something- Indian, Telegraph, Ave

Meh, I can't remember the name of this Indian place either, and will have to correct it once we drive by to our next stop (which is Pakistani - yay for a new ethnicity to taste on the project).

As we get closer to campus, I have a theory that we're going to begin to find cheaper food which, regrettably, may mean that we're also finding sub-par food - drunk college kids aren't as picky as crabby 30-something internet executives, after all.

So far, this theory seems to be holding. After having Meh Sushi, we then went for Meh Indian food.

I will state for the record that we're kinda split on the Meh Indian. Partner in Chow liked this place better than I did, and admittedly the ingredients seemed fresher than a lot of other Indian food I've had. Somehow, though, the preparation just seemed... American. Like someone was trying to make Indian food taste good for Gringo taste buds, from the strangely fluffy Naan to the mildly spiced Dal. Hmm.

What we ordered: Dal, Sag Paneer, Garlic Naan, Regular Naan, Baklava, Lamb Something
Service: friendly Mom 'n Pop - we got Pop (and he gave us a free Baklava)
Atmo: citified hangout - stools at high tables, an upstairs, order at the counter, open kitchen
Crowd: Cal students, the neighborhood
Spent: Around $30
Overall rating: 3 sporks

As stated, this food just somehow fell flat (except the Naan, which was the opposite of flat due to its inexplicable puffiness), and left me feeling as though I ate Americanized Indian food. The naan had the consistency of pizza dough, and although the sag paneer had fresher spinach than I usually see, it somehow lacked a true Indian flavor.

The lamb was loved by PIC, who overall thought this place was a great find for someone on a budget and/or someone close by looking for cheap, decent Indian grub.

This place is indeed cheap and fast, and better than eating at Subway or something. Even so I wasn't a huge fan of this place, - and it apparently wasn't a fan of mine either. I almost never have an upset stomach after dinner, but for whatever reason this place led to some unpleasant after-effects later. Since we both ate all dishes and PIC didn't have a food hangover, it may have been something I ate earlier in the day. (Um... toast?)

Bright spot: the baklava was great. In fact, the baklava was the best we've had so far, and we've had it a few times at various Ethiopian haunts.

That being said, I wouldn't risk eating there again due to The Evening Thereafter. And even if I were feeling risk-taking, I'd probably just go elsewhere.

-something-Sushi, Telegraph

OK, 'tis true - I can't remember the freaking name of this sushi place, and I'll correct it when we drive by it again. It's on Telegraph somewhere between the Drunken Boat and Fondue Fred's.

Anyway, not remembering the name is in this place's favor. It's not very good. Cheap, but not good. It doesn't look good from the outside, and the atmo didn't surprise.

What we ordered: various rolls, teriyaki chicken
Service: fine
Atmo: somehow this place left me with the impression that I was in the Japanese version of Applebee's
Crowd: the 'hood - lots of Cal students
Spent: Around $30
Overall rating: 1.5 sporks

Honestly, there's not much to say here but "Meh." Don't bother. I've had fresher fish, more interesting rolls with less sauce, and better atmo in other sushi joints. If you want cheap sushi, the place in San Leandro's Pelton Plaza is way better.

Aunt Mary's Cafe - 4307 Telegraph Avenue

I can't believe that this place is so close to our house and we didn't even know it was around. Apparently Aunt Mary's has been open for a year. I dunno how we missed it, but I'm glad we finally found it.

We've eaten brunch here twice now. After my last disastrous experience at my go-to brunch place of yore (Cock-a-Doodle), I've been looking for a new one. And may we praise the Brunch Gods now, for it is found. And it is good.

The menu here can best be described as Southern-meets-California, which now gives us 2 places close by (Pican is the other) that service this need.

First off, I love what they've done with the space. Warehouse-chic is up my alley and P.I.C. also loves high ceilings and concrete floors. Secondly, I love that our server wore retro glasses and a housedress and an apron. Thirdly, I love that our server had a sassy attitude and brought Partner in Chow out of a bad mood (we thought we'd missed brunch hours) and into a good one (we did actually miss brunch hours, but they made it for us anyway).

