A Weekend in 3 Parts: Part 1-Salty Reunions
Some weekends are like this. They
unfurl with a myriad of tendrils heading in various directions. These are the
weekends when my dad leaves me messages and affectionately refers to me as
butterfly – as in social butterfly. And these weekends tend to be food
filled.
And so I find myself in a weekend of
three parts. A weekend that began with a late dinner at Camber
(a mistake I won’t make again) with my friend Tolbert.
I hadn’t seen Tolbert in a while. Not really. We’d glimpsed each other last
weekend or maybe the one before that but we hadn’t made a plan to hang since
last fall sometime. We fell back into our usual habits, I am in charge of
most things food and he, electronics.
I’d been surveying Yelp to get some
ideas on places I’ve never been and was leaning heavily toward Old Weang Ping but Camber looked interesting too
and so I gave him the option and Camber won out.
First off let’s start off
understanding that being in downtown on telegraph on First Friday, if your
intent is not to be a part of First Friday, is not a stellar idea. All blame
on me, when I’m looking at food the last thing I pay attention to is the
address. Instead I get focused on the menu items that look delicious or the horrifying
stories of hair in the food. I am single minded of focus, summarily ignoring
complaints of crappy service. (sometimes I feel people get their panties in a
wad over service for things that are trivial…but that is a whole other
conversation I’ll entertain later).
Miraculously, I found rock star
parking on telegraph. Did I mention it was First Friday at 8:30?
Tolbert meandered in a few minutes later
with a cardboard box in his hand. We sat, the box taking up a sizable portion
of the two-seater table we’d been
escorted to at the back of the place, near the stairs.
It is dark. It is
noisy. It is more bar than restaurant despite the ample seats for food. The
game was on, music (old school hip hop, including Going back to Cali, which
made me bop my head through most of the meal) blaring from what I presume was
a DJ upstairs.
Yeah yeah…but what
of the menu, what of the food?
 The menu contains
some of my favorite items from other places. The crunchy rice ball salad that
I adore from Champa Garden (the thing I
can’t go there and NOT order), the day’s special of fermented tea salad
(Burma Superstar). And clearly these are not proprietary items. No one owns
fried chicken or even fried chicken and waffles, but certain places do raise
the bar. In this case things seemed to fall short.
Our starter was the Camber (crunchy) rice ball salad. I tried one of these outside of Champa once in a small Laotian spot on
International and was deeply disappointed. This one was no different. There
was definitive crunch, however it stemmed from some greasy deep fried
something that I couldn’t quite discern. Maybe it was a ball of rice but it
felt and tasted more like the breading on fried mozzarella sticks which –
while delicious- is not what I’m seeking in my salad. Lemon was the strongest
flavor (my fault for squeezing the lemon that was presented with the plate).
It was pretty enough, with the requisite dried chilies offering both color
and a little heat where they rested, but I was underwhelmed and found myself
describing Champa’s version to Tolbert
and promising to take him there one day soon.
Our entrees arrived
staggered. Tolbert will indulge me in
the tandem eating (family style eating) because he’s a nice guy but I never
get the feeling that he loves it. The only time I usually push the issue is
if I know that what I ordered is something he is interested in. and since I
can read a menu and pick him out pretty easily I knew our orders didn’t mesh
so well this trip.
He had the garlic
chicken and I had the basil eggplant and added shrimp. He had white
rice and I, brown. My plate came out first with huge shrimp and glistening
pieces of eggplant. I waited patiently for Tolbert’s food assuming it would
be out in short order. It was a few minutes before it finally emerged, my
food cooling in the meantime.
We both settled
down to eat. It wasn’t that my food was bad (at first anyway) it is more that
it wasn’t good. The shrimp, though large, were bland. The eggplant, soggy. The
sauce, abundant and salty in the strangest way. More than basil or any other
flavor, the saltiness was the pervasive flavor. Usually I enjoy the rice on
the bottom of a dish; it works as a conduit for flavor allowing me to soak up
the last of whatever is there. At Burma I use the coconut rice to soak up the
end of my samosa soup for a wonderful salty sweet counterpoint with the added
benefit of pulling the final bit of that dish to my lips. In this case I had
a bedding of rice that served more as blockade against the sauce with hopes that I could salvage the rest.
Tolbert’s food was
on the sweet side. The chicken was moist, which was a bonus. I’m always
irritated by chicken dishes where the chicken is dry and devoid of even
chicken flavor let alone anything else. Still, sweetness was the dominant
flavor there. I’m guessing he didn’t mind too much, unlike me his plate was
eaten clean without even a grain of rice to disrupt it. Of course I didn’t
complain about my food so it could be we just suffered in silence.
The one bright side
to the meal was the ginger lemonade, a fizzy concoction with a definite
gingery punch. It was a refreshing way to cut through the grease and wash
down the salt.
Turns out Tolbert and I were both true to our
traditional roles (although I fell short on mine with a poor selection); the
box he carried with him was an antenna for my big booty television. Last time
I saw him he tried, unsuccessfully, to make it work with the digital
conversion box. Failing that, this time he brought in reinforcements. Thanks
to him I can now watch "Friends" reruns and the news.
Camber is late
night drinking food. It is something more substantial than cheese sticks and
nachos but that is mostly in form, not in substance. I won’t be returning- at
least not for food- the DJ might be worth the trip.
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