Update

After a long hiatus I've decided to restart Duck Fat. I stopped posting because my life got very busy for a while. Now that things have calmed down, I've decided to start posting again but with a bit of a different purpose. We've just about run out of places to try, and really, restaurant reviews kind of suck. It's not like I've forgotten any of these places, so the blog's value as a record for family and friends to reference is limited. From here on out, the focus will be to record and document what we, the Babb's, cook and eat and how we get it all done. Consider it the digital version of the family cookbook.

Tropical Latin Food

Tropical Latin Food is located at the eastern end of downtown, right around where the car lots and chronic inebriates start.


The food they serve is perhaps best described as Caribbean comfort food. The owners are Puerto Rican and Dominican, so those two places have the strongest representation. It's a simple set up, basically a counter with a hot table and a few tables.


The menu changes regularly but some of the stuff you can always expect are various roasted meats such as pork and chicken, and some items such as stewed ox tails, pork ribs, fried plantains, and beans and rice in multiple forms. On Saturdays they have roasted goat.


The portions are huge and everything we've tried there has been excellent, simple but delicious.

The Sears Mall Food Court (No, Really)

We wanted to go check out a pet store at the Sears Mall (Corner of New Seward Hwy. and Northern Lights). This is an older mall and is perhaps not the most bustling or refined but the small food court was almost impressive.


The food court, with four different vendors, was the closest thing I've seen to the hawker stalls in Singapore since Honolulu's Chinatown. There was:

Vietnamese
Korean + Japanese
Thai
Chinese

Each stall was independently owned and the owner/operators actually knew what they were doing. Nothing was outstanding, but everything passed the muster. It was kind of neat to see a mall that isn't dominated by pizza chains and the like. I'd much rather have to choose between king crab green curry and bulgogi than a whopper and a big mac.


If you are in Midtown and are looking for a good, fast, cheap lunch don't be afraid to brave the Sears Mall.

Mandarin Kitchen: Sunday Dim Sum

I don't like dim sum because of the food. I like going for dim sum because of the spectacle. I like the crowds, the carts, and the pots of tea.

While Charlie's Bakery has excellent dim sum in terms of food quality, it is not the fun, festive time I enjoy. Ordering from at a counter just isn't the same thing as pointing at a steaming basket of something only vaguely familiar.


Mandarin Kitchen has recently opened in what was an "Asian" restaurant in the strip mall behind City Diner, on the corner of Benson and Minnesota. This is the first time I have seen dim sum done proper with the carts of food in Anchorage, so I have to recommend it.


The selection wasn't great but there was many of the standards you usually see, and they even had chicken feet. I think they can be forgiven this as they have just opened recently and the time we were there they were mostly empty (it was late for Sunday dim sum).

Overall, the food was acceptable and the atmosphere is right. Once they get a decent crowd coming in regularly I think they will up their game.

Pho Lena

I'd driven past Pho Lena dozens of times and always thought I had to get in there to check it out. It's a small, stand alone family restaurant located a block down Spenard Avenue from the REI/Tidal Wave strip mall.


It had all the right ingredients for a great dining experience: housed in an old, run down shack in a not quite gentrified part of town and usually busy. I finally made it in a couple months ago and I've been back a half dozen times since. Pho Lena may be my new favorite restaurant.


Pho Lena is a Laotian restaurant with a sprawling menu. The way I describe Laotian food is that it is northeastern Thai food with some Vietnamese and French influences that is the result of the years Laos was a French colony. You have thai curries, but you also have clear soups and baguettes with pate. It's fairly ecclectic, and the menu reflects that ranging complexity. I actually think they could shorten the down a bit.


My favorite item on the menu is their Lao style BBQ wings. It is the closest thing I've seen to good Southeast Asian street food in the US. The wings are and brassy and are a step above the neutered drummettes with Frank's Hot Sauce most other restaurants serve.


The curries are outstanding. All the appetizers are made in house and I've tried them all and would order any of them again. The stuffed wings are especially nice, as are the banh mi (those bagette sandwiches we can thank the French for). Their Pho can go toe to toe with any other I've tried in Anchorage.


