Here Fishy Fishy Fishy...

Little Fish

746 South 6th Street

Philadelphia, PA 19147

littlefishbyob.com 

I love walking around the city and looking for those little places that don’t get all the praise that some of the other restaurants do. They may not have a celebrity chef, but they have extremely skilled chefs that crank out some amazing food on a daily basis. I had eyed up a place like this for quite some time in the Bella Vista area called Little Fish. My girlfriend and I made plans on a Friday night to head over there during Lent. The place was extremely cool on the inside. It was very small, and the kitchen was right next to where people were eating, so you could watch the chef at work. The menu was written on a blackboard above our heads, and apparently it changes daily. I love restaurants like this because they keep everything so fresh in the eyes of the customers.

There were only a few options of things we could choose that didn’t have any meat in them. While most of the dishes were fish dishes, a lot of them had a meat component to them. We ordered up one dish that had a meat component to it, but asked them to remove it, that being the kampachi served with mangos, cashews, Thai basil and until our modification, foie gras. Kampachi is a fish very similar to yellowtail and kingfish. This Kampachi was sliced thin and served raw amidst a mango reduction, cashews and Thai basil. The taste and flavors were outstanding. The kampachi was a nice, clean fish that was meaty, but not overly oily or anything of that nature. Mixing it with the other ingredients made a whirlwind of flavor. It was delicious. 

For our entrees we ordered the cobia and the seabass. I had never had cobia before, but the elements of the dish intrigued me. The cobia was grilled and then served with sunchokes, uni, fennel, shishito peppers and in a dashi broth. The fish was cooked perfectly, and the grill marks added some nice flavor as well. All of the elements seemed to have the perfect place in the dish. The sunchokes added starchiness, the uni a creamy and earthy flavor, the peppers a touch of freshness, and the dashi broth brought it all together with its depth of flavor. I enjoyed it all, as evidence by my soon empty plate. 

I had the pleasure of tasting my girlfriend's seabass as well and was just as impressed by it. The skin was cooked to such a crispy state, that it cracked like a pane of glass when you touched it with your fork. The fish was extremely tasty, especially when mixed with the black garlic sauce and the Dungeness crab. Both entrees were outstanding, and we were extremely looking forward to dessert. 

I do have to mention that the kitchen was a bit slow. I know that tends to be the case when it is one or two people cooking in a small kitchen, but I just want you to be aware of it. The  wait time wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t fast by any means. We waited pretty long to get our dessert, but when we tasted it we knew exactly how worth the wait it was. We had ordered a brown butter cake with a mango sauce, banana ice cream and a brown sugar crumble. I know how good that sounds, but it doesn’t even do it justice. The taste of this dish was out of this world. The cake was small, but it was crazy flavorful. You could taste the brown butter throughout each bite. It wasn’t even that you could taste butter, but you could even taste that it had been browned first. The cake had an incredible texture to it. It wasn’t quite crunchy on the outside, but it did have some resistance like a crust. The banana ice cream was very banana forward, but it didn’t overpower the cake. Mixing in the bits of brown sugar crumble brought in another element of texture and sweetness to the dish. We almost ordered another one because it really was that good.

Three and a half pints for Little Fish. The food was exquisite, as was the ambiance. The only drawback for me was the price point. It was a little bit expensive. I think we wound up paying over a hundred dollars for two people, obviously with no alcohol since it was a BYOB. Other than the price it really was an amazing dining experience from start to finish. It will surely satisfy your desires for a wonderful meal, so check it out and let me know what you think! Cheers!

Aint No Mountain High Enough...

