Poor House Bistro, San Jose

Poor House Bistro
New Orleans cuisine, inexpensive and authentic

A friend took us to the Poor House Bistro several months ago, and we loved the Cajun food and the atmosphere. It's actually in a converted house: you walk up wooden stairs to the porch, and then the front door. All the seating is in the small rooms on the first floor, two rooms of maybe a couple hundred square feet each, with little patio tables crammed together, but nobody cares about the cramped space. They're too busy chowing down. The third room on the first floor is where the kitchen, cash register, and soda machine are. So you walk past the happy diners into the room where you order your food. They have a one-page menu and a daily special, and the kitchen is right behind the serving counter. This room is full of hungry people waiting patiently for their number to be called, watching the food come out to the counter. There are plenty of napkins for drooling into.

It's on August Street just down from the HP Pavilion, so the best time to go is around 7:30 on the night of a Sharks game or other event at the arena. When we got there at about seven, the place was full and just starting to empty out. There's a small pavilion in the side yard where live music plays, and that was also full. As we ordered and then waited for our food, the Sharks fans all left. By the time we were ready to wander over to the game, the place was nearly empty.

Like many Cajun places (at least CreoLa, the subject of a future post), Poor House Bistro offers a sampler of Cajun dishes: red beans and rice, jambalaya, and gumbo. They also offer po-boy sandwiches--I recommend the "cochon au lait," the pork po' boy, but they're probably all just as good. They use a Cajun mustard and mayo, and they import the bread from New Orleans because the owner couldn't find anywhere local that made the bread the right way. But all the food is good: the red beans and rice and gumbo especially. The jambalaya is tasty, but on this last occasion seemed a little mild and tomato-y, almost more like Spanish rice than Cajun. Still, it's hard to go wrong no matter what you order.

But don't fill up, because you need to save room for either the beignets or the bread pudding, or maybe both. The bread pudding is amazing, and the beignets are only slightly less so, drowned in powdered sugar and soft and fried. So unhealthy, so, so good.

They have a great lunch special, but lunch or dinner, this is one of the few Cajun places in the Bay Area that's worth not just one return visit, but many.

The Counter, Santana Row

The Counter
Do-it-yourself burgers in an urban diner setting.

We first heard about The Counter when they opened a store in Palo Alto on California (pictured)--alas, long after my office had moved from that area. Our friends on Santana Row whose condo overlooks the site of the new location had been watching it for months, so it was with great excitement that they announced to us that it would be opening on July 2. Better still, The Counter did a training day to which they invited Santana Row residents, and our friends invited us, so we got to go on June 30.

They didn't have all the decor up yet, but The Counter in Palo Alto has a modern-urban feel which this location says they're going to keep. The restaurant itself is all gleaming silver and white, brightly lit, with huge open windows and a counter that resembles an old soda fountain counter. A faux garage door hangs as if poised to close over the large front window. The whole place exudes a diner-like feel, updated to this decade or perhaps the last.

It might have been a training day, but the staff were very friendly and knowledgeable. The only strange thing was the instructions for ordering, making sure that we ordered a variety of dishes to give the kitchen practice (e.g., no more than 2/3 lb. of the same kind of meat per table). We had no problem as we liked a variety of the dishes anyway.

The appetizers, though all fried and unhealthy, must be tried. The sweet potato fries are delicious, as are the fried dill pickle chips, and they give you several sauces for dipping. Our waiter told us about an appetizer plate called "The Sampler," which wasn't on the menu, that featured those two plus their regular fries and their onion strings, so we ordered that, and all four were nicely warm and crisp.

The do-it-yourself burgers are the featured menu item, though they have pre-assembled burgers if you're not in an adventurous mood. You can order from 1/3 to 1 lb. of ground beef, ground turkey, veggie burger, or chicken breast; one cheese topping, four burger toppings (ranging from the standard tomato to shredded carrots, cranberries, or pineapple), and one sauce (you can get a roasted garlic aioli, for instance, or a dijon vinaigrette dressing, or apricot sauce, or sweet barbecue, or nine or ten others). Then you can pick your bun (regular, honey wheat, or english muffin) or choose to have it in a lettuce bowl.

