Rose Cantine » Restaurant reviews

SF restaurants promote recession specials: all you can eat pizza nights and prix fixe menus

esme — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:43:15 +0000

If you eat out in San Francisco, the first thing you notice is how easy it is to get a table at your favorite restaurant. In the pre-credit crunch days, you had to reserve weeks in advance. Today you walk in. It’s no surprise that SF restaurants have been doing all kinds of promotions to get people to eat out again:

SF recession specials: all you can eat pizza at Local and Open Table stimulus plan

South Food and Wine Bar recession special: $34 prix fixe, 3 course dinner

San Francisco lunch favorites: Recession special at Axis Cafe hits the spot

Of course, there are other ways to save money and still enjoy a great meal. There are a lot of ethnic restaurants in and around San Francisco that may not be high on decor, but in terms of the quality of the cooking, you can’t go wrong:

Mapplrâ€™s favorite dim sum places around SF

Miss Saigon: excellent, bargain Vietnamese lunch in downtown SF

Katana-ya: cheap good noodles in downtown SF

Best Pakistani restaurant in SF: Lahore Karahi

Kasa: Indian taqueria opens in Noe Valley

Japanese noodles and sushi in downtown SF (Union Square): Dojima-Ann

Amsterdam's latest hot spot: Momo restaurant lounge and bar

esme — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:18:50 +0000

I just reviewed the best place to hang out in Amsterdam: Momo, a restaurant lounge and bar next to the entrance to Vondelpark and one block away from the PC Hooftstraat, the city’s luxury boutique shopping street. What I like about Momo: the sushi and sashimi. Read Mapplr’s review of Momo.

User-generated dis-content: Yelp pulls suspicious reviews

esme — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:31:54 +0000

Ah, the joys of user-generated content (UGC), where everyone, including someone with an IQ equal to their shoe size gets his say. Very democractic, the Internet. Isn’t this what we were all waiting for? The problem is when everyone gets to have an equal say, who is to say whether the review is trustworthy or reliable? On the Internet, we’re all dogs.

So when I read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the controversy around Yelp’s (a SF review decision to delete accounts of business people suspected of trading positive reviews with other businesses, I was neither surprised nor upset. Yelp has always deleted reviews it believes to be fake, but this time around, business owners are talking about filing a class action lawsuit against Yelp. What a mess, but a completely predictable one given the increasing significance of these review sites in helping people decide where to spend their money.

I have used Yelp, but only to locate places on the San Francisco map, for example, finding a yoga place in SOMA (south of Market). I have posted some reviews of restaurants I like (or actively dislike) but very few. I have not posted anything recently. I never rely on the reviews — why? Because I don’t know if the owner’s mother posted a favorable review or if it’s a particularly nasty one, if it is from a competitor. Most reviews are utterly worthless. They go on and on, often not about the restaurant but about the reviewer. And how do I know if the reviewer shares my taste in food or decor? What if he or she is reviewing a Filipino restaurant and has no idea what good Filipino food tastes like? I noticed on the review page of a friend’s restaurant, some people even complained about portion size. I have eaten at my friend’s place and I found the portion sizes to be more generous than I am capable of eating.

Yelp isn’t the only one with worthless reviews. Tripadvisor is also unreliable. A friend of mine booked a hotel in Sorrento based upon glowing reviews in Tripadvisor only to find, upon arrival, that the place was a total disaster.

Bottom line is you can’t trust these reviews because you don’t know the people — their biases, tastes, and motivations in posting them.

Bad coffee comes to Europe: Starbucks empire set for European expansion

esme — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:29:49 +0000

What tastes like burnt muddy water? Starbucks coffee, of course. I hate it, well at least the US version. Why Starbucks coffee and pastries taste better in Japan’s Starbucks cafes remains a mystery.

Now it seems that Starbucks is expanding in Europe. They are already ubiquitous in London but that’s not enough for the purveyors of overpriced burnt muddy water. To be fair, the pastries in London’s Starbucks cafes are much better than the abominable “sweet things” at any Starbucks in the US (I can’t even bear to call them pastries).

I don’t care if they have free Wi-Fi. For me the quality of the coffee and the atmosphere of the cafe are of utmost importance in choosing a cafe.

Favorite restaurants in Sydney, Florence, Montreal and one ethnic dive in SF

esme — Fri, 02 May 2008 20:19:12 +0000

I’ve been posting a lot on Mapplr lately, favorites in various cities like Sydney, Florence and Montreal. I have also included a review of an excellent Pakistani-Indian restaurant, a real dive in the Tenderloin district of SF.

Mapplr favorite restaurants in Florence

Mapplr favorite restaurants in Sydney

Mapplr favorite restaurants in Montreal

Lahore Karahi: fabulous Pakistani-Indian food in San Francisco

Links of the day (20 March 2008): Absinthe review, WiMAX on a chip, 200 Kbps not broadband

esme — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:40:03 +0000

It’s been raining for two days in Amsterdam. That’s probably why I’ve been blogging so much. Here are a few blog posts I’ve written across a variety of blogs.