Also pictured here are the fried spicy pork spare ribs, which are really pan fried with a bunch of fresh green beans and Thai eggplant. And please note the sticky rice. This is my favorite type of rice, common to northern Thailand and Laos but rarely available elsewhere. Pho Lena is the only place I've seen it available around town. That alone is reason enough for me to come back.

Pho Lena has delicious, interesting, authentic food for low prices. The little shack on Spenard Avenue has become my fall back setting for Anchorage dining.

Triple D Farms

We drove out to Wasilla today to visit Triple D Farms. Triple D is a small family run poultry farm that raises a range of poultry, selling chicks, whole birds, and poultry products. The 'farm' is in the suburbs of Wasilla (a bit of an oxymoron as Wasilla is all suburb) and it wasn't nearly as agricultural as I expected. There was a pen of turkeys near the front of the compound (with a few guniea hens thrown in) awaiting their Thanksgiving Day fate and a flock of ducks waddling around the back. It's a large lot with a small house, a few pens, some open pecking space, and an abbatoir.

Here's their website with all their prices:

For sale, they had half turkeys, smoked turkey parts, whole chickens, and fresh eggs. If you catch them at the right time of year they will also have several types of fresh ducks, smoked ducks, duck and goose eggs, whole geese, guniea hens, pheasant, quail, and more. Triple D Farms also sells Matanuska Creamery ice cream (we bought chocolate and blueberry, $4/pint, $8/half gallon). Triple D Farms also carries Van Wyke pork by the quarter, half, full, and whole (a couple sizes) pig. (Van Wyke is the pork farmer out in Kenny Lake I wrote about last February.)


The birds you buy experience all stages of their life in the uncrowded, clean setting of the owners' property and the folks themselves have the right attitude for this sort of thing. Currently, you have to drive out to Wasilla to buy their stuff. I asked if there was any chance of New Sagaya's or another local food place carrying their birds, but she said no.

The reason is they would have to become certified by the USDA as a processing facility, an ordeal that would cost at least a million bucks. This is one of the ways large ag corporations are able to keep small, local producers out of the market, by pressuring the USDA to require somebody like Triple D to have an office and cleaning station for their own USDA inspector. I'd like to see this get challenged in court. Is there a bored lawyer in the house?


Triple D Farms is also known as the place where Sarah Palin was interviewed while the owner slaughtered turkeys in the background.

You can't make this shit up.

Pinnacle Mountain Lodge

We were driving back to Anchorage on the Glenn Highway after a sunny weekend of not catching fish on the Klutina River when we decided to stop and walk Goatboy for a bit. We were in a caravan with my mom's RV so we needed to find a place that is relatively easy to pull on and off of but that would still be interesting. We pulled into the Pinnacle Mountain Lodge mostly because they had a long, linear driveway and a collection of what I guess might be called tractor art.


The lodge is located about 20 miles east of Palmer, in a townsite called Chickaloon. Once part of the Mat-Su agricultural region, not much happens in Chickaloon nowadays and that is sort of the case with this lodge. It's quiet, out of the way, and easily overlooked but I think the owners prefer that.


Besides the tractor art, there was also all sorts of animals walking around: goats, alpacas, llamas, ducks, and geese. Inside, on the specials board, was an announcement that today one of the specials was a goat burger. Goat is a common meat in most parts of the world, but I rarely see it outside of some specific neighborhoods in Honolulu and the Southwest. I asked the lodge owner where her goat was from and she pointed out the window. It turns out this lodge produces much of the food they sell, including the goat, pork and bacon, poultry, and eggs. They also buy all their seasonal produce from people who live up the road from the lodge.


The burger was really good, and the bacon was definitly not mass-produced. They also bake excellent pies (we tried the key lime), and if you get there early they sell both chicken and duck eggs by the dozen, but they sell out quick. Everything far exceeded my expectations and I always like to frequent local food sources, and these folks seemed well connected and deliberate about what they are doing.


If you are heading out the Glenn Highway be sure to stop here. Next time I'm going to order breakfast; their biggest sellers is a hashbrown scramble called "The Valley Trash".