Why Hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where we take you on a torturous trek of misery and triumph all in the safety of your own home. I’m your Vergil of the Kitchen, Jon O’Guin, and today’s post is not ANY of the things I said it might be on Monday, and it’s really kind of a sudden thought I had, but I felt it might be a good time to talk about it. Partly because I wanted to slightly delay covering the two suggested topics, and partly because... Well, let me get to that in a minute. First, let me tell you about a goal I used to have, how I failed it, and how I think we should all try towards something like it.

You’re Pulling My Leg, Man

So, as I have almost certainly mentioned before, I went to college at Washington State University, which is a university located in a relatively ‘small’ city of Pullman WA.

A mere 30,000 people. Of whom, probably 20,000 go to, or work for, the University.

I lived there for 8 years, all told. 4 getting my degree, and 4 volunteering and working in the town. Now, I have…pretty much always had a passion for food. It didn’t use to be so academic, or creative, but I liked to eat. I was 6’2” and fluctuated between 220 and 280 pounds, I assure you, I ATE. And I came to the realization that Pullman has a relatively narrow/weird restaurant scene: since college students make up a hefty portion of the town’s population, and therefore its industry, there’s not a LOT of businesses in the town that aren’t part of the university. Like, it’s hard to get an exact measure, but TripAdvisor suggests there are around 70 restaurants in Pullman, all told. By comparison, MY town, less than half the size, has about 90.

Which means it is by NO means a difficult task to eat at every restaurant in Pullman. If you tried a new restaurant every week, you’d be done within 2 years. Which, at a certain point, I figured “hey, why not give it a shot?” I didn’t go EVERY week, though: several of them are quite expensive, and when I worked in Pullman, I made the equivalent of $18,000-19,000 a year. (It’s slightly more complicated, in that my rent was free (a value of roughly $6,000 a year, as I recall) but my take-home pay was around $800-900 a month. So I was only PAID around $13,000 a year before taxes.) So, for instance, I never made it out the restaurant that was outside of town on the golf course. But I was working on it, and I had made a solid amount of progress. How much progress? Well, when I checked the top restaurants in Pullman yesterday, I had been to 9 of the top 10, and 16 of the top 20. For context, since I left Pullman in 2015, I have been back for…4 weekend trips, none of them since 2018, and I didn’t try new places on those trips. In the 5 years since I left, I still have an 80% completion rate of the top 20. Given a couple thousand dollars, a week, and a lot of antacids, I could go back there right now, and probably complete the task.

This is the “main drag” of Downtown Pullman. Green means “Jon has eaten here”. Red means “He hasn’t”. I could finish downtown Pullman in a DAY.

And maybe when I’m more financially stable, I will. I still have friends who live in the area, and I did really enjoy the city. But I wanted to highlight the weight of those numbers. And what they can mean for you.

Do You Know What You Don’t Know?

If you had asked me, 15, 10, 5 years ago, how many restaurants were in Port Orchard…My guess would not have been near 90. I would have assumed I was aiming high with a guess of like, 50. And, my defense, several of the complexes that house 10-20 of our restaurants weren’t built until fairly recently. But my point is: so often, in our own communities, we have places we’ve never been. There are multiple bars in Port Orchard that I have never stepped inside, for various reasons. One of them, in fact, recently changed owners and names, which is additionally notable in that not one member of my immediate family had ever been in it: Apparently, my father had a bad experience there DECADES ago, and so he never returned, my mother never went, and neither have me or my brothers. That’s a slightly extreme/niche example, but I’m willing to bet there are places in your town (assuming it’s more than, like, 100 people) that you’ve never been/never tried. The restaurant that you hear is good, but it’s on the other side of town, so you’ve never had the energy to try it; the one where the first time you suggested it, someone knew someone who had gotten sick after eating there, so you’ve never gone; all the assorted odds of ends of your hometown’s culinary landscape that you’ve never tasted.

These are two restaurants in Port Orchard. I order breakfast delivered from the one on the right TODAY.
I have, to my knowledge, never eaten anything from the one on the left. I have no REASON that I haven’t done so, it’s just never come up.

And NEW places, where you’ve “heard good things” but haven’t gotten around to it. These are the sorts of culinary nooks and crannies that I want to talk about today. For a variety of reasons, one of which is Mike Chen. I mentioned his YouTube series back in November, as something I binged while recuperating from my kidney stones. Since then, I’ve been watching more of his content, and it’s been particularly interesting for me as a guide to semi-local options: Mike was living in Seattle for a while, and thus I could use his episodes as an insight into restaurants that were only an hour or so away from me, if I wanted to put in the effort. And indeed, in following up on his recommendations, I found other interesting details: he recommended a barbecue place, which, as I looked at it on Google Maps, I discovered was near a neighborhood with a lot of Ethiopian restaurants. His recommendation of a business in Bellevue led me to discovering there is a Korean supermarket about 15 minutes away from where my brother works, and is a 5 minute detour if my family was going to see one of my aunts. On a more intimate, and slightly sad level, a chance Facebook ad or Google search last March let me discover a new Hawaiian restaurant during lockdown, a discovery I NEVER would have made on my own, because A: It is located in a mall I don’t frequent, and B: last fall, one of the owners had a medical emergency, and they’re going to have to leave the mall space. I hope to continue supporting them even without the space…but would I have had the interest/courage to try a restaurant without a ‘real’ location before I knew I liked their food?

