Pearl Cafe (Mountain View)

A surprising find! The bulk of the food menu was Hawaiian. We tried loco moco, morning musubi and the pepper chicken with jasmine milk tea. The milk tea was decent (tasted like Quickly and the pearls were not hard), and the food was pretty nice. We liked how the pepper chicken had a good meat-to-batter ratio. We had never had musubi before, but the morning musubi was quite nice (the hashbrown and the rice melded together), although the seaweed was pretty old and couldn't be torn apart.
It's pretty decent food at decent prices (the portions were HUGE), so we'll probably return in the future. Also, the ambience is pretty nice for relaxing and hanging out with friends!

Loco Moco with katsu and curry sauce. This could be two persons' lunch.

Morning musubi. Egg, spam and hasbrown with rice wrapped in seaweed.

 Pearl Cafe

506 Showers Dr

Mountain View, CA 94040

(650) 917-8988

Paris Baguette

I can't believe that I haven't written a post about Paris Baguette yet. This is one of my favorite bakeries in the Bay Area so far, which offers a wide selection of Japanese-bakery-style pastries. Every pastry I've tried so far has been delicious -- high toast, green tea pastry, red bean pastry, sweet rice pastry (my ultimate favorite! This has azuki inside mochi inside pastry), tuna melt sandwich, strawberry shortcake (my all-time favorite cake), green tea pumpkin shortcake, etc.

I should post photos of the pastries next time before I eat them too quickly... 

Anyway, we heard that Paris Baguette in Palo Alto started selling shaved ice, so we went to try it yesterday. It was rather... disappointing =/ My boyfriend described the experience quite aptly -- "This is what you get when a bakery tries to sell shaved ice." Indeed. 

From the first look, it really looked promising. Lots of fruit, azuki on top, even mochi bits. Yummy, right? 

WRONG. Look at what's wrong in this picture. THE ICE IS WRONG. This is not the shaved ice I was expecting. I was hoping for shaved ice like the one you get from Taiwanese places, where you literally SHAVE snowflakes off the ice, not grind it up like ice-kacang or lame american snowballs =(
Or maybe I'm just pampered....
Ice aside, the strawberry sauce they poured over the ice was a little weird =/ And the melon didn't go well with the strawberry and kiwi, because the melon taste overwhelms the light kiwi taste! 
There was a huge lump of vanilla ice-cream in the middle of the whole ice tower, which was a surprise. Pleasant for some, not so much for us I guess, because it made the whole thing taste pretty random, as if they couldn't decide which style to make it in...
Or maybe we were just affected by our disappointment with the ice =(


Back to eating pastries for us..
*There is another branch of this bakery in Sunnyvale. The Palo Alto branch is newer and bigger. This is also a Korean bakery that makes Japanese-style pastries, just putting it out there. 

Paris Baguette (Palo Alto)

383 University Ave

Palo Alto, CA 94301

(650) 838-0404

Carmel Belle (Carmel-by-the-sea)

Came here for a late lunch after hiking at Big Sur, and it was delicious! It's a small cafe tucked inside an artsy shopping center, but a real gem indeed. It's my second time here so far, and it hasn't disappointed yet. I had a Berkshire Pork sandwich, and the pork was so tender with the right amount of sauce and fat, while the ciabatta bread had the right external crunchiness and internal softness.
My friends had a mushroom sandwich, salmon/half-boiled egg/baguette, cheddar and bacon sandwich, and cheddar and ham sandwich. Everyone found their food very good too, so we were happy patrons =)

Doud Craft Studios

Ocean Ave & San Carlos

Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA 93921

http://www.carmelbelle.com/