“You been to BLVD yet? You gotta try BLVD.”
The universe is punking me lately. People rave about a restaurant and I show up to find doughnuts that taste like old Christmas hams. If someone recommends free bread sticks there will be blood.
BLVD Chinese Kitchen and Sake House is a little box in Oceanside the size of a couple dorm rooms. It was formerly The Fish Joint. The inside is painted death metal black. There are reclaimed wood slabs on the walls, wooden communal tables, industrial lights, seating for about 35.
I show up at 3pm. The restaurant is only a few months old, and 3PM is an off-time. But still. It’s empty except for a table of employees and friends.
Another bust, I think. You need better recommenders.
The non-Chinese gal who greets me may have more tattooed skin than non-tattooed skin. She’s very nice, hospitable. Remember when only antisocial ex-cons got tattoos? A neck tattoo meant they weren’t very friendly because they were haunted by the people they’d killed. Nowadays people with tattoos use nice words. It’s confusing.
Chef-owner Alfred Sheik is Chinese. He learned to cook in his teens with his mom at her North Park restaurant, City Dragon. Then he went to culinary school, opened this spot next to his sister (she owns the salon next door). I haven’t been to City Dragon, but I’m willing to bet Alfred’s mom thinks his food is a little out there.
The menu is just a handful of items. I order the fish taco, a short rib slider, and a gigantic riff on the adorable Asian tradition of coin purse-shaped wontons. Sheik’s six-inch “money bag” is tied together with a green onion, surrounded by pickled onions, Brussels sprouts (symbolizing spilled h, I presume) and sesame seeds. Inside the “bag” is a curried rice (tossed with cream cheese, green onion and cilantro) and a single section of lap cheong (sweet Chinese sausage). It’s good. I might include a side sauce so that you can deconstruct the “wadded bag top” part of the dumpling and eat it. As it stands, the “purse” part is the only real eating.
Then I try the short rib slider. It is absolutely phenomenal. Sheik braises it for five hours in sesame oil, soy sauce, Shaosing (Chinese rice wine), lemongrass, cilantro, star anise, bay leaves and other ingredients. He uses the pan juices to make a glaze, then tops it with a pickled onion and tucks it into a Hawaiian roll, which he brushes with sesame oil, then sprinkles with salt and a few sesame seeds. The oil crisps up the roll and the salt offsets its sweetness. The result is one of the city’s best riffs on the glazed short rib, a dish that’s been a San Diego staple ever since the recession made cheap, slow-cooked cuts a necessity.
As for the fish taco? Well, it’s fusion’s world, we’re just the nerds trying to separate it into “authentic” boxes. Leave authenticity to the food historians. I prefer food that borrows whatever makes it better, from wherever it can find it. And so you get a Baja-style fish taco at a Chinese restaurant. Call it Mexinese. Or Chinican. Or good.
The mahi mahi is tossed in a glaze that’s shockingly sweet at first bite, addictive each bite after that. It’s “honey-glazed,” for which Sheik uses a chile and condensed-milk mayonnaise, adding a few shards of bacon and a Napa cabbage slaw that offsets the sweet fat. It’s so sweet you think, Well, my refined palate should just hate this. And then you laugh at what it might be like to be that big of a pretentious twit. This just tastes alien and delicious, regardless of whether it uses a classic dessert confection (condensed milk) or not.
As it gets closer to dinner time, an older woman walks in with three friends. She’s showing it off. She sits raves to them about the fish tacos. If I had one complaint, it’s that everything I taste at BLVD is skewed sweet. But she’s right. This place is a hidden gem.
Hidden Gem: BLVD Chinese Kitchen
