Koreatown Galleria

Just a quick post (I have much to catch up on, and it's almost the new year..!), but one hot summer day, I decided to stop into Koreatown Galleria for a quick lunch after I had gotten my haircut.

Don't exactly remember what the name of the little stand was in the food mart, but I craved Korean cold noodles. This was a really great combo - Korean cold noodles and Korean bbq marinated beef ribs over rice combo. The springy, cold and tangy noodles make slurping them a joy...I am instantly refreshed after eating these. The beef was very tender, I didn't really finish all the rice but the meat was great, and with the kimchi-ed bean sprouts, kimchi cabbage, and pickled veggies, it was a perfect meal. I should have taken my leftovers back home but I had some more shopping to do, so I figured it would be a waste...I'll remember to do that next time.

Koreatown Galleria Food Court
3250 West Olympic Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90006-2367
(323) 733-6000
koreatowngalleria.com

Smokehouse Restaurant

So, I work next to this old timey restaurant called the Smokehouse, which is supposedly one of George Clooney's haunts. Can't say I've seen him there (but when I do, I will give him a piece of my mind! One of my first questions - "How do you get your eyelashes to be so amazing?"), but Louisa and I have stopped in on numerous occasions now, mainly to take advantage of their $12.99 Prime rib Monday special. Yes, folks, you read it right - 13 dollas' for a sweet slice of prime rib, complete with 2 sides. If that isn't recession friendly, I don't know what is.

But they gotta make their money's worth as well, right? They're known for their famous garlic bread, as shown by their take out aluminum foil bread loaf bag...(this is another time, when I got take out garlic bread by itself...)

"Worlds Greatest Garlic bread" huh? We'll see about that...

And this is what a half order looks like. Old school artery clogging goodness. The topping, Owen has noted, looks and tastes like contents of those Kraft Macaroni and Cheese sauce packets. Processed, powderized cheese and garlic bits. Well, I guess they USED to be garlic and cheese at some point...right? Well, it's all pretty damn tasty still (again, my love for fake nacho cheese probably helps with this). This is where they get yer money's worth out of you, bread isn't free at Smokehouse, half order is like 4 bucks, and full order is like 6 bucks. Hrm, digging into the pockets now for that extra change...okay, back to the rest of the meal...


Here's my Prime rib special, (cooked to my specifications, medium) with my two chosen sides of creamed spinach and mashed potatoes. They have those little extras that are always nice with a prime rib - horseradish sauce, and a little gravy boat of au jus. Tasty...very tasty. This is a usual item on the menu, that costs, oh, 23 dollars? So this isn't that gross cheap 2 dollar prime rib from a shady casino in Vegas (oh so suspicious! why does it cost 2 dollars?!) I'd also like to mention that the service is LIGHTING FAST here. Once you order, I say it takes about 5 minutes for them to deliver your meal to the table. But I guess I'm speaking for myself, since I usually only go on Mondays, when there's less people. But every single time - super fast service.

Louisa's plate looks pretty similar to mine, except she chose the asparagus spears and the rice pilaf. She raves about their rice pilaf, someday I will get it instead of my power combo above.

Smokehouse feels fancy, like taking your grandparents out to a nice birthday meal, but with a deal like that, the fanciness is just the icing on the cake to a great meal. Clooney, I'll meet you there, when, next Monday? Yeah, prime rib's on me, hah.

Smokehouse Restaurant
4420 West Lakeside Drive
Burbank, California 91505
(818) 845-3731

Kings Head Pub and Restaurant (Part 2)

Whenever I think "Fish and chips", I first think about some of the fish and chips I had in England. And then I think of the fish and chips from King's Head in Santa Monica. Daphne and I headed there one night, before going to my friend Annette's show (Random Ninjas rule, by the way!) I was ready to try something new tonight though...and that new thing was this:

...a scotch egg! I had only read about these, and was determined to try one that night. I was not disappointed, it was a really filling appetizer. The boiled egg was perfectly boiled, not a hint of grey around the yolk, and super creamy. The sausage that was wrapped around it was nicely seasoned, not spicy at all, and almost melted in my mouth upon trying a piece. The breading was not greasy, and the gravy went perfectly with this. What an amazing food invention, the British think of everything!

Daphne got the special of the night, corned beef and cabbage,(in this picture, the cabbage is hidden underneath the mound of corned beef and gravy) which also came with a side of veggies. This place does gravy extremely well, I wanted to mention. This dish also came with...

