3 San Diego Meals – Kokoro, Halmouny, Sufi, and More

Kirk and Cathy are traveling, eating, doing important stuff, or maybe just resting today. So Ed (from Yuma) is posting about 3 meals (from San Diego).

Kokoro

I had to have some sushi. Just had to. Tina had memories of a good chirashi at Kokoro and its website said it would be open at lunchtime on Friday. And it was:

In addition to tables, Kokoro has an L shaped sushi bar that surrounds an elevated workstation and ingredient storage area, which I think helps executive chef Akio Ishito work more comfortably:

Although I don't remember it from before, the chirashi meal started off with a little lettuce and tomato salad:

The lettuces were very fresh, the tomato very ordinary, and the dressing seem to be based around rice wine vinegar, miso, and soy. Refreshing. Palate cleansing.

For soup, we were given the alternatives of miso or udon. So udon it was:

The noodles were perfectly cooked, toothsome and tender, but the soup overall was bland.

The chirashi looked beautiful:

Underneath the fish and friends, the sushi rice was faultless. The toppings presented a nice selection of sushi bar favorites, all good quality and offered good value at $19. We both liked the sizable slice of mackerel and the halibut (hirami), which was especially firm and fresh – in fact, much like the halibut crudo we would eat the next evening at the Wine Vault. We also liked the uni and shiso leaf pairing, and the surprisingly first-rate ebi, unusually meaty and flavorful. The hamachi also stood out. There were no bad tastes, though the slices of octopus and squid were exceeding thin. Overall, we enjoyed.

Halmouny

It had been a long time since Tina and I had been to any Korean restaurant. We weren’t looking for a smoke filled room or for cooking our own food, so we decided on Halmouny, where we’d always enjoyed our visits in the past:

We noticed they'd remodeled the interior, and we liked the changes – the place seemed cleaner, more modern, and more open:

A flagon of chilled water was brought to the table along with my beer:

A mysterious box on the table, when opened, contained stainless steel soup spoons and chopsticks – nice touch:

A funny thing happened. Tina and I started looking over the large menu, discussing things, and trying to figure out what we wanted. There were so many choices, and almost every one of them seemed inviting. Twice the friendly server came over and asked if we were ready, and we had to say no because we weren't. Then, when she came over the third time, we ordered two of the most standard dishes on the menu.

Soft tofu soup with vegetables:

And dolsit bibimbop:

I'm sure our server must have been laughing with her coworkers about the clueless gaijin taking so long to order such a simple basic meal.

But it was good. While the soup lacked a certain depth of flavor, it was certainly tasty, and the interplay between creamy tofu, spicy broth, and veggies and ‘shrooms was pleasant. The bibimbop was great comfort food. The simple meal was really what we wanted.

Though the ban chan was totally standard and uninspired, we enjoyed them. Here’s some items:

The dried radish was our favorite of those four. There was some baby bok choy and some other veggie that I can't remember, but our favorites were the regular kimchi:

and the wonderful dried tofu

For us, this dinner was, paradoxically, exotic comfort food.

Sufi

For lunch on Saturday, we were looking Eastern Mediterranean, but La Miche Kabobgee is closed for lunch on Saturdays. We remembered seeing a large restaurant, Sufi, on Balboa not too far from Convoy that promised Mediterranean food. So that's where we went:

It is large, and at lunch, it serves a popular buffet:

Photographing the entire buffet was pretty much impossible as other customers were coming and going. Plus I was getting hungry, so this fuzzy shot shows just a small part of the available choices:

Tina's first plate looked like this:

She really liked the chicken and the fire roasted veggies (the big zucchini slice and the charred tomato half). She also enjoyed the garden salad with the feta dressing, and we both liked the Shirazi salad with chopped onion, cucumber, tomato, and parsley.

Here's my first plate:

For some reason, I chose three slices of sausages, which were okay, but not really unique or outstanding. The baba ghannouj was decent, and the hummus was creamy, but far from the best I've had in San Diego. The chicken wing was OK, the pickled beet excellent, and the beef kebab just okay. Tina and I both enjoyed the stewed zucchini.

At first, the breads were not ready, but soon we were able to get pita bread and Persian naan:

For me, the breads said a lot about Sufi. The pita bread was pitiful – cool, store-bought, and boring. The Persian bread, on the other hand, was warm, tasty, and probably homemade. But in some ways that is the essence of the restaurant. While it calls itself "Mediterranean," Sufi is really a Persian restaurant that serves some generic Lebanese food to broaden its customer base.

In fact, most of our favorites from the lunch were Persian, like this interesting pomegranate soup, a lentil soup with a distinct sour tang:

And the stews on my second plate:

I believe the one on the left is called fesenjoom, a chicken and pomegranate stew. On the right is ghormeh sabzi with a big chunk of tender beef covered in greens along with large dark red beans. The closest item is, I think, gheimeh, beef and yellow split peas. I have no idea about the green bean stew furthest away. In any case, these Persian stews were the most interesting items on the buffet, and I wished that I had focused on them right from the beginning.

Nonetheless, the buffet was interesting and we certainly got to eat all kinds of things we can't get out in the desert.

Balboa Bakery

This little place is the "and more" in the title of the post. It's located right next to Sufi and looked promising, so Tina insisted we visit:

There was a bewildering array of Persian pastries:

So our late-night snack that evening consisted of these walnut or pistachio treats:
We were expecting something like baklava, but these were different. The pastry was not fila and they were a little more savory and less sweet than baklava. Four years ago Cathy visited the same bakery and hinted that a post might be forthcoming. Hint hint.

Anyway, we enjoyed all three of these meals. None was spectacular, but each scratched an itch, and that's a good thing: too long in Yuma and I get awfully itchy.

Comments

[Cathy]

We went there last Friday, Ed; after a lunch inside Balboa International market (which makes their own pita, 5 for $1.05). There will be a post soon. More importantly, Kokoro has signage!

[Krk]

Nice that Kokoro is open for lunch again; albeit only on Fridays.

[Ed (from Yuma)]

That's hilarious, Cathy. What odds? I'm looking forward to the post.

Kirk, the website says open M - F for lunch and M - Sa for dinner. We called from the road (Tina called, I was driving) just to be sure. So maybe they're getting back into lunches. The lunch menu is pretty long, so it looks like they're invested.

[Nhbilly]

Nice assortment of good eats.
Is it just me that I'm not a fan of communal utinsel?

[Ed (from Yuma)]

billy, I hope folks didn't put dirty chopsticks back into the box. I'm used to pho places with the bunches of chopsticks and the soup spoons nested into each other, so I thought nothing of it.

[jack]

I loved Kokoro's lunch! Thanks for the reminder.

[Ed (from Yuma)]

Yeh, Jack, I know Kirk likes lunches there too. Nice little place.