Cafe Athena - Pacific Beach

 

I’m on the fence with Café Athena because of the last visit I had there. I ordered the souvlaki plate with a side of lemon soup. The soup was ok, not really warm enough, but it’s a pretty good mix of lemon juice, egg, and chicken, enough to slip in and give you a little tickle. I have had better, though it was in Cyprus and Greece! 

I’m spoiled I guess, but I mean if you are going to make Greek food and charge Café Athena prices for it ($10-20 an entrée?), you better bring it on. These guys catered our wedding actually and I have to highly recommend them. My guests always bring up the food and always rave about how great it was. Maybe it was because they weren’t eating the usual chicken breast with salty gravy wedding food and were eating hummus. Their staff were excellent too, keeping everything moving well and clean behind the scenes. Being that it was my wedding I had a bite of food before I had to talk to the next Uncle Johnny, but their souvlaki skewers were excellent. 

Here, at the restaurant, their souvlaki skewers were so-so, to say the least. Actually they weren’t good at all. Though they were cooked well, my lunch skewers were too big, meaning that the flavor they were marinating in for whatever time didn’t have enough to soak into the meat. The meat was dry, big pieces of chicken, and actually the flavor of the outside was seared off and blackened.  Maybe it tasted like they had been sitting around for awhile and were reheated, I don't know, but they were way too expensive for that.

     

I wasn’t sure what kind of rice I ate with it either, it was kind of soft and mushy and really lacked any sort of flavor, even a hint. 

The dish was served with a side of bramini (the red sauce stuff in the first picture above), which was ok though really tasted like I was eating spaghetti sauce that I was cooking on the stove.  I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was eating spaghetti sauce on the side, tasted can quality too. Really, nothing about the dish was that Greek except for their tzakiki sauce which I actually liked, though it was also a little bland. 

My wife ate a gyros sandwich, which she enjoyed, though I suspect that ubiquitous gyros generic meat rather than a home-grown gyro’s rotisserie. I would like to see their kitchen actually, to see if they have a rotisserie, I bet they don’t. Most Greek restaurants don’t, or if they do they have that generic gyros tower that you buy from one wholesaler in Iowa or something. The one gyros meat thing you can get at Jake’s diner, the mall, Greek Fiesta Restaurant or pretty much everywhere, you know, mall gyro. 

I always say gyro like “Ji-Ro” just to make people upset or uncomfortable. Give me Ji-ro plate please, and they are like “ok, just keep calm, don’t correct him…” Though who knows how to pronounce it, I read on wikipedia that Ji-ro is the right way-ish? At the malls in New Jersey I've seen pronunciation keys next to it though: GYRO : “Yee-ro” 

Honestly who the f cares, just order it how you want, eat it and shut up, the American way.  

Listen Café Athena I’ll give you a second chance but at the moment you are skating on thin ice. I want small tasty chicken pieces with souvlaki-ness on them, not something I can make at home for 1/9 the price. Give me Greek rice, lemons on the side to put on everything, more than a thimble-ful of tzaziki, better bread than that thick weird pita-like bread, better service, better everything. 

And I want you to make your own Ji-roes. I don’t know when I’ll be back but when I do that’s what I want. 

Love, customer feedback 101, 

George Caye 

Café Athena: 

http://www.cafeathena.com/ 

1846 Garnet Ave.
San Diego, California
(858) 274-1140

Western Steakburger

gyros sandwich

Western Steakburger – A Good Charbroiled Fresh Burger in the heart of North Park

I remember one time in Nicosia, Cyprus, where I went to boarding school for a year in high school, sitting as a dumb teenager in the old part of the city at a restaurant’s table outside on a cobblestone street under a tree.  It was warm and the wine was flowing (there seems to be no drinking age in the country) and me and my classmates had dinner.  The waiter also turned out to be the owner and after we ate our pepper steaks he came and sat with us at our table and told us about his whole life and asked us about our short ones.  An old man appeared and started playing a guitar.  The owner shared some more wine with us and we smoked cigarettes and talked and stayed that way well into the night.

This type of thing never seems to happen in the States.  I’m not bashing but I can’t remember a time eating here where the owner was either seen at all or approached my table and talked to me at all or even where the waiters seemed that interested in talking to me at all about anything besides what I want to eat and do I want to know the lunch special.

 

plain burger

Not that I want someone hovering over my table yakking away about how good the food was or something either.  I don’t know.  It seems that most restaurant businesses just want you in and out, they take your money, shove some crap in front of you, then tell you it’s time to go and expect not only a lot of your hard earned ducats but also a tip and usually you feel like you have to thank them and tell them goodbye.

This is a very long introduction to Western Steakburger restaurant in North Park on University Avenue.  I know, a burger joint review, but what can I do.

