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So here it is, Thursday morning. I’d like to talk to you for a moment about food, and some crappy absinthe, but first, food.

There may have already been some food (and general trip) related photos, so make sure you’re keeping tabs on my flickr, which I didn’t even know that ping.fm posted to until yesterday!

Here’s what I’ve been jotting down my food-related notes in:

Tuesday when we got in, we checked our bags at the hotel, and since it was too early to check into the room proper we decided to suss out the closest delicious food source. I poked at yelp and so forth on my phone, and saw that there were a couple things up the street from us. Exploring, we discovered a little hole-in-the-wall Japanese place.

Koji Osakaya Japanese Restaurant

First off, whoever told me that sushi is just better on the west coast… was clearly right. This was a great experience that trumps every east coast sushi I’ve ever had. Granted, hunger does make a fine sauce – and man was I ever hungry – but this was very easily a much tastier and worthwhile experience.

The place was fairly quiet, somewhat understandable for about 2pm on a Tuesday I suppose. There was limited seating in the restaurant from what I could tell, leading me to think they probably do more takeout business than dine-in. Still quiet was exactly what I was after. I greedily eyed the noodle bowl options, but knowing the portion sizes that things like that tend to come in, I resigned myself to checking out the lunch specials and items that looked cheap since I knew they’d be somewhat smaller. I was starving, but not interested in eating myself sick either. Sometimes it’s a thin line between full and HOARF, ya know? While perusing the sushi options, I spotted an amusing typo.

I know they meant bagel, but it’s funny because my friends and I often say bagel as bag-hard-L-sound – some cutesy nonsense habit. So seeing this typo made me immediately read it as that.
It inspired the following:

For about 15$ I picked out the assorted sashimi lunchbox, mostly because I was hoping it’d come on a bed of rice so I could stuff myself silly on sumptuous sushi rice. It was to be my one concession to the urge to eat ’til I dropped. No such luck there, but the miso soup was some of the best miso soup broth I’ve had in a while even if it was lacking my personal favorite: green onion. My usual habit of dumping a generous amount of soy sauce (we’re talking 3 shades darker at least, people) into the soup was totally unnecessary here. The fish, oh the fish was amazing! There was a piece of octopus which was chewy, salty, light and packed with flavor. It’s somewhat difficult to describe but if you haven’t had octopus and you enjoy sushi, get past the idea that it’s a tentacle and do it up. There was salmon which was melt-in-my-mouth delicious, though perhaps a little… lighter than what I’m used to getting. This may have to do with it being fresher, or it may be a different variety of salmon. I couldn’t tell and I didn’t ask. There was something that was pale, flakey and unbelievably rich. I was just looking at sushiencyclopedia.com – which seems like a pretty nice resource – but couldn’t find anything that quite matched. There was of course some medium fat tuna, and something that I think was yellowtail perhaps. I grabbed a couple rolls off the sushi plates my compatriots got, and was also impressed. The rice was terrific (would that I had gotten some!) and the veggie roll with ume and shiso was intense. Not quite my thing, but impressively flavored nevertheless. I also got the coldest, crispest Sapporo I’ve ever had. It was in a brown bottle with a golden label, which I don’t think I’ve had before. Totally awesome. One of those and all that lush food, and I was on top of the world, lookin’ down on creation.

After an awesome start to the food ethos of the West Coast, I was pumped for what lay ahead. The hotel uses the restaurant downstairs to fulfill their room service, Pazzo, and that was our next experience, with WILDLY mixed results.

Pazzo and Pazzoria

We got late night munchies from them. I got manicotti, and @meatbag picked up the capellini pomedoro (which was angel hair pasta with… stuff). The manicotti was pretty good. The sauce was lacking a little something, but the baked cheese on top totally made up for all that. (What can I say? I’m a sucker for cheese.) With that experience being pretty satisfactory, I was looking forward to breakfast. I was wrong to do so

The egg in the omelet I got had almost no character whatsoever. The spinach and fontina in it were fine enough, I suppose, but paired with the egg it was just underwhelming. The potatoes were salvaged from a dry hell by copious amounts of tabasco and ketchup. The bacon… oh the poor bacon. The nearest thing I can think to compare it to would be pork rinds made out of cardboard. The cappuchino was cold, so it pretty much didn’t matter what it tasted like. I spiked it with coffee from the thermos so I could at least drink it. The coffee itself was definitely potable.

This morning out of laziness, we opted to give them another shot. This time I got the french toast with sausage, and a fruit cup. It was like a whole different experience! The slices of bread were huge and screamed “we totally bake our own bread” which they totally do, in the bakery connected to the restaurant that’s connected to the hotel (and the green grass grew all around all around, ‘cept it didn’t because this is the city, duh). Pazzoria bakery helped make this particular breakfast a total success. The pain perdu had awesome flavor. I spread it with butter and drizzled it generously with the (I believe totally authentic) maple syrup, stealing a little cream cheese from @meatbag’s smoked salmon plate for one of the smaller pieces. It was all music to my mouth and filling without being super heavy, like rich breakfast food like that can sometimes be. The fruit cup was impressive. It was actually a small bowl of nicely arranged, fresh, and really flavorful fruits. The apple was the best I’ve had in a long while and left me wanting so much more. The pineapple was delicious, as were the blueberries. I’m not a huge cantaloupe fan but this was firm and sweet, and before I let it get warm it was quite good. The only negative here was the slightly mushed blackberries. They still had good flavor, but once they start getting smushy the texture aspect just isn’t very enjoyable.

