rice Archives - Curiously Carmen

{Food Truck Compilation} JJ’s Trucketeria, Guanaco, and Super Thai

February 3, 2015

Food truck invasion! I decided to compile these 3 food trucks into one post as they seemed like it would be three very short posts on their own. These places are a compilation of two visits with coworkers during the Street Food City festival, which was part of DOVF. But, most of these you can have without Dine Out Vancouver. I should have included Vij’s food truck in here as well, oops!

Guanaco is a Salvadorean cuisine food truck, I think it is the only one of its kind in Vancouver but correct me if I’m wrong. I wanted to take a walk around the food truck festival and my coworker decided to come with me as well!

I had already eaten, but I was in the mood for a small snack which is why I settled on this place. My first choice was The Reef food truck, but their Jamaican patties looked kinda gross in the warmer so after walking around three times, I decided to just come here. Ugh indecisiveness.

I ordered two of their snack sized tacos, chicken and chorizo. I felt like a small snack, and felt that $5 would be a reasonable price.

The chicken was tender, while all the vegetables were fresh and crunchy. I liked the addition of fresh onions and loads of cilantro! The taco shell was soft and doughy, with a bit extra powder.

DSC04610-300x168 — Photo credit: Blast Media

Super Thai: On that same day, my coworker ordered the chicken pad thai from Super Thai. I didn’t try any, but she was happy to offer her opinion on it.

She liked how it was warm and comforting on a cloudy day, and said it was pretty flavourful and not watery like other pad thai that she’s had.

However, near the end, a lot of the noodles started to annoyingly stick to the bottom of the take out box, and took too much effort to un-stick. Perhaps it’s the texture of the noodles that makes it do that.

She also thought it wasn’t worth the price she paid. I also think it’s worth nothing that they were sold out on half their menu items by 2 pm that day. I wanted to order the coconut curry rice but there was none left! =(

JJs-Trucketeria-1 — Picture from Follow Me Foodie

JJ’s Trucketeria: While I went to Vij’s, two of my coworkers ordered from JJ’s instead. Funny story, none of us actually knew the name of this place. I didn’t take a close look at the place, and my coworkers didn’t see a name on the truck.. so we just referred to it as the yellow food truck.

I’m not even sure how we figured out the name, LOL! As you can see from the picture, half the name is on the covering which you’re not able to see unless you’re far away, while the other part is covered with their menu.

Flipino BBQ pork, fried egg, and garlic rice. My coworkers were nice enough to share with me as the portion was too big for just one person. The meat was very tender and well seasoned, while the fried egg was cooked perfect and oozed onto the garlic rice.

My favourite part of this was the garlic rice! Although I only had a few bites, I loved the slight garlic flavour. This is perfect Asian comfort food on a rainy day.

Although, I would recommend having gum or mints handy due to the garlic rice.

That sums up my food truck adventures last month, including Vij’s Railway Express!

What are the names of your favourite food trucks? Better question, what is your opinion on food trucks- love ’em, or prefer a traditional sit down meal?

Thanks for reading!
-Carmen

Sushi Mura

April 7, 2014

I came across Sushi Mura one day and enjoyed it! The only downside is that I’m usually never in this area, so going here would definitely be a treat or a trek. I enjoyed all of their dishes, and judging from the packed line waiting at the door, many other Vancouverites do too. Everything was delicious and I can’t wait to come back!

I also forgot the prices of the dishes, but they were pretty cheap and reasonable, I’ve included the estimated price range from what I can kinda remember (they didn’t have an online menu, boohoo).
The interior has a lot of wooden accents to it. The style reminded me of a contemporary west coast design with all the wood panels everywhere, even in the washroom! As you can tell, their interior is pretty modern and nice. Let’s move on to the food!

The first thing that we ordered was the house salad (I believe that was what it was called), which tasted like a standard salad you’d get at a Japanese restaurant, $4ish.

However, we were surprised when we found a bed of vermicelli underneath the salad. I don’t like eating salad so it was a pleasant surprise for me! Usually, restaurants don’t serve vermicelli with their salads.
Next was our tuna and salmon sashimi $8-9ish. As you can tell from the pictures, the slices were quite generous and thick! My cousin also ordered a ikura nigiri (type of fish egg) which was good.
This was my second favourite dish, apart from the deep fried california roll. Their tonkatsu portion is HUGE, we were pretty surprised at how big the portion was when it came. It was only around $7 and you get so much with it! To give you a ratio, the side of rice is a standard bowl size. There were also two tonkatsu cutlets on top of each other! This was so good! It was super crispy but juicy, and I liked how they give you more sauce on the side. YUM!
Lo and behold, the deep fried California roll (Less than $5)! I’ve seen this on a couple of menus at other restaurants before, but I never felt inclined to order it because I don’t want fried food, and California rolls are average to me. But this intrigued me due to the different colours of sauce layered on top. IT WAS SO GOOD. It wasn’t as heavy as I expected it to be, since it was deep fried, but still lightly crisp. Here’s a close up:
Look at that outer tempura layer! It was so crunchy and delicious.
This was the mango and avocado roll ($4-6ish). Again, I really enjoyed this dish due to the amount of mango they had in it. It was also very sweet.
This is the red roll, chopped scallop with spicy tuna sashimi on top ($4-6ish). It tasted pretty standard, but I liked how they put fresh green onion on the top of the roll.
I forgot what this roll is, but it was basically smoked salmon, crab meat, tempura, and cucumber ($4-6ish). Again, it was pretty good. The negitoro roll ($2ish) was good as well.

