Alaska Cruise: Pt. 3 - Not surprising, more sitdown meals

Our lunch, before heading out to Victoria, British Colombia Canada. We managed to get to the dining room for lunch before our excursion to Butchart Gardens (which was very beautiful, and we had perfect weather!) Pretty nice meal, considering...

A plate of calamari. Not the best calamari I've had, but it was pretty decent, as it was crispy enough and each piece battered well, if a bit too salty - one less pinch of salt, and it would have been perfect. The tomato dipping sauce was pretty bland but I used it anyway, to nullify some of the saltiness of the batter.

Owen's matzo ball soup, a comfort food for him. The taste I had of it was pretty solid, the matzo was yielding and soaked up the flavors of the broth.

Hello, salmon! This smoked salmon plate is amazing, imagine this being placed in front of you. Mmmm. This smoked salmon rolled "rose" of sorts was completely ALL SALMON. Not rolled around anything but ITSELF. The generous helping of cold smoked salmon was heaven. Seriously good. The cream cheese balls, onion and capers, all added to the taste of the salmon - a bite of this combo on a bagel was great. This is where Princess truly excelled at their meals - their quality and quantity of their smoked salmon was the best thing on this cruise.

Owen's Shepherd's Pie was very delicious too, bits of fresh ground lamb, carrot, onion and peas, with a whipped mashed potato topping, and then baked. Very British. The taste that I had of this was very good.

For dessert (yes! a lunch dessert!), Owen got a chocolate pudding pie. He liked it a lot, and finished the whole piece. The chocolate shavings on top were a nice touch.

I got their frozen yogurt selection of the day, some tamarind flavored frozen yogurt. It was just bleh. Again with the half melted textures! Ah well.

Not even halfway through the Alaska stuff yet, sorry if anyone's bored, but I went on a picture taking frenzy during this time, so bear with me...

Alaska Cruise Pt. 2: Another Dinner at Sea

Another day, another dinner in the dining room. These early dinners were a little rough on Owen and I, as we are used to later dinners and later wake-up times (we're on vacation, right? I always seemed to get a call in the room around 8am with my mom bugging me about why I haven't gotten up yet...) Considering the later wake up time, we'd eat lunch around 1 or 2pm, and having dinner at 5:30pm, it was difficult to be totally excited about what to eat when you're still digesting the last meal...well, I guess it's the way of cruising, right?

One of the appetizers we had that night was the Spinach Turnover on a Light Cheese Sauce. This was pretty decent! I remember the outsides being very crispy and light and the insides being savory and good. I couldn't tell there was cheese in the sauce but it did add to the dish.

I love salmon, so it was a no brainer for me to order this: Norwegian Gravlax and Dill-Mustard Mayonnaise. This was AWESOME! I would slice off a bit of salmon, mash it with a roll - I kind of wish I had this plate in front of me right now.


In the interest of trying new things, I got the Chilled Blueberry soup- "velvety smooth, fruity and creamy", the menu proclaimed. It was actually alright. I was expecting worse, but it kind of tasted like a melted ice cream soup, but more watery. I usually hate that kind of texture but I think the fact that it was properly labeled as a "soup" made it okay, and the bits of real blueberry floating around made the taste very pleasant. I would almost liken this to a Chinese dessert soup, like the red bean tapioca soup I would get at the end of a Chinese dinner. This was a very desserty soup - wish they had this as an option for dessert instead of a soup.


Sea Scallops on a bed of Belgian Endive - Pan Roasted Coquilles with Carrots, Scallions and Rice Pilaf. Pretty good, the scallops were pretty big, and had a good texture to them, and the rice was really tasty. I think this is one of the few times on the cruise that I had rice.


Aged New York Steak- (this is one of those plates that are always available) - Owen got this because he didn't want anything else on the rotating menu. He said it was okay, but not salty enough (like every other meat eaten on this cruise). Oversteamed and overcooked carrots, asparagus and mushrooms, and mashed potatoes rounded out the rest of this plate.


My brother got the "Veal Cordon Bleu - Breaded thin slices of meat, stuffed with swiss cheese and ham, accompanied with zucchini and anna potatoes". I try not to eat veal very often, for the immoral-ness of eating baby cow, but I admit, the small taste I had was pretty good. Really, if you fry anything and stuff it with cheese and ham, how can it not be good?


