My Return, Cont'd: Yu Me Ya Hillcrest

The thing about being at home for two weeks is that I was dying to spend some time outdoors. Dan suggested a walk through San Diego Zoo in the evening, during their Nighttime Zoo hours. The zoo's only open in the evening during the summer and it's a wonderful walk.

We stayed until the zoo closed, then looked for a late dinner. After some debate, we settled on trying Yu Me Ya Sake House in Hillcrest. We had a lovely dinner and that was further evidenced by the fact that, a week later, Dan suggested we return. That's an endorsement if I've ever heard one, since he usually has to be cajoled into trying new restaurants and usually requires a couple of visits before he warms up to it enough to add it to the rotation.

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Izakaya Sakura

There's no sign for the restaurant and it's in the same strip mall as the Original Pancake House and next to a military recruiting office. It looks like you're heading in to enlist, but you're heading into an izakaya or Japanese pub.

I've only been twice, but the food has been consistently excellent. The chirashi above was incredibly fresh and filling. The oyster was perfect, the shiso leaf a nice touch, and I even liked the uni (sea urchin), which I don't normally prefer.

All I can say is try it. I intend to return ASAP... anyone want to join me?

Izakaya Sakura
3094 Convoy St. #121
San Diego, CA 92184

Yoshi Sushi

Yoshi Sushi, located in Mira Mesa, is a good deal for decent sushi. For $19.95, one can eat as much freshly prepared sushi as they would like. It's better than Todai, not quite as fabulous as Sushi Ota.

During one of our blazingly hot days (now replaced with cold gray days), I lunched with the gents from the chemistry department. I'm not a particularly huge roll fan, but the soft-shell crab at Yoshi is pretty good.

There's a variety of cooked items on the menu, like hamachi kama or the grilled cheek of the Japanese amberjack (yellowtail). It's delicious and smoky, with the "dark" meat of the fish cheek flaking easily off the bone.

The nigiri (pictured at top) is good and very fresh. They should use a higher grade of fish, which would be more flavorful. Their salmon tends to run on the fattier side, which makes it buttery and fantastic, but the tuna is rather flavorless.

It's a bit pricey for lunch, of course, but it's a welcome splurge every now and then. Still, for that "crappy sushi" fix, I'm wondering if Todai might be a better deal. More bang for buck and their sushi is not much worse.

Yoshi Sushi
6715 Mira Mesa Blvd
San Diego, CA 92121

Kiyo's Japanese Restaurant

M. found this cozy little restaurant tucked away in the Gaslamp. I don't normally brave the crowded Gaslamp quarter for meals, so it was a rare visit to the area for me and D. Kiyo's seems to be a family-owned business, with Kiyo-san himself behind the sushi bar.

Sorry, the picture above is blurry. My camera freaks out a little during evening light conditions.

D. doesn't eat sushi, so he looked at the cooked offerings. We were both a little floored to see that the prices were pretty high for basics like chicken and beef teriyaki. These weren't combinations, either, just a la carte items served with salad, soup, and rice. D. went for the beef teriyaki, while I chose the chirashi sushi.

Beautiful, isn't it? My only complaint about this dish was that the fish could have been fresher. Despite the vibrant colors seen in the photo, once the slices were unearthed, it was clear they had lost a little bit of their color. The knife skills of Kiyo-san (who came to check on us and to inquire about our impressions of his masterpiece) are impressive.

It's pricey, but visit for a quiet and cozy evening of sushi. Avoid the cooked dishes. We sat at a table, but if there's a next time, I'd sit at the bar. Word on the interweb has it that the best of their inventory and repertoire are showcased at the bar.

Kiyo's Japanese Restaurant
531 F Street
San Diego, CA 92101

Tsuru Sushi

On our last day in the Bay Area, we had dinner at this family-run restaurant in San Leandro. Tsuru Sushi is, somewhat surprisingly, run by Cantonese-speaking Chinese people. Given the diaspora of the Chinese, especially the southerners, it isn't a huge stretch to find Chinese families running Japanese restaurants. In fact, there are quite a few in the San Gabriel Valley area of LA.

The food is pretty good. I haven't tried the sushi, but the good dishes are more than decent. I liked the miso soup, which isn't too salty.

My favorite thing about this place is their tempura. Very few places make it like this anymore, with a crispy, flaky, and almost translucent skin.

My tempura don (tempura on rice) was pretty good. Very, very filling, with a huge pile of crisp tempura on a bed of fluffy sticky rice. It was all drizzled with the light soy sauce used for tempura-dipping. It's a very rich dish, considering it's rice with fried stuff, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Good place for basic Japanese food. The one big downside is that they're rather pricey. Their beef teriyaki combinations ran for $16.95... eek! The portions are generous, but the price is still too high.

Hanaya Sushi

Kim and I met up for lunch, hoping to try Island Boy Grille. When we arrived, Island Boy had closed. Since it was located in a strip mall surrounded by business parks and there were very few options, our choices were to leave or try one of the other eateries in the mall. We stayed and I'm glad we did, because we found a little lunch gem in Hanaya Sushi.

It's basic Japanese food. Bento boxes with various teriyaki meats and tempura. Noodle dishes like yakisoba. Some sushi, although I'll bet the turnover's not high enough to keep the fish fresh. We both had the chicken teriyaki/tempura combination.


Tempura's serviceable, California rolls well-made (i.e. the roll was tight) with lower-quality ingredients, and the salad fresh. The cup in front contained vermicelli and cucumber slivers tossed with a sweetened mayonnaise, which was a great little side. Edamame could have used some salt, but they were fresh.

