Bomb Ass fries at BLAZE on Thayer St.

Hello! It's been an extremely long time since I've blogged.

March -- not sure what happened in March. But I do know that I didn't try any new Asian restaurants, plus there aren't any that I'm interested in going too. Speaking of Asian restaurants...Haruki is opening a Haruki Express on Waterman St. I'm not sure what the food would be like and I won't be around to find out either since I'm moving back to California. YAH! Anyway....I had really bad sushi today from East Side Market Place...I don't know why the food is considered "fresh" when it's shipped from California...that's why I made sure to buy cooked fish eel. (I was too lazy to order take out and I was picking up a movie from my P.O box at the market anyway).

April -- We went to Red Stripe a few times...the grill cheese sandwich is awesome...but extremely oily. Their roasted tomato soup is the best I've had so far, but then again I don't usually order anything vegetables. Anyway, for $9 or $9.50 you get this HUGE (I'm not kidding about the huge part) grilled cheese sandwich grilled with pear, some sort of cheese, and prosciutto...and your choice of roasted tomato soup (yummy) or fries...skip the fries...they are always TOO salty!(you’ll leave the restaurant extremely bloated if you order the fries). But if you want to try them just have someone else order them and eat off of her/his plate. They usually give you too much fries anyway.

We are at Red Stripe....too many times...twice in May...May 1st and May 9th....after awhile the food gets boring...except for the roasted tomato soup. They have this awesome turkey liver mousse, but it’s expensive ($15 for a shared plate). I'm sure there was something else in it but I only remember "turkey." If you order the share plate it comes with 2 other or 1 other pate, duck, and salami. The jam (or chutney) that comes with it compliments the pate/meat very well. Ever since I had their turkey mousse pate I’ve been trying a sorts of pates from the cheese shop on Wayland, Whole Foods and even East Side Market place…but NOTHING compares to that. I should ask them where they get theirs from …I doubt they made it.

(May 17th, After writing about the roasted tomato soup I called in an order this afternoon. BTW the service is a little slow so if you're in a hurry or just want your food sooner tell them you have to leave soon. It works.)

We recently went to Blaze. I think they had/have one on Hope St. but they opened a new one on Thayer. The food was pretty good. Here's what we ordered.

0. Roasted tomato hummus (okay, are you starting to notice a trend of things I like? roasted tomatoes?) with some sort of toasted bread....it's # zero because it was FREE! How cool is that!

1. Sweet Potato Fries -- YUMMMMMY! Battered and deep fried, but still so good and you can STILL taste the sweet potato. This appetizer comes with this awesome Cajun mayonnaise base dip -- I loved it. And an okay tamarind dip...it wasn't thick enough to be called a dip.
Cost: $4.95, not bad.

2. Mushroom Ravioli -- I loved it! I usually don’t like to order anything without a lot of protein because I hate feeling hungry an hour after I just ate...but this wasn't bad! It was good! It had a little pork somewhere in the dish but I didn't see any. The sauce was thick which made the dish taste so good. You HAVE to try this dish if you ever eat here. Cost: $14.95, a little pricey but it's worth it (I ordered a pasta dish from The Kartabar for $12 or $13 dollars...and damn it was SO BAD! no flavor! no nothing! I could have made a better dish with $3 and my eyes closed and hands tied behind my back...yes, it was that bad!).

3. All American Burger --TOO DRY. I asked for medium. It was well done. Not good. But the salad that came with the burger was pretty good I guess. Cost: $7.95, too much for a bad burger

Our waitress (Sarah M.) was extremely nice and helpful! Too bad all waiters/waitresses aren't like her. So if you decide to try this place ask to be seated in Sarah M's section. She's the cute tall girl with the glasses.

Here's a quote I found online,

"You may find Jamaican Jerk Chicken, Steak Argentine or RI Style Calamari. For the Chocoholic there is Lava Love, a warm Chocolate Cake served with House Made Ice Cream. MMM Delicious!!!"



