Food trucks, Rae's Restaurant, and Borneo Kalimantan Cuisine

Fooding

Santa Monica and SGV

The bottled water addiction has reached epic levels if they have to advertise this...

The Surfer Taco and Okamoto Kitchen.

Pork belly with a rice patty bun. Eh. Great in theory, reality was too greasy, fell apart.

Kai Kai Dumplings. Couldn't find them on Yelp.

Apparenty for good reason. Organic pork, zero flavor, even the skins tasted bland-- like straight flour, not even a good texture.

Santa Monica Well Being Fair at Santa Monica City Hall.

Rae's Restaurant. OG...

OG...

I think all the decor is from 1950-- and hasn't been touched since.

Purely ordinary in execution, but still quite good.

Bacon was actually quite mearty (and salty), french toast slices are actually decently thick.

Oxtail soup.

Mie hokkan.

Laska udang.

Nasi campur. Probably the best dish.

Roti. All the food here was kinda... meh. Decent but nowhere near as awesome as the real thing in SE Asia.

See the Food Republic at VivoCity Mall photo in the back? Yeah, even that is 10x better.

M Juicery and Creamery.

Fancy ice creams. 6-cone mini sampler.

#camerashyellalee looks very confused as to what kind of delicious nom's her mom is eating behind her.

Santa Monica Classic's pre-race expo was the Santa Monica Well Being Expo at Santa Monica City Hall. Kind of a cute little thing, sorta half-formed (aka not really a critical mass of people or interests), but they had a stage with zumba and a few vendors.

Okamoto Kitchen was there-- tried the pork belly bun, which was pretty interesting. Pork belly (char shu, sorta-but-not-really) with cabbage and rice formed/pan fried into patties of "bread." Concept was better than the execution, which was very greasy rice and pork that wasn't a patty, so it kind of slid apart. Meh. What was worse was Kai Kai Dumplings, which did organic pork gyoza... which were flavor-free, including flavorless meat and flavorless, texture-less skins. Truly awful. And more than a buck a dumpling. Ouch.

Late lunch at Rae's Restaurant, one of the OG diners in Santa Monica. It was... truly OG. Interior probably hadn't been touched since the 1950s, same for the menus. The food was very, very solid for a diner, if 100% standard for such a diner. Still, scrambled eggs were quite decent, bacon was unassuming but surprisingly meaty and disappointingly salty, and the french toast slices were just thick enough to feel luxurious.

Dinner with Sophia and friends at Borneo Kalimantan Cuisine that night. So-so Singaporean food (well, possibly Indonesian and Malaysian, although their photos on the wall were mostly from Singapore) in a restaurant just cramped and modern enough to faintly echo Singapore, but a little too modern to evoke any memories of a hawker stall. Not that the food was bad, per se, but it completely lacked the sizzling, hot, authentic feel of proper roti or laska you get standard in that part of the world.

M Juicery and Creamery was right next door. Pretty good higher-end fancy ice cream. Everyone seemed to like it, although I'll be honest-- I prefer Scoops' execution of fancy ice cream, or I prefera more basic style of ice cream a la Fosselman's or Handel's.