We ate here one weekend and brought friends back about 2 weeks later.

What we've ordered: red flannel hash, pain perdu, succotash (w/bacon and heirloom tomato), hang-town fry
Service: hip, local sass
Atmo: urban hip warehouse
Crowd: penultimate Temescal neighborhood crowd
Spent: around $30.00 for two
Overall rating: 4.5 sporks

The first time we ate here I had the succotash and P.I.C. had the pain perdu. Both were really fresh, really delicious, and overall something we'd both order again. The second time I had red flannel hash and a friend had the hang-town fry, which had fried oysters on top. These freaked him out because he hadn't noticed that part of the menu description, but I suppose if you like oysters (and need something called hang-town fry) these are probably pretty darn good.

I can't remember what his wife or P.I.C. ordered, because I was sitting next to my brunch pals' newborn and therefore just completely distracted by his insane cuteness throughout the meal. Yes, I am a terrible food reviewer. On the other hand, I'm a great babysitter.

The red flannel has is a combo of root vegetables with eggs on top. To be honest, I was chatting away and playing with a month-old baby and catching up with old friends and basically so distracted that I don't really remember it that well, but I ate the whole thing and I'd order it again, so I think it was really good.

On the succotash/pain perdu day I was a bit more focused, as there was no sinfully cute newborn hogging my attention. Both were fantastic - the heirloom tomatoes weren't overwhelmed or made too hot and soggy by the succotash, and there was just enough bacon to flavor without making it too bacon-y or fatty.

The coffee here was also good. Bonus.

The pain perdu was really delicious and the presentation was artsy and fun. The sauce didn't make the bread too soggy, and P.I.C. ate all of it with no troubles.

Overall, we're thrilled that this place is around and will be eating brunch here again soon.

Tai San - 2811 Telegraph Avenue

We decided to order takeout from Tai San, which was a fortuitous pre-determined decision given my general phobia of (1) bad lighting and (2) carpets in restaurants.

The staff here is really, really nice. The guy on the phone was even really nice. And there was a big table of well-heeled Chinese people inside having a relaxed, leisurely meal, so we figured that the food probably didn't suck.

Turns out it didn't suck. Partner in Chow has gone down on record as saying this is the best Chinese we've encountered on Telegraph, and better than our go-to delivery place (Yang Chow).


What we ordered: mu shu tofu/vegetables (they'll add the tofu for you, either fried or sauteed), hot 'n sour soup, vegetable fried rice, broccoli beef
Service: really friendly and super fast
Atmo: Bad early 90's Chinese buffet
Crowd: Hard to say - there was only the one table of well-heeled Chinese people. It was about 8 on a Tuesday.
Spent: around $28.00
Overall rating: 3.5 sporks

One big bonus of Tai San is that it's freaking cheap. We spent less than $30 on 4 menu items - nice.

Another bonus was the Hot 'n Sour soup, which P.I.C. claims is the best we've had so far in Oakland/Berkeley. I liked it, but I do wish it had been a little hotter to balance the sourness. Sour it was; hot, meh. Next time I'll ask them to make it spicier.

I am not a fan of overcooked, fried or overly rich food - one of the reasons I don't eat Chinese food often, as it tends to be covered in stuff and full of scary meat and hard to taste the main ingredients individually - so Tai San was a pleasant surprise for me. The mu shu tasted fresh and the vegetables were nice and crunchy, even the cabbage. I hate getting soggy cabbage in my mu shu and ate a lot more of this than I normally do.

The broccoli beef was pretty standard Chinese take-out broccoli beef. The beef was that strange fluffy Chinese food beef, and I didn't eat it. PIC liked it, though the standouts were definitely the soup and the mu shu.