Yes, I heard that the desserts are very good, but we didn't have enough room for more food so next time I'll let you know if it's "MMM Delicious!!!" I think I'm going to order the Lava Love...with a name like that who could pass it up.

Next restaurant destination: Somewhere in Montreal, QC and then onto Waterman Grille.


Blaze
272 Thayer St.
Providence, RI 02906
(401) 490-2128

This address is not online yet so you should write it down. =) or come back. Thanks for reading!

Thee worst restaurant in Providence is Sakura Restaurant

No words can describe how horrible the food was. The beef teriyaki was the worst thing I've ever eaten in my life (and I've had sea urchin before). I didn't bother eating the sushi that M-- ordered because from the looks of it they didn’t even look like raw sushi grade fresh.

I didn’t even bother offering some of my beef to M--. After awhile I told him that I would offer it to him, but that I’m not going to because it was so bad. I apologized to him for suggesting that we go there. I know it wasn’t my fault, but I felt so bad. He said he was okay (that’s because he’s very tolerant).

Here are the reasons why the beef dish (oh my gosh! I still can't get over how horrible this place was!) was so bad:

1) The beef was flat....meaning it was extremely thin (thinly sliced).
2) The beef smelled. It smelled of rotten beef because it was probably rotten. Before I even ate the meat I could smell how bad it was (and I'm the type of person that eats anything). I ate a piece and was seriously thinking about not touching my plate after that. I should have done so since I feel sick to my stomach right now.
3) The rice was soggy.
4) The beef was over cooked. (The reason why they over cooked the meat was to cover up that fact that the meat was rotten. They do this in Chinese restaurants, but it’s harder to detect because they cut the meat into smaller pieces AND they add ginger and a lot of garlic to over the smell).
5) The ramen noodles that came with the plate was nasty and was unnecessary
6) The beef tasted BAD. Need I say more?

The only mediocre thing about the food was that the miso soup wasn't bad and the price for the food wasn't as expensive as Haruki. (I'd rather pay more for some-what good Japanese food than pay less to eat TRASH. Yes, they serve trash and I resent everyone that holds this place so high. Besides the food being very nasty, inedible and sicken the entire restaurant looked like trash. Seriously, even a person without an eye for detail can see the enormous flaws they have at that restaurant. The ceilings were old and dirty. The walls were cracked and dusty. And the bathroom --- well, it's comparable to the boys’ bathroom in the public schools. Okay, it wasn't as bad, but it was very bad. Did I mention that the blinds in the bathroom weren't closed all the way because they were broken and dirty (I saw this before I got the food) and that the soap looked dirty and crusty?)

This place serves trash.

I am so sick of the Asian restaurants here in Providence (except for Sawadee on Hope St.). The Asian restaurants here in Providence give non-Asians a false sense of what Asian food is like and that is not good. If you want real Asian food go to California (go to LA, Oakland, San Francisco, and any city in the Bay Area). My gosh, it's horrible how a lot of people think that this place is so great when it's not. Yes, they don't charge that much, but do you really want to eat trash? I hate to dog this place, but they get an “F-“ from me.

I read the reviews on yahoo and everyone seemed to like it EXCEPT one smart individual who said this place is overrated and YES it is!

Do not eat here unless you really don’t care about eating good food.

I would have been HAPPY to have had a frozen entree than to have eaten here.

Haruki East on Wayland Ave. is going DOWN hill.

Yes, I said it! They are going down, down, down. Their sushi is no longer thick and fresh. The food in the bento boxes are tiny seriously, I'm not joking. I ordered a beef teriyaki bento box which comes with California rolls and the beef. The beef was smaller than a 2x3 post-it. The broccoli didn't have the sauce that it usually had, and to top it off it took TOO long to get to our table. Our sake (salmon), sweet shrimp, and yellow tail came after we fished our soup/salad, but I swear we waited over 20 minutes for our damn boxes to get out. It was 1pm and I was starving!