 

gyro and fries in box

The owner not only welcomed me but also told me about the history of his restaurant, showed me an article he had posted, told me about the food that he was going to give me (even though it was a “to go” order) and the chef, wearing a chef hat, even showed me the raw fresh hamburger that they use.  They’ve been in business since the early 80s.

Wow.  This place is great.  They have gyros and burgers basically but they do it right and all of their ingredients are fresh (ask to see the burger), the owner, who happens to be Greek and so spurred the Cyprus memory, works behind the counter, helping on the grill and running his kitchen. 

 

bbq burger 1/2b

I got the BBQ burger ½ lb. and it is a big burger messy with sauce and onions and ketchup.  They also put relish on them but I asked for no relish.  Now this burger's meat is a bit on the unflavored side, which is a little sad but it does taste like a good flame grilled fresh burger and is certainly one of the better burgers in San Diego.

I need to try their signature creation, the aptly named Western Steakburger, with gyros on top!  They also have ribs.

Their fries are thick steak cut fries and soft (not hard crispy) and I found them to be very good, but it’s hard to mess up a fry, especially with the old standby to slather them up in:

 

I want to invent Racha Mayonaise but I have no idea how.  I’d buy it for those of you interested in food business.

I also had some of the Gyros sandwich which was heavy with gyro meat that was a little less spiced then the mall-based gyro sandwich but was still pretty good, better than Café Athena the last time I went there.

Western Steakburger is very casual, formica tables, maybe not formica, but plasticy type diner tables.  There is a huge cardboard cutout of John Wayne and I want to say there is a hand painted picture of Rocky but maybe I am just having a flashback to some weird dream or something.

 

There’s a TV precariously balanced on a hotel-wall stand thing that looks broken (the stand not the TV) and the channel is usually on ESPN.  There are also some nice fake plants and a newspaper rack.

I wish the burgers were of the caliber of Rockys or Nessy but alas they aren’t.  They are, however, a good standby when you’re in the area and I think they are actually better than Crazy Burger, which some people seem to swear by but I don’t know why, maybe because they have beer on tap and a funky staff?

Western Steakburger your ambiance and conversation wins and your food is good, fresh and tasty.  Thank you.  

Love,

george caye


sometimes the place looks closed on Mondays?

2730 University Ave
San Diego, CA 92104
(619) 296-7058

Arabic Supermarkets in/near San Diego

 

Arabic Supermarkets:

El Cajon International Foods
502 E Main St
El Cajon, CA 92020
(619) 444-5800

Review:  This market stocks the Arabic staples and has a great deli section which prepares everything from hummus, tabouli, tons of pickles and olives and everything else you can think of.  Their grill serves up platters of (or individual) kebabs (chicken and beef), shawarma (chicken or beef) and falafel (sandwich or individual).  Most importantly is their homemade bread, a manhole cover sized freshly made Iraqi piece of Arabic bread will set you back $1.

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North Park Produce
3551 El Cajon Blvd
(between 36th St & Wilson Ave)
San Diego, CA 92104
(619) 516-3336

Review:  Arabic based but has a ton of “International” foods and fresh produce.


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Arabic Market
4869 University Ave
San Diego, CA 92105
619-283-4493

Note:  This small supermarket has all of your Arabic canned goods needs (hummus, pickles, tahini, etc.).  They also stock Berbere spice (due to the local African clientele) and other spices by bulk.  They also have a halal butchery and make their own cheeses, hummus, garlic sauce, etc.  Sometimes they have a stock of freshly made Arabic food that they freeze for resale.  Also has an olive deli, cheeses, and music, books and CDs

Super Cocina - City Heights - San Diego

Whenever I eat out I always have this sneaking suspicion that the people who are making my food in the kitchen hate me.  Their job probably sucks, if they work at a chain restaurant I’m almost certain of this, if they are poorly treated Mexican immigrants making Indian food I’m also pretty sure of this, if they are the owner/chef who stops in to yell at everyone before going around the dining room sucking ass, well, I don’t trust that guy either.

Maybe I’m paranoid but I've worked in chain food before too and know the level of "true" love that doesn't exist between cook and customer (or even manager and staff, owner and manager, etc.).  Some kind of natural power hierarchy dependent on the system that sets up an undeniable structure that is difficult if not impossible to bridge or get out of even with the best of intentions. 

I've also seen true love exist in business to be sure, but it is really rare.  Hopefully the popularization of things like 'slow-food,' local business and better health will lead toward business owners actually caring about their products and customers first and not profit margins or other shifty money matters.  Local first is kind of a cool trend that would be difficult for any mega-corporation to co-opt due to the trend's built in limitations (though I'm sure they are trying as we speak) so I foresee better days if it continues.

 

The much touted but still often suspiciously uncrowded restaurant Super Cocina is a place where I can taste the love in the food, not the hate, who cares who eats it, the love of making the food is in the food.  A key ingredient.  If you can taste the hate in the food from some quick flash of a cook’s eye then there goes your dinner.