The veggie fried rice was also pretty clean-tasting - not a whole lot of oil, not greasy. If you like greasy fried rice that's really been fried, you won't like this. If you prefer fluffier, cleaner rice that's only been lightly fried and flavored, you'll like it. I liked it.

Overall, I'd get take-out from here again. But until they rid themselves of the carpet and swap out the fluorescents and pink vinyl chairs, this is a take-out only place for me.

Cafe Colucci - 6427 Telegraph Ave

Cafe Colucci seems to be the go-to Ethiopian place in this part of Berkeley/Oakland, and it's easy to see why. What they got right: atmo. So many Ethiopian/Eritrean places are either really dimly lit or just kind of run-down, and this place has a California-meets-Africa vibe that makes it really inviting overall.

I've been here a few times years ago, and this was my first time back since we discovered Cafe Eritrea d'Afrique. Partner in Chow ate here during her mourning period for The Blue Nile, so the first time she ate here she wasn't impressed. This time, we shelved all thoughts of competing or defunct restaurants and just ordered what sounded good.

What we ordered: vegetarian sampler, side of Mitten-Shouro (which the menu claims is "so tasty you will be hooked for life" - good marketing, Colucci)
Service: good - we went in late and it wasn't that busy
Atmo: cool California cafe with African accents
Crowd: hipsters, hill folks, the neighborood
Spent: around $30.00
Overall rating: 4 sporks

One interesting sidenote: some Ethiopian restaurants we've visited have tables of Ethiopian-looking diners. Eritrea d'Afrique and Asmara both seem to have a constant bar crowd, and usually some tables of folks who look like they know their Ethiopian food eating there. Cafe Colucci seems to lack that authentic African diner; perhaps it's the wait. Hmm.

Good rule of thumb: if you walk into an Eritrean/Ethiopian restaurant and it's filled with Eritrean/Ethiopian diners, it's probably a good sign.

While we're going to tie Colucci with Eritrea d'Afrique, Partner in Chow definitely prefers the food at Eritrea d'Afrique. Colucci ties because the atmosphere is so much better, and atmo is an important part of any dining experience. I do love Eritrea d'Afrique, but I am notoriously sensitive to bad lighting - and their lighting and color scheme is just the worst. Fluorescent gray meets white linoleum floors and gray walls and gray tables... ugh. Colucci has good lighting, warm yellow/orange walls and way better furniture.

The real test will be what happens when we're done with this project and just want to go get some Ethiopian food. Hmm.

Cafe Colucci seems to be the go-to Ethiopian place in this part of Berkeley/Oakland, and it's easy to see why. What they got right: atmo. So many Ethiopian/Eritrean places are either really dimly lit or just kind of run-down, and this place has a California-meets-Africa vibe that makes it really inviting overall.

I've been here a few times years ago, and this was my first time back since we discovered Cafe Eritrea d'Afrique. Partner in Chow ate here during her mourning period for The Blue Nile, so the first time she ate here she wasn't impressed. This time, we shelved all thoughts of competing or defunct restaurants and just ordered what sounded good.

What we ordered: vegetarian sampler, side of Mitten-Shouro (which the menu claims is "so tasty you will be hooked for life" - good marketing, Colucci)
Service: good - we went in late and it wasn't that busy
Atmo: cool California cafe with African accents
Crowd: hipsters, hill folks, the neighborood
Spent: around $30.00
Overall rating: 4 sporks

The food here is very good; no complaints. It was hard to avoid the comparisons with Eritrea d'Afrique - the spicing is slightly different, the Mitten-Shouro was a new one for us (dunno if we're hooked for life, but we liked it a lot), but we missed our usual side of fava beans that we have at Eritrea.

One interesting sidenote: some Ethiopian restaurants we've visited have tables of Ethiopian-looking diners. Eritrea d'Afrique and Asmara both seem to have a constant bar crowd, and usually some tables of folks who look like they know their Ethiopian food eating there. Cafe Colucci seems to lack that authentic African diner; perhaps it's the wait. Hmm.

