Tag Archives: South Bay

Toshi Sushi (Gardena, CA, December 2025)

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I said I would post a restaurant report from Los Angeles in December today and by gum, there’s still a few minutes left in the day!

As I’ve noted before, a few years ago my mother-in-law upped and moved from her home in Koreatown to a retirement community in Seal Beach. This means—horrors!—that our base of operations in southern California is now in Orange County. On the other hand, we are now much more apt to eat in the South Bay cities of Torrance and Gardena, where some of the best Japanese food in the greater LA area can be found. I’ve previously reported on a number of sushi, ramen, yakitori etc. meals eaten in these cities. Here now is a quick look at another meal in Gardena: a very nice lunch at Toshi Sushi. Continue reading →

Sushi Chitose (Redondo Beach, CA, June 2024)

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I keep saying that I plan to post my write-up of our dinner at Tenant in Minneapolis at the start of June and also my remaining reports from Seoul in February and March—to say nothing of the last report from New York in May; but here again, instead, is another report from our current trip to California (which will end soon). There’s a whole bunch of these reports as well: after a week in Southern California, we drove north for another week and are now back in Seal Beach for a few days before returning to Minnesota and we’ve been eating out a lot everywhere in the state. I’d rather make a small dent in the pile of reports from these meals before getting back home and finishing up with that older backlog at leisure. Here, therefore, is another report from Los Angeles’ County’s South Bay, and it features sushi. Continue reading →

Tomizo Ramen (Gardena, CA, June 2024)

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As I’ve said on numerous occasions before, my mother-in-law’s move from Koreatown to Seal Beach a few years ago has been a paradigm-shifting experience for us—one that is still ongoing. My first 10 years in the US were lived in Los Angeles—first by USC, then in West LA, then in Santa Monica, then West LA again, and finally in that stretch of Olympic Blvd. between Robertson and La Cienega that doesn’t really have a name (or at least not one I have ever known). And when the missus—raised in Los Angeles proper—and I returned to LA on our annual visits after we first left in 2003, it was to her mother’s house in Koreatown we came and which was our base. My general experience of Los Angeles County until a few years ago was thus largely contained in the polygon formed by the 10, 405 and 101 freeways (with a major exception made for the San Gabriel Valley). It’s not that I never ventured out of that sprawling zone but that was my Los Angeles, my Southern California, and also to a large extent, the missus’ as well. Continue reading →

Sushi Nozomi III (Torrance, Ca, December 2022)

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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 →

Dim Sum at Lunasia, South Bay (Torrance, CA, December 2022)

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Here, finally, is a report on our first meal on our Southern California trip in December. This was originally scheduled to be a sushi meal. We were supposed to arrive right before lunch time and the plan was to stop in Torrance for lunch at Nozomi before heading to Seal Beach. But our flight was delayed by more than three hours, and by the time we got our bags and picked up the rental car there was no way we could have made it to Nozomi before they closed for the afternoon. And so we changed the call to dim sum—after sushi, the other genre of food our family loves that we can only get very inferior versions of in Minnesota. Of course, you wouldn’t think that if your only source of information was the local Minnesota food press. According to them, there is very good dim sum available in Minnesota. Just recently a popular food website gave yet another rave review to Mandarin Kitchen, a restaurant at which we’ve only had farcical experiences (the most recent one reviewed here). As such, we always make it a point to eat dim sum at least once on our Southern California trips. And on this trip it was on the very first day. How did it go? Read on. Continue reading →

Josui Ramen (Torrance, CA, December 2022)

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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 →

Uncle Fung, Borneo Eatery (Long Beach, CA, December 2022)

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Just about a month after our trip to southern California in late December began, here finally is my first meal report from that trip. It is not of our first meal (dim sum) or our second meal (sushi), but of our third meal: at Uncle Fung, Borneo Eatery in Long Beach, who specialize in dishes from Indonesia (Borneo specifically), Malaysia and Singapore. They are a relatively recently opened branch of Borneo Kalimantan Cuisine in Alhambra (in the San Gabriel Valley). Since the Long Beach location opened in 2018, they’ve also opened a branch in Buena Park. It was to the Long Beach branch we went, however, as it is located a mere 10 minutes drive from my mother-in-law’s place in Seal Beach. We’ve not found much food of interest in Seal Beach—indeed our worst meal on this trip was eaten towards the end in Seal Beach. And so, the prospect of good Southeast Asian food within easy reach was enticing. I am glad to report that that is exactly what we found. Herewith, a bit of detail. Continue reading →

Hakata Ikkousha Ramen (Los Angeles, June 2022)

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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)

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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 →

Dim Sum 101 (Los Angeles, June 2022)

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Alright, let’s get started on the meal reports from our 9 days in Los Angeles before we headed off to Hawaii. Unlike our two weeks in Hawaii, our time in Los Angeles was very food-focused—as it always is. We are not tourists in Los Angeles: all we do is hang out with family and friends, hang out at the beach and go out to eat. And one of the three categories of food we look forward to eating the most when in Southern California is dim sum (sushi and Korean are the two others). Usually, we head to one of our favourite places in the San Gabriel Valley for dim sum but on this trip we decided to stick closer to home, which is now in Seal Beach (which is not only not Los Angeles, it is not even in LA County). We ate dim sum twice on this trip—coincidentally for both our first and last meal out—and at two different ends of the spectrum. First up, a quick meal at Dim Sum 101 in Lomita, a relatively new operation. Continue reading →

Jidaiya Ramen (Los Angeles, December 2021)

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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)

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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)

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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 →