The veggie burgers are really good. They're actual veggie burgers, not meatless patties trying to taste like beef. The chicken is good too, and I'm told the beef burgers are good. We were less impressed with the turkey burger than we've been in other places, though. Assembling your own toppings is definitely the way to go, though it can be daunting. We all erred on the side of too little spice to our toppings, and the veggie burger in particular needs something like the dijon or the barbecue. But the burgers are good, the toppings are fresh and plentiful, and the sauces are served on the side so you can dip or spread, as you like. Everything's tasty--the garlic aioli was less garlicky than I was expecting, but still good. And we got out of there for about $15 a person, which around here is not bad for lunch.

I have yet to try a dessert or milkshake there, but I'm told they too are worth trying. Perhaps that'll be the subject of a future post. In any case, if you're in Santana Row and looking for a good, cheap option, The Counter or the nearby Wahoo's Fish Tacos will serve admirably.

Tanglewood

Tanglewood, in Santana Row in San Jose, is a fairly new restaurant that changes its menu based on available meats and produce. They're one of many Bay Area restaurants to ride the new trend of using locally produced food from small, sustainable farms and fisheries.

We visited Tanglewood for Sunday brunch and opted for their brunch menu rather than the regular luncheon, which also looked good. We ordered the Caramelized crispy French toast filled with orange cream and Vermont maple syrup, which came with scrambled eggs and housemade chicken apricot sausage; and the Eggs Benedict, with housemade Canadian bacon and hollandaise sauce, served with roasted potatoes.

Inside, Tanglewood is an elegant but restrained eating area focusing on wood decor, after its name. The tabletops are slabs of wood, polished on top but still rough around the edges. The staff were unfailingly polite even at the end of what must have been a long morning of Father's Day brunch crowds.

Normally when we get Sunday brunches, we walk away feeling stuffed. Tanglewood's version of brunch was very light for what it was, and delicious all around. The French toast was a thick square of brioche-like bread, filled with a light, subtle mixture of orange-infused cream, which tasted mostly like orange butter. The maple syrup was hard to pick out of the flavors, but the toast didn't suffer for that. The scrambled eggs were served in a lump more like an omelette, but still tasty, and the chicken apricot sausage was served in two small patties the size of silver dollars. Unlike most instances of chicken/fruit sausage, the apricot taste was strong, the texture nice and crumbly, the overall taste outstanding.

The distinguishing feature of the Eggs Benedict was the light, tasty Hollandaise sauce, as opposed to the thick cream I'm used to on this dish. The eggs, perfectly poached, had great flavor and went well with the Canadian bacon and the fluffy English muffin. My only complaint was that the Canadian bacon was so thin that the flavor got a little overwhelmed by the others; on its own it tasted fine. The potatoes were good, if not as outstanding as the main courses. Most impressively, the portions were just the right size for us (therefore probably slightly small for the average diner) and the prices weren't more than we'd expect from a nice Sunday brunch place--$10-12 for the meals.

Dinners at Tanglewood tend to run expensive. Try a lunch or Sunday brunch and you'll get great food at reasonable prices, and a chance to see their lovely interiors.

The Loft Bar and Bistro

We'd set out to lunch on Memorial Day and found our original destination closed, so we wandered around San Jose and happened upon The Loft, a very vertical restaurant with a small bar on the ground floor and a couple tables on the sidewalk, a larger loft space upstairs, and a rooftop patio. The loft space, where the seven of us ate, was beautiful, large and well lit, and that does a lot for a dining experience.

Mark and I shared the grilled chicken sandwich and the pear and blue cheese salad. Both were quite good, the grilled chicken thin and flavorful with onions and sun-dried tomatoes and a mayo that contributed a nice light flavor to the sandwich. The bread had a good consistency and the cheese even worked well, I think because the other flavors were so light, even the onion (many times I find cheese on a sandwich just adds fat while the flavor gets lost in a strongly-flavored sandwich). We had to try the fries, and here they were nice and thin, with good flavor, but not quite crisp enough for our tastes. The salad came with a little too much sherry vinaigrette, but the dressing's flavor was good, and the candied pecans and blue cheese went well with the crisp, sweet pear slices.

Service was good overall, the complimentary bread served with a balsamic dressing that we sopped up quickly and refreshed without our asking. Other dishes ordered were the French dip, the tri-tip steak, and the panko-crusted chicken, all of which were quite satisfactory.

We'd definitely come back. Though it was a little pricey, it wasn't any more so than Gordon Biersch, which is just down the street, and the ambience is definitely nicer even if the menu is a little more restricted.