come for the gas, stay for the grease

The other day I posted a link on my Facebook page to a 'restaurant' review from the East Bay Express of a new place in Fremont. I say 'restaurant' with quotes around it because the place in question a) specializes in deep-fried junk food and b) because it's located in a gas station. Even though the accompanying comment I made on the link was disparaging, I was kind of intrigued by this place. Kind of like that morbid curiosity people have while gawking at a wreck on the side of the road: you know you shouldn't look, but you just can't help yourself.

Now, as much as I might seem like a food snob, I have a confession to make: I grew up on white trash food. I didn't realize it until I was much older, but a lot of what my mom cooked when I was growing up was totally redneck. You know the kind of stuff I'm talking about: 'meat' from a can, Campbell's Soup used as gravy, Jell-O mold with fruit cocktail inside and the like. My mom is actually a great cook, so I'm pretty sure this was a function of growing up in the seventies as more women were working outside the home and looking for quick dinner solutions. My favorite dinner when I was a kid was meatloaf made with Lipton French Onion soup mix mashed in to the ground beef, then smothered with Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup with a scoop of rice and Green Giant corn niblets on the side. If I went to visit my folks and my mom put a plate of that in front of me, I would devour it like a starving 10-year-old who just got home from two hours of swim team practice. I wouldn't make it at home for myself - my mom probably hasn't made this dish in 25 years either - but I would still think it was totally yummy.

Like any good American, particularly one who was raised on white trash cuisine, I love fried food. I'm down for pretty much anything dipped in batter and run through the deep fat fryer. So it's a little odd that I've made it to this point in my life without ever having a deep fried Twinkie. But then again, maybe not so odd because that particular delicacy seems to be most easily found at events like county fairs and tractor pulls - two places where I very rarely (if ever) find myself. (Well, there was that one time Kirk and I went to the San Mateo County Fair to see Night Ranger, but we were there to rock, not eat. Wow, did I really admit that in public?)

It just so happens that the following day I was working in Santa Clara and would be driving right past Fremont on my way home, so I made it my journalistic DUTY to go check it out so I could report back to you, dear reader. Wasn't that altruistic of me?

The place is called "The Deep Fried Twinky (sic) and Pastrami Shop," or at least that's what the banner outside says. It's situated in the back of the convenience store attached to the Valero gas station on the corner of Mowry Avenue and Fremont Blvd. Not sure if the misspelling of "Twinkie" is on purpose to avoid any kind of copyright infringement or if the sign maker or store owner is not smarter than a fifth grader. Does anything say 'redneck' more than deep fat fried food from the gas station? I bet they sell rifles and ammo there too.

Besides the obvious pastrami sandwich (which is not deep fried) and Twinkies (which are), this place offers all kinds of deep fried goodness (or should I say, badness) including but not limited to, Oreos, PB&J, bananas, cookies and cupcakes. On the savory side, they have a bacon-wrapped hot dog (deep fried), ham & cheese sandwich (deep fried) and garlic fries (obviously, deep fried). I think the only thing not deep fried on the menu is the pastrami sandwich. Not sure what makes it so special that it doesn't get a batter-and-oil bath like everything else they offer, but I suppose I'll have to find that out another time.

I find the menu a little overwhelming. Which fried delight should I have? For the truly undecided, they have a Sweet Sampler plate which consists of two bananas, two Oreos, half of a PB&J, one Twinkie, two cookies and one cupcake for $9.99. But I am by myself and not looking to give myself a heart attack on the spot, so it's between the Twinkie (hereafter refered to as DFT) and the PB&J. The PB&J sounds a little more exotic and somewhat more satisfying, but I'm actually not all that hungry. I decide to go for the DFT mainly because I figure that if I'm going to pop my white trash fried junk food cherry it might as well be with a classic.



The DFT comes drizzled with chocolate sauce and dusted with powdered sugar. It actually presents well, like if it wasn't being served on yellow fast food paper in a disposable paper tray, you might actually mistake it for a five dollar dessert at some family restaurant chain like Chili's or Applebee's instead of a two-buck one at the gas station.

The first bite is a hot, crunchy burst of molten cake. A little too hot to taste anything, really, so I let it cool down a bit. After a few more bites, I have to honestly say that I'm not a fan. What I like about Twinkies in their original form is the sponginess of the cake and the lightness of the creme center. But the hot oil has turned the cake into a gritty, mushy substance almost the consistency of polenta and the creme into flavorless liquid. At least the batter, chocolate sauce and powdered sugar made it into something that was edible and mildly enjoyable. I think the DFT could have benefited from a scoop of vanilla ice cream to temper the hotness and sweetness.

