Here is my penultimate restaurant report from our trip to Southern California in December. It was not our penultimate meal—that, unfortunately, was our less-than-great sushi meal at Koi—but it was one of our better meals, even if it took us deeper into Orange County, to Costa Mesa. (I’m still in denial that on our trips to L.A we are now based in Orange County.) Izakaya Hachi does have a Torrance location as well but the Costa Mesa branch is an easier drive from Seal Beach on a week night. It was a rainy week night, as it happens and so we were in the mood for some good izakaya food when we arrived. Luckily, Hachi did not disappoint. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Japanese Cuisine
Itton Ramen (Bloomington, MN)
I recently got a tip from a reader about a new’ish ramen place in Bloomington. Ramen is big in our family and so we were glad of the news. While there is good ramen to be had in Minneapolis and St. Paul, it’s would be very nice to have some a bit closer to us. And so on Saturday we showed up at Itton Ramen with a couple of the friends we often eat out with. As I also like to support small restaurants, I would love to tell you that we found it to be an unsung gem. But, alas, that was not our experience. While the meal, on the whole, was not bad per se, it was more than a little underwhelming on most counts. Herewith, the details. Continue reading
Koi (Seal Beach, CA, December 2022)
Only a few more reports to go from our Southern California trip in December. We ate sushi at Nozomi in Torrance the day after we arrived and we ate sushi at Koi in Seal Beach two days before we left. One meal was a little more expensive than the other and one meal was not as good as the other, by some distance. Alas, the more expensive meal was the less good meal and that meal was this dinner at Koi. It was not bad per se—and, again, it was far better than anything available in Minnesota—but we were left wishing we’d just gone back to Nozomi for one more meal. Continue reading
Sushi Nozomi III (Torrance, Ca, December 2022)
Lunch at Sushi Nozomi was supposed to be our first meal in Los Angeles this December, to be eaten on our way from LAX to Seal Beach. But Sun Country screwed us over and we ended up eating dim sum instead at the new Torrance outpost of Lunasia (a meal that was good but not as good as I’d expected it might be). Nozomi is an altogether more reliable prospect though and I am pleased to report that our eventual meal there—lunch the next day—was just as good as we’d hoped it would be. The price, however, was not what we’d hoped/expected it would be—more on this below. But first let’s get to the good stuff. Continue reading
Josui Ramen (Torrance, CA, December 2022)
Back to Southern California, back to the South Bay, back to ramen. As I’ve noted before, when my mother-in-law moved from Koreatown to Seal Beach, we lost easy access to the best Korean food in the United States but gained easier access to what is probably the most extensive Japanese restaurant scene in the US in Torrance, Gardena and environs. Japanese cuisine is probably our family’s easiest call when eating out all together: whether it’s sushi, ramen, or izakaya food, the boys are always into it and it’s easy to find things that everyone enjoys. Consequently, now that we are 20 minutes from Torrance and Gardena, we eat Japanese food a lot on our visits to Southern California. Indeed, on this trip it was the cuisine we ate out most. This visit to Josui Ramen in Torrance was not the first of those outings but it’s the one I’m reporting on first. Continue reading
A Farewell to Kiriko (Los Angeles, June 2022)
My penultimate meal report from our Los Angeles trip in June is of what was probably my favourite meal of the trip, and definitely the most melancholy. Favourite because, well, sushi and particularly the lunch sushi omakase at Kiriko has always been excellent (see here and here). Melancholy because a few minutes after finishing and pledging to once again start eating regularly at Kiriko on our Los Angeles trips we discovered that they were only two weeks away from closing for good. We kicked ourselves for our years of neglect—though I should add they did not close due to lack of business; rather, due to exhaustion borne out of the stresses of the pandemic. Well, as sad as we are to see Kiriko go and to know we won’t be able to eat there again, it was a wonderful last meal. That’s something. Continue reading
Hakata Ikkousha Ramen (Los Angeles, June 2022)
Here is a quick report on a quick meal on our Los Angeles trip in June. I’ve noted before that my mother-in-law’s move to Seal Beach a few years ago has meant a major adjustment to our Los Angeles life. We are no longer in the heart of Koreatown, no longer a short hop to Thai Town—and quite a bit further away from the San Gabriel Valley. There are, of course, compensations. These include proximity to the beautiful and numerous beaches of the South Bay; and from a food standpoint, we are now much closer to Artesia for Indian food and, above all, much closer to Torrance and Gardena for Japanese food. As a result, our Japanese food intake has risen sharply on recent trips. On our previous trip we enjoyed lunch at Jidaiya Ramen in Gardena; here now is an account of another ramen meal just a little further away on Western Ave. in Torrance. Continue reading
Kanpachi (Los Angeles, June 2022)
