Meanwhile, a couple of restaurant reviews

Because why not?

So two new spots have opened up in Costa Mesa recently have already garnered a lot of attention — and well deserved too, it turns out. Various photos and comments via Flickr and Twitter prompted a few demands for more information so here we go…

Right near where I live, Valhalla Table is a sausage/beer spot that is essentially a riff on places like the wonderful Wurstküche up in LA. As Edwin Goei’s OC Weekly review points out, the secret to the place lies with the owners and main chefs, two sisters from Indonesia who clearly know their market. I hadn’t read the review when I first visited a couple of weeks back but I knew that was the chefs’ background and so I figured that the dishes to try would be those reflecting that cuisine. Bulls-eye — as Edwin’s review, backed up by his own family knowledge of Indonesian cuisine, confirmed and this photo of my meal shows:

So what you’re seeing there is the wild boar Balinese sausage, with sambal balado topping — Wikipedia has a sambal entry if you’d like to learn more — and the resultant rich, fiery taste is a treat and a half. Meantime, the dipping sauce for the fries was their mango curry mayo blend, a perfectly sweet but not sugary counterbalance to both the fries and the sandwich. The beer selection is pretty good for a small spot — that was one of the porters I had there — while the owners, who first opened a bakery over in Irvine, also make their own desserts; their double chocolate cookies rival the Avanti Cafe’s killer chocolate truffle cookies, and that isn’t light praise on my part. I’ve since brought other folks over to the spot and they’ve all left raving about its excellence so I figured word of mouth is going to sell this spot pretty darned quickly, and the staff are all friendly and helpful folks. And hey, it’s one block over from where I live, I can’t beat that!

Meantime, a spot down near Triangle Square that hosted the Italian/Argentine spot Pasta Connection was recently transferred to a new owner/chef. Pasta Connection is still around — they moved up the road a bit — but its replacement, Il Dolce, is also an Italian/Argentine cuisine location, and it is already knocking things totally out of the park. Il Dolce has also benefited from an Edwin Goei writeup as well as one in the LA Times, and I’ve noticed threads and discussions on Chowhound and other spots around the net. As I had the day off on Thursday I figured going down for a lazy early afternoon lunch would be the way to go — and was that ever the right decision, the place is simply stellar.

For an initial appetizer I went for a beef empanada — always a good standby if you’re trying Argentinian cuisine — and gotta say that might be the best one I’ve ever had in a restaurant setting:

Looked great, the side sauce was excellent and the empanada itself just tasted wonderful, the classic combination of a flaky but firm crust and the blend of meat, eggs, spices and more inside. I would have had more but in combination with a good greens salad, I didn’t want to ruin my appetite for the main dish itself, one of their pizzas. I went for the pizza patata:

This wasn’t as good as it looks, folks — it was BETTER. Let me put it this way, even the rosemary was stellar, and the blend of that, the potatoes, the pancetta, the mozzarella, filling but not overstuffed…I was completely in heaven. Add in a Quilmes beer and I took my sweet time eating this one up, because I didn’t want to rush any of it. No room for dessert but next time out, that’s definitely part of the plan.

So yeah, check ‘em out.

Snow on the San Gabriels

And the air, as always when the winter rains come through, is scrubbed clean so the view can actually be seen, however distant. Winter does have its advantages around here…

Storm remnants over a forthcoming dawn

A bit of a sequel to yesterday’s photo, around the same time of day but looking a different direction twenty-four hours later. Supposed to be clear the rest of the week but we’ll see…

Sealions and a seagull just chilling away

And that’s how my afternoon went out on a whale watch run — no whales seen, alas, but some dolphins turned up, too quickly for my camera to catch. I did like how even as the waves were choppy these guys were just literally above it all (but the bird was above even more). A full set of photos here.

Into the final local votes — looking at judges and school districts

Okay…I don’t know about you but I’m tired.

WAY tired. I suspect we all are, and would like nothing better than to sleep. In lieu of that, though, there’s a batch of local races I’m looking at, and I admit I feel a bit down because of waiting for so long.

As they say, all politics is local, but it’s also true that I tend to look at the broader picture — international, national, state — rather than truly local. Costa Mesa is kind of a good city for that, for better or worse — affluent enough in enough spots to make you feel like everything’s going reasonably well. It’s easy to cocoon oneself away as a result, which isn’t always a good thing, however good the impulse might be. Similarly with larger county issues and positions as well, even though the problems are more overt and noticeable there just because of the size of the place.

