New Foodie Destination: Fremont

If someone had told me a few years ago that I would be raving about the culinary scene in Fremont, I would have taken him for a nutcase.

Fremont, if you have never seen it, is a prosaic mess of suburban sprawl, the most Southern Californian feeling place in the Bay Area (note that I only marginally call Fremont the Bay Area. Once you are in Millipede or San Jose, et al, you have left the Bay Area). Wide streets lined with tall date palms, ugly post-war architecture. Each house has a lawn in the front, and almost all business is conducted in strip malls.

Granted there are several neat downtown areas (I can think of three, each the result of smaller towns being eaten up by the expanding Fremont: one of which, Niles, was the movie capital of California before Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin made several films there. Now it is a withering downtown with lots of antique stores, the weakest of Fremont's downtown areas), and lovely hills surrounding the town (I did say that it was a lot like Southern California).

However, the upside of Fremont's lack of charm has been that it was an affordable place for immigrant workers in the Sillycon Valley to settle, and that has resulted in a plethora of good, inexpensive ethnic restaurants (and a really unlikely little place called Pearl's that is a true gem of Bay Area fine dining). I have had outstanding rustic Afghani food, great Indian food, outstanding Korean soft tofu bowls, and so on.

Alright, some of these places might have been in Newark, but I have difficulty telling where one begins and the other ends.

Tonight I reviewed an outstanding little hole in the wall Lebanese restaurant. Not only was the food great, but they offer a decent Lebanese red wine (Cabernet, Cinsault, and Syrah, I think) from the Bekkaa Valley, a fertile area that was once settled by Romans who built magnificent temples and the sort of stuff that Romans generally liked to leave behind.

It is getting to the point where I really look forward to reviewing restaurants in the market area of our Fremont paper. I never got that feeling when I had to go out to San Mateo, which is not really much farther. I just felt that I was driving for miles to eat mediocre food.

But not in Fremont. In fact, if any of you are thinking of doing a food and wine tour of California, you should plan at least one lunch or dinner in Fremont. It is fantastic what is going on there in terms of food.