TGEL: 126 chili peppers, 5-6 days sodium... forget it, it's Oakland Chinatown

I wanted to celebrate the season by making vegetarian summer rolls, and decided to get all the ingredients from the centre of the the East Bay's Vietnamese community, which happens to be Oakland Chinatown. But first, I stopped at Cam Huong (920 Webster St) for a sandwich. Quite a lot of banh mi lovers prefer this place to the canonical Saigon Sandwiches. After one sandwich here, I'm inclined to agree with them, but need to go back to make sure. Lots of choices: I had the beef, the taste of which shone through the heavy seasoning. There's a crisp, sour mix of vegetables, and the peppers have some kick. To nitpick, the bread is only decent, and it's a little saucy, but otherwise it's near-perfect in its proportions. As good a light lunch as you can get for $2.50.

Then it was off to the markets. There are maybe a dozen Chinese/Vietnamese grocery stores there are on 8th and 9th Street; no idea how they all stay in business, but apparently some of them have been open for decades. I ended up purchasing from four of them:

Sam Yick (362 8th St): most gweilo friendly; pornographic calendar (dated 2007, impressively) in plain sight
Maui gold pineapple (screw authenticity): $1.99
Jicama: 59c/lb
Total: $2.99

Cholon Moi (378 8th St): pan-Asian range of sauces and packaged goods; girl at the counter answered my funnily accented fish sauce questions
Three Crabs fish sauce (Thai): $2.95
Green onions: 35c
Total: $3.34

Wah Hang (415 9th St): great selection of what-is-that? exotic vegetables; cheap meat counter I wasn't brave enough to try
Some greens I think were bitter melon leaves: 69c

Khanh Phong (429 9th St): the best of all worlds except service; sauces, produce, meat, even (goodness) fresh fish and prawns
Three Lobster fish sauce (from Phu Quoc, Vietnam, supposedly the place for fish sauce): $1.59
Spring roll wraps: 89c
Small rice papers: 59c
3 packets of those Kasugai roasted hot green peas Shankenstein likes (not for rolls): $1.29 ea
Total: $6.94

Before I returned home I decided to have a late afternoon meal at SPiCES! 3 (369 12st St), the latest outpost of the cloyingly typeset, small-but-growing chain. I counted: the "fish fillet with Explosive chili pepper" came with exactly 126 chili peppers. To put this in perspective, the last time I was in a chili-eating contest, it was stopped when the two remaining contestants hit 50, at which point organisers feared for their safety. (I had dropped out after five.) Was this dish Explosive? It certainly tasted so, but to make sure, I tried exactly one chili pepper. Yep. Up until then, I had enjoyed that the dish didn't just rely on spiciness: that you could also taste salt, pepper, even a little sesame. Afterwards, all I could taste was the chili, no matter how much of the horoscope-appropriate fruit drink (Aries: honeydew and coconut) I consumed. I left the other 125 chili peppers in the boat in which they were served.

After several hours of tastebud recovery, I started to make the rolls. Cutting the pineapple with my kitchenware was a challenge, but one at which I succeeded -- thanks, howtocutapineapple.com! I blind-tested the two fish sauces. The Three Crabs only had the fainted hint of fish -- it just tasted like salt (a tablespoon of either sauce contains half my sodium RDI; together with the Explosive chili fish, I'd guess I went through 5-6 days of salt today). The Three Lobsters had a lot more fish taste, but was overpowered by the presence of MSG. I slightly preferred the Three Crabs but was hardly satisfied. I ended up using a mix of three parts Three Crabs to one part Three Lobsters. Then I just ate the spring rolls undipped. Then I just ate the constituent ingredients. Then I just ate the green onions. They were quite good.

TGEL: China Village and Great Szechuan

Been on a Sichuan tip lately. China Village is the ranking restaurant in the category, and last week I blew twenty bucks on a late lunch there. Started with the home style chicken, which came in a thick, ridiculously spicy sauce. Barely made a dent in the "bacon-cut" (this is the local euphemism for "so fatty your arteries will hate you for the rest of your short life") pork with preserved mustard green hearts, but the dish was good from the lunch until today, when I threw the remainders into a lima bean stew.

Six of us had dinner at Great Szechuan yesterday: Dicko, F's friends Flobert (semi-chilliphobic), and Shankiwack (demi-semi-vegetarian). We cobbled together a hodgepodge of a menu, but it was mostly wonderful. We started with excellent sliced chicken in a homemade spicy sauce much thinner than China Village's, but almost as hot; and agreeably salty jellyfish salad in green onion sauce. We were served our sizzling rice soup without spoons; when Dicko asked for them, he was told they were being washed. The soup was eventually surprisingly good, with lots of shellfish in it, and perhaps some MSG.