Even though I'm not impressed with the DFT, I'll probably come back to the DFTAPS to try the PB&J and the pastrami, and of the bacon-wrapped hot dog sounds pretty awesome too. I think the PB&J will hold up better in the fryer than the Twinkie - melty peanut butter sounds infinitely more palatable than disintegrated sponge cake. Of course, I would ONLY be returning here because it's my journalistic duty to report back on these things. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Did I mention that the gas here is really cheap? Like 20 cents per gallon cheaper than what I paid at the ghetto gas station near my house. It's worth the five-minute detour off the freeway just for that. And hey, if I have to fill up my car, might as well fill up my belly, too.

The deets: The Deep Fried Twinky & Pastrami Shop, 4004 Mowry Avenue at Fremont Blvd, Fremont. Phone: (510) 794-7666. Open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.

A Brisk-et fall day

Today's been a classic fall day: sun shining, a nip in air, porch covered in leaves. We've been lucky with our typical Bay Area Indian summer but I think those days are finally (sadly) leaving us. There are still a few tomatoes hanging around on our vines but soon we should be replacing them with winter veggies - leafy greens, maybe some beans and snow peas. We had a really lovely crop of snow peas last year so hopefully we can duplicate that success this year.

I had a little bit of a strange schedule today - a morning appointment in Alameda and an afternoon job in San Mateo that left with me a decent chunk of time to get some lunch out somewhere. I consider Phat Matt's BBQ (www.phatmattsbbq.com), which is opening today on Telegraph and 34th in Oakland, but decided that it was somewhere I'd rather go with a carnivorous friend than alone. I didn't really feel like tracking anyone down, plus I questioned the wisdom of going to a restaurant on their first day of business. But the seed had been planted that I wanted meat for lunch. Then I remembered the brisket sandwich at Bakesale Betty, which I had read about months ago but hadn't sampled yet. So off to BB it was.

Bakesale Betty is one of the cornerstones of the burgeoning Temescal dining scene, literally - it's located on the corner of Telegraph and 51st Streets in Oakland. They make yummy pastries (mainly pies, the best strawberry shortcake on the planet, cookies and scones) and a few incredible sandwiches. On any given day (especially weekends), you'll see long lines of people waiting for their chance to get a BB delectable. This is the only place I can think of where it actually pays to stand in a long line because employees will often come out and dole out free cookies as you wait. One time, the free cookie guy insisted I take two even though one was plenty enough for me. By the time I got to the counter I was so full I didn't really want to order anything. From that perspective I'm not sure if this is a good business strategy, but from a public relations one, it's a home run.

Bakesale Betty is a real person, though her name isn't really Betty. She is Alison Barakat, a transplant from Australia and another Temescal Chez Panisse alum (the other being Charlie Hallowell at the neighboring Pizzaiolo). Betty/Alison is a blue-hair, and by that I don't mean old: she wears a blue bob wig that's become her trademark. The hair and her cat-eyed glasses give her the look of a punk rock version of a 1950's housewife, perhaps an allusion to her modern take on classic food.

The fried chicken sandwich is the one that put Bakesale Betty on the map - the original cause of the lines flowing down Telegraph Avenue. I bet that out of the 1,503 reviews on Yelp, at least 1,425 of them rave about the fried chicken sandwich (and the other 78 were written by vegetarians). It's not all hype either - it really is THAT good. But I didn't come here today to talk about the fried chicken sandwich; that one has had its moment in the sun from many other sources. Today it's all about the brisket, baby.

I got to BB around 11:15 a.m. No line, but that meant no free cookie, either. (Ed. note: What kind of place makes you sad that you don't get to stand in line? I think the DMV should start handing out homemade cookies - there would be a lot less pissed off people there.) As much as I love the cute old ironing board tables that make up the outdoor seating area, today it's a little chilly so I take my sandwich to enjoy in the comfort of my own home.

As I start to unwrap it, I notice little potato chip crumbs falling out of the paper. 'That's weird,' I think to myself, 'why would they wrap potato chips up with the sandwich? Why wouldn't they put them on the side?' Then I realize that the potato chips are actually IN the sandwich. Glory hallelujah! I've been surreptitiously sticking potato chips in my sandwiches since about the sixth grade - they go great in tuna salad with alfalfa sprouts - but I have never in all my sandwich-eating years ever bought one with the potato chips already included in the filling. I've even purchased bags of chips for the express purpose of sticking them in my sandwich. I haven't even taken a bite and already I'm in love with the damn thing.

