This weekend, we had a friend visiting from out of town, which meant that we had an opportunity to be serviced by some of our favorite restaurants in the area.
Castro Street in Mountain View offers a myriad of options, and we begin our culinary journey at Xanh, the modern Vietnamese restaurant of Castro Street.
We ordered some old favorites which pleased our appetites:
Soft-shell crab spring rolls to start as an appetizer. The warm crispiness of the fried crab complemented the coolness of the lettuce and spring roll skin.
Spicy Tuna Tartare. This food choice would ultimately feed our desire to have sushi the following day. Chunks of fresh raw tuna, mixed with avocado and dashes of wasabi and lemon made this dish one in which the food simply melts in the mouth, leaving you wanting for more.
Grapefruit Salad. Carve out a grapefruit, and fill the rind with pieces of grapefruit, shrimp, apple, vermicelli rice noodle, and a touch of fish sauce, and the result was delicious enough that it simply disappeared off our table.
Shaking Beef. Cubes of Steak served on a bed of fresh greens. While I did not partake of this particular dish (other than some greens), everyone else seems to have happily enjoyed it, commenting that next time, they'd like a large.
Catfish in a Claypot. I love this dish, as it reminds me of home cooking -- the sweet and salty sauce brings out the moist tenderness of the catfish, and goes great with both the jasmine or the coconut rice.
Hazelnut Mousse. I can't get enough of this dessert -- my friends always tease me for ordering one for myself, refusing to share, but that's just how good it is -- the distinct taste of hazelnut, the crispy crust and the muted sweetness of the mousse is pure heaven for me.
Golden Wok Restaurant
This is by far, the Chinese Restaurant we frequent most often for Dim Sum. While their selection of dim sum items is limited and subject to change, it never fails us in our staple of shanghai dumplings (xiao long bao), barbeque pork buns (char siu bao), sesame balls (zhuma cho) or sweet glutinous rice. Their fried meat dumplings are also very good.
Sunday Evening was a fiasco of sorts, as our friend met up with a friend for dinner at Spice Islands (unknowingly ordering Mango Chicken and not ordering the gem of Spice Islands -- the Roti Prata) , and we set out to find a Japanese restaurant which was not closed. Sushitomi gave us their usual round of excellent food with unattentive service, as we dined on softshell crab, onigiri, and our standard fare of sushi (hamachi, uni, amaebi, saba, king kani, sake) and we sampled the blue fin chutoro.
Sunday evening was finished off with some cream puffs from Beardpapa's before we all happily went into food coma.
Lunch of Monday was at Shiva's, which had a lunch buffet. I'm a big fan of Shiva's food for dinner -- and their lunch buffet is quite tasty -- which is where the problem lies -- you end up eating so much at Shiva's for lunch that you can still feel the Indian food hours later. Stay away from the donut holes soaked in sugar -- it is an overwhelmingly sweet dessert, and opt for the praline cakes instead.
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