Anyway, I also forgot to mention that the fruit that came with the box was NOT fresh. 4 day old container fruit at the market would have tasted a lot fresher than what they had in our box. I usually eat everything when I'm hungry, but not the unfresh fruit! For that much at least let us leave feeling a little satisfied. Geez. We need a new spot. The good about this place is that it's so close to our house! Oh well the salmon really satisfied my sushi cravings for Saturday morning. Unfortunately they didn't have salmon skin, WTF!

The next day I went to Ruffles and had their pancake special. The price was very special. For $5.95 ($6.43 plus tax) I got a small cup of OJ, coffee (FREE refills), 2 soft fluffy pancakes, 2 sausages, 1 egg (over easy please!) and some home fries. Can't beat that! They serve brunch until 1pm. Word of advice, DO NOT arrive after 12pm because you might not get a seat. It's always packed after 12pm on Sundays. (Note if you're a fan of eggs Benedict or corn beef has I'll suggest you NOT order these. We ordered that last time and it was not all that, it was okay, just not great compared to Cafe Orlin's in NY or Zackary’s in Santa Cruz (I'm not sure if they're still there)).

Don't shoot me, but Trinity Brewhouse was BAD, not bad cool, but bad BAD!

Yes, it was bad. I ordered the Trinity burger and couldn't eat it. There was blue cheese in it. I like blue cheese, but not in my burger. That's my fault for not paying attention. One thing I can really complain about are the fries, they were bad. I'm not sure how to explain it; you'll have to eat them to find out. Okay fine, they were thin, but not crunchy. Some fries were uncooked. $9.95, not worth it! Next time I feel like getting a burger I'll head over to the Kartabar on Thayer. It's only $7.00 for a bigger and better tasting burger.

The Trinity Nachos were okay. We liked the chips because they were large and crunchy, but the whole thing lacked flavor. I think pickled Jalapenos would have added more flavor instead of Fresh Jalapenos. Overall the nachos were the best thing we had besides the PC Pilsner.

M-- got the grilled sausage platter. The Red bliss mashed potatoes tasted like they were sitting in water after they were mashed. Bad, bad, bad. And the thing was lacking flavor.....salt. The platter came with two sausages. One of the sausages tasted like extremely salty hot dog and the other just tasted expired. The sauerkraut was not fresh, it was not sour, it was all brown and tasteless. For $13.99 we got a lot for this platter, but too bad it didn't taste good. We were extremely hungry so we ate all the nachos, but didn't touch the mash potatoes after 2 bites. I eat anything even if it's bad because it's a waste of money not to eat it. So we packed half of the burgers, all the fries, and a sausage. On our way home I didn't feel so great so I might NOT eat the left over after all. We'll see. People eat anything when they're hungry. I think we should have ordered the fish legs. At least it would have been different.

Oh well, we wanted to try a new place; we did and didn't like it.

Go here for beer, not the food. If you want beer and food, I suggest going to RiRa (a few blocks away). Plus, RiRa has 3 plasma screen TV’s and on certain nights they have pub trivia or a show.

Best place for a burger:

Kartabar
284 Thayer St.
Providece, RI 02906

I always order the Kartaburger(again only $7.00, dinner!). And M-- usually orders Gnocchi Diablo con filet mignon-$13.50(dinner!). We've tried some of their specials and other pasta dishes, but we like this one better. The only complaint about the Kartabar is that their cocktail drinks are water downed, I think they water down their wine too if that's possible).

Hibachi Steak House in Norwood, MA. YUMMY and CHEAP!

Hey folks, we had our company Christmas lunch yesterday. The Boston team came down and we went up to Norwood for lunch at a place call Hibachi Steak House. We went there last year and everyone loved it so we went back again.