When I do finally take the first bite, the love just deepens. The brisket is tender - not quite melt-in-your-mouth, but close - and a tad on the salty side, which is A-OK with me. The horseradish cream sauce slathered all over adds just the right amount of kick, not too overwhelming or spicy, and carmelized onions give it a little sweetness. While the horseradish and onions are nice nods to tradition, the addition of arugula (along with the aforementioned potato chips) bring the sandwich into the 21st century. This is not your grandma's brisket sandwich, and amen to that.

The one criticism I have is that the sandwich was served cold. I was able to heat it up because I was at home, but if I had eaten it there, I would have been a little disappointed. It's a lot better warm.

Price-wise, at $8.50 it's a bit steep for a sandwich. Then again, there is no way I could eat a whole one in one sitting. Since I'm getting two meals out of it, that averages it out to $4.25 each - which is a total steal. I'd pay more at Subway for one of their sad-excuses-of-a-sandwich. (Actually, I wouldn't pay more at Subway because I would never go there unless I was stuck out in the 'burbs or desperate...or both.) And it's an especially good deal because I didn't have to buy the potato chips separate.

I still love the fried chicken sandwich, but it's nice to have options. And the brisket sando is a wicked good one.

The deets: Bakesale Betty, 5098 Telegraph Avenue (at 51st), Oakland. Phone: (510) 985-1213, on the web at www.bakesalebetty.com. Sunday-Thursday, 7:00 a.m to 3:00 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

The Pizza Philes, chapter 1 - Emilia's Pizzeria, Berkeley

One of the 18,236 reasons Mark and I get along so well is that we share a deep, passionate love for food and for the most part, we agree on what we like. (Our biggest divergence is around pork products, bacon in particular - but that's another story for another day.) Forget about the four basic food groups you learned about in elementary school, we've got our own: pizza, ice cream, breakfast and anything with butter. Sometimes these categories overlap, and all the better (though pizza-flavored ice cream doesn't sound all that great).

Pizza is by far my favorite food. I seriously think I could eat it every day. (My personal best to date is six days straight.) It's made up of three things I love - tomatoes, bread and cheese - how could anything made up of those ingredients be bad? I grew up in a smallish town on the Big Island of Hawaii where the only pizza place was Pizza Hut. (OK, there was also Magoo's, but no one ate the pizza there - it was all about hot ham & mushroom sandwich. But that too is another story for another day.) The choices when I went away to college in Des Moines, Iowa, weren't any better. We had a Pizza Hut near campus (where I worked waiting tables one summer), a Domino's and Home Team Pizza, a locally-owned shop that came into existence my sophomore year. The arrival of Home Team was a big story on campus since they seemed a better alternative to corporate pizza. At first, the quality was better - but by the time I graduated, you could barely tell the difference between their pizza and Domino's.

I feel fortunate to be living here in the Bay Area at a time when pizza is going through such huge renaissance. It seems like almost every week you hear of a new place opening, and they're all top-quality establishments - not the greasy, cheese-laden carb-fest joints that thrive around college campuses. Even a big player in the NYC pizza scene, Anthony Mangieri, closed his restaurant in the Big Apple to relocate to San Francisco. Una Pizza Napoletana will be opening in SOMA next March, and I can't wait to check it out!

Emilia's Pizzeria in Berkeley is the latest addition to the East Bay pizza scene, which is already an embarrassment of riches with Pizzaiolo, Dopo, Gioia, Marzano and Zachary's (among others) already enjoying ridiculous amounts of success. Emilia's owner Keith Freilich first learned the art of pizza making in his native New Jersey at the Hoboken outpost of Grimaldi's, which Zagat names the best pizza in New York. After spending 10 years or so interspersing a career in IT with pizza making, he moved to California and scored a job at Pizzaiolo a few months before they opened in 2005 - where he stayed until opening Emilia's last month.

It hasn't taken Emilia's long to establish a following. Pretty much every night Freilich tweets around 8 p.m. that he's run out of dough and is closing up shop. So finally after weeks of wanting to try it but not being able to make it in time, I planned ahead.

It turns out that Emilia's is located exactly two doors down from the dry cleaner where I take my clothes to get altered. I had taken in a few pairs of pants to be hemmed earlier in the week and planned to pick them up right before 5 p.m. on Saturday, closing time for the dry cleaner but opening time for Emilia's. My plan worked perfectly - or so I thought. I showed up at Emilia's at 4:50 p.m. and the door was open. I tried ordering a pizza but was told by Freilich (it's truly a one-man operation - the guy is the pizzaiolo, phone answerer and cashier) that he just started a new system today where he was taking orders in advance over the phone, and had so many orders already in that the earliest he could get me a pie would be 6:30. I quickly weighed my options. Did I *really* want to come back in an hour and a half after I planned the logistics of the visit so well? Not really. So I put on all the charm I could muster and gave him my sob story about how I had come ALL the way from OAKLAND (a whole two miles, tops, but you know, it's a big enough town where I could have come from far enough away to be a major inconvenience) and planned this trip a week ahead of time and how I kept wanting to come but he kept running out of dough before I could get there, yada yada yada. And you know, for Jersey guy, he sure was pretty nice about the whole thing. He squeezed me in and had my pizza ready in 20 minutes. And boy, am I glad I stuck to my guns and got that pizza.

