R.I.P.: Nathan’s Hot Dogs, Wapango and Sisley

Victoria Gardens has lost the three above-named restaurants recently. Nathan’s closed a while back in the Food Hall. Wapango and Sisley, two sit-down restaurants, closed in the past week. (Wapango was by Gyu-Kaku and Fleming’s; Sisley was by the AMC.)

Heck, Wapango, a pan-Latin restaurant, only opened in July. You can read my “Restaurant of the Week” piece about them and weep. I never wrote about Sisley but had had one meal at the Italian restaurant and enjoyed it quite a bit. Kept meaning to go back for a special occasion, but you know how it goes.

As for Nathan’s, that was the cruelest blow for yours truly. I ate there a half-dozen times. It was more in the journalist price range. Good dogs, and I liked their fries too.

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Check the spellcheck

Our spellcheck system here was of little help in proofreading Sunday’s column on restaurants. Here are some of the alternate words it suggested:

For taquerias, “daiquiris.”

For Tijuana, “Tujunga.”

For pho, “who.”

For tacos, “togas.”

And for sushi, “Susie.”

This is the same spellcheck that always wants me to substitute “clarinets” for Claremont and “monocular” for Montclair.

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Sunday column preview

In 2008 I ate at a grand total of 100 new-to-me restaurants in the Inland Valley, a personal best, and one I have no intention of trying to top.

Sunday’s column gives a nod to as many of the good ones as I could squeeze in, including a few that never made it as a “Restaurant of the Week,” the inevitable byproduct of averaging two restaurants per week.

For anyone new to the blog who reads Sunday’s column and shows up here, welcome. To find accounts of any particular restaurant, type its name into the search function. If it doesn’t turn up, that means it’s one of the ones I never got around to writing about.

You can also click on the category “Inland Valley Eatin'” to find every piece all at once. Bon appetit!

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Restaurant of the Week: Bright Star Thai Vegan

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Bright Star Thai Vegan Cuisine, 9819 Foothill Blvd. (at Ramona), Rancho Cucamonga

A vegan restaurant in the Inland Valley? Unlikely as it seems, there is one, in an aging strip mall east of Archibald Avenue that also boasts a Korean market. Bright Star opened a few weeks ago and on a recent lunchtime was doing decent business.

Since few Thai dishes use eggs or dairy products, this is essentially a vegetarian place, but they do use soy milk rather than condensed milk in Thai iced tea, which is less sweet than what you’re used to. Bright Star has soups, salads, curries, noodle and rice dishes, and some non-Asian sandwiches.

Our table had two of the lunch specials, garlic soy chicken with mixed vegetables and sweet chili soy fish ($6.95 each), which come with miso soup, salad, steamed brown rice and two dumplings. The faux chicken was indeed chicken-like, the faux fish less so but acceptable. This isn’t precisely my sort of thing, but it wasn’t bad, and you can’t help but feel more virtuous after a vegan meal, which counts for something.

I was impressed that a niche restaurant that would seem better suited to Santa Monica appears to have found a place here, and a multi-ethnic clientele: Over the course of a lunch hour, diners included a half-dozen blacks, a few Asians, one Latino and a white couple besides yours truly. Not cutting into meat must cut across all sorts of boundaries.

(This area has just two other vegetarian restaurants, according to HappyCow’s restaurant guide: Veggie Era, 903 W Foothill Blvd. in Upland, and Veggie and Tea House, 641 Arrow Highway in San Dimas.)

* Update, February 2014: Bright Star is still around, which is even more impressive given that its strip center is largely vacant. I got the garlic soy chicken again for photo purposes. It’s gone up a mere 4 cents in price in six years, to $6.99, although you only get one dumpling now, not two. Still tasty, and the restaurant was doing a good lunch trade.

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Another year, another classic

Happy New Year!

You may recall that last New Year’s, I decided to begin an ambitious book, “Moby-Dick,” a novel that turned out to well repay the hours (and days, and weeks) I devoted to it.

That gave me the idea of starting one long, classic book each Jan. 1, something to lose myself in during the winter months and to constitute a sort of intellectual self-improvement program. What is Jan. 1 for if not for outsized goals?

I was batting around the titles of various complex novels on my shelves, including “Don Quixote” (bought from a sale table at B&N circa 2001, never read) and “Crime and Punishment” (bought after seeing “Match Point,” ditto), before deciding to read a shorter classic book: Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd and Other Stories.”

I’d meant to read this last spring, sometime after finishing “Moby,” but got sidetracked. (The ambition of January gives way to the pragmatism of May.) Besides, given the alarming number of unread books piling up, this year my hope is to read more, but shorter, books, to fool myself into thinking I’m making more progress.

In a way, this choice is cheating, because I’ve spent the past month reading “…And Other Stories” — “Bartleby,” “The Piazza,” etc., including the short novel “Benito Cereno” — and 285 pages later, all that’s left is “Billy Budd,” which is about 95 pages. I’ll report back when I’m done. Since Melville isn’t a quick read, give me two or three weeks.

Anyone want to offer encouragement, or share their own New Year’s goal?

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