• Jonathan Kauffman braves the Chinese Buddhist vegan cuisine at Enjoy Vegetarian’s downtown location, which contains no garlic or onions, and guess what? He kinda hates it. He tries to be kind about a few dishes — like the soy spareribs that he calls “a remarkable facsimile of beef” — but he lets loose about one coconut sauce that has “all the appeal of a bottle of Elmer’s glue,” and concludes that such prescriptive flavor deprivation isn’t really for him. “There’s only so much that a human, religious or no, can do without.” [SF Weekly]
• Mr. Bauer, who apparently never met a goat dish he wouldn’t try, says that the goat stew at longtime Top 100 player Kokkari “would have been better as a sauce,” and the starters weren’t so hot either. “The beans were underdone and starchy… the octopus was so tough that my jaw was exhausted after a couple of bites.” Guess they won’t be on the Top 100 this year. [Chron]
• We mustn’t forget the descriptive Mr. Reidinger, who drops in on Specchio in the Mission, which he seems to form very little opinions about except to call the setting “au courant,” the lobster “problematic,” and chef Gino Assaf’s menu “poised and traditional.” [SFBG]
• Nicholas Boer treks out to Dublin’s Ulferts Center to review Koi Garden, a popular Chinese restaurant whose food he gives two and a half stars, but, he warns, “Like a watering hole on the savannah, [the scene in the restaurant] can switch from serene to frightening at the drop of a chopstick.” [Chron]
