Mangosteen, Flavor of Vietnam restaurant review

Tonight, I might have had one of the best pieces of fish in my life. My wife and I are spending Valentine’s in San Francisco and we’re staying an older place called the Embassy Hotel. Usually our plan is the Marine Memorial but they were sold out this weekend and I didn’t plan ahead well enough. The hotel is a bit aged, you can see by the furniture that they did have a hay day but have since dropped down a bit in the star power. One thing I like about the hotel, it’s located in the middle of little Saigon, an area that I’ve wanted to check out for a while with a ton of restaurants that are enough off the regular tourist beat that their prices are a bit lower.

Walking around tonight, we picked a place called Mangosteen, they had a bunch of very positive reviews on City Beat on the wall so we went in to see what it was all about and I ordered a spicy bass dish and Heather ordered a seafood curry pot. This place breaks away from the rest of the pack in tastiness and the prices were very reasonable. We’re going to have to come back and try out more menu. With 2 beers the bill came out to 33 bucks and we were barely able to finish it.

Tomorrow, we’re going to hang out with one of my old military buddies, “Chains”, the guy who got me into computers, roller hockey and punk music.

Work has been amazingly brain draining, 600 or so people, it takes a lot of effort to keep up and make it look good. The work is paying off but it’s a never ending job, and no matter how well you do, there are days were everything seems to fall apart. Well little things that don’t matter fall apart and when you’re running that fast, you don’t have the time to slow down.

The Shout House

Last Friday we went out to The Shout House with Josh and Brikkie. Brikkie’s getting out of the Navy and Josh invited us and several of their other friends to go an celebrate. If you haven’t heard of The Shout House, it’s a “dueling piano” bar, I’ve been to a few piano bars in my time but going into the Shout House was on another level altogether.

The premise of the place is this, someone requests a song by writing it down on a piece of paper along with a tip, the piano player that does the song best plays it using the other guy as back up and they get the crowd heavily involved. They call up people to sing, if they don’t see you singing, you get called out. It’s actually a lot more involved then that, the piano players are traded off every hour, during the trade off, the off going players play backup for a couple of songs with the drums and a bass guitar. Occasionally throughout the night, they call all of the wait staff to come up and do choreographed dances, the bartenders dance on the bar and if it’s your birthday, you can expect them to sing you happy birth day and make up a dirty song in your honor.

Definitely not a politically correct place, leave your politically correctness at the door and be prepared to rock your socks off. They did the favorite oldies but they also did songs like Akon’s “Shake That”, which turned out surprisingly good considering it was sung by a middle aged bald white guy. They also did Baby Got Back in where they called all of the women on the stage and my wife showed that the could shake it with the best. Good times.


(here's that picture)

If you want an unforgettable night in San Diego that is unlike anything you can imagine, The Shout House is the place for you. I would count last Friday night as one of the most fun in my life.

“You picked a fine time to leave me Lucile….”, after going, you’ll know the rest too.