Since there is an impressive following in Yelp, I promise to not post reviews on my blog as much, but rather limit those postings to time where a restaurant really impresses me.  This is one of those times. 

I happened upon a restaurant named Mana Restaurant in San Mateo, CA, just south of San Francisco.  It’s located on 25th street, just off of the main El Camino road, where you’ll find several other ethnic cuisines.

Giving You Some Context The thing that really intrigued me enough to walk into this eatery was that the sign said it was a “traditional Filipino restaurant.”  If you don’t already know, my family is from the island of Guam.  This makes me partially a pacific islander.  In fact, if you look at one of our family photos below, I think you’ll get the “picture.”



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I didn’t intend on writing a food review this soon after arriving at San Francisco, but I happened upon a little place that really impressed me.  (This is also why I don’t have more than one picture.)  I chose to eat Chinese tonight to make sure I got my money’s worth for dinner, and stumbled upon the Oceanic Restaurant, specializing in Hunan & Mandarin cuisine (which is a very specific cuisine).  From the outside, it looked like a typical Chinese restaurant, so I didn’t expect too much.  However, the front door was a choice of three different doors.  Luckily, I chose correctly the first time – the left door.

Oceanic Restaurant 2507 South El Camino Real San Mateo, CA 94403 (650) 570-4234

Upon entering, you are definitely greeted with the standard Chinese atmosphere, though it wasn’t clear where to do or what to do when I walked through the door. ...

I usually like to boast that I don’t fall for the standard forms of advertising, like commercials, radio ads, magazine ads, website banners, etc.  In fact, most times I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about an ad that was just shown or played.  However, I couldn’t help but listen intently every time a Beef O’Brady’s ad played on the radio recently on my ride home from work.  The first time, I only caught the end of it when it said a phrase that I always welcome, “the hottest pepper in the world.”  Luckily, the good folks at the radio station saw fit to play the same ad again during the next commercial break, where I would hear the rest of what they had to say.

As it turns out, I heard the phrase right the first time around.  Apparently, Beef O’Brady’s had just reformulated their “Nuclear” flavor of their wing sauce using a pepper called the Ghost pepper.  I am a huge fan of the Habanero...

About a year and a half ago (maybe more), I noticed this little restaurant pop up near the Florida Mall.  It’s name was Viet Thai Cafe.  I was immediate intrigued since it seemed to combine two of my favorite foods.  I don’t eat either as much as I want to, so this was a treat.  It was conveniently located near my office, so I could drop by for lunches.  I indeed stopped by about a week later, and I brought some people with me.  Unfortunately, this place fell off of my radar, until recently…

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I mentioned and posted a picture to twitter of what I made for breakfast this morning.  Following that, someone asked for the recipe.  So, I decided to go ahead and put the recipe here on by blog for all to benefit from.

The Tuna Before you can make the melt, you have to first have some tuna on-hand.  While any variation of tuna salad will do, I find that tuna melts usually are better with a plainer variation.  Here...

Near my work, I used to go to a Tijuana Flats. However, they recently closed that location.  I haven’t been back since, because they do not have another location that’s convenient to me.  There was good news though… In place of the now closed restaurant was another Mexican restaurant – though this one being more of an authentic restaurant.

Tajuitos Jalisco is the new restaurant in the area.  I thought it was completely new, until I realized that this was just the newest in a small chain of local Mexican restaurants.  This location is located on Orange Blossom Trail, a few blocks north of Sand Lake Road, in South Orlando.  From the outside, it often looks closed if it’s not busy.  Especially since the employees began parking in the rear of the building – but it’s open.

The owners do a great job trying to establish an ambience.  The servers are all wearing stereotypical...

Today, part of the family and I had to go to Tampa, Florida for an appointment.  Of course, when the appointment was over, it was after lunchtime.  We proceeded to look for a place to eat near us.  We ended up finding what looked like another small business sub shop from the outside.  I soon found out I was wrong, but it was still a great visit!

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I have been to quite a few Japanese steakhouses in my day.  I really enjoy the atmosphere and the entertaining nature that they tend to provide.  The cuisine is not so bad either.  Today, I went to the Yabi Japanese Steakhouse in Winter Garden, Florida for the first time.  It is new place that we happened upon this evening in looking for a good place for a pre-Father’s Day dinner.  I gave the family one piece of criteria in choosing...

Any serious tea drinker knows that the teas they drink are only one part of the lifestyle.  That’s right. Coffee is a drink, and tea is a lifestyle.  Few things have changed my life in a similar way.  Anyhow, tea is one part of the equation, but the sweeteners and the tea pot are the remaining portions of the equation.  Because of my busy lifestyle, I mostly opt for a tea maker over a tea pot.  For the longest time, I thought that I had the coolest tea maker, but I was wrong.

How could I be wrong though?  My tea maker worked much like a coffee maker, only it was clearly designed for tea drinkers.  It wasn’t a coffee pot by any means.  In fact, using it for coffee would present a few challenges.  It had an automatic timer, a variable heating element that worked off of the timer and everything.  Any true tea drinker knows how valuable those features are.

Some...

Last month, the family and I went to the Annual Pig on the Pond event.  It is basically a carnivore festival where the kids ride the rides, and the adults “pig” out on outstanding Bar-B-Que.  Yummy!  While the fireworks were a dud this year (pun intended), we still managed to get some great pictures, and even some where I was playing with my low light settings.











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Growing up, I didn’t really have a preference for pizza.  I had not idea how good pizza could possibly be.  It was not until a family vacation to Philadelphia and New Jersey in 2002 that I found out how different GOOD pizza was from what I had been eating. 

I am a fan of New York style pizza, but that’s mostly because I have never had good Chicago style.  Anyhow, a GOOD New York style pizza has a somewhat thin crust, the best and freshest ingredients, and oregano on the sauce.  When it comes out of the oven, the pizza is as greasy as they come.  But the taste is so incredible!



When we returned from our vacation,...

For those of you that don’t know, I am German, American Indian, and Guamanian.  Did I confuse you with the last one?  If I did, that means that my Grandfather was shipped over here as a child during WWII from a little island in the middle of the Pacific, called Guam.  I used to more closely resemble my family in terms of my skin tone, but I rarely spend as much time in the sun as I used to.  Which was a lot of time…

My family takes pride in many things, not the least of them being cooking.  One of my favorite family recipes is for a food called Lumpia, which can very easily be described as a mini seafood egg roll.  They are absolutely delicious!  However, they take a long time to prepare.  For some reason, they are usually gone in a matter of minutes though.

I am not going to give you the entire recipe.  That’s partially because I do not give out family recipes, and also because for better or worse we learn to cook by sight, and...

If you have ever been in an area that has a lot of Mexican people in it, you already KNOW what I mean by "taco stand". Otherwise, you are really missing out (if you like Mexican cuisine). I had some troubles finding what I was looking for.