Review: Sangria's, Part II

One of the first restaurants we reviewed was Sangria's, a tapas restaurant where we had a light lunch. We knew it was just a trial, though -- we can't let a tapas restaurant go without a real meal. We went back for our anniversary (which was over 6 weeks ago, so that tells you how far behind I am) for tapas.

For our first round, we got the fried calamari, the patatas aioli, and the chorizo in wine sauce; the second round was meatballs and a salad. We got a carafe of sangria to accompany our meal. Anyone who knows the kind of eating we usually do at a tapas restaurant already knows that something was amiss if we only did two rounds of five dishes. And it was -- salt and oil.

The chorizo, for instance, was outstanding -- smoky, fatty chorizo, plenty of melt-in-your-mouth onions, a deep umami flavor to the sauce -- but it was all we could do to eat it all from the salt. Everything but the salad followed the same pattern -- delicious thanks to all of the salt and oil, but difficult to finish for the same reasons. Unfortunately, this is neither authentic to Spanish tapas nor appropriate to the ways Americans eat tapas. It might be more reasonable to start with a plate or two before a pan of paella (which we have not tried), but Sangria's was a difficult place to make a meal.

The calamari followed the same pattern: barely overcooked at all, far less so than most American restaurants, but Melanie likened it to Kentucky Fried Squid -- heavy breading that overwhelmed the flavor of the squid itself.

And so on: the potatoes were nicely fried, but swam in oil with a layer of heavy aioli on top; the meatballs were garlicky and flavorful, which was partially owed to the hefty helping of salt they had.

Sangria's does deserve applause, though, for their willingness to shy from an excess of consistency. The sangria had different fruit, following what was seasonally available, and the salad was topped with different stuff -- different cheese, different charcuterie, etc. Kudos to Sangria's for bucking the insistence that every dish must be cookie-cutter identical and keeping our palates entertained day after day.

In the end, that openness to variation could come in handy, since Sangria's is definitely the sort of place I could start out most any night with a tapa and a glass of sangria. For appetizers or a light lunch, Sangria's is wonderful, but for a meal -- maybe not so much.

Review: Magic Wok

I want to take you away to a magical place of fantasy and make believe. I speak of a place where the greasy spoon in a roadside trailer meets the moderately rude Chinese joint; a place where there are two things on the menu and no one knows what the other one is; a place called Magic Wok. I'd link to their website, but really, don't be silly. This is a place with three tiny tables inside an immobilized 50's-model trailer with an adjoining overflow seating area with decorations that range from "Funky School Bus" toys (whatever the heck that is) to the normal Chinese mountain scenes.

I went to the Magic Wok with some work friends a few weeks ago. The question isn't so much "what do you want?" but "how spicy?" You get the cashew chicken. The menu technically has "dish with rice" on it, and in theory I suppose there might be another dish, but no one orders anything but the chicken. (Well, people order the kim chee, which isn't much like any other kim chee I've had -- it was much fresher -- and I have on good authority isn't much like Korean kim chee either, but it was tasty.)

This isn't your pedestrian cashew chicken. This has cashews that have just been roasted on the stove top, slightly smoky. The chicken has the wonderful flavor of a well-seasoned wok, not the anodyne restaurant cleanliness.

But let's talk spice. You can order the chicken one of three ways: "Chicken"; "spicy chicken"; or "extra spicy chicken." If you order it spicy, they've got a dozen hot pepper plants sitting outside the trailer so you know you're in for some zing. If you order it extra spicy -- and I must stress that I am not joking or exaggerating here -- they pass you a molcajete out the window and a baggie of habaneros, and you make your cashew chicken just as damn spicy as you want it. They pass you a molcajete and a baggie of habaneros. Seriously.

Magic Wok doesn't have the best Chinese food you'll ever have. In fact, it probably won't even be in your top five, but that hardly means you shouldn't eat there. It's got wonderful home cooked flavor, and if nothing else, Magic Wok is an experience. I grinned like a fool for an hour afterwards, and so will you.

Necessity is the mother of delicious

I've complained before about the kitchen we're stuck with for a while in our temporary housing. Tonight, that lousy kitchen blossomed into something really quite lovely.



This week at the Oak Ridge Farmers' Market there were several vendors with deep green bunches of basil that caught my nose. Although early season and so a bit overpriced, I picked up a bunch and resolved to make pesto. I've always made pesto with a food processor before, but this time I'd have no such electrical assistance; this would be made all by hand. And I mean "by hand": since the townhouse has a glass cutting board and dirt-cheap knives, I don't even have a reasonably sharp blade to work with.

So I toasted up some pine nuts I had left over from a salad, chopped the basil as much as I could without destroying it, and crushed some garlic. Lacking even a cheese grater I had to buy pre-shredded parmiggiano, but at least it wasn't in a green can.



Without a reasonable pot, the wrong way to cook pasta had to suffice:



Cooking the pasta in far too little water had two effects: as expected, it was unevenly cooked, and some bites were definitely much more toothsome than others; but secondly, the salt was more concentrated, so the pasta was very flavorful, and carried the pesto very well. This sort of light pesto doesn't carry a ton of flavor on its own, so the extra saltiness of the pasta helped it along.

