In Fremont, kabobs call
When I first moved to San Francisco, brighteyed and eager, I used to pester local friends about where I could find certain kinds of cuisine. Is there any really great Indian food (besides Shalimar)? What’s Afghan food like? Can you get it in S.F.?
The responses were often variations on the same answer: “There are a few places, but the good stuff is in Fremont.”
Fremont. Always Fremont. And yet, in the 17 years I’ve lived in the Bay Area, I think I’ve been there four times, including twice this month. Having promised in an earlier installment of this column that I’d be giving the greater Bay Area its proper due, I figure I should begin to make good on my word.
One of the people who has frequently sung Fremont’s praises is my friend Joe, an Afghan American lawyer who now lives in New York but still has family in the Bay Area. I asked him to connect me to any local relatives who might know what’s good in Fremont, and within a few minutes, he texted me a list of six places that his cousins had enthusiastically recommended for Afghan food in San Carlos, Oakland, Pleasanton and Fremont. They made a point of singling out De Afghanan in Fremont as their favorite.
There’s actually a branch of De Afghanan right here in San Francisco. On the Afghan tip, there’s also Helmand Palace on Van Ness, which serves a similar array of dishes in a more upmarket setting. If you live in the city and you’ve never tried mantoo (slippery meat dumplings topped with yogurt and meat sauce), or kado borani (tender roasted pumpkin with dried mint), or quabili pallow (the quintessential Afghan rice and lamb pilaf; more on this later), go tonight.
But as for me, I had my heart set on Fremont.
There are, in fact, two De Afghanan operations next to one another on the northern end of Fremont Boulevard: the itty-bitty Kabob House and — here comes my favorite nondescriptive descriptor — a “sit-down” restaurant. The former is bare-bones: just a grill, a small range, a griddle, a cash register and an abbreviated menu. Contrary to the above distinction, you can sit down here too, provided you score one of the two cramped tables inside or the lone two-top outside.
If, like me, you’ve made a 45-minute trip from the city to have lunch in Fremont, you’ll be forgiven for ordering liberally. But unless you’ve come in a group of four or five, be assured that you will not finish your food. An order of bolani kachaloo — a potato-filled griddle-fried flatbread — comes cut into at least a dozen coaster-size pieces. The bread itself recalls a Chinese pancake, bubbly and sandy to the touch, crisp and chewy. The menu suggests that the filling is a mixture of potato and green onion, but the latter is scant and barely detectable. Overall, it’s pretty flavorless, save for the lightly vegetal taste of boiled potato, but I find it to be a perfectly suitable conveyance for large quantities of yogurt and thick house-made cilantro chutney.
Kabobs come in four varieties: chicken, beef, lamb and chaplee — a thin beef patty bound with egg and seasoned lightly with
chile flake and scallion. I like the chaplee; it’s deeply browned on both sides but floppy-pliable and not at all dry. But the strongest case for driving all the way to Fremont for kabobs comes in the form of lamb. The knobby chunks of meat aren’t much to look at, but they’re succulent and slathered in a peppery herb paste. All kabob plates come with a fluffy hillock of basmati rice and a side of damp potato-and-chickpea salad that’s heavy on cilantro and pleasantly sour. You also get a scoop of fairly anonymous cucumber-and-tomato salad and a few squares of Afghan bread, dimpled and toasty.
The diner next to me, man-spreading in spite of the restaurant’s tight quarters, groaned pleasurably with every other bite of chaplee. At one point, he called the cook over and asked for more ghore angoor. As the cook handed him a spice shaker of sumac, the diner pleaded with him to open a branch in San Jose.
The kabobs are definitely better than the ones at the De Afghanan in San Francisco — there’s something inimitable about dining in a little nook just a few feet from the grill.
Am I advocating you make the trip to Fremont? I want you to, yes. While you’re in town, stop at Maiwand Market, another local culinary landmark, for a loaf of Afghan bread the size of a small quilt, fresh out of the oven for 2 bucks. But, truth be told, it’s a pretty mundane suburb. Despite what I’d read, there was no “Little Kabul” to speak of — no spoofy Afghan equivalent of Chinatown or Little Italy, at least.
As a sort of self-check, I returned the next night for a lengthier meal at the sit-down De Afghanan with an acquaintance of Joe’s, another first-generation Afghan American who lives nearby in Union City. We shared kabobs, roasted eggplant that teetered on the precipice of falling apart into mush, squash-filled bolani — superior, I think, to the potato version — and a plate of quabili pallow. Meanwhile, I asked her impossible and inane questions. I wondered how it is that so many Afghan immigrants came to live in Fremont, of all places. She didn’t know what had brought her family, or others, to the area. It’s just like any community, right? Someone moved here and liked it, relatives followed and then others.
As chance would have it, about a week later, I found myself having dinner with Joe at his parents’ house. Joe’s mom had prepared her recipe for quabili pallow and it was as outstanding as ever — a gargantuan platter of ethereal, beautifully perfumed rice and forktender lamb, bedecked with copious sweet raisins and carrots. My wife scooped me a small serving from the shared dish. Mom interceded, “No, Joe, help her. Do it the Afghan way.” In other words, Joe, heap much, much more onto my plate. Thanks.
I refuse to declare Joe’s mom’s quabili pallow as more or less “authentic” than the version at De Afghanan, but I will say without hesitation that hers was far superior, lighter, more flavorful. After we ate, I caught Joe up about my meals, and he immediately began to list all the various quibbles he had with De Afghanan and other Afghan spots, almost apologizing for the underseasoned bolani, the use of leeks instead of scallions (attributed to laziness) and a number of other perceived mistakes I hadn’t even noticed. But, Joe added, his family still goes to the restaurant. They still love it. Nitpicking the food is an affirmation of its existence. And even if I didn’t understand all his gripes, or how that dude could proclaim his love for the food while blasting it with sumac, at least I’d been there to see it for myself. I nodded my head as I listened.
Why do communities form around seemingly random, run-of-the-mill suburbs? Because we like to be around people who will hear and understand that it sucks when a restaurant puts too much ice in the doogh or waters down the chutney, and why the lamb is good at one place but the mantoo is better at another. Why do I think it’s worth visiting these places? Because you’ll be one step closer to understanding the conversation. Besides, how else are we going to finish all this food?