While all of these examples are (of course) quite personal, I highlight them as illustrative. Because I believe, for almost everyone, there’s something similar you could be checking out. And I want to invite you to do so. You don’t even need to leave your house to do it anymore. You can use tools like TripAdvisor, Google Maps, and maybe even YouTube, to find people willing and eager to give you their impressions of businesses in your area. If you want, you can probably try take-out or delivery from them, to get an even stronger idea of whether you like it or not.

Pushing On

I invite you to try all of these ideas for a simple reason: because the vaccine is being distributed, many locations are starting to at least DISCUSS the plans for lifting their lockdowns/quarantines/stay-at-home orders. And, especially in America, many local eateries and businesses have been grievously impacted by the long safety precautions. So I’m inviting you to start making plans and seeing where you want to go when you can finally GO places again. It’s a way to build a little anticipation for the upcoming freedom, while also ensuring you’re thoughtful in how you use it: A LOT of people have apparently been booking “around the world” cruises, but in most places, you can probably save thousands of dollars by just doing a tour of restaurants serving world cuisine within a couple hours of your home. (Other than in Texas. Y’all are just too damn big.) Another benefit of keeping the scope of your “getaway” more local is that it helps local people more as well. So I invite you to plan out a couple sprees come late April, or May. And maybe one or two exploratory trips/delivery orders beforehand. Don’t just stick to what you know (though of course, helping out your favorite places is noble, and you should do so) but also look up one or two places you’ve never been to before, and see if you can help them out, and if it turns out they make stuff you like. Use this as a time to grow, to push your boundaries a little, in the first heady rush of freedom.

“I CAN BREATHE THE FRESH SALT AIR AGAIN! I’M GOING TO ORDER NINE POUNDS OF CRAB LEGS AFTER THIS!”

And while it might sound decadent, or out of your budget, it’s possible it will actually SAVE you money. Right now, a pound of 21/25 white shrimp (meaning you get 21-25 shrimp per pound) at H-Mart, the Korean Supermarket I mentioned earlier are $6.98 a pound, which, depending on the quality of the shrimp, is either directly comparable to, or vastly cheaper than, anything I could get at my normal grocery store right now($6.99-11.99, depending on If the Shrimp is previously frozen, organic, etc). Asian markets are renowned for having a broader range of instant noodles and frozen goods, meant to make filling and cheap meals: frozen pot-stickers at my Fred Meyer are $6.50 for a pound and a half bag, $5.50 if you buy them as part of a “buy 5 items, save $1 each” deal, which is very good! And at the H-Mart, 1.5lbs of 4 varieties of dumplings (including a pot-sticker) are currently 2 for $10. For context: those bags typically contain about 60 dumplings, meaning you’re paying about 8 cents per gyoza. Hell, if you’re looking for a cheap meal option, you can make Mandu-guk (“dumpling soup”) by just tossing a couple frozen dumplings into a bit of simmering broth and veggies, getting actual meat into a soup for cheaper than instant ramen.

You could even spring for the fancier 12 cents-per-dumplings to the right.

It’s a valuable task, and one I think fits with the theme of a lot of José’s work, without being directly about him: people helping each other, trying and enjoying new foods, and trying to make do with what you’ve got, in a way that FEELS like you’re not straining to survive. It’s something that spoke to me, in the moment, as a way of embracing the ideals of José, reflecting on the media I’ve been consuming lately (I have watched at LEAST 20 hours of Mike’s content over a couple of his channels.), and as something for all of us to take a breath, and dream/hope for a spring and summer where we can once again be free. And I think it’s a fun continuation of the idea of supporting local small businesses that I first brought up last April with my prior discussion of unknown knowns. Until then, a little window shopping can’t hurt, right?

MONDAY: JON MAKES CARROT CURRY, BECAUSE HE NEEDS TO IMPROVE HIS EYESIGHT TO READ THESE TINY WEEKLY ADS FOR ASIAN MARKETS. HOT POT BURNERS ON SALE FOR $25?! DAMN IT, I PAID TWICE THAT IN JANUARY!

THURSDAY: HMM. I THINK WE’LL COVER THE COOKBOOK I USED FOR BOTH OF THE LAST TWO RECIPES.