Fuji Mountain 

2030 Chestnut Street

Philadelphia, PA 19103

www.fujimt.com 

During the Lenten season last year, I had completely blanked when making dinner reservations. I didn’t even think to book some sushi restaurants, so this year I wanted to make sure we got a good mix of stuff in. For the second sushi place we tried, we went over to Fuji Mountain because I had read some good things about it. We walked in and were immediately seated and began perusing the menu. They definitely had some good choices, so we had to make some tough decisions. We decided on some vegetable spring rolls to start, and then the following rolls listed out below:

·         Spider roll - soft shell crab tempura, lettuce and spicy sauce

·         Mexico roll - shrimp, avocado, masago, and spicy sauce

·         Spicy trio - chopped sashimi with spicy sauce, crab stick

·         Spicy scallop - scallop, masago, scallion, and spicy sauce

·         Florida Roll - salmon, masago, spicy sauce and avocado

The spring rolls came out first, so we dug into them immediately. They were piping hot, but they were pretty traditional spring rolls. Some crunchy vegetables stuffed inside the fried wrapper and then dipped into the sweet chili dipping sauce. It was good, but nothing amazing. I am not a huge spring roll guy, so I guess that’s probably why I felt that way. 

The sushi came out all together, but the presentation wasn’t really very appealing. Actually everything about the restaurant was a little boring. The decoration certainly felt a little Japanese, but it was very bland. The same could be said about the look of the sushi plate when it came out, and unfortunately, the same could be said about the taste of the sushi. I really wasn’t crazy about any of them. I liked the crunchiness of the soft shell crab in the spider roll, but the other sushi rolls were pretty forgettable. The sauces were very lackluster, and the fish simply wasn’t of good enough quality to carry these sushi rolls to that umami zone. My girlfriend and I were pretty disappointed, especially because the price point was higher than the delicious sushi we had at Fat Salmon two weeks prior.

One and half pints for Fuji Mountain. They definitely offer up a wide variety of sushi options, but unfortunately for my taste, they just were very underwhelming. They have some decent sushi, and I am sure the rest of their food is pretty decent as well, but there are definitely better options for sushi out there in the city. Cheers!

Taco Taco Taco...

Tacos Al Carbon

107 Peach Street

Hammonton, NJ 08037

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tacos-Al-Carbon/408525352572284 

One day while in Hammonton, my buddy cancelled on me when we were supposed to try a new taco truck together. I didn’t want to try it without him, but it happened to be on the day that the Tacos y Tortas truck was closed, so I didn’t really have much of an option. So I headed over to Tacos Al Carbon to see if their tacos matched up to the tacos I had experienced the week before at Tacos y Tortas. The truck is quite a bit smaller than the other, and the menu is as well. Each day they have a new menu that they write on a white board in Spanish. Aside from tacos they also offer tortas, tostadas,  and a delicious item called chilaquiles. I opted for two tacos de chicharron and two tacos de carnitas, as well as a mango jarritos. Since it was February, you can imagine how cold it was outside. All of the seating is outside, so I sat down in the wind and waited for my tacos to be ready. They have a bottle opener attached to the truck for the Mexican sodas, so I popped mine open and took a sip. Holy deliciousness! The mango jarritos was the best one I had yet. It was sweet, but it wasn’t overpowering, and the carbonation really was spot on. If you have never had a jarritos before, you really should try them.

My tacos were ready soon thereafter, so I took them and sat down. I was a little disappointed by the lack of filling in them. There was of course double tortillas, which I love, but the filling was minimal. They skimped on the cilantro and onion, and didn’t offer up a lime wedge. It was a little disappointing. I dug into the chicharron tacos first, and I was again disappointed. They didn’t have the texture I was looking for. To me, chicharrones are crispy fried pieces of pork skin, and these were not crispy at all. I am not an expert, but that is what I have come to expect from chicharrones, so I was pretty disappointed by the lack of texture. The sauce they were dressed with was very nice, a combination of peppery and creamy. I definitely was looking for that textural difference, as well as more cilantro and lime juice. 

The carnitas were very tasty, but disappointing in terms of texture as well. I don’t know much about carnitas, but I know that I like mine to be a little bit crispy. These were definitely rendered down as if they had been cooked all day, but they didn’t have that little bit of crunch that I would have liked with them. As with the others, a little bit more of the cilantro, onion and lime juice would have gone a long way to kick these tacos up into another gear. The sauces that they have sitting on the truck are really phenomenal. They were very spicy, one an orange sauce in a bottle, and another green sauce in a molcajete. I doused one of each kind of taco in the sauces to give them a taste and they really heightened the flavor of the tacos. I finished up my tacos and my jarritos and I paid the man in the truck. It was also very reasonably priced. I think it was $8.50 for four tacos and a soda, so a pretty good deal as well. It just didn’t live up to the tacos at the other truck.