I got the Yankee Style Pot Roast - Braised top loin of beef in a cabernet sauvingnon sauce presented with cream potatoes, glazed baby carrots and garden green peas. Alright. Nothing to write home about, but the gravy helped the meat, to not be so tasteless. The texture was good, but again, not salted very well. Overcooked peas and carrots for the old folks, and mashed potatoes.


Ah, dessert. I got strawberries cooked down in liquor with vanilla ice cream scoops. A decent dessert but strawberries weren't really in season so the slices I got were kind of tart, which they tried to mask with the liquor sauce. The one thing that DID disappoint consistently other than the unsalted meat was the ice cream - it always arrived to us half melted, whereas I prefer ice cream to be very frozen. I admit it's a preference thing.



This is my brother's poached pear - the sugar free choice of dessert for the evening. It was okay.

After a full evening of milling around, checking out the casino, and then playing video games on Owen's laptop till 3am, we would get a bit peckish and order some room service, which was operational 24 hours a day, and free. Owen really took advantage of this by ordering what was to become his favorite thing on the cruise...

Their clubhouse sandwich. Usually, it comes with turkey (from a REAL TURKEY, sliced turkey breast, this was the main draw of this sandwich), crispy bacon, and lettuce and tomato, on white bread with the crusts cut off. Later, Owen would order this with avocado too. It came with chips by default, but you could have fries or a salad instead, if you so chose.

Here's a shot with a few bites out of a half. Aside from the great turkey they used, the bacon was really tops - crispy crunchy and plentiful. Owen could down 2 plates of these on his own - that's how much he loved this. At 3am in the morning. Yep. We were living large...

More to come, for our Alaska cruise!

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...

Vito's Pizza

On the suggestion of fellow foodblogger LA Pizza, whom I met at the Jinpachi foodbloggers event, he mentioned the best pizza he's had in LA is at Vito's Pizza in West Hollywood. I was so curious I had to give it a shot, right before our flight back to the bay area for our upcoming Alaska cruise with my family. I figured it was a good "eat while packing" type of food.

I called in beforehand to place an order for pickup, even though they do delivery I've resigned myself to the fact that practically no one delivers to our apartment, and I assumed they wouldn't deliver from West Hollywood to LAX area. The only size they offer is a large, so I went along with it, and ordered a Garibaldi. (more on that later.) A simple drive down the street from work, and into their lot parking (score! I love that I didn't have to deal withi parking at all!).

Inside Vito's, admittedly there wasn't much room, but cool huge printouts of pictures of Vito himself, a kid running down the street - all conjuring up feelings of "the old world" Italy that this pizza harks itself from.

My pizza wasn't quite done when I got there, but I was politely offered...twice!...to "have some pop while I'm waiting". That was really nice of them, I mean it costs them practically nothing and I'm still giving them business. I noticed they had slices in their display - maybe next time I'll try something different!

As my pie was finished, I wanted to take a picture, and the lady at the front offered to get Vito himself to pose with his masterpiece! He was so nice, gave me a high five! and glad that he had gotten a good recommendation for his pizza.

Here he is, Vito, in all his glory, with my pizza that I happily dug into when I got home.

And here's the closer view of the pizza. This is seriously good pizza, really really close to the New York style slice that you can hardly get out here in LA . The Garibaldi pizza is a fresh tomato basil pizza with sliced meatballs and usually comes with jalepenos, but I told them to omit those (Owen stays away from too many jalepenos). Again, this is a masterpiece of a pizza. It's like eating one of the best spaghetti and meatballs, but instead of pasta, it's on a slice of amazing crust, wasn't too thin so all the toppings would slide off, but not too thick where after you had one slice you felt bloated. The crust was so light I didn't feel bad at all eating two slices, and didn't feel overly full. This is a must try for anyone who likes pizza NY style, but really, anyone who likes pizza in general. Thanks for the suggestion John!

846 N La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90046
Phone: (310) 652-6859

Jinpachi

A few weeks back, I was invited to go to a food bloggers event hosted by fooddigger.com, and was really surprised to be even asked - I keep thinking like 2 people read this food blog- and heartily accepted the invitation.

After arriving at Jinpachi, I was lead to a somewhat secluded set of tables, with people already there, chatting and enjoying some appetizers. They were all super nice - it's so cool to be able to name some restaurant I haven't tried yet, and for someone at the table to have already been there and to give me a synopsis. Awesome. Well, let's just skip ahead to the food...