...randomly, some raisin bread. I tried some of the corned beef, very nice and tender. Corned beef is one of my favorite meats, but after having the scotch egg, I was already pretty full.

And this is the king size order of the fish and chips at King's Head. Daphne and I split this, as all the fried stuff was starting to get to me (and my arteries). This was excellent as always, the fish itself was tender and flaky, and not mushy. The batter was crispy, light, and flavorful. Love these fish and chips!

I also love the atmosphere here as well, and the waitresses are actually British and it adds to the whole English feeling in there. I'll be back!

King's Head
132 Santa Monica Blvd
Santa Monica, CA 90401
(310) 451-1402
www.yeoldekingshead.com

Alaska Cruise: Pt. 9: Last dinner!

Last dinner on the cruise! After being at sea for two days, we were excited to be back on land soon, but we also wanted to savor our last chance to try so many different foods. Bring it!

Owen got the Avocado Boat with seafood in a lime cilantro vinagrette. Avocado and seafood, can't go wrong. The avocado was nicely ripe. Not too much seafood but not bad for an appetizer.

I got the Vol au Vent a la Reine - A flaky puff pastry case filled with chicken and mushroom in sauce supreme - this was awesome. I wish I could have one right now. The inside was kinda like pot pie, if you made it with Campbell's Cream of mushroom soup. The flaky outside was very well done, not undercooked like the other pastry dinner items we had on other nights.


Justin got some Floridian Oranges Steeped in Grand Marnier and Mint - The mint was kind of weird, as it tinted the oranges a bit green, but an orange is an orange. Albeit, a decent orange, since we had access to that amazing fruit on the cruise.


I was curious about what this was - "A Classic Philadelphia Pepper Pot" - It's just spicy minestrone. The mystery is solved. This was just okay.


Another prime rib night - "Texas Prime Rib with Creamed Horseradish - Roast beef with natural juice, grilled roma tomato, corn on the cob and baked idaho potato" - this is my "medium rare" cut. This is definitely NOT medium rare. I only ate half of this. This cruise does not know how to use salt on meat. Disappointing, to say the least. The baked potato, solid and good as always. Didn't eat my corn on the cob, but it seemed a bit oversteamed.


Owen loves turkey - given the choice, he'd eat turkey at almost every meal. So, seeing this on the menu, he instantly ordered it..."Young Tom Turkey and all the trimmings - Whole Roasted with Bread Fruit stuffing, giblet gravy, cranberry sauce and glazed sweet potatoes" - Owen was in heaven. Thanksgiving came early for him. After I took this picture, they also added cranberry sauce, which really sealed the deal.


Justin and I decided to get this plate to share - "Sea Scallops Mediterranean Fashion - Served over Ratatouille of Eggplant, tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini, kalamata black olives, capers and fresh herbs" - I sneaked a few of the scallops, it was alright, but I think the mediterranian sauce was a bit off. It made the scallops almost...bitter tasting.


Dessert time! First up, a Honey and vanilla ice cream cake thing. I tasted it, it was okay. Not horribly memorable.


I got this strawberry mousse, the sugar free choice of the evening. The taste of this is described in one word: pink. It tasted like the color pink. Nothing really much of substance, that fakey sugary taste. This was really disgusting.

More mousse, but much better than that horrible sugar free crap. Vanilla and Chocolate Mousse, with chocolate shavings on top, it was really rich and tasty, especially as a contrast to the pink nastiness that I had just tasted.

The Princess Chocolate Heart dessert, one of the options that you could have every night. More of the same texture of the mousse, except a bit more cakey.

A splurge on the last night of the cruise, Owen decided on getting a chocolate sundae, with chocolate ice cream and fudge. This is a combination you pretty much can't mess up for him.

That's pretty much the end of the cruise! We had another sitdown breakfast before leaving the ship, but it was pretty much what we had last time we had the sitdown breakfast. What an eating marathon. I think I'm done with cruises for a bit, but it was great to catch up with family, and see Alaska! Now back to our regularly scheduled program of food blogging around LA!

Alaska Cruise Pt. 5 - Well documented meals, lunch and dinner

Our next stop was Skagway, and we were taking our time, because we didn't have an excursions on this port. So we had time to go to lunch and dinner on the boat.

This appetizer was a cheese quesadilla, with guacamole and salsa. The salsa was quite fresh and spicy - they put a lot of jalepenos in it! This was a good quesadilla, very crispy edges and tasty, and went well with the guacamole.

Minestrone soup, alright, but nothing special.