Good rule of thumb: if you walk into an Eritrean/Ethiopian restaurant and it's filled with Eritrean/Ethiopian diners, it's probably a good sign.

While we're going to tie Colucci with Eritrea d'Afrique, Partner in Chow definitely prefers the food at Eritrea d'Afrique. Colucci ties because the atmosphere is so much better and atmo is an important part of any dining experience. I do love Eritrea d'Afrique, but I am notoriously sensitive to bad lighting - and their lighting and color scheme is just the worst. Fluorescent gray meets white linoleum floors and gray walls and gray tables... ugh. Colucci has good lighting, warm yellow/orange walls and way better furniture.

If we could just take the atmo at Colucci and the food at Eritrea, we'd never bother with another Ethiopian place. The real test will be what happens when we're done with this project and just want to go get some Ethiopian food. Hmm.

Ethiopia - 2955 Telegraph Avenue

We really wanted to like this place, but that wasn't in the cards.

Somehow, walking into a restaurant that's almost empty just makes me want to like it even more and so I was determined to look past the fact that the menus were sticky, the partition at our table almost fell on Partner in Chow and was just sort of ghetto-rigged together, and the table was kinda sticky too. This place shall therefore forever be known as "That Sticky Place," and that's just never a good thing for a restaurant. Unless you're a Saltwater Taffy restaurant or something.

The only other table was full of 8 fresh-back-to-school Cal students, which meant that we got to listen to inane college chatter while we waited. And waited. And waited. And this is when That Sticky Place lost its Mom 'n Pop appeal.

We were seated immediately, but it took about 15 minutes to even get water. I'd actually started a Countdown to Meltdown by the time we finally got service, meaning that about 10 minutes in I gave Parnter in Chow an ultimatum: if we didn't get service in 5 minutes or less, we were leaving. And I timed it (thank you, retro gold Timex, for your stopwatch capabilities).

The waitress made it to our table with literally 5 seconds to spare.

So: this didn't start out well at all, but we both love Ethiopian food and I decided to just let it go and enjoy the food - there was one server and it seemed like she was overwhelmed by the large-ish table of college kids, and Ethiopian/Eritrean restaurants in general don't seem to be hallmarked by speedy service.

The waitress assured us that the vegetarian combo for one wasn't enough food for the two of us. Being somewhat familiar with the strange, hunger-defying aspects of injera I was hesitant to believe her, but since she worked there and all we went ahead and ordered basically the entire vegetarian menu.

One bright spot here: you can take a number of dishes and combine them as you'd like for your entree.

What we ordered: vegetarian sambussa, every vegetarian thing on the menu
Service: friendly, but a bit disorganized and very sloooooow
Atmo: sticky - this just doesn't seem like the cleanest place around, and lots of things have seen better days. We do like having the partition between us and other Ethiopian-fan diners, but since ours was wonky and we were facing The Back Side of it (I thought partitions were decorated on both sides, but ours wasn't) it didn't help out too much. It just made me feel like we were forgotten behind a semi-invisible wall that might fall down on PIC's head.

Crowd: What crowd?
Spent: around $25.00
Overall rating: 2 sporks

The sambussa came first. This is a lot like a samosa in Indian food; this one was filled with lentils (I think). The flavor on these was very good and very concentrated, and this would end up being the bright spot of the meal. I'm generally avoid fried food, but I enjoyed the one I ate.

The first thing we noted when the veggie platter came is that we could have easily ordered for one and added a side. Oh, well. The second thing is that the injera was really... dense. And kind of dry. And extra sour. This injera:regular injera was like baguette:sourdough rye. It was the oddest injera we've ever encountered, and while I tried to shelve my preconceived notions of injera I just couldn't quite get over its dryness. On the plus side, there was a LOT of it - and the dogs enjoyed every leftover morsel later on. (They therefore give this place 5 paws up for providing enough food that they got tasty leftovers.)

The food itself was also a bit different than other similar places we've tried, in that everything was just really intensely flavored. Generally this is a good thing; here, the flavors were so concentrated that it became a little much.

