Dim sum is one of those beautiful mid-morning traditions that’s been around for ages in Hong Kong and China. Without getting into its historical traditions (read here for that), I’d like to point out some of its modern traditions. These are the traditional pre-dining hoops you have to jump through before you can taste that char siu bao or nibble on steamed chicken feet.

You must do the following to ensure an excellent dim sum meal:

• 1. Choose a Saturday or Sunday, between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.
• 2. Drive across town(s) and sit through at least 20 minutes of traffic.
• 3. Arrive at a crowded, strip-mall parking lot.
• 4. Acquire temporary, vulture-like qualities while watching finished diners slip out of their compact spaces. Swiftly maneuver your car into the space before someone else does (trying not to make eye contact with the other guy waiting for the same space). ***
• 5. Take a number from the shrill-voiced hostess standing at the podium with a microphone she doesn’t really need.
• 6. Wait until she shouts your number in both English and Chinese. Three times.
• 7. Wave your number around and cheer — you’ve completed the model and can now begin your excellent meal in a ballroom-like dining space next to a giant fish tank under a glass chandelier.

Unless these lucky-seven steps are completed, you’re going to have a sub-par dim sum meal. Why? Because if you’re at a dim sum restaurant with an empty parking lot and no wait-time, it’s probably not that great (this applies to more than just dim sum). The harder you have to work for your dim sum meal, the better it will be.

*** Regarding driving: If you live in a town/city where you do not need to own a car, transportation to/from dim sum restaurant may include any type of wheel or rail, or walking.

Photos used in this post are from Capital Seafood BBQ & Dim Sum Express, 2700 Alton Parkway, Irvine, Calif. 949-252-8188. Though not the greatest dim sum, it’ll do in a pinch.

– Cynthia Furey

Side note: March Madness is a month-long challenge in which I will post Monday through Friday for the entire month. Thank you for reading!

So there’s a story making its rounds through many of the major news outlets right now claiming that read meat is harmful to your health. In fact, a headline from the San Francisco Chronicle grimly reads, “Study claims red meat can be deadly.” The lead:

“Eating red meat increases the chances of dying prematurely, according to a large federal study that offers powerful new evidence that a diet that regularly includes steaks, burgers and pork chops is hazardous to your health.”

By “regularly,” the National Cancer Institute study means “the equivalent of about a small hamburger every day.” It followed more than 500,000 people ages 50 to 71 over the span of 10 years. Those who ate meat “regularly” during the span were “30 percent more likely to die during the 10 years they were followed.” (click on this link to read exact numbers and other details.)

The problems I have with this study — thought it does present some useful information — is the “regularly” part. Does the general population really eat red meat daily? What if the study was on fish: If you ate tuna every single day, would you suffer the same (or similar) diseases as the red-meat-eating population? (Jeremy Piven’s mercury poisoning, anyone? Ha.) Do these findings reveal anything about people who eat red meat in moderation?

– Cynthia Furey

Side note: March madness is a month-long challenge in which I will post Monday through Friday for the entire month. Thank you for reading!

If ever I opened a restaurant, it would be modeled after the Ramos House Café.

The San Juan Capistrano, Calif.-eatery is as romantic as it gets. It’s nestled in the heart of the city’s Spanish-influenced downtown area where kitschy shops share narrow roads with tiny, 19th-century homes built by early settlers whose future generations still live there today. This is the kind of place you bring your out-of-town guests to fall in love with California — if they haven’t already.

Being there is like traveling back in time when everything was made from scratch, from food to clothes – when nary a homeowner’s association existed to send these residents angry letters about unruly gardens or wrong choice of paint color. Here, beauty is achieved without conformity.

The Ramos House itself was built in 1881. Chef/owner/CIA grad John Humphreys lives there, cooking meals out of his home (in an updated commercial kitchen) to diners he serves on his covered patio. The bathroom is a converted outhouse, while herbs used are grown on site.

Humphreys’ food is of the southern variety, like the kind I imagine you’d eat on the wraparound porch of a Georgia plantation home. Buttermilk biscuits, citrus compound butters and jam are made by hand. Dishes are homey, and some are given a California twist that lightens the fare — like the macaroni and cheese with artichokes and lemon.

