[LA] Headline’s Diner & Press Club

Dec 012012
 

I finally dug up the photos from our last trip to LA (yes, the same trip where we had ABC Cafe and Cafe Spot). We were looking to grab a quick lunch near UCLA, and I found Headline’s Diner & Press Club through Yelp.

It’s a pretty small diner – a handful of tables and seats at the counter. We sat at the counter. Notice that there’s a mirror on the back wall to make the place look bigger! Clever trick indeed, since both S and I thought that there was more seating in the back. Haha.

The menu is pretty simple – breakfast platters like scrambled eggs, omelettes, bacon, and sandwiches. Normally I choose breakfast, but that day I chose a sandwich. It turned out to be a good decision.

Tuna croissant, served with fruit ($7.75)

While the tuna salad was not bad, the croissant was quite underwhelming and dry. I feel like if you’re going to serve sandwiches on a croissant, it should be a good croissant – doesn’t have to be French patisserie quality, but at least not stale…

Bruin Special – 2 pancakes, 3 eggs, hash brown, 2 slices of bacon & 2 sausages links ($7.69)

S ordered the Bruin Special, which seems like a hefty plate of food from the description. Well.. it was all right. As you can see, the bacon is pretty flimsy, and the sausage links were small. Hash browns are nothing like the crispy, browned thin potato slices that we love – it’s more of a… scalloped-potatoes hash? Not really sure how to describe but it’s definitely not hash browns. I was quite disappointed.

Overall, we weren’t very satisfied with the meal, but I guess I can see why college students would like the place. (After all, greasy diner food screams hangover cure.) For my diner fix, I still think Studio Diner is the best I’ve had since moving to San Diego.

Headline’s Diner & Press Club
10922 Kinross Ave, Los Angeles, CA

http://headlinesdiner.com/

Hours: Mon-Fri 6am-10pm; Sat-Sun 7am-10pm

Cali Baguette Express

Nov 262012
 

S and I wanted to have a quick and light lunch one Saturday, so we stopped by Cali Baguette Express. I believe there are a few locations around San Diego, and we visited the one on Convoy St.

Our current favorite place for banh mi is K Sandwiches - you can get a pretty hefty sandwich there for about $3, and they have a bakery with assorted pastries, including, notably, delicious cream cheese croissants ($1 each!). So I was curious as to how Cali Baguette Express would hold up to our current favorite. The store is a bit smaller, and there is no bakery, but the menu is quite similar.

There are also smoothies available. S ordered a Thai iced tea – if you haven’t had one before, it’s a Thai black tea with sweetened condensed milk.

#1: Cali Special ($3.25)

 

I chose the Cali Special – figured I’d go with the namesake sandwich. It was a lot smaller than the sandwich at K Sandwiches, and definitely less meat. Even the bread wasn’t as good (it tasted almost stale?). S had #6, the BBQ pork sandwich. We didn’t like it at all since there were barely a few pieces of pork, and again the nearly-stale bread was a big turn-off. I didn’t even remember to take a picture of it…

We were quite disappointed with Cali Baguette Express. It’s rather highly rated on Yelp (4 stars), so maybe we came on an off day. Nevertheless, I don’t think we will be returning and will stick to K Sandwiches instead for our banh mi cravings.

Cali Baguette Express
4425 Convoy St. Suite 200A, San Diego, CA
(858) 278-2525 

Hours: Mon-Sat 7am-8:30pm; Sun 8am-8pm


Hoangies food truck

Oct 252012
 

There are several food trucks that stop by my workplace for lunch – pretty much a different one everyday. However, I haven’t actually tried many of them because I usually bring my own lunch. Last week, though, I had the chance to try out one of my lab’s favorite trucks – Hoangie, the banh mi food truck.

The truck had a super cute “Banh mi on wheels” cartoon. They also posted photos of the menu items, which I always appreciate. You can also view their online menu here.

The different sandwiches had very cute names, such as Hoangie Moo (marinated pepper steak), Hoangie Doodle-do (garlic marinated chicken breast), Hoangie Oink (sweet marinated pork shoulder), etc. I chose the Hoangie Oink with a fried egg ($1 extra for the egg).