Owen's carbonara pasta - a decadent pasta dish with tube pasta, eggs and panchetta and cheese and cream. I'm not much of a fan of tube pasta (too much carbo bite to them) but cover anything in cream and butter and stuff and I guess it's good. I tried one tube, it was very rich.

Here's a dish of the beef shortribs. We were pretty excited to order this, but were disappointed when we started eating it - it had way too many hard pieces of tendon, lots of chewy parts that should have been cooked down. The sauce was ok, good and hearty, the mashed potato was good, the root veggies were eh.

Seafood Cioppino was the dish I ordered after not finishing the beef shortribs. This was much better than the ribs, good portions of seafood, I think the mussels were the best. The seafoody broth at the bottom was a delight to soak up with the garlic toasts.

I got a slice of carrot cake for dessert. Tasty, but I was too full at this point and only took a few bites.

In Skagway, we hung out at an old cool bar called the Red Onion Saloon, which used to entertain the gold miners before their treacherous journey for the search for gold, to get rich quick. The place had a really old timey feel, with saucy stuff on the walls. We had a few drinks (cranberry soda for me) but we also ordered some nachos with the works for the table. I remember there being bell pepper, onion, jalepenos, sour cream. The nachos did not include any kind of meat, but they were pretty decent, albeit expensive for what they were (do you think this plate should cost 12 dollars?)

Back on the boat for dinner, my brother had been trying to save his appetite all day for the main course...but of course, appetizers first..

"Poached Baby Leeks with Smoked Salmon Julienne, Champagne Vinaigrette" was my brother's choice. This looked pretty good, more smoked salmon, sign me up! Most of us were "fooled" by the first part of the description, we thought it would be mostly baby leeks but ended up being mostly smoked salmon. Eh, it's okay, plenty of other things to try...


"Citrus Fruit selection with toasted brioche and apple butter" - Owen's choice. He liked the apple butter a lot, it was really good with the bite of brioche he gave me. The usual awesome fruit deliciousness. This plate represents the best parts of the cruise food, heh.


"Tomato cream soup with a basil crouton" - just okay. As much as I try to like tomato soup, I think it's too acidic for me. I need this ladled over some pasta or something to make it palatable for my tastes.


And now, the thing my brother had been waiting for the whole day - "Aged Rib Eye Steak of Beef - Grilled Texas beef in a grain mustard sauce with corn muffins and garden vegetables". I also got a baked potato on the side. This was okay, again, needed to be salted properly. This cruise is very stingy with seasoning meat, as I have said before. I really liked the baked potato, as they gave us as much green onion and bacon bits as we liked. Mmm. I didn't eat the corn muffin, but Owen liked it a lot, so I guess it was tasty.


One of the desserts - chocolate creme cake with coconut shavings on top. I don't remember who got this, but I guess it was okay. (??)

This is what I got - the BEST sorbet I have ever had, which was this black cherry sorbet, which was made on the boat. The flavors unfolded on the tongue...complex...really cold and not melted by the time it got to me (one of the complaints that I always had about the frozen confections on this cruise), this was perfection. I wish I could buy this at the store.

This lemony cake was okay, I had a taste but I'm not really into lemon desserts unless they are in sorbet form. Good presentation though, the color of the cake really pops against the white of the dish, and the different pastel colors of cream are way fun.

And now I present to all, Owen's favorite dessert, hands down, of the whole trip - a chocolate "pudding" of sorts (pudding in the British sense, like bread pudding, not Jello Pudding cup pudding), but the show stopper was the dark chocolate sauce that was drizzled all over it. He was so in love with this sauce that he wanted to fill a thermos with it and drink it straight. Yes. I guess it was that good.

More Alaska to come? Why yes there is...

Alaska Cruise Pt. 1: Dinner at Sea

For those who didn't know, I was gone for a bit, whisked away on a cruise to Alaska, to celebrate my Grandparents 61st (!!) anniversary. If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you are probably aware of my weariness towards cruises and food, but I admit this cruise really surprised me, in overall quality and enjoyment factor. This cruise line was Princess, and we were on their ship, the Princess Dawn.

I won't really go into the buffet (I mean, it's a buffet...food is put out and you get what you want - note on that, the older folks were REALLY AGGRESSIVE with the tongs), but I'm going to highlight most of the dinners we had in the dining room. We had a set time to eat, at 5:30pm, at the same table, with the same waitstaff. We were at the "kids" table (me and the cousins, with Owen and Leah), and were served separately from the main table, with my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles. Dining attire was usually "dressy casual", basically as long as you weren't wearing shorts, torn up jeans and cutoff shirts, you were ok.

