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Food

Luke Tsai's Top 2024 Meals That He Can’t Wait to Have Again This Year

Molly Wu
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This year I really wanted to get back to exploring the entirety of the Bay Area food scene in a more robust and deliberate way — its creative pop-ups; its distant, outer-suburban enclaves; and, especially, its underappreciated late-night haunts.

The good news? The scene is just as delicious and joyous as ever. Here are a few of my faves.

 – Luke Tsai, Food Editor, KQED Arts & Culture

Surti egg gotala at Egglicious India

The egg gotala is a star of Egglicious’s egg-centric menu. (Luke Tsai/KQED)

I was especially amazed by the Surti egg gotala, a kind of thick curry topped with both a runny-yolked fried egg and a couple of hard-boiled eggs grated into coarse white shavings that resembled shredded mozzarella cheese. Scooped up with fluffy pav rolls, it was the most flavorful three-egg plate I’d eaten in years.

 

Garlic butter crab at A-One Kitchen

A-One Kitchen garlic butter Dungeness crabs in the Bay. (Luke Tsai/KQED)

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Dino beef rib at Fikscue

A tray with fried rice, smoked brisket, a dino beef rib bone and jalapeño-cheese beef sausage is seen at Fikscue Craft BBQ in Alameda on August 4, 2024. Husband-and-wife team Fik and Reka Saleh opened Fikscue as a pop-up in 2020 before they began serving Texas-style barbecue and Indonesian dishes from their current brick-and-mortar restaurant in Alameda last November. (Marissa Leshnov for KQED)

I still daydream about the gigantic dino beef rib, which was so tender and fatty that it wobbled obscenely each time I nudged the meat with my fork. But the genius of Fikscue is how well the barbecue goes with all of the Indonesian side dishes — the peanut slaw, creamy kale curry and smoke-kissed nasi goreng fried rice.

 

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