Shishito Peppers were sitting around in a little dish, which kept us from starving inbetween the long pauses between each course. These were pretty good, and not as tongue burning hot as I thought they were going to be. The cooking process softened them up a lot, and were bordering on too soggy by the time I got to them, but again, ok to munch on while waiting.
Spicy tuna on crispy rice - a bunch of these were brought on a plate as an appetizer. I really liked these a lot, but put spicy tuna on rice and it's hard for me to DISlike it. Anyways, these were good.

Each of these got this placed in front of us - red snapper and salmon sashimi, in a light soy (?) sauce. The salmon was tender and soft, but the red snapper was just okay.


This is the non-fish version, served to John (of LA Pizza) who sat across from me and is allergic to fish. I am pretty sure one of these is scallops but I don't know what the other one is...I'm sure it's not fish though, heh.

Grilled black cod, with a tempura shishito pepper and two squirts each of black and white miso on either side. The cod was very good, with a sweet flavor to it, especially after dipping it in the miso.

John's non fish version was chicken teriyaki, with asparagus and sliced potato. This looked really good too - it looked like a complete meal!

Now the sushi. Bluefin tuna, and fatty tuna. I got one piece each of these. I love me some tuna, so this was top notch. I love when sushi melts on the tongue...

Then came a platter of (from the back to front) halibut, yellowtail, and albacore. The albacore and yellowtail were really good, but the halibut was not very good in my opinion. The texture was way too hard and too fishy.

John's non fish version - sea eel. He was worried that eel was too close to fish - is eel a fish? So I got to eat it, in trade for my glass of sake (a win-win situation, as I don't drink.) Pretty good, but I really like eel. I think it could have used a BIT more eel sauce, and could have been toasted to have those crispy edges I love in eel, but it was still solid, in any case.

Next up, came shrimp tempura roll - this was really tasty, the tempura was super fresh and crunchy, a great simple roll that exceeded my expectations.

The scary good uni that came to the table - scarily fresh, once hitting the tongue it dissipated into a tasty essence of the ocean. Very good, very rich, not something I would order at the usual cheaper sushi joints I would go to, because I would worry about quality. This was way tasty, can I emphasize this enough? Haha.

Shad sushi - this is the first shad I've had - and probably the last, if I can help it. Texture was too hard, had to chew it a lot, the rice was too vinegary (maybe to make up for the oiliness of the shad?) Not my bag.

This was the first blue crab handroll that was brought to the table, and it was for John to make up for the shad. More on that later, as we all got one...

Supposedly our last few pieces of sushi, salmon and more albacore? Heck, I'm not complaining, really good and solid sushi.

We requested these blue crab handrolls as our last order, as these are freakin' amazing good. The crab meat is super fresh, sweet, and cold, as a good contrast to the avocado and cucumber. The way the sushi chef rolled it, he added an extra piece of seaweed to the bottom, so when you started eating the handroll from one side, all the fillings wouldn't just start falling out of the end. Very considerate of him! This was definitely a great dish to finish the meal with.

Dessert consisted of different flavors of mochi ice cream, halved and presented to us on a plate. Chocolate, vanilla and green tea were the different flavors. I've had many a mochi ice cream, and this was alright. Hard to mess this up unless you let it sit out and melt to the point where they're unedible.

The fooddiggers were aware of the lacking dessert choices that Jinpachi had to offer, ever since their dessert chef had left! So they nicely bought us macarons from Paulette - which they swore were just as good as the kind they've had in Paris. Amazing! The two flavors that I got were pistachio and praline. Both had great texture and delicious interiors to their fillings.

I just want to note, this meal was comped by fooddigger (thanks!!), so I have no idea on pricing. This is the first time I've gotten a meal comped for any food posting. Thanks again to fooddigger, and all the awesome foodbloggers I met! (Shout out to Caroline on Crack, Gourmet Pigs, Tangbro, LA-OC Foodie, Potential Gold and John of LA Pizza!) Everyone is so nice and it's so fun to talk about food!

Jinpachi
8711 Santa Monica Blvd
West Hollywood, CA

Paulette
9466 Charleville Boulevard at Beverly Drive
Beverly Hills, CA 90212