Beignets are pillowy, with textbook-perfect brunoise of apple (We should expect nothing less from a CIA grad). The crab hash, dotted with crispy bacon, scrambled eggs and sweet potato curls is my go-to. And if it’s on the menu, a slice of huckleberry coffee cake is a great way to start or end a meal. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more.)

(more…)

Why I love holidays: The treat selections at bakeries double in size.

Fourth of July? Get your red, white and blue cookies here. Halloween? Orange- and brown-hued blondies. And St. Patrick’s Day – walk into any bakery, and you’ll find green in all shades: Mint chocolate brownies. Pistachio sugar cookies. Moss-green velvet cupcakes.

The latter are what caught my eye during an optometrist visit. I chose him not by his stellar credentials (though I’m sure he has them), but by what restaurants were near his office: Thai food, Vietnamese and the Layer Cake Bakery, where these moist, lovely cupcakes lived.

I normally hesitate when buying baked goods because as we bakers know, we can make them for a fraction of the purchase cost. But these seemed to speak to some deep-rooted carnal urge I have that rears its head at the sight of something uber-delicious. I’m an animal. I bought 12.

At $2.75 a pop – for a regular-sized cupcake, nonetheless – this is pretty steep. Sprinkles, which charges $3.25 per cupcake, at least tries to justify its price with a bigger one. And it’s highway robbery when you consider that baking them costs roughly less than $5 for a whole dozen. (And here we are, smack in a recession, and I’m dropping more than $30 on cupcakes. Eeegad.)

But we bakers have to admit: It’s nice to hang up your apron once in a great while to enjoy something someone else has made. In this case, I lucked out even more: These cupcakes were made by a woman I had attended culinary school with, who had a flawless reputation for her baking. But I didn’t need to know that. The airy cream cheese frosting and fluffy, rich cake speak for themselves.

Layer Cake Bakery, 4250 Barranca Parkway, Irvine, Calif. 949-786-0223. www.layercakebakery.com

– Cynthia Furey

Side note: March Madness is a month-long challenge in which I will attempt to post Monday through Friday for the entire month. Thank you for reading!

David Myers’s Los Angeles eatery empire has an Orange County leg in the Mozza-esque Pizzeria Ortica, which opened in mid-January near South Coast Plaza and the OCPAC.

The restaurant has extended its three-course OC Restaurant week menu, which is a steal when you add up what you would have paid ordering these dishes a la carte. (Don’t you hate when you go to a restaurant and they try to fool you into thinking their “special” is a good deal, when really, it’s no different than ordering a la carte. We’re not fools!)

The Italian word “Ortica,” according to wordreference.com, translates to “nettle,” or “stinging nettle.” I didn’t see the ingredient on the menu, but I hear its one that Myers uses in a ravioli dish. I also hear that Myers plans on opening a second outpost of Ortica near La Cienega, where Sona thrives and the late Boule bakery (sniff) once lived.

The space itself is lovely – long and narrow with a minimalist Dean-and-Deluca feel, with tall archways and a half-open kitchen. (I love it when a kitchen has nothing to hide.)

Short thoughts on food: A pizza margherita (pictured above) is more than enough for one person, and if you’re in need of a post-theater snack, I’d say this would work for two. Here, San Marzano tomatoes, modest discs of mozzarella and wilted basil grace a thin, bubbly crust. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more)

(more…)

Every serious foodie should experience a kitchen tour. You’ll learn so much about your food: where it comes from, who’s cooking it, how it’s made. There’s a big difference between peeking into a restaurant’s kitchen and being an observer from the other side of the window – though both situations offer their own set of perks. Peering through a kitchen window (like in the above picture, at Bouchon Bakery) is a cheap thrill. You feel like you’re stealing a moment – snatching a behind-the-scenes look at something that’s normally left behind the thick wall separating the dining room and the beating heart of the restaurant.

Actually being in a kitchen and watching cuisine unfold is entirely different. You’ll feel like a fly on the wall, just watching the world pass by; standing still as activity works its way around your body at a feverish pace. And if it’s a well-run kitchen, you’ll also feel a little out of place – a good kitchen will run like clockwork, and will work seamlessly without paying notice to a new face.