The soft, gingery vegetarian ma po tofu was a highlight, maybe the best tofu I've had in this country. The spicy garlic eggplant was extremely hot but had no eggplant taste -- I'd like to try it again in season. The crisply battered salt and pepper prawns were pretty good, with more salt than pepper. We also had some nonconfrontational scallop thing that didn't leave much of an impression. Bill worked out at $13 each.

Different meals, so comparisons might be unfair, but the quality of the cooking was very similar, maybe with a slight edge to Great Szechuan. On the other hand, the service at China Village was excellent, while at Great Szechuan it was abominable even by Chinese restaurant standards, with the spoon shortage merely the funniest of our problems, and hardly the worst. I'll overlook a lot of bad service, and even the kind that actively wastes my time, like we experienced at Great Szechuan, isn't fatal: I still want to go back there to try an all-chilli meal. But I'll return to China Village first.

China Village
1335 Solano Avenue @ Pomona, Albany

Great Szechuan
3288 Pierce St, Pacific East Mall, Richmond

EDIT: Whoops, possible food poisoning alert from one of our table at GS. That tips the scales.

TGEL: Daimo

Sauteed pea greens
Three-egg spinach and mushrooms
BBQ duck
$16 p.p.

I had been whuppin' The Brazilians at NBA 2K7 for several hours, building sixty point leads via the simple strategy of having Magic Johnson on my team. By 10 p.m. G-Roc was getting sick of this, having nothing better to do than to see if he could get all his players fouled out. (It didn't work: once he was down to his last five players, the computer wouldn't kick anyone else out, despite Marcus Banks having ten fouls.) Clearly it was time for a food break, and Daimo is the best open-late (till 3 a.m. daily) carpark restaurant near the El Cerrito-Richmond border.

64KB is a vegetarian, always dangerous in a mostly Cantonese restaurant (plus he thought the soon-to-be-steamed fish looked sad), but we took the server's word that the three-egg spinach and the much-ballyhooed pea greens were meat-free. Strangely, the pea greens were unevenly heated, though this didn't detract much from their freshness. G-Roc was a little put off by the richness of the other, more oily dishes, but 64KB and I preferred the spinach and mushrooms, braised in a very thick sauce. The pidan and hamdan (xiandan) retained an egg taste through their preservation. The duck was also just how I like it, with crispy skin enclosing mounds of fat -- I don't eat them, but I think they help infuse the BBQ sauce.

So now I'm annoyed that it took me four years in the East Bay to get to this place: it's exactly my idea of comfort food, just like the neighbourhood Cantonese dives my parents, uncles and aunts would take me to before their endless mahjong sessions (the New Asia in Otahuhu!). It might just be because I rarely have this sort of food now, but Daimo seems a little better. To make sure, I'll have to go back here with carnivores to put a fish out of its misery, and pay attention the next time my parents take me out. Ah, now I'm homesick.

Daimo
3288A Pierce St, Richmond (in the Pacific East Mall/99 Ranch carpark)

Think globally, eat locally: Shanghai Restaurant

Xiaolongbao
Sizzling rice soup
$15

One of the many things for which I'll be eternally grateful to my ex-girlfriend is introducing me to this establishment, and to the xiaolongbao (henceforth XLB). I'd never been back there without her, since the English of the staff there is nearly as limited as my Chinese. But finally my desire for those not-quite-dumplings got the better of me, and after a quick memorisation of the characters for "little basket buns" -- more foolproof than learning to pronounce them -- I headed to the restaurant.

I don't know much about Shanghainese food (other than stinky tofu, which I wasn't in the mood for), so after some attempted dialogue and restrained gesturing, the hostess and I agreed on the sizzling rice soup, which I think is the sort of dish my ex wouldn't let me order. The brief attention I got from the next table when my besweatered server crackled and popped the rice squares into my broth was nice, but it was my second shrimp soup of the day, and the one I made was better. But the XLBs, hidden away on one of the three menus as "steamed buns", more than made up for it. The goal is to make the wraps so that they fall apart in your mouth, not burst between your chopsticks, and this was achieved admirably. Inside, the soup was agreeably meaty and the pork was agreeably sweet. All they needed was a quick dip into some sour soy sauce to put me in XLB heaven.

I've had other good stuff here on previous visits -- I think I recall a nice hot and sour soup -- but it's the XLBs that make the place. Note, though, I've never them from anywhere else so can't compare (unlike this guy). Still, this dish is the best (and possibly only) evidence that it's not impossible to find good Chinese food near campus.

Shanghai Restaurant
2517 Durant #D @ Telegraph, Berkeley