With so many other options for Ethiopian food (Cafe Colucci is right down the street), this restaurant is in last place of all the Ethiopian/Eritrean restaurants on Telegraph. Sorry, Sticky Place. Maybe we'll try again someday. Or not.

Le Bateau Ivre Cafe - 2629 Telegraph Ave

The Drunken Boat is at this point the furthest we've gone on our project, and we were excited to be so close to campus - if a little afraid of a French place that's probably been around for 30 years, with a sign boasting brunch, lunch and dinner - could they really do all three well?

We went in after 9 for dinner and were pleasantly surprised by the atmo. This apparently used to be a house and reminded me of being in Europe somehow, and since Partner in Chow and I both love classical music we enjoyed the soundtrack. We sat in the restaurant side, which is apparently different than the Cafe side.

We were seated right away and had no issues with service, but of course we went in pretty late and there were only a couple other tables. Our waiter was super nice and really attentive, and though the Yelp folks are noting some incredibly bad service (which I myself have zero patience for) we had a great experience here.

What we ordered: crabcakes, lobster bisque, cheese baked in a pastry thing (this is named something en croute or some such), red trout spread with bread, Chimay (bonus points for having Chimay on the menu)
Service: attentive, friendly
Atmo: sparse but Euro-friendly - tablecloths, but it's in an old house and it feels like it.
Crowd: old-School Berkeley - this seems like a place that kids who grow up in Berkeley frequented with their parents or grandparents, and then bring their kids to when they grow up.
Spent: around $50.00
Overall rating: 4 sporks

We really enjoyed Le Bateau Ivre, though we didn't order an entree. I'm a person who enjoys doing Appetizer Explosion rather than meals, and this menu made that possible. Also, this place was really reasonably priced - the crabcake plate had 2 huge cakes on there with big chunks of crab and fennel over salad, and they were like $9. These were the single best plate of crabcakes I've had in California, ever. They may be the best crabcakes I've ever had period, and I've eaten them in D.C. and Maryland and in various other places where crabcakes are supposed to be great.

The reason they were so good was threefold: (1) The crab was extremely fresh, (2) The crab was the star of the show and in big lumps, (3) I love fennel, and it paired well with the crab. These were rustic, homestyle crabcakes that fell apart when you put a fork in them. Fine by me - that just means there's a shit-ton of crab in there.

The smoked red trout spread was really salty and trout-y. It was a little intensely flavored for me (kinda just too fishy), but smoked fish in general is just a little fishy for me, and I knew that going in so I'm hesitant to fault the spread. We lucked out and got super fresh bread straight out of the oven (mmm) so we used that rather than the toasties that came with it.

The lobster bisque tasted like LOBSTER. Big capital letters. This was not your watered-or-creamed-down version that tastes like generic cream base with a hint of lobster; this tasted more like a lobster than lobster meat. Impressive.

So the bisque was freaking delicious, but right on the cusp of being more like a sauce than a soup. PIC has bad memories of the generally well-loved Martini House due to them over-concentrating their flavors and serving soups that tasted like sauces, but this one was just soup-y enough to pass with her.

Brie baked in pastry: hard not to enjoy this calorie explosion, if you're into that sort of thing. PIC is most definitely into that sort of thing and enjoyed this quite a lot.

Overall, the food here has concentrated flavor and good-sized portions for what you're paying, at least on the appetizer menu. The plates were overflowing with salad, etc and could have easily been much larger plates.

I really like eating in restaurants that have been around for a long time, the same way I enjoy living in Victorians and buying mid-century furniture. We didn't know what we were in the mood for that night, so finding an old-school Berkeley institution that happened to serve quality French food for reasonable prices was a nice surprise. We sat in the front window and had a nice cozy late supper, listening to classical music and enjoying a strong Belgian beer. That's just good eats.

We'll be back. I'm interested in trying brunch on the patio, as brunch outside is a hard thing to find in Oakland.