

The Cheesy Mac Fully Loaded should be called the colon cleanse, and the quality wasn't worth the pain. The mac and cheese was mediocre, and there was no way the so-called sharp cheddar could overcome the BBQ. The shredded pork was chewable, and the caramelized onions were close enough. It's what you would get on a barbecue plate if you stuffed everything into your mouth at once except there's extra bread to dull the flavor.

The Roast Beef at least made sense. Double cream brie goes with almost everything and makes for a cogent combination with creamy horseradish sauce.

Dessert was a dry sculpture of starch. The S'more Melt was accurately named, featuring Nutella instead of conventional chocolate, but you don't need to be a chef to know that cramming dry graham crackers between slices of toasted bread is a bad idea. My mouth was more dry than Vegas on a Wednesday, and I could barely swallow the last couple bites.

Grilled Cheese Truck is a misnomer. A more accurate name would be Stuff-as-Much-of-Whatever-You-Can-Between-Two-Slices-of-Grilled-Bread-and-Cheese Truck, but I'm guessing that didn't fit on the side.

When it comes to food, I love it all, but when it comes to art, contemporary isn't my thing. The same is rarely true of food, but I look at the Grilled Cheese Truck the same way I see a sculpture of chewed gum and hair. I can only shrug my shoulders and say, "It just doesn't do it for me."

Therapeutic Chengdu Taste – Alhambra

I think every physician deals with one medical problem that defines bane of their existence. All problems are a pain in one way or another, but there’s always one that gives us more trouble than most. Mine is hypertension, and if I could do away with just one medical problem, that would be it. Because trying to control hypertension in an outpatient clinic is an absolute nightmare.

When treating newly-diagnosed hypertension, we almost always start at the second line because the first line treatment is miserable. Props to patients who try, but no amount of Mrs. Dash is going to substitute for salt, the saving grace of food…At least that’s what I thought until found the Wontons With Pepper Sauce at Chengdu Taste. The deep red sauce of numbing pain is the classic temporary taste-bud-obliterating broth that put Szechuan cuisine on the map. When you think of numbing the tongue, you usually recall the Novocain the dentist gave you to soften the blow of the repulsive root canal, but status post Szechuan food is different. You may be barely able to feel your tongue, but what you CAN feel is a strangely prickly taste that mimics the sting of salt.

But even the strictest diet can fail, and you’re left titrating dosages to no avail. You strike a balance between the diuretic, the ACE, and the kidneys like the perfectly-proportioned cumin crust of the tender Toothpick Lamb. Disrupt that balance and you may be throwing away the toothpick with the lamb still attached.

If only salt were the only culprit for hypertension; sometimes the culprit is me. Affectionately named “white coat hypertension”, my mere presence can skyrocket a normal systolic by 70. If you’re completely at ease with doctors, dip into the Boiled Fish in Hot Sauce and let the sweat tell the story. The fish is flaky and fresh, the cabbage is soaked through but still stays crisp, and the still-numbing sauce brings on the heat.

Sometime I think I AM a medical condition. People come to my clinic complaining of the bland food they eat and the white rice they replace with brown (which is NOT a suitable substitution if you’re Asian, BTW), and I sometimes think I made their lives worse instead of better. At least I can recommend Chengdu Taste to soften the blow. A single spoonful of pepper sauce makes the medicine go down… That’s my lie and I’m stickin’ to it.