Super Cocina is a small restaurant tucked away on University Avenue just past a nude dance club and sharing the street with various shifty looking middle aged men with corn rows riding bikes, prostitutes with flabby thighs and Daisy Duke shorts, “slumming it” executives on lunch break and various children on big wheels and too young mothers haplessly following them through the cross-walk.

It’s a neighborhood where I live and where I have yet to experience any sort of deliberate violence on me but where the threat is sort of enhanced in some undeniable ways.

(super cocina para llevar)

Super Cocina is a place of comfort of almost religious proportions.  Their tables and chairs are very simple contraptions, it is very very clean, the smell as you walk in is that of hours and hours of stewing meats and dishes, a place where love has gone into the food, a place where a woman who looks tired but is eager to get you your lunch asks you in Spanish if she can help you.

You walk up to a glass enclosed buffet type deal full of silver pans of stewing meats of multivariate coloring.  Somehow the colors look incredible.  When I went for lunch today it was just the beginning of lunch and everything was hyper clean and the pans were full to the top.  There were no droppages of sauce splattered around carelessly, even the cut Mexican lime halves were new and clean.

There is a kind of a menu on a board above the countertop but really the key is just to go up to the counter and look at the stuff and point at something that looks good.  The workers here are more than happy to give you a sample of anything and they have little plastic cups behind the counter just for that reason.

It costs about $7.50 for a 2 dish plate that comes with rice and beans and tortillas.
I always get the same thing.  It’s just too good to pass up and whenever I get a twinge of hunger for some comfort food it’s just the thing to sate my soulful desire.

(combo plate - chicken mole and puerco enchilado)

I get the Pork Enchilado.  Super Cocina’s enchilado is a pork dish of pork pieces stewed for God knows how long (long enough and perfect enough and gently enough I swear) in a red chile sauce that is just hot enough to be more spicy than most things you will find in a Mexican restaurant in San Diego but not too spicy to where the spice overwhelms the complexity of the dish.

Enchilado seems to be some type of stew.

The pork (and all the meats I’ve had here) is made with the various bones and whatnot.  If you are a person accustomed to a pre-shaped nugget battered and deep fried with no bones you might get a bit nervous.  But you shouldn’t because the flavor is out of this world.  The pork is so slow stewed that every bite is infused with the oily spicy greatness that is their enchilado sauce.  Fat mingles with cartilage, weird crunchy things tap your tooth and you need to spit them out, the meat is so succulent that strange sensations start happening to the backs of your ears.

(enchilado close up)

Their chicken mole is another favorite of mine and actually I’ve never had a mole that I liked before besides the one at Super Cocina and I really love it here.  There is usually a weird industrial taste to mole that is somehow chocolately but yet still tastes like medicine or chemicals – something – I can’t place it.  And I’m usually not too fond of the sweetness of mole in general.

The mole at Super Cocina wraps its sweetness neatly and easily inside an envelope of spices and salty flavors to make for a very very imperceptible tinge of sweet underneath a more powerful (but not overly so) spiciness that is just too good to be true.

(out of focus mole - i was too excited to eat so my hand was shaking)

Talking about love, I could taste the love not only in these two stews but also in their beans and rice.  The beans were so perfectly cooked they gave just slightly, as if they were al dente, to the tooth, but were so incredibly soft inside that it was almost like eating soft potatoes or something.  The taste was mostly of the bean, the earth of the bean, the freshness of a real bean that is cooked from scratch, from the beginning to the end, with love.  A hint of pork?  Some slight salt?  Plus the earthiness of the bean = love bean.

(love beans)

The rice was perfectly moist and had a slight meaty flavor to it also, like it was cooked with chicken stock or some other meat based flavoring.

Super Cocina is not a place for vegetarians, although they do have veggie dishes like chile rellano.

The meal comes with some fine tortillas in a plastic baggie.  I truly don’t know how to eat with tortillas but since I grew up in the Middle East I just use them like pita bread in the Middle East, tearing off a chunk and dipping it in the sauce and then using my hand to tear some meat off the chicken or pork and then eating it.  I assume this is how you do it but I never really know.

I’m not sure if they take credit cards so bringing cash will help.

They have a free fixins area with limes and onions and cilantro and dried chilis.  No salsa bar or hot sauce (you don’t need it I promise).

They don’t serve alcohol, which is a bit too bad because their food goes so well with a nice Mexican lager, but they do have horchata usually and free or bottled water and sodas.

You don’t have to speak Spanish to go but they will usually love it if you try.  Their food changes almost every day but they usually have the mole and enchilado.

Thanks for the love Super Cocina, I really need it from time to time.  I’m sure most of us do.

-    George Caye


Super Cocina is near the University Avenue exit off the 805 freeway:

3627 University Ave.
San Diego, CA 92104
619-584-6244

8 am-8:30 pm daily

- Small off-street parking lot available