The name makes it sound like a yogurt place. But Toppings Tree in Santa Clara is one of a handful of Filipino restaurants that have sprung up in the South Bay. Curiously, Filipino food makes up a mere 1 percent of California’s restaurant industry, although Filipinos are the second-highest Asian population in the country. This lack of Filipino restaurants remains a mystery. Some say that Filipinos prefer to eat at home.
Articles by Kristine Bautista
The Willow Glen place is the brainchild of Craig Guynes, whose knack for all things seafood stems from a childhood in the Chesapeake Bay, “spending hours cracking blue crab and watching the Redskins lose,” he recounted with a smile. For years, to satisfy his personal cravings, he had been shipping the blue crab to California. Blue crab, of course, is on the menu, along with Dungeness, snow, king and stone, all at market price.
Finding a new type of cuisine is equivalent to finding a new adult playground. There is rapture involved in the pursuit of nondescript hole-in-the-wall places with uncharted taste profiles. This exploratory spree pays off when one discovers a dish whose flavors hit the tongue like fireworks.
A restaurant in downtown Los Altos that is starting to garner some legitimate buzz. Its cottage setting is reminiscent of a visit to Grandma’s: impossibly clean, surprises for the children and collective sighs of relief from the parents.
Mochi ice cream is a fusion dessert that binds the traditional Japanese dessert—mochi (rice cake)—with the quintessential American dessert—ice cream. Its roots can be traced to Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, where feisty Japanese pastry chef Frances Hashimoto invented, distributed and later marketed the wrapped ice cream balls to big-name American supermarkets.