The food is pretty cheap compared to Haruki. I had the pleasure of introducing sushi to V--. She's never had sushi or faux sushi (California Rolls, etc). I didn't order anything too wild. I ordered the following sushi for us to taste: Sake (salmon), Unagi (eel), Toro (tuna belly), Habachi (yellowtail), and the caterpillar roll. I was so happy that she was so open minded. (I keep trying to coerce K-- to try some eel since the eel was not raw, but she wouldn't do it). She's never used a chopstick either so I had to tell her how. I hold my chopstick incorrectly, but I told her as long as the food doesn't fall that it was fine. I showed her how to use the soy sauce (low sodium soy sauce, which I told her that Asian's don't use that. They use the real thing, but I didn't want to bother asking for regular soy sauce). I showed her how to mix the wasabi into the soy sauce. Then we ate the sushi piece by piece. I told her that one way the soy sauce/wasabi can be applied to the sushi is by dipping a piece of ginger into the sauce and then rubbing the sushi or you can just dunk the sushi into the sauce, which is what we did. After we ate each piece I told her that she should eat a piece of sweet ginger to wash down the taste of the previous fish. Her favorite sushi out of the few that we had was the sake (salmon) and unagi (eel), which I also love too! I told her I was proud of her being so brave. She totally just dove in. She said that if she was going to try sushi she wanted to go with someone who knew something about it so that she won't order the wrong thing and decide that she hates sushi for life. That's a good way of looking at things! That's awesome. One thing that I forgot to order was salmon skin. I am so mad. I should have order California roll for her too, just so she can taste what faux sushi is like. I also ordered some edamame ($3.75, not a bad price). She liked that too. I think we fished one plate by ourselves.

For the main course we both ordered the samurai special. This dish consists of fillet mignon and shrimp with the choice of white rice or fried rice. Japanese people traditionally don't eat fried rice so I ordered white rice for the both of us. I think we were the only ones there who ate white rice. I like Japanese white rice more than fried rice. I explained to her the difference between Japanese rice and Thai rice and Chinese rice. We also talked about yellow sticky rice, which is a South East Asian thing (this was brought up because we were talking about her Laotian friend (FYI, people from Laos (Laos is in between Vietnam and Thailand).

I can't stop thinking about the food we had yesterday. Right now I'm trying to figure out if I want to get pancakes or sushi. The only reason why I would want pancakes is because it's a lot cheaper than getting sushi. hmmmm. They cooked the food in front of us! This year we didn't get the show they did for us last year. They only do the volcano, shrimp and knife tricks for dinner. Dinner is a little pricy so I guess that's why they have to entertain their customer. Oh well. The fillet mignon was cooked perfectly, medium well. The shrimp was tasty too. The order also came with onion soup (not into onion soup so I skipped that part) and vegetables. $12.50 for all of this. Not bad at all. You get more compared to a bento box at most restaurants. Please I ordered the most expensive thing on the lunch menu.

For drinks we got this thing called the Flaming Volcano. I think some people call it a Scorpion bowl. The drink is huge so V-- and I shared one (only $10.75). After that we ordered a cherry blossom. The drink is very cute, but not as tasty.

If you click on the title you can see the restaurant menu.



Hibachi Steak House
315 Morse St.
Norwood, MA 02062-5034

Haruki East on Wayland Ave.

300 pound halibut

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Last night we went to Haruki East for dinner.

I was being cheap so I decided to stay away from sushi. Choice number one was Kibe Beef: NY steak with mash potatoes and seasonal greens, $14.00. Yes, I know it's not "Japanese" but I like this dish. At the last minute I decided to go with "The Catch of the Day." Grilled halibut.

I should have stuck with my first choice because the halibut wasn't that great. The wasabi sauce that came with the dish was interesting, but the fish was still lacking salt. I poured some soy sauce on top of the fish, but that didn't do it any good.