What was always set out was a breadbasket, with delicious crispy on the outside, soft on the inside rolls. These were the most consistently good thing on the cruise, always fresh, always delicious.

Here's another overexposed shot - there were wheat, white, seeded, sesame...you get the picture. But again, all of them - great.

And what to go with these fresh rolls? Butter, of course - butter shaped to look like little flowers. I don't want to think how many of these I had during the cruise.

Owen's choice of appetizer was an order of their spring rolls. Pretty okay, probably the best version of Chinese food I had on the cruise. The insides were just veggies, mostly cabbage, as I remember. What I don't remember is what that sauce tasted like. Maybe I didn't have any.

No forgetting the sauce in this dish - this is an order of their shrimp cocktail, which was available at every dinner meal in the dining room. The shrimps themselves were okay, a good size, cold, didn't taste too much like iodine - but the ketchupy cocktail sauce will forever be imprinted in my memory. Not spicy at all, more like thick ketchup, this was always liberally doused over 5 or 6 shrimps. Pretty decent though, and always something to fall back on if nothing else looked good for appetizers.

Entranced by its' name and wanting to try everything, I ordered an Epicurean Cold Water Lobster and Seafood Terrine - "A Delicious Blend of Lobster Meat, Shrimp and Rockfish, Accompanied by a Garden Green Bouquet". This was gross, actually. It was like cold bad fish paste, whipped to a disgusting texture, embedded with seafood bits. It's like the fruit cake of weird fish dishes. Fail.

This was one of their salads of the night - Watercress, shredded carrots and Hearts of iceberg lettuce - thousand island dressing. Snore. Iceberg lettuce is kinda boring to me. By the way, all these dressings tasted THE SAME. They might have had different colors, but they all had the same creamy weird nondescript taste.


The caesar salad was a choice you could get at any dinner, same as the shrimp cocktail above. Owen seemed to like this most every night but I don't think it was that spectactular. Dressing wasn't particularly caesar tasting, and the parmesan cheese wasn't very pungent. Eh.


Our server Emma recommended this: the Crockpot with Cajun Spiced Shrimp - White Fish, Mussels, and Shrimp in a Spicy Tomato Sauce under fluffy pastry. A few of us got this, and what we felt was that this was more like an appetizer course than a real main course. Not to say that this wasn't good - it was pretty decent, actually. The stew part of it was nice and spicy, the seafood was all very decent on the inside. The biggest "eh" part of this dish was the puff pastry top, which was only partly cooked and almost raw after scraping off a small layer of the part that had been brushed with egg whites. Broccoli was okay, carrots were overcooked.


Here's a closeup of the seafood on the inside - mussels, mmm. Shrimp...mmm.

What we ended up doing was ordering a plate of the Nebraska Prime Rib with Creamed Horseradish - "Roasted Premium Beef with String Beans and a Baked Idaho Potato" - to share between a few of us. This was probably the best job they did the whole cruise, when it came to them giving us the doneness of meat. The meat was ACTUALLY medium rare, instead of well done. However, it was very unseasoned, and needed a good sprinkling of salt for every bite. The baked potato was good, I didn't eat any of the corn as it looked overcooked and mushy.



Then came dessert, which was Charisse's and Owen's favorite course. Charisse got the Princess Dream cake - shaped like a heart, chocolate mousse cakey kind of stuff. This was an option you could get every night. It seemed ok? I had a small taste but I'm not really a sugar fan.

This was Justin's apple streudel slice with some vanilla sauce. I tried a little of this as well, I liked the apples in it.

Chocolate cake something. I'm sure they had a fancy name for it but let's call a spade a spade - chocolate cake.

This was my profiteroles. Puff shells with cream inside, surrounding a fruit tart of sorts, drizzled with chocolate sauce. The fruit was all great, as was all of the fruit on the ship - I don't know how they managed to pick out the ripest, sweetest and freshest fruit to offer at each meal on this ship but I was super impressed with that. Back to this dessert - the best thing was the fruit, I mostly left the rest of it on the plate.

Sorbet. I forgot what flavor it is but most of the sorbets ordered on the cruise were pretty decent, and I think they made them on the ship, so that's pretty amazing!

This is the chocolate mousse with crunched up pistachio crumbled over it. I think this is the sugar free option for desserts. I remember trying it but I don't remember it tasting extremely great. Probably the sugar free part of it made it not so delicious.

Part two, soon to follow...