Hoangie Oink with fried egg ($9)

The sandwich was pretty big – more than enough for a meal for me (although I ate the whole thing anyway…). The baguette was slathered with an aioli + French butter mix, which was amazing. Veggies included cucumbers, pickled carrots and daikon radish, sliced jalapenos, and cilantro – all very fresh and added a nice crunch to the sandwich. The meat wasn’t like any grilled pork I’ve had in bahn mi – it was more of a sweet-marinated pulled pork. It was really delicious, though, and went well with all the toppings, in particular the perfect fried egg.

This, along with Tabe BBQ and Mr. Pig’s BBQ, definitely served one of my favorite food truck meals in San Diego so far. In fact, strangely enough, the pork in Hoangie’s banh mi and Tabe’s burritos taste very similar – my labmates also concurred with me, so maybe we just like the sweet-marinated Asian-style pulled pork. Haha. The only thing I’d pick a bone about is the price tag. While $8 is typical food truck price, it’s pretty expensive for a banh mi, especially compared to the $3 price tag on the banh mi at K Sandwiches. I do understand that Hoangie is trying to use better ingredients, so maybe the comparison doesn’t hold. Still, though, I rarely shell out $10 for lunch, so this might be an occasional treat for me.

Hoangies – Banh Mi on Wheels
Schedule on website
http://www.hoangiesfoodtruck.com/index.html

[SD Miramar] Lunch at Motor City Deli

Jun 112012
 

I’ve been in the middle of an oh-so-fun moving process, which involves furniture shopping, apartment repairs (ok, waiting for the people who actually know how to repair), and of course packing and unpacking and lots of cleaning.  It’s been pretty time-consuming and stressful.

I try to schedule deliveries and repairs for days that is least disruptive to my work/experiment schedule, but sometimes it’s quite difficult.  So, yes, did I mention being stressed?

But the upside is, I got to go to a lunch place that I’d otherwise never have the chance to try, thanks to an appointment scheduled for early afternoon.

I forgot how I found out about Motor City Deli (probably through Yelp).  It’s only open on weekdays from 10-3, so I actually finally got to check it out.

As I expected from the name, the shop is pretty small.  There is a pretty standard deli counter, and just a couple of people working – they were super friendly, by the way.

The menu includes traditional sandwiches like the BLT, Rueben, pastrami, tuna, veggie… and also a few less-common sandwiches like smoked pulled pork and tri-tip.  Specials are listed on the counter by the entrance.  I had a hard time deciding between the tri-tip and the special “Jerky Turkey”.

Finally decided to go with the turkey since I love jerk seasoning.

Jerky Turkey sandwich, $6.99 (with 1 side)

It was a pretty decently-sized sandwich!  I chose spicy mustard (upping the spiciness just a bit more), lettuce, tomato, and olives… in retrospect it was a pretty odd combo, but it all tasted pretty good.  The sliced turkey was very fresh, not overly salty like some deli meats can be.  The jerk seasoning, however, was a bit weak.  Maybe the spicy mustard overpowered it…

I could also choose a side of coleslaw, chips, potato salad, pasta salad, or green salad.  I picked coleslaw – it was decent, not enough vinegar for my liking, but the veggies were crunchy.

The bottom line?  I enjoyed it – it was a good amount of tasty food for $7.  Although I’m not sure when I will have the chance to come back, if you enjoy deli sandwiches, you can definitely stop by and give Motor City Deli a try!

Motor City Deli
7094 Miramar Road, Suite 114, San Diego, CA
(858) 566-6562

http://www.motorcitydeli.com/

Hours:
Mon-Fri  10am-3pm

Two Brunches in San Diego: The Linkery and Urban Solace

Aug 232011
 

When I went to San Diego for Independence Day weekend, S. and I tried a few new eateries. First up, The Linkery, apparently one of SD’s most famous farm-to-table restaurants. As you can probaby tell from the name, their specialty is house made sausages. The restaurant is very… open. Basically instead of a wall on one side, it’s just open to the outside. Actually, the restaurant’s ‘hippie-ness’ really reminded me of something I would see in Berkeley.