Tacos al Carbon deserves two and half pints. They offer up some really good Mexican fare, authentic, tasty and fun, and they really get after what they are going for.  It’s definitely worth a visit, especially if it is on a Monday when Tacos y Tortas isn’t open. I kid, it is definitely worth a shot, so try it and let me know! Cheers!

Completely Fooled...

Ralic's on South

119 South Street

Philadelphia, PA 19147

http://www.yelp.com/biz/ralics-on-south-philadelphia-2 

Unfortunately, a while back I fell victim to something that I know happens to people all over all of the time. I ignored my better judgement, and I visited a restaurant with my girlfriend based solely on the good things that I had read about it on Yelp. Now usually and even more so after this experience, I use Yelp as a tip guide to find good dishes that people like before I go, rather than use their whole reviews as a reference. While it can be helpful, there are certain aspects of a meal that can skew a whole person's review, but at least from my experience, even people that have bad reviews tend to mention great dishes that they had. It was a Friday during Lent, and I was excited about the prospect of finding a great seafood place so near to my girlfriend's apartment. We walked down to Ralic's on South that evening in hopes of finding a gem. 

From the moment we walked in, I knew we might be in trouble. There was maybe six other people eating in the restaurant, not always a tell tale sign, but it can be. We were seated and the waiter took our order for drinks, a margarita for me, yes I know, mistake number one, and strawberry margarita for her. When he brought out the drinks, he took our food order: lobster bread pudding, sesame seared tuna, and cod with green beans and roasted potatoes. After the waiter left, we cheersed with our drinks, took a sip, and both looked at each other with faces of disgust. The drinks were awful and when I say awful, I mean AWFUL. Watered down, not enough booze and no flavor, these drinks were not a good way to start off our meal.

We rarely saw our waiter all night. I don’t really know what he was doing, because there was no one else for him to be attending to, we were the only table he had. He showed up again when he brought the lobster bread pudding out. It had taken a good 25 minutes for him to bring that out, which I thought was just crazy. It wasn’t the prettiest plate, but we dug in nonetheless. It was almost as bad as our drinks. It was a big pile of mush, with no flavor, no seasoning, and completely lacked texture. There was only one piece of lobster in the whole dish, and a few kernels of corn dispersed throughout. I was ready to get up and leave at this point, but we stayed and waited to see if the entrees redeemed them at all.

The dish I picked had been raved about on Yelp, so I thought maybe it would be their saving grace. After an additional 30 minutes to get our entrees, which were a seared rare tuna steak and a piece of cod, our entrees arrived. Again, visually unappealing, and they did a really crappy job of slicing it. The tuna was torn on some pieces  and the pieces were all different sizes. I tasted it and really couldn’t believe how bad it was. First off, it didn’t even taste like tuna. Second, it was ice cold in the middle, as if it had been defrosted and then slapped in a pan to cook it. It wasn’t even hot on the outside. It was chewy as well, a complete and utter failure. The celeriac root puree was gummy and had no seasoning what so ever. The green beans were just like any other green beans out there, nothing special about them, but probably the best part of the dish. My girlfriend's cod was just as bad if not worse. It was undercooked, with juices running out of it, again as if it had been cooked without being fully thawed. There was no sear to the fish, and the texture was really gross. I think she had three bites or so before she said enough. We eventually got to see our waiter and asked for the check immediately, because it had been an awful night from start to finish.

No pints for Ralic's on South. The food was horrendous, the service was abominable and the attempts at making margaritas were laughable at best. I don’t even what to know what dessert would have held for us. I learned my lesson, and I will do my research better from here on out. I am usually so thorough, but this one got me, and I apologized to my girlfriend about it. She isn’t used to me picking bad places, but this one took the cake. Avoid it all costs! I should mention that Ralic's on South has since been rebranded into a restaurant called the Headhouse Crab and Oyster Company, and there is a new chef with tons of experience at the helm. The new reviews and reports seem to be much improved, so I look forward to trying the new concept sometime soon! Cheers!