For the most part, you can tell a lot about a chef just by walking through the kitchen. Chez Panisse’s open kitchen speaks of Alice Waters’ nature: open, honest; welcoming you into the world of slow food (though, the opposite can be said about this pissed off cook, above). You meander through and watch a pork loin roasting on a spit, or observe as pastry cooks work dough on a bench. You can touch bottles of wine in Waters’ cellar. It’s all very romantic. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more)

(more…)

Much of Sunday was spent stumbling through LA Weekly’s Gold Standard, an event featuring some of Los Angeles’ top eateries as deemed by Pulitzer prize-winning critic Jonathan Gold.

The four-hour eatfest was priced at $60 a pop, and was held at a Smashbox Studios, in an area normally congested by Melrose hipsters (so imagine throwing even more bodies on the map. Like Disneyland on a summer Friday). I’ve been to a handful of food festivals that just weren’t worth spending the cash, and this thankfully wasn’t one of them. Most restaurants took great care in preparing their nibbles, and quite a few of them lived up to their hype, making enough of an impression on me to come back and dine in their brick-and-mortar establishments.

And the best part: The main draw was Gold had given us his foodie blessing. All restaurants were handpicked by him. So instead of spending the next 30 days canvassing Los Angeles for Gold’s top picks, they had assembled in a location and had essentially come to us. It was all worth sitting in two hours of traffic, fighting for parking on two-lane streets and getting ceviche all over my boots. I’ll be back next year.

Some of my favorites:

Where was the crowd at Drago’s booth? It’s citrus panna cotta (main photo, top) was as beautiful to look at as it was to eat. It was largely being ignored for the blood orange coolers served at Sona’s booth, which, by the time I had my hands on one, was watered down because the chefs were running out of juice.

Alain Giraud of Anisette served bamboo skewers of duck l’orange (above), each with a crispy, citrus-soaked crouton. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more)

(more…)

It was a day so perfect that it seemed almost unreal, as if someone had Phototshopped away even the smallest of what would have been the day’s imperfections. One that you rarely get to experience but that you’ve read a lot about in books: the sun, the birds, blue sky — the whole shebang.

I was in Napa Valley, Calif., centering a vacation around a story I was writing on a local chef. It was a four-day exercise in excess as we tried desperately to cram as many restaurants and wineries into our short window of time. Much of it was a wine-soaked blur.

It was during this culinary adventure that I stumbled upon Taylor’s Refresher in St. Helena. It’s a classic American roadside stand, with echoes of In-N-Out and Ruby’s Diner, only — dare I say — better. The restaurant also has a nostalgic, small-town feel, sitting on an enormous manicured lawn with red picnic tables teeming with locals and visitors alike. At that moment, there seemed to be nothing more American than the old-schoolish Taylor’s.

It was October, but the warm weather and thick air immediately surrounding the restaurant made it seem like I had walked into July and was crashing a neighborhood barbecue. My meal emerged from the pickup window picture-perfect: a cheeseburger came on a sunny egg bun with bright tomatoes and textbook-perfect melted cheese, a basket of French fries in garlic butter and parsley. It was a simple meal, made with love and blue-collar honesty — no-frills American fare that will satisfy hunger and cure a hangover to boot.

To this day, I haven’t been able to eat a burger quite on par as the one at Taylor’s, though few have come close. I often wonder if my memory serves me when I tell people that it was the most amazing burger I’ve ever had. Often when you fondly remember a meal, it’s surrounded by the memory of company and other crucial factors that sway opinion. Had I eaten this burger just down the street from my apartment, would I feel the same way? If I had visited during a thunderstorm, would the burger have tasted as good? I wish I could tell you. I’ll guess just have to visit again and find out.

• Taylor’s Automatic Refresher, 933 Main St., St. Helena, Calif. 707-963-3486. www.taylorsautomaticrefresher.com. There’s a couple more locations around the Bay area, check the Web site for details.

Side note: March Madness is a month-long challenge in which I will post Monday through Friday for the entire month. I hope you will humor me in reading! Check back tomorrow for a caramel cheesecake recipe.

– Cynthia Furey