Imperial Delight - 1/2 Right

You can approach Imperial Delight from two ways, we approached down a side street and were treated to their sign.  I am a sucker for restaurant signs that hang like that.  I think the reason I do is that these signs have such a strong association with pubs.  In fact these signs bias me so much in favor of the restaurant that even if the food is not all that good I will still enjoy it.

As it turned out this was the best feature about the restaurant.

Chinese restaurants are know for turning the tables and being fairly cheap.  Ding and dong.  We did get off to a bad start when after ordering, the waitress came back and wanted to confirm that one of my lunch-mates had indeed wanted the beef.  He of course had ordered the chicken.  This theme would return.

The restaurant was teeming so I was holding out hope that the food would exceed my expectations.  My lunch came first and although I had ordered some unpronounceable chicken dish I was served an unpronounceable beef dish.  I told the server that I had ordered chicken, but she was having none of this.  She kept on scowling at me and proffering the beef to me.   It was clear she did not want to take the dish back and was willing to fight me  about it.  They must have to pay for wasted food out of their own pocket.  Although I would not be surprised if they just dumped it back into the community pot. She finally relented and disappeared into the back.

99.99% of chinese restaurants are bad.  I think they all go to the same cooking school.  The school of turning meat into a rubbery consistency with no taste  that is dowsed in a brown sauce that within a 1/2 hour turns to gelatin.  This place was no exception.  

The further away you get from your meal the worse you feel.  When you first start eating and the strange meat and sauce is still liquid and hot it is edible.  5 minutes into the meal you start to wonder why you came here in the first place.  After the meal I get the same feeling I have after bowling, that my whole body is covered in a thin layer of grease.  I craved a shower and a mouth rinse.  

Here is the only time the food is good, before your first bite.

Not only is the food awful, but within a 1/2 you are hungry again.  Unfortunately the grease and smell stays with you a lot longer, so you really don't feel like eating even though you are hungry.  At least I had the stale fortune cookies to look forward to.

Cafe Myers - Identity crisis

Cafe Myers one of the Market Place restaurants that I have never been to. Luckily three of my colleagues accompanied me so I would be able to get a wide range of dishes to evaluate. First off probably the only way you would even find Cafe Myers is by stumbling drunk out of The Hopyard.  You would have to make a series of wrong turns and then suddenly there it would appear right in front of you. Reminds me of Venice.

Suffice it to say this place is behind the 8 ball when it comes to foot traffic, so you figure for them to stay in business they must have great food.  

If this table is any indication this place is in trouble.  These people never came back, unless they consider their food like wine and want to age it a few years.

My first thought of the name Cafe Myers is of Myers Lemons and Italian cooking. So I am hoping for a good solid cafe style Italian food. In reality you get a long standard cafe type menu and then a separate Thai Food menu. What was their thinking? I think they have no idea what they are doing. To me it is obvious that a Thai husband and wife bought the place and really have no idea about american culture and thus marketing to Americans so they kept the cafe menu, but they really like making and know Thai food so they added it to the menu.

As you can see from the flyer it is very amateurish and not too appealing looking. I did ask the guy at the counter what they do well and he said everything is good and preceded to point and read every item on the menu. So he was useless. He did not give even a hint of why a particular item on the menu was good, he just read it, which I had done in half the time.

Our orders where 2 turkey burgers, 1 ham and egg sandwich and 1 thai chicken basil dish. Thanks to the counter guy I was expecting great things.

This is quite a place. As you gaze around you marvel at the improvements put into the cafe. These guys must have thought that americans love Disneyland and what typifies Disneyland more than Its a Small World.

Back to the food. My turkey burger was mediocre, if I want a good turkey burger I am going to go to Hopyard. The Thai Chicken was edible, but if I want Thai food I am going to a Thai restaurant. The Ham and Egg sandwich was just that, nothing outstanding.