So with that in mind, these final thoughts and decisions are driven by general judgments rather than in-depth reflections. (This will be the first of two or three collective posts.) Maybe next time I’ll work from the bottom of the ballot up!

First, there’s two main candidates for the Judge of the Superior Court here in OC, Office. 12 — Debra Carrillo, a deputy DA, and Kermit Marsh, a Westminster city council member. Unsurprisingly, what we’ve essentially got here is a battle between a generally libertarian candidate, Carrillo, versus an old-school GOP type in the form of Marsh. Over at the Orange Juice Blog, Art Pedroza comments on some of the bizarre infighting at work, noting that the Libertarian Party has endorsed Marsh, for no very good reason from the sound of it. In looking that over, I note that apparently Marsh supports Prop 8 while Carrillo, in line with the Libertarian Party, opposes it. If that’s the kind of thing to expect from both of them then no question of it on my end — CARRILLO gets my vote.

Meanwhile I also get to vote on three different positions for the Coast Community College District, which covers three local community colleges. For Trustee Area 2, the choice is between Jerry Patterson, whose brief statement in the voter guide I got struck me as a reasonable series of accomplishments to tout, and one Joseph Dovinh, who has his own list of activities but also says things like “We should all be very, very wary of influence from communist countries– especially as it pertains to the field of education.” Uh? I’m with this blog entry I found on that front, but I think I’ll vote PATTERSON here.

For Trustee Area 3, the choices are Armando R. Ruiz, Don “Coach Doc” Apodaca and Lorraine Prinsky. Ruiz, to put it mildly, is not exactly doing himself any favors lately (for more, read here, here and here), while Apodaca has decided to throw his support behind Prinsky. And Prinsky herself? Well, based on this back and forth (read through the comments as well), she’s pretty easily got my vote. PRINSKY.

That leaves Trustee Area 4, with Mary L. Hornbuckle, Charlotte Pirch and David L. Boyd in the mix. Frankly I can’t make heads or tails of this one — there’s some rumblings about Hornbuckle accidentally (?) being linked to Ruiz due to the mailer talked about in the Prinsky link just above, while Pirch supposedly got questioned over where she got her degree, and from what I can tell Boyd’s a bit of a cipher. I think I’ll err on the side of caution and go NO VOTE here.

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The Social Science Tower at night

I’m rarely on campus in the evenings any more but yesterday was the Indian Jewelry show and in between two of the opening acts I snapped this shot of the SST, which is the building next to the library where I work. I had the advantage of a stable surface to rest the camera on so no blurriness on this one, and I really liked the effect!

Another Costa Mesa sunrise…

…oh darn!

You know that ‘it never rains in Southern California’ line?

Don’t believe a word of it.

Ex-OC Sheriff Carona — the videotapes!

It’s been a while since I checked in on our most entertaining former county sheriff. And oh the roffles today:

Acting Sheriff Jack Anderson has turned over to federal prosecutors a computer containing video footage from former Sheriff Mike Carona’s office.

…

“The matter has been turned over to the U.S. attorney’s office where they are working in conjunction with the FBI to further investigate the matter,” Anderson said. “As it is under investigation, I cannot comment further.”

…

The video-only surveillance camera was installed in Carona’s office by the sheriff’s department in 2001 or 2002 for security reasons following Carona’s appointment as a senior advisor to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said Jeff Rawitz, Carona’s attorney. Some things had been taken from Carona’s office and officers with the department’s Dignitary Protection Unit were concerned about the national security documents within the office, he said.

“It was a security system consistent with what many companies use to monitor sensitive locations after hours,” Rawitz said. “Mike did not operate the system, have access to the system and has never seen any of the videos recorded by the system. It was purely for security purposes.”

Bad couple of days for that legal team, it has to be said. First the judge tells ‘em no venue change, now this. At least they have a Memorial Day weekend for them to relax and go, “Wait…what did we get ourselves into again?”

For a food post tonight, I turn to Gustavo Arellano

Gustavo, as those of us lucky to read him down here via the OC Weekly and various other locales have long happily known, is not merely one of the funniest and most passionate writers on both local Latino history and the Mexican-American experience in general — his wonderfully barbed column ¡Ask a Mexican! has been entertaining people and/or driving them up a wall for years. He’s also a great music critic and excellent food writer. So basically he has the life I want. Not that I’m jealous. (Okay, a little.)

Anyway, he posted a brief piece on the top 5 Mexican restaurants in O.C. over at the LA Times, and if he says it, it must be true. I’m not brooking any argument here. And having tried none of them yet, I’m long past overdue.