Just a quick, rather sad post for today. At around 10am this morning, “FOY” Mar sent me an Instagram message of a post mentioning that El Borrego was closing. Needless to say, I didn’t see this one coming. And in the comments of that post El Borrego confirmed this.
And soon after Junichi also mentioned this in the comments of my last post on El Borrego. You can see the post on El Borrego’s Instagram account as well.
It’s a sad day indeed, since I first started visiting back in 2006…..I kinda feel bad for not visiting as often as I should have!
Man, so many places that have been opened for decades are now closing……
 The portion of rice was quite large there was corn and edamame scattered about the hot plate. The beef, supposedly four ounces was topped with a small scoop of butter, which I thought wasn’t necessary.
 
 The bread was very crusty…it was indeed quite fresh, though it didn’t hold up real well because there was a bit too much mayo. The menu said the banh mi has pate in it; but I could not find, nor taste any. There was a good amount of pork, in chunks, fairly chewy, but decently savory-sweet-salty.
 I had noticed that it was toasted, which was a clue that the folks here weren’t using Shokupan, the classic Japanese Milk Bread; a must for a egg salad sando, which this was definitely not. I missed the light, fluffy texture and the slight sweetness that the proper bread brings to the sando.
 
And while the rice was on the dry side and the sauce for the chicken was a bit heavy in the oil department, this was pretty good overall. The skin while a bit on the chewy side had nice flavor and as a while the chicken had been nicely poached as the flesh was quite tender and there were hints of winey-gingery-“fowlness”. One positive for having a rather oil heavy sauce was that it clung nicely to the chicken.
 I will say upfront that my favorite item were the fries, which had been dusted and were perfectly seasoned and still crisp after the 15 minutes drive home.
 The rice was on the drier, harder end of the scale. I was asked if I wanted “spicy” sauce with my lunch and I said yes, but I think they forgot it. It’s ok, I’ll leave that to the “soft” opening.
 
 The “pot stickers” were like a very bland, chewy, fried mandu. This was not terrible; very fast-casual in nature, though not my kind of thing.
 This was interesting as in terms of flavor, it seemed to lack the sour vinegar tones. Though, I had to remind myself, when reading tomes like 
 Anyway, in terms of the dish, the beef was really tough, and quite “metallic” in flavor. There wasn’t enough tomatoes to add a nice acidity to the dish. As for the papas fritas….well, I had to “dig” to find them. There were a few quite dry pieces of potato provided. In terms of flavor, this was slightly salty, lacking in the sour tones, with metallic tones. The rice was fine, though also on the dry side.