I didn't like the fish, but I ate everything because I told myself that the fish was healthy and that it will fill me up. Oh well, next time I'll spend an extra $5 or more for some sushi (fyi, California Roll is not sushi, it's faux sushi. I hate it when people think they've had sushi, but they really didn't).

I like this place, but I don't think I'll ever order "The Catch of The Day" again.

Positive things about the place:

1) The atmosphere is really nice (they're always busy at night esp. on Fridays so make reservations!)

2) I like their fried ice cream esp. when it comes with blackberries. The last time I had it they served kiwi with it--Hate it.

3) The sushi's not bad

4) I heard the Red Snapper Cheek was very taste.

Negatives:

1) It's a little on the pricy side so if you can make it before 3pm lunch is a better bargain
2) The price (I hope you got my point).

p.s

I didn't feel so great when we got home from Haruki, but I'm fine now.

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And I don't always eat good or expensive food. Today I had a Celeste personal pan pizza (with sausage). Their "Zesty Chicken" is much better and it's lower in calories. $0.67 Yes, 67 cents, you can't beat that!


Man, blogging makes me hungry.

If you click on the title you can read a review on Haruki East and you can also see their menu.
(Note: The prices have gone up. Sashimi deluxe is not longer $24, it's not $28).


Haruki East
172 Wayland Ave.
Providence, RI
401-223-0332

Nasty ass Pakarang (not Parakang) in Providence, RI

Seriously folks this place was NASTY.

Just remember the name: Parakang, accent on the first A.
Do not go there unless you don't know anything about Thai food or good food in general.

Okay, it wasn't horrible. It was just very very okay. Before I get to the food, here are more reasons why I didn't like the place:

1) The menu was very short
2) They cost more than Sawaddee (My favorite Thai restaurant)
3) service was slow

The only good thing I can say about this place is that it was a large restaurant with hardly any customers...hmmmm, I wonder why.

Here's what I ordered:

Salmon and Ginger-yes, it was Salmon and ginger, but where's the "Thai" in this dish? It was bad, nasty and my stomach hurts now. Maybe I was expecting too much since everyone was raving about it. Plus they got an award for "Best Thai Food" in 2005. Yeah, that's 2005, and it wasn't like they got an award for 2004. Also, who's rating these places anyway? How do I know that this person rating this restaurant knows what s/he is talking about?

M-- got beef basil which was better tasting than my dish, but it was only good because it was yummy cow (dinner table talk was about slaughtering cows and killing chickens and knocking fish on the head).

Tom Yum soup was wack, W-A-C-K wack! It had too much sugar and the fish sauce was too strong. There was a lack of "sour" in the "hot & sour" soup.

The iced coffee wasn't bad, then again it's hard to mess up on iced coffee.

I told M-- that I no longer trusted non-Asian views on Asian food because honestly I don't think they've had enough to really compare what's great or not. Seriously though, I'm not trying to be racist or racial, but don't you think Asians know a lot more about Asian food since we eat it a lot more than American food? See, this is how we Asians see it. If we're trying to see if a restaurant is worth going to we survey the crowd and if we see a bunch of Asians we usually go in, but if we hardly see anything we run.

There was this restaurant in Oakland's Chinatown that served noodles. That place was always busy. 98 percent of their customers were loyal Asians, but 2 percent were loyal Americans (whites/blacks).

So what I'm trying to say is that Sawaddee is hands down better than Parakang. Someone said that she thought Sawaddee have down hill, but no I don't think so lady. Their pad Thai is so much better than Apsara (an Asian restaurant that she claims have better pad Thai). A restaurant that also serves Chinese, Viet and Cambodia food doesn't know that much about Thai food.


Sorry no picture, but don't worry they didn't do a good job on the presentation.

