Pizzeria Locale (Taken with Instagram at Pizzeria Locale)
One of the latest new pizza places in Boulder, and the best one we have come across so far! They strive on being authentic. This was the last bit left of my Pizza Campagnola, which had black and green olives, capers, anchovies and garlic. The crust was not too bready or crispy—it was chewy yet not heavy. I highly, highly recommend it.
It’s incredibly hard to take good photos with a camera phone (even with an iPhone 4) in a restaurant at night. This was the best I could do, even with some tweaking in Aperture.
Bottom line: Five Spice is our new favorite Asian restaurant in Boulder. (This is very much in contrast to my last restaurant review.)
We’ve been hearing about Five Spice for a while, but due to its less-than-convenient location, we hadn’t checked it out. The food was great, the service was great, and, belying its shopping-center-and-next-to-Super-Cuts location, the ambience inside was nice.
We ordered mostly off the “secret” Chinese menu (which is also in English). We started off with some traditional American-Chinese fare—hot and sour soup and steamed dumplings. The dumplings were not hot, but the soup was great. For main entrées, I got mapo tofu, pictured here, and Susanne got basil eggplant. We ordered Xander a tropical fried rice, which was definitely one of the more interesting and flavorful fried rice dishes I’ve had.
We’re certainly going back—regularly! And they deliver! Five Spice is located on the north side of the shopping center that contains Safeway at the corner of 28th and Iris.
(Photo via my Flickr)
Elephant Hut Review
We had been hearing about Elephant Hut—the Thai restaurant on 30th Street—for a while. We were in the mood for Thai food tonight and decided to try Elephant Hut, instead of our Thai food go-to place, Khow Thai.
The punchline: We’re not going back.
The positives: Pad see ew was decent. Nothing impressive but on par with most Thai restaurants around Boulder. And chives pancakes were good. Tom yum soup was good as well.
The negatives: Fishcake appetizer, while flavorful, was a bit dry and too salty. Most importantly, the red curry dish was not what it should have been. As Susanne said, ”This is the worst red curry I’ve ever had!” She followed that up with “Do you want to try?”, an offer I declined promptly. She’s been a connoisseur of Thai food for nearly twenty years, so I trust her judgment. “This is the only good part about this dinner,” she mumbled while taking bites out of the orange garnish that was on our plates.
The service: It was okay. All our food—the two appetizers, the soup, and the two main dishes all came out together. I’m not sure whether the kitchen or the waiter was responsible for that.
Minor nitpicking: Silky/satiny napkins don’t work. They look fancy, but they are highly non-absorbent, which makes them terrible napkins. Symmetrical knives don’t work. When laid flat on the table, the dinner knife was perfectly symmetric (which is not the case for 99% of other dinner knives I’ve seen in my life). That is, the blade side and the backside looked and felt identical (other than of course the small serration on the blade side). But picking up the knife I could not tell and had to look for the blade side every single time.
LensHero—Find Your Next DSLR Lens
Photography is an expensive hobby. I can think of more expensive hobbies—e.g. piloting airplanes—but photography certainly costs more than reading or scrap-booking. While the advent of cheap digital photography has lowered the cost by obviating film development, SLR camera bodies and, more importantly, lenses still cost quite a bit. This implies that sustaining the equipment side of a photography hobby entails making trade-offs, especially about lenses—trade-offs about quality, strengths/weaknesses and price.
A new web site—LensHero—helps photographers do exactly that. The site is by the creators of one of my other favorite photography reference sites—SnapSort—which helps photographers of all levels compare digital cameras of all types.
The interface of LensHero is simple, attractive and intuitive. First, the site asks for your camera model and to specify a budget. Then, one gets to specify what type of lens one is interested in. Here is the main strength of LensHero. One can specify the type of lens in one of three ways—by photography style (e.g. macro, landscape, action, etc.), focal length (15-300mm) or letting LensHero know what lenses one already owns and having the site make recommendations.
The resulting page based on choices of photography style or focal length should be familiar to those who have used SnapSort. One can easily specify more criteria (e.g. brand, price, focal length, image stabilization, focus motor) to narrow the results. Each lens fitting the search criteria is displayed with easy-to-compare characteristics and a link to a page with more in-depth information about the lens. On the detailed information page, lens characteristics such as minimum and maximum focal length, aperture, and angle of view are rated as above or below average.
The “suggest” feature is interesting and helpful. I entered the two lenses I own: a Nikkor AF-S DX 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR II and a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D. The resulting suggestions were Nikkor AF-S DX Micro 85mm f/3.5G ED VR and Tokina 10-17mm f/3.5-4.5 AT-X 107 DX Nikon-f. The first suggestion was especially intriguing as I had been considering a macro lens.
Two small improvements I can think of. First, enabling users to narrow down the lenses by sensor-type—i.e. lenses for full-frame sensors vs. those for cropped sensors—would be helpful. In Nikon parlance, it’s the FX- vs. the DX-format lenses. Second, for the “suggest” feature, it would be better to let users to add in all the lenses they own first, rather than jumping to the suggested lens after entering each lens.
“Baja Fish Fry” — Not a great food photo shot, but it’s my favorite dish at Centro Latin Kitchen. (Trying to take a photo of the food in front of me when I’m hungry is not a good idea.) Fried rock cod with seared greens and hot corn salad. Poblano tartar, spicy vinegar and habanero dipping sauces. The fish is crispy, and the corn salad bursts with flavors. The habanero dipping sauce is my favorite. A great deal for $16. Shot for @dailyshoot #ds277 for a meal. (Photo via my Flickr)
“StrEatChefs.com” — My colleague and friend Jenny organized a field trip outing for lunch today to the StrEat Chefs location for the day. It’s a gourmet food truck, started by a team headed by the Season 5 winner of Top Chef, Hosea Rosenberg. The truck parks in different places in and around Boulder to serve lunch. The food was amazing. I got the grilled cheese, “loaded” with pork belly and apple jam ($6), and it was an excellent combination of flavors. I also got a taste of homemade golden tater tots with green chile and cheese ($4), and the sauce was flavorful, but two orders of the tots themselves were cold. My colleagues raved about the tomato and watermelon gazpacho with mint ($4) and the cherry limeade ($2). Chef Hosea was present himself and served food to customers out of one of the trailer windows. StrEatChefs is a great idea, well executed, and I can’t wait to go back in the future. Shot for @dailyshoot #ds275 for a sign. (Photo via my Flickr. More here, here and here.)
