Baseball & Other Obsessions

The Wok Wiz on Baseball

My friends think Anne Rice had me in mind when she coined the phrase “Accidental Traveler.” Whether I’m heading across the Bay, across the country or across the dreaded ocean, my trips seem to detour off the high road of original intentions. Sharply focused people find this annoying, but I’m far more comfortable with chaos than with things like global positioning software (GPS) - or whatever they call that annoying little voice in rental cars that keeps saying “Error. At your earliest convenience, turn around.” If I wanted to be reminded every time I made a mistake, I’d travel with my mother. My friends also say that I’m the reason for Chinese driver jokes, but that’s another story.

Today, I want to tell you how a trip to a baseball game can easily morph, with the help of butterflies and a few good chefs, into life-changing revelations. I first visited San Antonio to find a man, but not the way you probably think. You see, when I’m not conducting culinary tours or teaching Chinese cooking, I often hang out at the baseball park in San Francisco. In fact, I bought a condo near Willie Mays Plaza because it came with a great parking place. But, I’m getting sidetracked. See how easily that happens?

Back in 1999, the first Chinese baseball prospect in America was playing for the San Antonio Missions in the Los Angeles Dodgers’ farm system. Chin-Feng Chen had a swing as sweet as Barry Bonds’ and he seemed likely to break the hearts of my San Francisco Giants for years to come. As a proud Chinese fan, I wanted to see him when I could still appreciate him, before he made it to the majors and started wearing the colors of the enemy from LA. So I flew to Texas.

In between games, I drove around the hill country looking for butterflies - which I found, no thanks at all to the voice in the GPS. Wildseed Farms, between San Antonio and Fredericksburg, is the largest wild flower farm in the USA, so it attracts a splendid migration of butterflies and hummingbirds. Overcoming a life long paranoia, I let butterflies cover my arms and face with the unbearable lightness of familiarity. I’m not exactly a nature girl, but I asked owner John Thomas to show me which seeds to plant to attract butterflies to my yard so that my grand daughters might delight in them too.

Now, as fate would have it, Chin-Feng never made it to the major leagues for long enough to drink a pot of first-picked Formosan tea. After years in the minors, he returned to the Chinese League in 2005. So, I never got to brag that I saw him back when he was just an unknown minor leaguer. But I’ve been back to San Antonio five times now, to indulge in more serious pursuits.

Once I just drove around for a week eating smokehouse barbecue in hard-to-pronounce Texas hill country towns like Llano, Lockhart and Luling, the only places I’ve ever found that make beef brisket better than we Chinese do. On another trip I ate nothing but Mexican cuisine in San Antonio cafés like Blanca Aldaco’s and the Barrios-Trevino family’s Los Barrios. San Antonio has the best Hispanic culinary scene I‘ve found. Admittedly whenever I went looking for the best Mexican restaurants in Los Angeles, I only found how easy it is to get lost in LA. I blame the Dodgers.

My point - I bet you thought I lost it - is that baseball is a delicious, complex American tradition that deserves far better culinary accompaniments than hot dogs and nachos with industrially simulated cheese. Maybe not in Los Angeles, but certainly in San Francisco. Unlike LA, our ballpark is within easy walking distance to some wonderful dining. I wouldn’t have bought a condo to be near hot dog stands. And there’s no time better to enjoy these places than the off-season, when you don’t have to compete with 40,000 fans for a good table.