My meal reports from our trip to Los Angeles in June began with the first of two dim sum meals. Here now is my second report, on the first of two sushi meals. In my write-up of our dinner at Sushi Takeda in the winter I’d noted that on our next trip we were unlikely to go out to another expensive sushi dinner, given the escalating prices of omakases at the high end. And we stuck to that sort of resolution on this trip. For one thing, we only went out to sushi lunches, not dinners, and for another, we only ate the set lunch omakase specials at the places we went to. The first of these places is an unheralded restaurant in Gardena, the kind that does not show up on lists of the best sushi bars in Los Angeles: Kanpachi. It was a satisfying lunch anyway. Continue reading
Sakura II (St. Paul, MN)
Sakura was the last restaurant I ate at before the pandemic closures began in March 2020. I stopped in for lunch by myself, sat at the bar and had an enjoyable meal of not-exceptional but entirely acceptable sushi. That may sound like damning with faint praise but in Minnesota it’s actually saying a lot. Thanks to the pandemic, it took a little over two years for me to go back and this time I went with the family. In the interim they’ve stopped lunch service and are now only open for dinner. Our plan had actually been to eat dinner that Sunday at Kyatchi’s St. Paul location but they closed unexpectedly for a few days for Covid-related reasons. Our kids had been promised Japanese food and so we pivoted to Sakura. I am glad to report that it didn’t disappoint on this occasion either. Continue reading
Sushi Takeda (Los Angeles, December 2021)
Here finally is my last meal report from our trip to Southern California in late-December. Somewhat improbably, I have wrapped up all these reports in less than two months from the end of the trip (you can find all the others here). We had a lot of good restaurant food on this trip but this dinner, eaten on our penultimate night, may have been the true highlight. In this I suppose it follows the pattern of most of our recent trips to Los Angeles: we typically eat one expensive sushi meal as the splurge on the trip. After this trip, however, I’m not sure that this will always be the norm for us going forward. This is not because our dinner at Sushi Takeda was bad; far from it—it was in fact excellent. But the rapidly intensifying price race in the high end of the sushi market in Los Angeles makes it unlikely we’ll be able to continue to partake of it. Continue reading
Jidaiya Ramen (Los Angeles, December 2021)
With this report I come to the end of our first week of eating in Los Angeles. No, there wasn’t an entire second week of eating: only three more restaurant meals after this one. This, our seventh meal out, took us back to the scene of the first. Jidaiya Ramen is, you see, located in the same strip mall in Gardena as Shin-Sen-Gumi Yakitori. Indeed, while leaving Shin-Sen-Gumi after lunch that Monday we’d noticed people eating outside Jidaiya as well and that is a big reason why we picked it as the scene of an early lunch on our way to wander around the Manhattan Beach pier. Things didn’t go quite according to plan. Despite it being a bright, sunny day they told us they weren’t going to be setting the outside tables up as they were expecting to be too busy to be able to staff both the inside and the outside. But we’d got there right after opening and there was no one else there yet and so we decided to make a quick lunch of it indoors anyway even though they too were not checking vaccination confirmations. Continue reading
Shin-Sen-Gumi Yakitori (Los Angeles, December 2021)
We got back from Los Angeles about 10 days ago. Given how maniacally we ate out while there, we’ve been taking a break from eating out since we go back. We’ll probably get back on the horse next weekend. Until then I’ll be posting more meal reports from the Los Angeles trip. Unlike from trips past—where I have posted reports 6 months to a year after the meals were eaten—I’m hoping that this time I’ll be done with all of them before we get too far into February. Here now is the 4th report of the 10 meals we ate out. It is, as it happens, an account of our very first restaurant meal on the trip: at Shin-Sen-Gumi Yakitori in Gardena. Continue reading
Sushi Nozomi II (Los Angeles, December 2021)
If dim sum is one of things we most look forward to eating in Los Angeles, so is sushi. My views on Minnesota sushi being just about as beloved as my views on Minnesota dim sum, I will say no more about that. I will instead only reiterate that it is very easy to find good sushi all over Los Angeles county—you don’t need to go to the temples of sushi in order to eat very good fish served atop very good rice. And if you’re in Torrance one of the best choices for that combination is Sushi Nozomi. I’ve previously reported on a meal eaten there six and a half years ago, a bit on the run on the way to the Long Beach Aquarium. We stopped in again on this trip—Torrance being much closer to our new base of operations in Seal Beach than to our previous in Koreatown—and this meal was even better. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Red (Madison, Wisconsin)
And so I finally come to the end of my meal reports from our trip to Madison in August. I know it will be hard for you all to face the coming weekends without the succour of these brief reviews but somehow you will have to manage.
