Author: jean komatsu
Last saved by: ENU

Lucky 37
2868 Fruitvale @Brookdale, Oakland, CA
http://luckythreeseven.webs.com/ (link to the Facebook page also)
Review date: September 2014

This miniscule shop opened up to offer Filipino take-out food to the neighborhood. By no means is this the kind of full-service restaurant like its nearby competitor Kainbigan. There's a couple of rusty metal tables and rickety patio chairs to sit on, placed outside along the Brookdale St. side, but almost everyone does take-out.

L37 rotates its menu regularly, although some items like lumpia and tocino sausage, and some form of adobo, are always available. They are open from 7a to 7p every day, and are diligent in posting the day's menu before 9a at the latest. 

One of my friends had stopped by but wasn't interested in what's basically steam-table food. She preferred Kainbigan, which is still on our list to try. But I'd noticed that Lucky 37 regularly rotated in an oxtail stew, and as we love oxtails we found this very intriguing. 

I checked regularly on their Facebook page, but couldn't match up our schedule with Lucky's oxtail dish until today. We were taking Inez out for our weekly lunch, and after dropping her off, Lucky 37 was on the way home. We'd just finished up the last of our leftovers the night before, so we could pick up something for today's dinner.

The listed menu was: pork adobo, mixed vegetables in a coconut sauce, lechon sisig, oxtail caldareta, chicken and pork lumpia. When we got there, the pork had turned into chicken adobo, and there was also the option of shrimp lumpia. Oddly, the food is sold not by the pound, but either by the piece (sausage and lumpia) or by bowl size – small or large. There is a distinction between ordering the bowls with rice, or without (cheaper with rice, obviously). We prefer our own rice, as we make it moist and sticky.

They don't give samples on everything, but we could try the lechon sisig. Carlos disliked it; it's basically pork belly in cubes, cooked in a sweet/salty soy sauce (teriyaki style, but the Filipinos use a different kind of soy). He doesn't like fatty pork, so we didn't get any of this.

We didn't think the large bowl looked very large, but it turns out they pack those bowls pretty full. $10 of oxtails ended up feeding us for two meals with the other dishes we got, making this cheaper than cooking at home, if admittedly not as good. The prep was different than we'd expected, a not-very-saucy braise with tomatoes, whole green olives,  slices of red bell pepper, and a nice jolt from spicy chile pepper flakes. Although suffering a bit from being held so long on the steam table (which they keep at a very hot and food-safe 135 degrees), Carlos and I both agreed this was a tasty and cheap way to satisfy that occasional yearning we get for oxtail stew. 

There's nothing difficult about cooking oxtails, but it takes hours to cook — which is not something I enjoy doing when it's 82 degrees outside but 87 degrees inside my kitchen. There are times when it's all about convenience and instant gratification, LOL.

Less successful was the mixed vegetables in coconut sauce. Frozen green beans and fresh turban squash were decent, and the coconut sauce was pure coconut cream so far as I could tell. But they'd dumped a bunch of sugar in it, so it was distractingly sweet. Without the sugar, it would have been a good contrast to the oxtail calderata.

The tocino are fat short links in crisp casings. They're a decent side, tasting like Chinese char siu in ground pork form. Nothing remarkable – there's many sausages we like better – but it was good and again, dirt-cheap.

The lumpia (Filipino version of eggrolls) we chose were the pork – shrimp being an iffy proposition in this kind of bare-bones operation – made in long narrow rolls. Rather to our surprise, they were solidly stuffed with pork, the only vegetable being a bit of shredded carrot. Carlos and I split on this; he said he would have liked more vegetables in it, but I disagreed, saying the Chinese ones are usually so full of filler vegetables they don't even have any meat flavor any longer. Lucky 37 gives you a sweet-hot dipping sauce, which goes pretty well with the rolls. 

Lucky is the Filipino equivalent of a Chinese chop suey dive. Any self-respecting Filipina would turn up her nose and say she (or her mother, or her grandmother – or all three) could do better...and probably could. 

This is food for starving students and the chronically underemployed/underpaid, grabbing food on the run or taking it home to eat in front of the TV. This is 1.5 food at most, a little on the greasy side. 

But despite that, they give an honest value for your dollar. Considering our last disastrous take-out meal from Ly Luck Chinese less than a mile down the street, Lucky 37 comes up a winner in comparison. There was none of the cheap filler ingredients, no evidence of MSG overdose, that Ly Luck throws at its unfortunate customers. I had given Ly Luck a 1.5 star (their noodle dishes are at least edible, and the fried squid is decent). 

But in terms of overall quality of its basic ingredients, Lucky 37 is gourmet in comparison to Ly Luck. Lucky's ingredients are as decent as what you'd buy at its namesake supermarket chain (no relation to L37, Lucky Supermarkets are equivalent to Savemor or Kroger's), whereas Ly Luck must be scraping its raw ingredients off the bottom of the factory floor.

Ly Luck, therefore, falls to a minus -1 star, and Lucky 37 inches to a 1 star. You could do better, but we've done (sadly) much worse.

Two people, take-out, enough food for two dinners (with our own rice): four sausages, two lumpia, one small bowl mixed vegetables, one large bowl oxtail calderata, was a mind-boggling $27. We stuck an extra dollar into the tip jar.