Let’s take a quick trip back in time though shall we? Yesterday’s lunch was equally as squee-tastic, and came courtesy of a jaunt out to a place called Bon Apetite, across the street from a large Greek restaurant with a crazy purple octopus out front.

What you see in the upper left corner is not a monster, but my finger. It was raining and I was attempting to shield the camera lens on the back of my phone.

Bon Appetite!

So as noted above, the Greek restaurant with the giant octopus out front sounded great at first because it’s Greek food, and it’s close, AND they have a giant octopus out front. I checked it out on yelp and was disappointed to find that most reviews were very negative. Slow service, incorrect orders, etc. I sniffed around some more to see what else was in the area to satisfy my urge for something Mediterranean. Just across the street from that same cephalopod-bearing restaurant was a place called Bon Appetite, labeled as Greek/Mediterranean food. Perfect! We trucked down there in an inexplicable rain shower, a light but steady drizzle from what looked like a clear sky.

It took a second to find the place. It’s part of a strip of stores that aren’t terribly distinctive. That puzzle solved, we headed in and firmly glued our eyes to the menu. Shwarma, falafel, gyros abound on their list. The shwarma was tempting, but since Quick to Go in Somersworth (NH, that is) has already won the right to that fiefdom of my heart, I went with the falafel. I’ve made my own sweet potato falafel, but never had proper falafel until yesterday. Holy crap I had no idea what I was missing. It had a enough of that fried food flavor to satisfy even the most vicious urge for grease, but not so much that it was dripping with oil. The flavor itself was rich with parsley and that slightly nutty flavor that only comes from chickpeas. The sauce was so fantastic I actually avoided picking the tomatoes out of my wrap, which is kind of a big deal since I don’t do raw tomato as a rule.

Or as I conveyed my feelings on the matter via Twitter:

that was so good it was almost sexually gratifying A+++++++ would nom again

We grabbed an appetizer box to go for @malpertuis, who’d stayed in to chill. It slid around a bit since the takeout box decided to turn sideways in the bag, but that didn’t stop it from being fantastic, it just stopped it from looking pretty. The hummus, baba ganoush, etc were all amazing, and clearly homemade with that kind of balance between richness and salt that can’t come from the store.

After the fantastical radness of Bon Appetite, we decided it was high time to procure some booze. Not being bar-going folk, @meatbag and I both decided we’d hunt down the liquor store and see what was different and thrilling on offer. We first popped in to a convenience store to pick up a six pack of local beer, which was pretty good, though nothing incredibly distinctive.

I didn’t know you could buy scope at the liquor store…

What WAS noteworty was the absinthe we picked up at the liquor store on our way back to the hotel. First off, a word about this liquor store. It was dimly lit, maybe because it was so close to closing time. The selection was pretty admirable, though hard to read since it was all behind the counter. A type of theft prevention, I’m sure, but kind of annoying as I like to be able to read the bottles and price labels up close and personal. The guys working were playing Wilco (Being There, so mad cred for that too) at an admirable level.

In the interest of perhaps setting ourselves up with the means to make Doctor Funk/Crunk/Funkenstein (pro tip: they’re each slightly different drinks), we eyed the absinthes on offer. They had Lucid, which has become our standby at this point, and three others we weren’t familiar with. One was about the same price as the Lucid (around 60), and one was $80 in a lovely bottle. The one we ended up getting, however, was about $45 dollars. We learned the hard way that you do NOT cheap out on absinthe. Ever. Seriously.

It came in a cardboard tube, positioning itself like some “fancy” booze. In retrospect I theorize this was not so much a package design decision as a “let’s hide how fake this shit looks” move. This was definitely an instance where the inability to get up close and personal on the packaging (largely due to lack of time, I’m sure they would have let us check it out) really hurt our purchase decision ability.

Here’s how the live twitter report went:

• http://ping.fm/p/ijjMm – new kind of absinthe it is VERY green not sure how I feel about that, but the proof is in the louching afterall :)
• http://ping.fm/p/7drCc - no your eyes do not decieve you, that IS mouthwash colored absithe, friends. taste verdict to come
• it smells like a high alcohol herbal perfume so far, not as rich on the nose as i’d like…
• correction to aroma report: out of the bottle it smells like wintergreen and non-descript men’s cologne
• and what did we learn here, kids? we learned that you don’t get the cheap goddamn absinthe. it TASTES like wintergreen cologne too. :/ Editor’s Note: FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

It was just plain awful. It’s got at least 3 dyes in it, thus the fucked up neon aqua color. It really does taste like what would happen if you dumped some cologne into scope. A child’s experiment in mixology. “Here daddy I made you this!” Hell, I almost gargled with it this morning since I really just want it to be good for SOMETHING. It was a tragic waste of 40$, for sure.

Avoid, at all costs, Le Tourment Vert absinthe. I really can’t stress this enough. Other reviews back me up, too. Someone generously suggests that it might appeal to people who enjoy Rumplemintz. That may be true, I’ve never had Rumplemintz so the comparison is lost on me. However, I’d not suggest giving this away to a desperate alcoholic who is on the verge of switching to sterno, I found it so repugnant.

Luckily, we’d also picked up a 10 year Macallan scotch, so that and the Blue Heron beer comforted me.

So what now?

Tomorrow marks the first day of the film festival, and the arrival of @cheshster and @oddessy, as well as the exciting prospect of meeting @theweeklygeek-ers. :) I look forward to all of it.

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