What I Ate: January 16, 2009 (In-N-Out; Merit Vegetarian)

Tina and I went to In-N-Out for lunch. I got a Double-Double, and we shared fries and a Coke.

For dinner we went to Merit Vegetarian (548 Lawrence Expy, Sunnyvale, CA‎ - (408) 245-8988) which serves vegetarian Asian cuisine. We started with a Red Bean Smoothie (made with red mung beans, sugar, and sweetened condensed milk blended with ice) which was excellent. It was so good, in fact, that we ordered another one to go at the end of our meal.

For an appetizer we ordered Fresh Spring Rolls, but they were out. So, I got the fried Imperial Rolls instead. The flavor was good, but Tina didn't like the texture of the inside (a little mushy and gritty).

We had one of their specialty dishes: Sauteed Garlic Beef. The texture of the fried gluten approximated chicken better than beef and many of the pieces were too thin to be fried so long so they were hard through out. We were hoping that the "beef" would have been cooked with some sauce. (I understand that the frying is important for getting texture, but it would have been nice to actually have it sautéed after) Neither of us liked the dish to start with, but by the end of the meal I had grown to enjoy it and kept eating more and more of it. (The garlic flavor was great.)

We also ordered Spicy Garlic Green Beans which had a great sweet and spicy sauce. One of the problems was that the sauce didn't coat the beans very well, so a lot of the beans weren't flavorful. We ended up taking a bite of the beans and then either using the bean curd in the dish or the rice to sop up some extra sauce to get some more flavor.

Special Rice Claypot was another specialty that they have that had a lot of flavor. It had tofu, soy "chicken", mushroom, bean thread, onion and ginger that we mixed into the rice. The rice is definitely something to order, but next time we'll try a different set of dishes.