Trendy

Earlier today I had the lovely pleasure of dining with Becca, Nadia, Ellora, and Dominique at Tamarine, in Palo Alto. Before I knew anything about the restaurant, I would go up to friends and ask them what kind of food they thought would be served at a “trendy” restaurant in Palo Alto. I had many answers but my favorite was “sandwiches and arugula…maybe cheese, but definitely arugula.” It turns out Tamarine is a Vietnamese restaurant that boasts of its specialization in a “family dining experience.”( I tried to look up the word Tamarine in the dictionary, but it kept coming back to tamarin: a South American marmoset, therefore, I assume the word is most likely in Vietnamese.)

Lunch got off to a great start. I had a glass of water. I’ve found that it is incredibly difficult to mess up a glass of water, although some have tried. A few minutes later we ordered. We all decided to get different things so that we could be in keeping with Tamarine’s policy of family dining. Tamarine makes small plate entrées only, specifically for this purpose. As we waited for our food I looked around some. Tamarine is indeed a very “trendy” restaurant. The table at which we were seated was a very modern style, half booth/half seat table in a pretty seafoam green. The other tables were in keeping with the modern theme and a color scheme of wood (wood isn’t a color…), green, black and white. The restaurant also doubles as an art gallery, so I got to look at some of the painting that were hanging around in the main room.

Then my food arrived! I love food so I was unspeakable excited to eat. The first things they brought out were our appetizer choices of which I tasted the shrimp spring rolls, wakame salad, and the papaya salad. I really enjoyed my spring rolls. My mother makes spring rolls from scratch so I was expecting a thin layer of dough stuffed with deliciousness and then deep fried. I’ve come to see that as the definition of spring rolls, but this was entirely different. I stared at it curiously for a moment because I highly doubted that it had seen a deep fryer (to my complete disappointment)! The layer of dough on the outside was incredibly light tasting and white in color. I’m not sure what if was, but Wellington is as close as I can come to describing it. Inside it there was shrimp, pork, lettuce, and mint, but all I could taste was the lettuce and mint and the Hoisin sauce I was dipping it in. It was like eating a mint wrapped in lettuce and dough dipped in a sweet sauce.

The next thing I tried was the wakame salad. This salad contains seaweed, tofu, and avocado in a yuzu-lime vinaigrette. It is described on the menu as “a light and refreshing salad” and indeed it was just that. I am accustomed to seaweed in sushi form, so this was a new experience for me. I have to admit I couldn’t actually taste anything. If you asked me today what seaweed tasted like I would say, “um…light?” I’ve decided a seaweed salad is more of a feeling than a taste. It says, “I’m sophisticated and hip and the kind of person who orders dressing on the side and eats froyo with fresh fruit and sips lattes and…” The other salad I had was the papaya salad and that too could be described as light and refreshing. The unripened papaya was sliced incredibly thin and paired with beef and basil. It was good, but I still finished eating it feeling as though I’d eaten nothing at all. We actually began a discussion on iron chef because of our appetizers because it felt like this is what someone would make if given green papaya to cook with.

I finished with my entrée of kurubatu pork prime rib in a spicey tomato sauce. It was not spicy at all, but I was certainly happy to get to the meat after all the lightness. It was very delicious! Over all I had a very good, light, dining experience, and with all that trendiness flying around we figured why not stop at red mango for some fro-yo? Amazing! All I needed was a small Yorkshire terrior on a leash lightly jogging ahead of me as I balanced my new painting from Tamarine.