I tossed the raw pesto ingredients with a generous drizzle of the old extra virgin and the hot pasta, barely steaming the garlic. The end result was really splendid:



This was a pesto far more reminiscent of the wonderful pasta olio e aglio I had in Italy, and less reminiscent of the heavy, oily gloop that comes out of the food processor. It still wasn't nearly as creamy or cheesy as the real pesto genovese, but it was definitely fine summer fare. Once I get sharp knives and reasonable cutting boards back, I'll certainly be trying this again -- and may even be cured of my food processor pesto habit forever.

4th of July bonus

A couple of weeks ago after dinner we swung by Chez Liberty for some cheese and digestifs. Luckily I'm way behind on my blogging, so I didn't get to write them up until Independence Day, which seems apt.

I should note that this isn't a real review, since we didn't do dinner there. We split a plate of the St. Andre triple-cream cheese, which was heavenly. Creamy (as you might imagine) and rich, firm but not unyielding. Chez Liberty has a lovely little cheese list at very reasonable prices, so they may become our go-to restaurant for postprandial cheese.

I don't know if cheese and brown liquor go together, but we didn't particularly care; I was in a scotch mood, so I ordered a MacAllan 12 off their very well-apportioned scotch list (which may be a touch overpriced or may just tend towards better scotches). Melanie got a glass of Fundador, a Spanish cognac that she liked quite a bit, although it was a bit spicy for my taste.

As the night wound on and Chez Liberty started closing down, the owner came around to talk to the cognac drinker. They've managed to score an 81-year-old bottle of cognac that was literally hidden from the Nazis in France during WWII, and which they'll be popping open this fall and serving at a discount. Needless to say we'll be going back, and not just to eat there so we can write the place up properly.

Review: Calhoun's

I didn't want my introduction to Tennessee barbecue to come from a chain, but that's the way it happened. Normally I wouldn't even admit to have patronized a chain in this space, but, as you'll see, they earned it.

On Sunday last we were on a wild notary chase, and had been frantically looking for a notary all morning. When 1:30 rolled around and we still hadn't eaten we were a little punchy. We had planned to try a little 'cue joint in Oliver Springs, but they were closed, so when Calhoun's came into view, we stopped there. We had heard decent things about them, and they're a small local chain, so we suborned our principles to our hunger and went on in.

Not bad barbecue. Pleasantly vinegary. Nice smoke ring. They've probably got a skinny white dude tending the corporate-approved ovens, and while he's doing a swell job, he's no 350 lb. guy named "Cincinnati Jefferson" running a smoker on wheels in a gas station parking lot. Overall: very tasty, but not transcendent. About the best you could get from a chain -- certainly better than other chain BBQ I've had.

A high point was the beer selection. As far as I can tell, no macrobrews were offered. They had their own beers, and maybe some other local brews. (I don't recognize the names yet, so I couldn't tell.) But there was no Miller Light to be found; no Bud Select, and no Sam Adams. Even more impressive, when I jokingly asked the waitress for a glass of something cold, amber-colored, and mildly intoxicating, she started listing off the beers that were actually amber-colored. This was no rote list of every beer they had; she filtered out the ones that were too dark or too light and suggested a brew based on my half serious criteria. Most waitrons wouldn't know Select 55 from Old Rasputin if Ol' Raspy jumped up and bit them in the butt -- that's the bartender's job, right? But this waitress was carefully distinguishing between the pale ale and the red ale based on a glib offhand comment. Oh yeah, and the beer was good too.

But wait, there's more!

As we were leaving, refueled, we asked offhand if they had a notary on staff. They didn't -- but within a few minutes we had the general manager, the assistant manager, the hostess, and a waiter all calling people, leafing through phone books, and wracking their brain to figure out where we could find a notary on Sunday afternoon. For fifteen minutes.

Impressed, my wife said she felt like she should buy one of the shirts in the display case to thank them. Pretty soon the GM came over with a shirt.

"I know you said you should buy a shirt," he said; "but I think you should just take one." We were a bit stunned. "But I'm not being selfless here," he cautioned. "Here's why: First, this shirt is a medium. I don't have a lot of guys in the kitchen who are mediums, so I've got a surplus of these. [There goes my skinny white dude theory.] Secondly, this doesn't have the Calhoun's logo on it, and that doesn't make me happy. But it does have the word 'Pitmaster' on it." He asked if we knew what a pitmaster was, and resisting our desire to mention the Sarlacc we told him we did. "Great," he said; "so when someone asks you what a pitmaster is, you can tell them this story." And with that he wrapped up a few of his business cards in the shirt and handed it to us.

I'm guessing he didn't know at the time that he was talking to East Tennessee's most widely read food bloggers (okay, only food bloggers), and that the story would be told to an e-audience of up to three readers. He just did it because he knows that word of mouth is great advertising, and that he had sufficiently wowed us with a spontaneous act of awesomeness that we'd be talking.

So go to Calhoun's. They've got pretty good barbecue, great beer, out-of-this-world service, and an awfully nice system of bribery going, too.