As I’ve noted in my other reports, we experienced variable weather in our three days in Madison, ranging from the sunny and extremely hot to the extremely rainy. Somehow, this only impacted one of our meals (we ate breakfasts in our hotel room). We managed outdoor dinner on the first night (at Strings Ramen), outdoor lunch and dinner on the second day (at Bandung and Ian’s Pizza) and lunch on the third day (at Settle Down) but there was no hope of eating out on the third evening. The rain was torrential and it was unrelenting. As we were unwilling to eat in with an unvaccinated child in tow it had to be takeout then. How did it end up being sushi and what was it like? Read on. Continue reading
Saji-Ya (St. Paul, MN)
My last dine-in meal before the pandemic closures first hit Minnesota in March 2020 was eaten at the sushi bar at Sakura in St. Paul. That meal surprised me by being completely decent—my history with sushi in the Twin Cities, you see, has been less than inspiring (see my accounts of meals at places like Kado no Mise, Sushi Fix and Origami which have all been or are local critical darlings). It wasn’t the case that I found the sushi at Sakura to be of a very high quality but that it was all fine! Fine is good. At the time a number of people told me I needed to also get to Saji-Ya. And then the plague intervened. A year and a half later, I’ve finally made it there. We had a family dinner on their patio last Saturday and once again the experience was far better than I’d feared it would be. I know this sounds like damning with very faint praise but we enjoyed the meal on the whole. Continue reading
Strings Ramen (Madison, Wisconsin)
Here begins my series of reports on our meals in Madison a few weeks ago.
As I said last week, our trip to Madison was in many ways an inverse of our trip to Kansas City in July. The earlier trip was centered on the eating of barbecue and we didn’t find Kansas City to be so very compelling as a family destination beyond that. Madison on the other hand didn’t hold very particular food significance for us but there was a lot of outdoor stuff for us to do or there would have been (even more) if not for the weather. However, armed with recommendations from friends who know the city very well and some people who’ve lived there a while, we ate quite well anyway. That said, the list of places we ate at might possibly strike some people as surprising and perhaps not in line with what comes to mind when you think of food in Wisconsin. For example, our first meal there—a few hours after arrival—comprised ramen, at Strings Ramen, a hop, skip and a jump from our hotel. Continue reading
Pandemic Takeout 18: More Ramen from Bull’s Horn (Minneapolis)
It’s hard to talk about positive things coming out of the last few months, especially in the context of the restaurant industry. As you all know, restaurants have been hit very hard by the (necessary) restrictions on dining-in and it remains an open question as to how many of them will make it to whenever it is we return to whatever normal will be when this is over, or at least when this is better.. We’ve managed to eat well so far via takeout and support many of our favourite places in this difficult time. The only new thing we’ve encountered was Doug Flicker’s foray into ramen via “take home and prepare” kits back in May. I previously reported on our very first Bull’s Horn ramen experience right after that first week in May. We got another set of kits the following week but then the ramen thing went on hiatus for a while. It’s now back again. Takeout ramen kits are available every day they’re open and since they’re now also open for dining-in on their parking lot patio they also have special ramens available on Wednesday’s only for people eating on the patio. I can report that no matter which way you go, the ramen will be excellent. Continue reading
Pandemic Takeout 06: Flickeramen from Bull’s Horn (Minneapolis)
Okay, so it’s not actually called Flickeramen. But maybe it should be.
If you’d told me in 2017, when Doug Flicker closed Piccolo, our favourite restaurant in the Twin Ciites, that it would take us 3 years to finally make it out to his next spot, Bull’s Horn, I would not have believed you—even though I was ambivalent then about seeing Doug Flicker putting out diner food (like watching Michael Jordan play HORSE). And if you’d told me that when we did finally get around to Bull’s Horn it would be during a pandemic when takeout would be all they would be offering AND that what we’d get from them would be home assembly ramen kits I’d have thought you were crazy. But that is what we did, that is what we got and that is what we ate. And it was good. More than good: it was the best ramen we’ve yet had in Minnesota. That may seem like damning with faint praise but it’s not. Continue reading
My Annoying Opinions 