Beside the fact that I don't think many people know that this place exists their food is just not that great. There is nothing compelling to bring you back. Their problem is they have no identity, they should stick to good cafe food or be a Thai restaurant. Instead they are stuck somewhere in the middle. Plus this place is totally miscast in this center, they need to be somewhere on I-5 in a middle of the nowhere truck stop without any other food choices around. Probably cheaper rent and they would get just as much traffic.

If for some crazy reason you want to eat here you better hurray because I doubt it will be around long.

El Balazo - A magical place

The San Ramon Market Place is home to one of the El Balazo mexican restaurants. El Balazo is spanish for the bullet. This has always struck me as an odd name for a restaurant. Is it a hint at the speed in which they get your food to you? "We serve our food as fast as a speeding bullet." Could it be something more sinister maybe the owner shot someone and stole their family treasure and used that money to start up the first restaurant.   Who knows the reasoning, but after looking at the size of the burrito and calculate the number of calories, you might as well shoot yourself because it will be a much faster less painful death.

Trying to calculate the calories of their giant burritos definitely calls for an Iphone App. After running numerous calculations the burrito clocks in at least 2,000 calories with around 900 cal from fat. Hopefully you did not eat the stale chips with that, or the full sugar drink. To burn those calories off you would need to jog for almost three hours. Which would all be worth it if the food was really good.

Unfortunately your first impression as you walk into the restaurant is the smell of a mixture of bleach and barf. As you walk along your feet start sticking to the floor which then really makes you wonder about that awful smell. If you can get past the sticky floor and the bad smell you arrive at the counter and are surprised to see some good looking chicken breasts grilling away.

This gives the customer some hope and spurs you on to your order. At this point you decide to order a chicken burrito. This is where a strange magical process happens as your nice fresh chicken breast  travels from the grill to your burrito.   The lovely chicken is transmogrified into a greasy disgusting meat that no longer tastes like fresh chicken breast, but more like transmission fluid. Add this fact to the enormous size of the burrito and you are soon all too well aware of why you smelled the bleach/barf.

To be fair if you have trouble smelling and tasting and you need to gain 15 pounds at one sitting, El Balazo is just the ticket you need.

Cafe Tandoor - Diverse

For the third restaurant in the San Ramon Market Place Revue I headed back to a familiar grub spot the Indian Cuisine of Cafe Tandoor. Of all the Market Place restaurant this is the one that I have eaten with the most diverse groups. I think most people like the fact that the restaurant has tall ceilings, is well lit, seems clean and indian food in general has good flavor.

Cafe Tandoor on the other hand is anything but diverse. First off there are only indians that work at the restaurant, which don't get me wrong, I prefer my ethnic restaurants to be populated by the particular ethnicity of the style of food being cooked. Chinese for chinese food, mexicans for mexican food, etc. etc. But even amongst the workers there is not much diversity, I believe that the cooks must be triplets all hired off of a remake of sinbad the salior.

All their dishes pretty much follow the same formula, Naan bread, rice, cucumber salad, main dish, i.e. chicken, lamb, veggies in a side dish in brown sauce.

To top it off they always have some crazy Indian Bollywood flick playing on the flat screen TV. So if you are easily offended beware Cafe Tandoor might not be for you.

I almost always order the special, which has me wondering whether the special is a specialty of the house or just excess food they have not been able to sell. Kind of like the deli chicken breast on Monday that becomes the chicken salad by Friday.

Come to Cafe Tandoor for brown fairly tasty food and racy bollywood flicks.

Mykonos - Something New

For the next restaurant in the revue I decided to try something new. It turned out to be Mykonos, which is Greek style food. I was hoping that I might get to see the Fleet Foxes eating there, but no dice. As I approached the restaurant to my horror I saw this.

Pictures of the food dishes. It got even worse, once inside you see that there is an entire wall covered with pictures of their food. As you approach the counter you are once again subjected to these same pictures, just smaller. One of my golden rules of thumb is to never eat at places that display pictures of their food dishes. Unfortunately I was committed so I steeled myself and plunged on. I thought I might try one of their specials.