Our brunch: (sorry for the lighting, my camera’s white balance was way off…)

Link Benedict: house made Klobasa sausage, two poached pastured chicken eggs, beer bread, Hollandaise sauce ($14)

I really liked all the different components of this dish. The Klobasa sausage (pork, garlic, marjoram) was very nice, and the not-so-subtle garlic flavor made it all the more delicious. Eggs were really nicely poached, and the runny yolks + Hollandaise sauce was tasty without feeling too heavy. The beer bread was AWESOME! I’d never had beer bread before, but it instantly became my favorite type of bread. Maybe the extra carbon dioxide from the beer made the bread more fluffy or something… regardless, it was so good.

The downside of this dish is that it doesn’t really work very well all together. Poached eggs with sausage just doesn’t go together very well for me. I did enjoy sopping up every last bit of the sauce and yolks with the bread, though. Maybe if I had just gotten the sausage on the side…

House Sausage Sandwich (Andouille sausage), served with tortilla strips and cole slaw ($12)

S., being more of a minimalist (haha), ordered the house sausage sandwich. It’s very simple – in fact, it looks like a hot dog in the photo, probably because of the house-made mustard that’s squirted on there. The Andouille sausage is pork, cayenne, thyme, and garlic, and delicious – although not as spicy as I had hoped. I thought the tortilla strips were just strange.. not quite chips, not quite fries, just… strange. The cole slaw was very Californian in that it lacked any mayo or vinegar. Basically, it was a salad, not slaw. So we asked for a bit of mayo, mixed it in, and voila, made our own slaw.

Although the dishes we ordered were very interesting ways to serve their house-made sausage, S. and I agreed that next time, we would probably just order a link by itself, and with a couple of sides. I really felt that the sauces overwhelmed the flavor of the links in our dishes, and I’d like to try them without any garnish. Oh – and you can bet that I’ll be back for the beer bread.

The Linkery
3794 30th St, San Diego, CA
(619)255-8778

Hours
M-W   11:30am-11pm
Th       11:30am-12am
F-Sa   11am-12am
Su       11am-11pm

Another new place that we tried this time was Urban Solace, a brunch place that I’ve heard about quite a few times already. Again, we went for brunch (yes, we like brunch). Surprisingly, the wait wasn’t as bad as we had thought! Brunch in SD (and in Berkeley, for that matter) can have some pretty gruesome wait times, but luckily our ‘party of two’ was seated in about fifteen minutes. (We also don’t like to sit outdoors, which makes it easier for us to get seats. Haha.)

Burger: Niman Ranch Chuck, Aged White Cheddar, Smoked Tomato Jam, House Sauce Bibb Lettuce, Egg Bun ($9.75), added Mushrooms ($3 extra), served with fries

Before you call me out on ordering a burger at brunch, let me just say that this was a good burger. The patty was so juicy, and all the condiments and toppings made the flavors very unique. My favorite part was the smoked tomato jam – quite a creative alternative to ketchup! Fries were nice and crispy, sprinkled with some parsley (I think) and sea salt. (For the record, I did not try the pickle.)

Belly Benny: House Biscuit, Braised Van de Rose Duroc Pork Belly, Poached Fresh Eggs, Smoked Ancho Chili Hollandaise ($12)

Here’s the brunch food of this meal, the “Belly Benny”. Despite the enormously long description on the menu, all I saw was ‘braised pork belly.’ I swear I have a pork belly radar. Anyway, this was awesome – a much better benedict than the Linkery’s, since all the components worked together very nicely. (I think it’s because pork belly has the same ‘melt-in-your-mouth’ feeling as the eggs and biscuit, whereas the sausage links do not.) I also liked Urban Solace’s Hollandaise sauce better, probably because it has chilis. The biscuit, however, doesn’t really taste like the biscuits I’ve had in the South – this was almost.. chewy, like an English muffin-biscuit hybrid. I would have loved beer bread instead of the biscuit, but well, ya can’t have everything I guess :P

Overall, S. and I thought that this was definitely the better brunch of the two. Their dinner and lunch menus also look quite interesting… It’s on the pricey side, but I would love to come back for special occasions.

Urban Solace
3823 30th St, San Diego, CA
(619) 295-6464

Hours
M-Th:   11:30am-10pm
F:            11:30am-11pm
Sa:          10:30am-11pm
Su:          Brunch 10am-2pm; Dinner 5pm-9pm

Switch to our mobile site