Snacks at Thanh Tam Bakery, Garden Grove

Not too far from Bonchon was a bakery I saw that popped up on google maps.

Thanh Tam is a Vietnamese bakery and usually those establishments have pate chaud....

Pre-Birthday Highlights

I know it's been a while since I blogged but we were in the midst of a remodel.

Through the magic of backdating (this is really 5/16 folks...), I will be posting highlights from my milestone birthday last month...

(passing by the deactivated San Onofre nuclear power plant, but I just call it the "tits")

in which Bert, myself and TC took a Friday off to spend a 3-day weekend in the OC and LA...

Au Coeur de Paris, the new location

Just a few minutes away from the Mall of Fortune was the newest location of a Vietnamese French Bakery...

I didn't even know they had a new location so of course, we just had to stop by before making the drive back to good ole San Diego...

The Snowflake Factory

Curious we were about this place...

Seems like more and more of these shaved snow/snowflake/snow ice places are opening up all over the place...

85C Bakery @ The Mall of Fortune

This will be a short and sweet post...

Luckily for me and Cathy, there was a relatively new 85C in the Mall of Fortune. Located on the front part of the mall, you can also walk to it from Brodard's on the other side...

Return to Brodard's and a Mac attack!

Fresh from our quick foray into blueberry donutland, we headed back down to Little Saigon, taking the surface streets. We drove through Anaheim, Santa Ana, and a few other cities and ended up in Garden Grove.

Our next destination was right across from one of the many locations of Lee's Sandwiches, a Vietnamese chain which popularized the Banh Mi sandwich to Americans. The original location is on Bolsa Blvd, across from the Asian Garden Mall (thanks Wandering Chopsticks!).

There it is...the 99 Cent Store in a non descript strip mall, called "The Mall of Fortune".

Ignore your GPS directions and  go around the BACK...

Vien Dong

While at Bon Epi Patisserie, I was furiously thinking of where we were going to go next for the Epic Birthday Food Crawl. As I punched in the address of my desired location in my GPS, I saw that it was only ten minutes away. Since we were in the area, I thought, "Why the fk not!"

So off we went to Little Saigon...to have the mini feast that you see above...

Brodard's - Garden Grove

Okay, now where were we?

Oh yes, the continuation of our little food trip (me and D)...

After H-Mart, we continued up north to the city of Westminster where Little Saigon is located.

We were on a mission...

Brodard Chateau

Going back to earlier this month...

Before returning to San Diego, we had lunch with Bert's bro/SIL at  Brodard Chateau, a Vietnamese restaurant in Garden Grove. It is the more "upscale" sister restaurant of Brodard's, also in Little Saigon.

I'd been wanting to go here since reading about it on Wandering Chopsticks' blog (post linked at the end). Plus, my SIL is a new convert to Vietnamese food and was also curious to try this place...

Warung Pojok

Last week, Bert and I  had a rare weekend together without TC, who was spending time with her cousins in the OC.  Our goal was to try a different cuisine each and every time we ate during out mini road trip. Last Friday night was a 'no meat' night (Lent). Not familiar with the area, I emailed Elmomonster from the blog Monster Munching for his seafood rec's a few days before. He was kind enough to reply and gave a few good ones but we ended up going here, Warung Pojok:

Check out these past posts on Warung Pojok here and article in the OC Weekly and Yelp reviews. It's in a strip mall in Garden Grove. The name "Warung" in Indonesian means "casual eatery"; "pojok" means "corner". Basically this was a "hole in the wall" but what a great hole in the wall it was!

When we got in there, the place was nearly packed. We were lucky to even get a table. There was a table of customers talking over our heads about their lives (travels to Indonesia, what they did in the service, etc). There were little kids running around. There was a lot of shouting going on. But it was cool.  We loved it. I'd rather have this than a deathly quiet place that will put me to sleep. Their online menu (quite helpful) can be found here; it changes daily!

More of their menu board:

Daily specials:

This photo was taken during a lull. It was actually crowded most of the time during our dinner there.

There was still food left in their steam trays...

Too bad we couldn't eat meat that night...Their beef rendang look really good!

Bert held down our table while I looked over the items and chatted with the lady behind the counter. She was happy to let me know which dishes were vegetarian and/or meatless. This was the two item combo ($5.50) with fried rice with egg. The two items were Ikan Asin (fried salted fish) in the front with Gule Ikan (catfish in curry sauce) in the back. This was for me, but Bert and I shared of course.

Plate 2 was Bert's. At 3 o'clock was the  some sort of Tofu dish with peppers and shrimp. The other item was Tempeh Goreng Cabe Ijo - which is stir fried tempeh in jalapeno chili.  I didn't particularly care for the tofu, but the tempeh wasn't too bad. The sauce, while spicy, had a sweet heat to it.

Close up 1 of the strir fried tempeh:

Close up of  the tofu with peppers and shrimp.

Close up of the catfish - gotta warn you, there are bones in here!!!! But it tasted pretty good and not muddy at all! You know how catfish can taste sometimes....

Close up of the salted dried fish. The woman couldn't name the type of fish this was. All I know was, there were a lot of bones and it was very dry, kind of like a fish jerky. And yes, it was very salty as hell!

I liked how the tables had colorful batik prints on them (underneath the plastic covering):

Oh yeah...fish bones!

They also sold chips in plastic ziplocks. This was the same kind I got at Indo Kitchen in Alhambra. I later found out that this was called "Emping" and made out of melinjo nuts. The man in Indo Kitchen last month didn't know the name of this in English. The woman here warned me that it was bitter, but I told her that I liked bitter!!!

This was the other type of chip we bought. By the way, each bag of chips was$1.00. This was your basic shrimp chip...Kind of like biting and munching on air. I liked the other one better - it was more thin and brittle and had that bitter taste that I love.

We ate the chips with this trio of sauces. From the top was the Indonesian version of bagoong (it was a fermented shrimp paste sauce), down at 5 o'clock was a bland tomato based sauce and at 7 o'clock was our favorite, Sambel Bajak (a sweet and spicy sauce). That last sauce was delicious. I could eat that with anything!

And even though we were planning to have dessert at this place in Irvine, we wanted to try an Indonesian dessert. THis was the Es Kacang Ijo - a mung bean drink on ice with coconut milk and palm sugar. It was kind of wierd for me to eat mung beans in a dessert since I normally think of monggo beans cooked with spinach, shrimp and pork. These mung beans were soft and sweetened by the palm sugar and the creamy coconut milk. The ice was a very nice touch and I can see why people like a lot of shaved ice desserts in the tropics.

Towards the end of our dinner, the woman who helped me earlier was sitting down at a table with some friends. Seems like everyone knew each other here. She asked us how we liked our food. She and I had a nice chat about how similarities with Indonesian and Filipino words. She mentioned that the ice desserts were like 'halo halo'.  I noted that one of their menu items had the word 'bihon' on it (it was a noodle dish), like our 'pancit bihon'.

Another woman said, "Sorry we Indonesians are so loud!" but we felt it was an unnecessary apology because we didn't think it was loud at all. I told her that Filipinos were the same way! Everyone there was pretty nice and friendly. I think we were one of the few non Indonesians there that night.

It was a pretty filling meal with a good price! You can't beat $5.50 for a two item combo. I don't think we could have polished off a three item combo! On to dessert!