I did find out one reason they have all the pictures, when asking what the Beef Kufte was the guy at the counter said a lot of words that were unintelligible and pointed to a picture. I had no idea what his comments were, but the picture showed some nice looking chicken on a stick and some nice looking steak on a stick, along with something else that I could not quite make out. Looked as good as anything so I ordered the Kufte. It turned out to be pretty cheap, $6, so I was feeling a little better about the lunch. It was nice outside so out I went to wait for my lunch.

Here was my view from the tables.

One thing you can say about San Ramon is that there is plenty of free parking. I think that would be a good slogan for the City, "Come to San Ramon - Plenty of Free Parking, no driving around in circles for hours looking for parking and then finally throwing up your arms and park illegally and get your car towed" I think that would be an excellent slogan.

When the lunch was finally ready it looked nothing at all like the picture. No chicken, no steak, just two objects shaped like turds. I had to go back and re-look at the picture the guy was pointing at to see why he showed me that picture. And yes there were indeed two turd like objects in the picture, just none of the other items.

The turd like objects were on top of some rice and a side salad. You also got two plastic cups filled with two types of sauce, a red and a white sauce. At this point I was pretty hungry so I was ready to eat. I cut into the turd which was a lot firmer than I expected, and into my mouth it went. It was some sort of fennel tasting ground beef. It was very sausage like. The rice was fine, the salad was fine, the portions very small. Not really my type of place.

If you like pictures of food, want something pretty cheap and are on a diet, try out Mykonos. Heck you might get lucky and see the Fleet Foxes.

Hopyard - old faithful

When working at one place for many years in a row you end up eating at the same places over and over.  It could be called a rut.  With that in mind in order to expand my eating horizons I have decided to eat lunch at every restaurant in the San Ramon Market Place.

We begin with Hopyard.  Hopyard is a brew pub which is what originally drew me to it.  This is one of the standbys at my firm.  I would say I have been here for lunch in the neighborhood of 500 times.  You would think that with that many lunches I could give an in depth review of the menu, but the first 300 visits I ordered a Patty Melt with a turkey burger and a side salad instead of fries.  I finally stopped ordering this when they started calling it a turkey burger with a patty melt set up.  This cost $1.75 more.  I also discovered that the swiss cheese was really american swiss cheese, which I am not even sure is really cheese.

For the past 200 times I have switched my order to the Barbecue Chicken Salad.  This comes standard with deep fried chicken, honey mustard dressing and barbecue sauce.  I modify this a bit with grilled chicken, oil and vinegar and no barbecue sauce.  Not sure why barbecue sauce and dressing go together.  In fact when I take a close look at the barbecue sauce it appears to have white bubbles, which makes me wonder whether or not it is refridgerated properly.  Also there is probably tons of sugar and liquid smoke in the sauce.  My rule of thumb is to avoid things with liquid smoke.

The other standard order is iced tea.  The iced tea comes with free refills, and depending on the waiter/waitress that can mean up to five pints a lunch.  By my calculation I have had 180 gallons of the Hopyard iced tea.  

The usual Hopyard crowd is John, Lori, Bill and Mark.  

Here is John and Lori enjoying the Hopyard experience.  I think they are distracted by the guy at the bar wearing man  Capri's.  He is also one of the waiters, who is very fast getting you your food but slow at getting you the bill.  I think it has to do with the Capri's.

Here is Bill, he tends to order things without any special changes.  Can't figure out why he needs to read the menu after 500 Hopyard visits.  He is just special that way.

The other great thing about Hopyard is that 99% of the time we see Steve Kerr.  He is almost always there with a different person.  John (who went to Arizona and thus loves Steve Kerr) and I can't figure out how he commutes back and forth from Phoenix and San Ramon.  I would think that he would want the Warriors GM job which would make the commute to Hopyard that much easier.

All and all Hopyard is a must if you visit San Ramon Marketplace.