All in all, I enjoyed my visit to Sushi Mura due to their delicious rolls and tonkatsu. My cousin, her husband, and I went and we were completely stuffed after eating everything.

However, service is pretty slow especially since it was so busy that day. Our rolls took longer to arrive too, but everything else arrived promptly. I would come back here again just for their deep fried California roll, Sushi Mura has converted me to liking deep fried rolls (never thought I would see that day..)!

-Carmen

Sandy La Chinese Restaurant Review

February 19, 2014

My first impression of this place was not great, but I was willing to give it a second try. Lack of service and the amount of oil they put in some of their dishes was what tainted their reputation for me. The food at Sandy La is drenched in oil, to the point where on both occasions, I had a tummy ache.

They are also not properly staffed, and the few staff that they do have, are not properly trained. The owners of Sandy La try to cut corners to maximize their profit, but it clearly does not work. It’s unfortunate because once you strip away the service, restaurant layout, and oiliness, the taste of the food itself is pretty decent.

We made a reservation at the restaurant for 7pm. However, we were told that there wasn’t a table for us, which was frustrating because that is the point of reservations! There were two large tables open for bigger parties, but they did not want to give us those tables since we only had six people. When we finally talked to a server, she pointed at the table in the corner and said that we had to wait until they were done.

The wait was uncomfortable as well due to the small size of the restaurant and also the way that it is designed. When you first walk in, you open the door which leads you to a small area. There is a second door that you have to open to get into the restaurant. The purpose of this is to block out the cold air, which is trapped in the small area.

After almost 45 minutes of waiting for our “reservation”, we were finally seated! We quickly ordered because at this point, we didn’t want to wait anymore than we already did. In total, there were only three servers during peak which is why service was so slow. They could have used at least two more servers.

The server came by promptly with a bowl of soup, which was complimentary since we waited for a long time. It seemed pretty oily to me so I only had a few sips. The boyfriend’s brother noted that there was a really strong MSG flavour on it.

This was the pan fried spicy beans ($10.95). I understand that the beans are pan fried, but these ones are a lot more oily than the ones I have at other Chinese restaurants. The taste of these beans are good, once you get past the oil.

They were pretty crunchy and had the right amount of spice. They also are not stingy with the amount of meat that comes with this dish.

Up next was the beef and broccoli chow mein. Again, I did not each much of it because I was scared I would get a tummy ache again. I could already feel my tummy churning from the oiliness of the pan fried green beans.

This dish was pretty good though. There was a perfect crunch to the noodles, and the sauce/beef/broccoli are up to standard. In a city like Vancouver where it is filled with authentic Cantonese dishes like this, it is easy to tell right away which restaurants can compete and which can’t. I would like to order this dish again!

The boyfriend’s family brought the crab to the restaurant, and asked for them to make it a certain style. I’m not too sure what the English name is but it’s something similar to deep fried garlic flakes and spices. I thought this dish was delicious.

The batter of the crab was really fresh and crunchy, instead of soggy batter that you may find at other places. The seasoning of this dish was perfect as well.

This satisfied me very much and I would order it again. One thing though, it took us awhile to have the server bring us the clamp to break open the crab. But otherwise, YUM!
This dish is the only reason why the boyfriend’s family comes here as opposed to other restaurants. This is squab, otherwise known as pigeon but I was taught today that pigeon is the incorrect term for it?

Anyways, this dish, again, was delicious. Nothing to complain about with this dish. I didn’t try it because it was too oily for my liking, but everyone else enjoyed it thoroughly. If you are going to come here, definitely give this dish a try!

This was the beef and vegetable dish. I took a better picture of this dish but I can’t find it on my phone anymore so this will have to do. Anyways, this dish seemed very oily and was very shiny when you looked at it, which put me off.

I ended up eating it, but washed off the oil in hot water in my bowl. I would not order this dish due to the oiliness of it. The good thing was that there was a generous portion of beef and sauce. We also sound a styrofoam circle in the dish, if you look carefully, center-ish towards the bottom right. Not sure how it got there but oh well.

Lastly, came the traditional red bean dessert. Right off the bat, the boyfriend’s brother noted that their dessert was better than most Chinese restaurants. Theirs had a thicker texture to it, and was also not as watery in contrast to other places. It was also very sweet so it accomplished the goal of a dessert!

At the end, our server told us that they gave us a discount on the crab, which was nice of them since we had a lengthy wait. It was originally $7 a pound but they charged us at cost, which was $3.50-4 I believe, I can’t remember exactly.

My recommendation is to definitely try the squab and crab, but be wary of their vegetable dishes as they are super oily. I would also recommend coming here past prime dinner hours even on a weekday, since we made reservations but had to wait around 45 minutes. In conclusion, their food is pretty decent once you get past everything else.

When it all comes down to it, you go to a restaurant to eat and enjoy their food, which is we did enjoy the majority of our food. It’s just a shame that everything other than that was lacking, from their service, to long wait times despite reservation, and layout of the restaurant itself. Trying to be efficient is great and I applaud efficiency, but Sandy La cuts too many corners when it comes to hiring servers and seating space to the point where it’s not efficient anymore.