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11401 Carson St, Unit A
Lakewood, CA 90715

When you have to name a restaurant, you come across a great challenge — how to make it as distinctive as the food you serve. Many companies struggles with finding the right name for anything they serves. Grey Goose was the result of careful thinking on how to find the right name for an ultra-premium vodka.

Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, the name of this restaurant belittles the type of food they serve. Nested in a corner of a small plaza opposing the ever-presence of Walmart, this restaurant quietly sit there competing with a large number of restaurants in a nearby larger plazas. Sparsely attended tonight may present a mood of a restaurant that is simply not good. Heck, even its crude website does not present any impressive image.

Please, ignore all of those negative signs. Because whomever the chef was behind that kitchen stand, the food was good. Not just good, but absolutely incredible. Perhaps it was the art of lowering a person’s expectation to the point where a solid meal would bring bliss to your heart. Whatever the reasoning may be, this is definitely a place I will go back to, repeatingly.

We started out with the Summer Rolls — a traditional appetizer dish from South-East Asia. Also known as Spring Rolls, Fresh Rolls, and the like, this minty shrimp roll is an absolute delightful simple dish anywhere. This restaurant served it in a beautiful layout surrounded by a sea of slightly sweet and wickedly spicy sauce that brings a new dimension to this excellent dish. Not only that, it was clearly obvious that this roll was made to order, unlike most places that would have it made in advanced — the shrimp was freshly cooked, and carefully wrapped among mint, sprouts, and noodles for a complete mixture of sweet, spicy, crunchy, fresh delight.

Let me emphasize the little fact in the previous paragraph — freshly made. Everything was so clearly freshly made that it is absolutely a delight to eat there. The wonton soup I had were clearly a prepared broth, with fresh ingredients added just before serving. The chicken tasted like a freshly steamed chicken, not a soggy mess as soups would tend to make them. Wontons were all just steamed, along with cabbage, and other additions to make this a delightful fare.

The main courses we had, the least favorite was the Pad Thai, but only due to having a strong personal preference for the style served in a small hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant at University of Pittsburgh in Oakland, PA. The second dish, Pad Kee Mao is chicken on top of noodles, mixed with delightful ingredients, and spiced just enough to give a kick. It is definitely an excellent addition to the Thai palette that I would know.

The star of the show would be the special, Kao Mun Kai. Think of freshly cooked chicken, steamed just right. Slice it up and lay it on a bed of steamed rice. Only the rice was steamed with chicken broth, not regular water. Garnish the dish with sliced cucumbers, and serve it with a ginger sauce with a devilish punch of spice. It is a traditional dish served in Thailand, and does not sound like much to our varied palettes. But with the right chef, as it is clear here in this story, everything was prepared just right, and the meal was just perfect.

Everything was portioned just right, instead of oversized as most Asian restaurants are victims of. Everything was prepared to order, and gave the right tinge of freshness. I was tempted to have more, but with this and the Thai Iced Tea, I had enough for the night. As for Thai Iced Tea - think of hot tea just iced, with just enough sweet cream doused on top. Overdo the cream, and the drink is too sweet. Underdo it, and the strong tea fight through to your brain. Just right, and it’s liquid dessert.

As noted above, I will go back. I do hope the readers here will someday join me there.

*turn* Hmm, cold. *turn* Still cold. *turn* Yup, too cold. *turn* HOLY FRACKIN’ BRIAN! It’s too hot!

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The room service patron still standing there expecting a tip, despite the automatic 18% gift they already added.

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The little things the cleaning person would overlook. Most of the time, it’s silly, such as not folding the toilet paper, and forgetting to resupply the shampoo bottle. Other times, it’s downright obscene such as forgetting the towels, and in some cases, not even cleaning the room!

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Don’t you have the feeling hotels want to just kill you as soon as possible? Look at the food they provide. Fried foods, heart-clogging snacks, and salads overdosed with cheese and heavy dressings. Healthy breakfast? Heck no, bring on the hearty continental meal! No V8. Few diet drinks. Want that water bottle in your room? Pay 4x the price of a Coke, sir. Sure does drive me to drink, but no! The minibar is removed. Of course, that water was imported. Imported, my butt. It have been imported from the great bang billions of years ago — are you paying God for the license fee?