Emilia's only does one size - 18 inches. No single slices. The pizza comes with tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella and basil, and there are a few extra toppings that can be added which change from week to week. I got red peppers (because he had tweeted earlier this week that he wasn't sure how much longer he'd be offering them) and red onion.

The pizza is beautiful to look at and even better tasting. The crust is blistered and charred in places, just how I like it. It's also chewy and crisp, just how I like it. The sauce is flavorful and the peppers are roasted to perfection. There's just the right amount of cheese - it's doesn't take over the whole pizza and lets the taste of the toppings shine. I think it's the best pizza I've had here in East Bay in awhile; comparable to Pizzaiolo and Dopo in quality but a lot more accessible since it's basically just a take-out joint with only one thing on the menu. Getting a fully-loaded pie at Emilia's will at most cost you $30. If you go to Pizzaiolo or Dopo, you end up ordering salad, drinks and dessert and leave $70-100 poorer (although richer for the dining experience) and the pizza is much smaller.

Atmosphere-wise...well, there just isn't any. Emilia's is little more than a take-out counter. There are three small tables, but they were more probably more useful when he was doing slices, for people who just wanted a quick bite. This pizza should be enjoyed in the comfort of your own home.

Even with the new ordering ahead policy requiring you to plan ahead and the extra drive to Berkeley to pick it up, I can see Emilia's being our new go-to place for takeout pizza. After all, it's a lot closer than Gioia and I would say even better.

The deets: Emilia's Pizzeria is located at 2995 Shattuck Avenue (at Ashby) in Berkeley. Phone: 510-704-1794. They start taking orders at 4:00 p.m. Hours: 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. (or until they run out of dough), Tuesday-Saturday. Website: www.emiliaspizzeria.com, follow on Twitter @emiliaspizzeria.

A New Beginning

Welcome to my latest (and hopefully greatest) foray into the blogosphere. Some of you (OK, two of you) may remember my baseball and poker-themed one from a few years ago called The Queen of Diamonds (thequeenofdiamonds.blogspot.com) that went the way of the dodo after a mere five months in existence. My very first posting on QOD spelled out my biggest fears in starting a blog: 1) that no one would read it, 2) that people would read it and think it was lame and 3) that I wouldn’t have enough time to keep it up. It was that third fear that ultimately killed The Queen of Diamonds: my very last post happened the day before I started massage school. It was really too bad, because at the time my NL team had been floundering and I ended up winning the league that year. And because I was too lazy and/or too busy to write, I didn’t even get to publicly gloat about it.

For awhile now, various friends have suggested that I write an East Bay food blog. It makes perfect sense because eating good food is by far my favorite activity these days, something I do much more often than check baseball stats (well, it IS the off-season) or play poker (which I haven’t done since RC’s last Super Bowl tournament). And I do spend an awful lot of time following street food vendors on Twitter and taking notes on new restaurant openings from the Chronicle’s Inside Scoop column, so it would be great to have an outlet to share that information. But what of those old fears?

I am not really worried about whether or not other people read this or what they think. I’m doing it mostly for myself, because I really need something more creative to do with my spare time than play Bejeweled Blitz all night. The time and commitment fear...well, that’s to be seen. I figure the only way to find out is to just do it and see if it sticks.

This time around, I am not going to limit myself in scope. I think that was a contributing factor to the death of my old blog. Once I stopped writing, it was hard to start again because I felt the need to ‘catch up’ from where I had left off and it was just too overwhelming. I’m hoping that if I’m just writing about whatever’s going at the moment, there would be no such pressure.

I’m calling this blog The Omnivore’s Delights for several reasons. Obviously, it’s a play on Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which is a book about food. Of course, food will be one of the main topics. Mark and I eat at too many fabulous places and cook too many enjoyable dishes to not share about those. But I’m a consumer of many things in addition to food: music, film, art, books, reality television, plays, fashion, etc. and I want to be open to talking about all these things and whatever else comes to mind.

So welcome to my blog, version 2.0. I look forward to a long, happy, inspiring, entertaining and fun experience with it and you, dear reader. (Assuming you are, in fact, out there.)