Phonatic

Today after Taiji, I went to this restaurant called, "Phonatic." I sat down to look at the menu and for some reason I couldn't find any "Pho" on the menu. And this is a place where they're supposed to serve Pho because it is "Pho" natic. Anyway, I looked at the menue again, but couldn't find anything with the words "pho" well except on the front cover. Then I remembered order a number 20 something....that's when I looked again and realized that the menu skipped 25 to 40. Wow, that's a lot of items missing. Anyway, when I saw this I thought, "hmmm, maybe they stopped serving it because someone complained about the MSG or maybe they're just out of Pho broth today." So when the waitress came to take my order I told her that I knew what I wanted but that it's not on the menu because number 25 to 40 was missing. I told her I wanted a small steak and beef ball Pho. I guess she didn't understand because she ran to get me another menu. With the menu I was able to point out that I wanted rare steak, but also with meatballs. The soup came and for some reason the bowl looked very small today, might have been because I was extremely hungry? Anyway, I also had Vietnamese ice coffee.....my hands are shaking from it still since I'm not an avid caffiene consumer. Today I tried something new that I have never done in my life while eating Pho. I ate the soup/noodles without an hot sauce or hoison sauce. That was a big step for me. I was able to appreciate the pho broth (I used to work at a Vietnamese restaurant called "Saigon City" in the Bay Area, the broth it's not easy to make). Don't worry I had my "rooster" sauce and hoison sauce on the side (I like to dip my meat). So yeah...with or without the MSG, I'd go back again because it was pretty good, it was cheap and most importantly they didn't charge me for adding the meatballs.

Here's a photo I found online (I forgot to bring my camera).

The name of my favorite Thai dish

Today was fun. We left the house a little late, but were able to do a few things. We stopped by Earthen Fire and painted these. Can't you tell who painted what? =) I got lazy so I took a short cut and just painted the whole area inside the plate and just added dots. Mike's project didn't go so well. I told him that I didn't want to be mean, but everytime I looked at his mug I felt like throwing up because it reminds me of the American flag. He tried his best so I give him credit for that. He said that he didn't know what to do and plus the curves made it hard and he claims that he used red because I didn't let him use my pink...anyway, he thinks it's bad too...O well..it could be worse. I kept suggesting that he paint in the white area...but he didn't. Oh shit, I forgot to take a photo of his little guy inside the mug. It's very cute. I think he should have painted a comic strip on the mug..it would have been hella funny. He said that next time I'll do the mug and he'll do the plate....hmmm...that won't be til another 7 month or so.



fter paint for over an hour...(we took SO long. These little girls came in after us and in 15 minutes they were done. I told Mike that it's probably one of their chores so they just painted their mugs in one color and got it over with. As for Mike and I, we took 10 minutes to choose our colors and then we took another 15 just to paint our name. Haha.)

After this we went and ate at my favorite Thai restaurant....Sawaddee...I think it means "How are you" in Thai. I'm not 100% sure though. We ordered the Spring Rolls..which I think are wayyy too pricy for the size..but whatever Mike wanted the dish.



We also had Tom-Yum soup....our favorite..it's basically hot and sour soup...but Thai style. We ate and drank everything! It's that good! Plus we were hella hungry. Either way we would have ate and drank everything.



And then we got Pad Thai with chicken..I usually don't order this dish at most Thai restaurants because they are always dissapointing, but they have really good Pad Thai.



And of course we had to have my (now also Mike's) favorite dish....*drum roll* #44. Yes....I used to know it by "#44....but today I made an effort to say it...it's called "Yum Nurr."



And there you have it folks...my favorite Thai dish...I went online to try to find a recipe...damn it was very hard to find one...I finally found 2...on the internet they call it "beef salad"...I guess sometimes they eat them with greens...as you can see above the only green thing in there are the scallions. When I make the dish this week or whenever I'll post it. =) I also plan to make Tom Yum soup...it's easy..all you have to do is buy "Tom Yum" paste...that's the hot part...for the sour part...you just add lime juice. Why pay $3.95 for a tiny bowl when you can pay a little more for A LOT! =)

Thanks for reading...and drop a line if you enjoyed my post for today. =)