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$10 Internet fees. But wait! They are more than happy to throw in free long distance phone calls in that bill! How so nice of them. But those hotels that got free net? Free dialup-speed net, more likely.

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When you decide to get up early in the morning to burn off that cholestrol you ate last night at the hotel bar, you will realize that there’s 300 others with the same brilliant idea as you do, and 2 stairmasters, 1 treadmill, and a heavy ball to occupy everyone for the next 30 minutes.

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The add-on features on their TV. And the absence of honest-to-god good channels, such as Discovery Channel. Who do you know still use that internet-on-TV feature? When is the last time you paid $24.95 and allowed it to show up on your hotel bill for some honest-to-goodness hearty shows?

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Loud sex next door. When you are between girlfriends. Nuff said.

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When those hotels will ever figure out that giving you 30 pillows, and only 2 of them are actually meant for sleeping… that’s going a wee bit too far.

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When someone call in for a wake-up call, and gave your room number instead of their… maybe they should at least check on the names of the occupants in the room or something. Thanks to myself being deaf, I’ve had my room barged in by hotel folks in panic because they couldn’t wake me up and thought I may be dead or something.

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Speaking of waking up, hotels that does not provide outlets easily accessible to the bedside for alarm clocks that you prefers instead of their $5 tiny radio thing. (Yes, I know Hilton have the iPod clock. They also have the TV with $14.95 N64 games and no closed captioning. So shut up.)

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I’ve had some hotels with bed bug problems. Never ever liked those. I always told the folks right away when I notice.

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Vegas-related: I know you want me to see the casino, but why do you have to make it a huge journey for me to find the elevator to my room?

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Disneyland-related: Having a Mickey Mouse theme is one thing. Having Mickey Mouse hands reaching out from the wall to hold up bowls and lights… is a wee bit too creepy.

As found on ArsTechnica, this quote is brilliant:

As a father of (currently) three, raising children is like the pleasure of slow cooking ribs in a cast iron smoker using real hard woods you’ve harvested off your own property.

It is amazingly time consuming, but the end result is awesome.

Before the awesomeness is in full force, you have to do a lot of prep work. Doing the prep work wrong can really ruin the final outcome.

There is no magic temperature control knob. You’ve got to work hard and plan to keep the flames at the right temperature, but some times it will be a little hot, and other times it will be a little cold, but thing even out over the long haul.

The more you put into it, the more you get out of it. I don’t really NEED to know what limb of what tree was cut and split and used to stoke the fire, but because I do, the meal is almost spiritual. You don’t need to pass your family heritage on to a new generation, but it is an honor to be able to do so.

Almost all shortcuts reduce quality. Propane and lava rock might seem nice at the store, but they don’t create competition winning BBQ. Ignoring your kids might give you more time to work , but it doesn’t build awesome families.

There is a lot of environmental fluctuation, and you’ll never have the exact same outcome twice. However, the fluctuations are often the flavor that makes them amazing.

The outcome is one of those awesome things that you can never get without a sacrifice of time and commitment. Just like the best restaurant ribs pale in comparison with ribs that spent 8+ hours in a cast iron smoker with layers of homemade BBQ sauce, the most fun you’ve ever had with someone else’s children pales in comparison to the golden moments you share with your own children.

Someone else saw fit to add this:

People who don’t eat meat are always going to bitch about how superior they are for it. You just smile and enjoy your ribs.

It’s hard to imagine that it has been fifteen years since I have seen the vast majority of my high school classmates.  It is a shame that I only know how to contact two of them.  Fortunately, they are the two most important ones — the one forming a high school reunion, after our class president apparently skipped his duty at the 10th reunion.

I am really looking forward to the Patrick Henry High School reunion this November 24th.  I do need to book my flight, and find a hotel nearby.