Omai - December 16, 2010

A Vietnamese restaurant in Chelsea meant that the dinner was set on a course – Destination: Failure. No, no one else picked Omai but I: Sometimes, I cannot resist the urge to play a game of chance with myself – Me against The Reasonable Me. You should try it, too: More often than not, you are your own best opponent, a match in every way, or, the worst enemy for knowing your every move. This game can be quite entertaining and, occasionally, enlightening; and let us hope that such game is seldom frightening. In this case, the die was cast and stopped onto Omai.

Banh Mi Saigon - October 6, 2010

My most frequent dining companion has an inherent mistrust toward renovation; his theory is that the dirtier and dingier the place is, the better the food.  While this theory has so many holes, it seems to contain a grain of truth when it comes to restaurants in Chinatown; as a matter of fact, I should use "places" instead of "restaurants" as the word, "restaurant," would be, more often than not, an overstatement for many establishments. This little Vietnamese sandwich shop used to be exactly such a hole-in-the-wall, or more correctly, back-of-a-jewelry-store, place in Chinatown where I had passed by numerous times without a thought more than "They neglected to change the awning" because a store with a display window dangling with strands of real and fake beads could not possibly be named "Saigon Bread (often bakeries in Chinese are called "xxx Bread")" in Chinese or English (nothing lost in translation).