Brunch, lunch, dinner in SF: Absinthe does all three quite well

Why having WiMAX in your device won’t necessarily make you get WiMAX service

FCC finally agrees that 200 Kbps is NOT broadband

Northern California delights: sunny Wi-Fi cafes, Napa Valley bistro, Roman-style osteria in Pacific Heights

esme — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 17:46:58 +0000

Cafe Flore and Dolores Park Cafe

Bistro Jeanty in Yountville

SPQR: osteria on Fillmore Street

Israel travel notes: delicious mediterranean food

esme — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 15:25:25 +0000

I just returned from a one-week trip to Israel (March 16-23, 2007) where I attended Kinnernet 2007. I also spoke at The Marker’s annual tech event and at a Digital Policy symposium in Jerusalem. Apart from the lovely beach weather, one of the things I appreciated most about this trip was the food. They serve fresh delicious salads morning, noon and night: cucumbers in yogurt dressing, tomatoes and bulgur with coriander and mint, beets with cumin and salt, etc. There’s fresh ripe fruit everywhere.

One of my favorite dishes is shakshuka which people eat for breakfast, although breakfast in Tel Aviv is served till 13:00 to accommodate people who partied till the wee hours of the morning. Here’s a photo of my shakshuka breakfast at Badulina, located on the Tel-Aviv Port. Shakshuka is an egg dish: the eggs are on top of a mixture of onions, green and red peppers, all cooked in tomato sauce with chunks of tomatoes, lots of coriander.

I made shakshuka at home and my version turned to be very close to what I had at Badulina. Chop into cubes: one large onion (or two small ones), a lot of very ripe tomatoes (or use 2 small cans of chopped tomatoes with their juice), 2 sweet red peppers. Put all the ingredients in a pot together with lots of ground cumin and simmer over low heat for 30 minutes. Throw in a lot of coriander and simmer for another 10 minutes. When you are ready to serve, put some of the mixture in a small frying pan, crack two eggs over it and cook some more till the eggs are slighly firm. Alternatively, you can put the mixture with the eggs in an oven and cook it in there. Put the frying pan or oven dish on the table and eat out of it — serve with bread.

Badulina
2 Yordey Hasira Street
Tel-Aviv Port
03-5449449

Best chocolate eclairs in Paris

esme — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:18:41 +0000

Who serves the best chocolate eclairs in Paris? According to Le Figaro:

1 – Carette (4 place du Trocadéro XVIe)
2 – Jean-paul Hevin (23 bis avenue de la Motte-Piquet VIIe)
3 – Stohrer (51 rue Montorgueil IIe)
4 – Ladurée (16 rue Royale VIIIe)
5 – Vandermeersch (278 av. Daumesnil XIIe)
6 – La Maison du Chocolat (8 bd. de la Madeleine VIIIe)
7 – Lenôtre (15 bd. de Courcelles VIIIe)
8 – Blé Sucré (7 rue Antoine Vollon XIIe)
9 – Rollet-Pradier (6 rue de Bourgogne VIIe)
10 – Dalloyau (101 rue du Faubourg St Honoré VIIIe)
11 – La Gerbe d’Antan (249 bd Voltaire XIe)
12 – Fauchon (26 place de la Madeleine VIIIe)
13 – Pascal Pinaud (70 rue Monge Ve)
14 – Gérard Mulot (76 rue de Seine VIe)
15 – Arnaud Lahrer (53 rue de Caulaincourt XVIIIe)
16 – Arnaud Delmontel (39 rue des Martyrs IXe)
17 – Paul (17 et 21 rue de Buci VIe)
18 – Kayser (10 rue de l’Ancienne Comédie VIe)
19 – Rousseau et Seurre (22 rue des Martyrs IXe)
20 – Laurent Duchêne ( 2 rue Wurtz (XIIIe)

Technorati Tags:
gastronomique, paris

Restaurant review: Kim Thanh; and a word about video blogging

esme — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 09:25:10 +0000

Here’s a short video clip I took with my new Nokia N93 video phone at Kim Thanh, a Vietnamese restaurant on Geary and Jones in San Francisco. My friends, Gabriel Amaya and Glen Bolosan, are raving about the seafood (baked salted crab). Kim Thanh is one of the best Vietnamese restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their specialty is seafood. Our favorites are the baked salted crab, baked salted shrimp, steamed fish (with ginger and scallions) and sauteed pea sprouts.

Kim Thanh
607 Geary Street (at Jones)
(415) 928-6627
San Francisco, CA94102

Video blogging

Shooting video is tricky. You realize two important things: light (of which there was too little in this restaurant) and sound (of which there was too much, in the background). I’m not about to carry a flashlight in my handbag to illuminate my subjects just in case, on the off chance, I decide to “video blog”. I will limit myself to shooting video in bright sunlight. The second problem is the size of the video clip. This clip is 25 megabytes even though it’s only 1 minute 15 seconds. I guess I won’t be sending this as an attachment to an email. I could have edited it down to a smaller size but then I spent a lot of time looking for a suitable video editor. Most are so cumbersome to use.

So I posted the clip to YouTube. The process takes a only a few minutes.
A word about video cameras: The Nokia N93, like its predecessor, the N91 is a beautiful device. The N93 is even more stylish, but too bulky to stick in your trouser pockets. Read the Engadget review here.

The N93 allows you to edit the clip so that the file is much smaller and then send it to friends via GPRS. In this case, the phone compressed my 25 megabyte MPEG-4 file to about 283 kilobytes. I like this video camera/phone very much because it is easy to use.