I had good intentions about blogging while I was in the Bay Area, I really did.  My days were full of family, friends, and food.  I know that sounds like the perfect thing to write about.  That’s sort of what Nosheteria is about, right? But, you know how it is– sometimes life just gets in the way of blogging!

It was good to be back in Berkeley though.  The restaurants, the markets, and yes, the politics.  I took this picture near my old apartment, not far from Berkeley Bowl– a market to beat all markets.  I’m guessing someone crawled up the billboard in order to leave their mark.  It’s kind of great.  Message received.

In Berkeley, some things never change.

When we touched down in Los Angeles about one week ago, I already was dreaming about the food destinations we would visit.  The Santa Monica Farmer’s Market, with its numerous vendors hocking summer stone fruit, and perfect heirloom tomatoes, Susan Feniger’s newest restaurant, Street, a culinary homage to street foods around the globe, and who can ignore, one of my favorite old standbys, Philipe’s, for a classic French dip.

Philipe’s is the supposed originator of the French dip sandwich– a traditional roasted meat sandwich where the bread is dipped in a scrumptious, salty jus– and has been at it current location in downtown LA since 1951.  That’s the equivalent to Revolutionary War times in LA years!  And the sandwich, well, it’s pretty great.  I like the standard roast beef, but Brian has ordered both the lamb and the pork, which were very good as well.  But it is the jus that steals the show.  It is clear, meaty, and salty; the perfect accompaniment to this simple masterpiece.  You order your sandwich, specifying a single, or double dip (both pieces of bread dipped), and the sandwich is slung across the counter to you.  It is not dripping, just lightly submerged, and with a side of non-mayonnaisey coleslaw, a perfect lunch is had.

Then it was off to the funicular, just a mile away, near the LA Times building.  A funicular to nowhere, just the way I like it.  The tracks of this street car are about 300 feet long.  There are stairs along the perimeter, and I’m almost sure that you could climb the incline quicker than you can ride it.  But then you would miss out on the lore of riding in this trolley that has been around since 1901.

On my alliterative outing the cutest surprise was to be found.  Hundred of goats, had been “hired” by the city to clear the hillside of brush, and dried grass, near the funicular.  We sat at the top of the hill, watching the goats eat a hardy lunch with our own bellies full of French dip sandwiches.  I thought to myself– I love LA!

Next, we’re off to the Bay Area, where more food awaits…

We would take leave from school and a-travelling we would go. My dad would board the plane, with a pigtailed little me following him and besides the final destination, and maybe a few business meetings along the way, my dad never had a solid plan about what we would do when we arrived. Meticulously planning where we would stay, or even landmarks that we wanted to see was not my dad’s style. He was lucky, and a little bit crafty, because most of the time the trips went off without a hitch, leaving me with childhood memories of slurping ramen with the local fishermen in Japan, eating buttery crayfish swimming in cream in France, and experiencing the sweet, tropical flavor of this gorgeous fruit in Hong Kong.

The mangosteen. A fruit I had only eaten once, and had not had again in close to 20 years. We were on a trip to the Far East, where my dad had yet again, not made reservations at any hotels. He simply picked a hotel at the airport’s tourist desk, and we barreled through the crowded streets of Hong Kong to our destination. My dad, with his fast-talking ways gabbed his way into a hotel room for our stay. The room was standard, but set on a coffee table, near the foot of the bed, was the most splendid fruit basket, filled with luscious unknown items just waiting to be peeled or cut into.

There were crisp starfruit lying next to pruney passion fruit. Mangoes by the handfuls luxuriated next to smooth skinned bananas and tumbling forth in the center of this basket were what I later knew were the slithery, tiny mangosteen. The rough, hard shell of this fruit adequately hides the delectable fruit inside. Pick it up, knock it around, try to bruise it– you would never know its contents. But peel it gently, and an off-white orb pops out. It is slippery and cool, segmented like a tangerine, but with a taste like no other. It feels like a peeled grape in your mouth, tastes a bit like a plum, but has a uniquely tropical flavor that was like nothing I had ever tasted before.

I promptly ate all of the mangosteens in that fruit basket, and made my dad stop in to buy more mangosteens at the markets throughout our trip. I was mangosteen crazy. There is more that I remember about that trip, like the air being so humid and stifling that when the clouds finally burst, and raindrops fell quickly to the ground, the water evaporated on contact rather than pooling into refreshing puddles on the cement. But it is that fruit basket that I remember most.

I had heard and read other Westerners’ accounts of the mangosteen, it appeared that I was not the only one so taken with this fruit. I had even read about farmers trying to grow them in the West, but I had never seen them for sale. That is until walking through a market in California, when I saw a small basket and a sign scrawled with the word– mangosteen. At $16.50 a pound this fruit was like gold, but still I had to buy at least two to give them a try. They were remarkable, sweet, juicy, strange– just as I remember. Maybe they were even better, or maybe it was just that I was so thrilled to finally eat them again.