The teriyaki's some of the best I've had anywhere. The sauce was perfect, very lightly sweet (unlike the goopy and overly-sweet sauces of a lot of other places) with the saltiness of soy sauce and the smokiness of the grilled chicken mixed in. I could even taste a little bit of mirin. The chicken was quite tender, pulled off the grill the moment it's completely cooked.

Two downsides: the teriyaki arrived cold, indicating that it was not made-to-order. The other was that everything was served on plastic, even for those eating in-house. I'm not a fan of high-waste establishments.

Otherwise, a great lunch joint and one that hopefully doesn't meet the same fate as Island Boy Grille. Kim did a little digging and discovered that Hanaya occupies the same space as Island Boy once did.

Dao Son

I have mixed feelings about this place, which bills itself as a Southeast Asian (mainly Vietnamese)-Japanese fusion. That alone is a little confusing, because Vietnamese and Japanese foods are opposites in terms of flavor and style. On one hand, the stir-fries are really good and has the taste and texture of a dish made with good wok hei. On the other hand, the soups are pedestrian: bland and uninspiring. My first visit, the soup was basically bouillon and water with noodles in it. It didn't necessarily taste bad, but I don't want to pay $5-6 for a bowl of hot water and bouillon. Figuring I had ordered poorly, I wanted to give Dao Son another chance.

We started with the fried spring rolls. They weren't bad at all. I prefer rice paper as a wrapper versus the flour-based wrappers, which are thicker. The greens were sparse, but fresh.

D.'s stir-fried rice noodle with chicken was really good. The noodles were perfectly done and the flavor was rich with onions, garlic, and pepper. The bean sprouts, Napa cabbage, peanuts, and carrots gave it a nice crunch. Wok hei is almost impossible to describe. Per the Wikipedia article, it truly is an "essence" and this dish was chock-full of it.

My shrimp tempura ramen was underwhelming. The ramen was a little undercooked, but I'd rather it be undercooked than overcooked and mushy. I believe the broth is supposed to be shoyu and mushroom-based, but it was somewhat bland.

The tempura were almost inedible. For one thing, they were almost 2-inches thick. Here's a cross-section. Talk about breading...

D. suggested the thicker tempura was made that way to absorb the soup, but when the breading became soggy, it was extremely mushy with a mouthfeel that borderlined on nauseating.

If I do go back, I'm definitely getting some fried noodles. They had a catfish and eggplant dish that also looked very intriguing. No more soup noodle dishes.

Sushi Deli 1

D. and I took a break from our vow to eat out less. We started Sunday with Chicago on a Bun/Wired and ended it with Sushi Deli 1. We met up with D.D. and D.B. for dinner, then headed back to our place to watch King of California. Good movie, by the way.

I haven't been here in about 8 months or so. Sushi Deli 1 is a prime example for being very good for what it is. Cheap and fast Japanese-American food. No, it's not going to win awards for authenticity or innovation, but it fills its niche very well.

The first of three Sushi Deli restaurants, this location is constantly crowded. The service is good and the ambiance is a deafening roar inside the restaurant.

D. started with the fried gyoza. They're not bad. Lightly fried all over, they taste pretty good and are nicely wrapped. D. wonders if they're made on-site or if Sushi Deli purchases frozen ones.

I ordered the Ume Combo. For $6.99, it's a lot of food.

Small sushi platter with CA rolls, cooked egg, and shrimp. Nothing adventurous. It's decent and quite fresh.

My favorite part is the croquette. It's essentially a fish stick. Flavorful white fish mashed with veggies, shaped into a "stick", and rolled in panko crumbs. Then, it's fried until it's light and crisp. Great stuff.

Their teriyaki is ok. It's kind of gooey and a bit too sweet, but good with rice. They switched to using more dark meat. It keeps costs lower, I think, and I like it. Dark meat stays more moist.

Basic iceberg salad with miso ginger dressing. Not bad. Fresh greens with good tomatoes, so it's not bad at all.

D. had the beef teriyaki combination for his entree. The combinations come with miso soup, rice, and salad during dinnertime. For lunch, it's the above plus a drink.

I ended my meal with two pieces of nigiri. Some of you out there might be wondering why I'd order nigiri at a place like this. However, I find their ikura (salmon roe) is pretty good. Fresh and salty, it's a delicious and rather large piece of sushi.

The crowds are the only thing that keeps me away from this place. It's a fabulous lunch spot, but it's too far from work to justify the trip. They're not open for lunch on weekends, but how I wish they were.

Cafe Japengo

(from December 19)

We stopped at this tony La Jolla restaurant for the company's holiday lunch. Located on the same lot as the Hyatt on LJ Village Drive, this is a place to see and be seen. Per our founder, evenings here can literally have a "meat market" atmosphere. Food-wise, it's Japanese fusion. Very expensive and very good, but do you get that much bang for your buck? Not really. It's Sushi Deli-style food with higher quality ingredients and prettier presentation. Since their prices are 5-6x Sushi Deli's, I'd rather go to Sushi Deli.

That's not to say that our lunch wasn't delish. We ordered tons of appetizers and rolls, all very fresh and classic Californian interpretations of the their Japanese counterparts. They were good, but I noticed that smoked salmon was substituted for raw salmon. I don't know if this is a quality thing or a maintenance thing (smoked salmon would last longer), but they had raw tuna, so I doubt it was anti-raw fish sentiment.

Here are two of the appetizers, starting with the duck potstickers:



They were good, but not extremely flavorful. I'd say the star of the dish was the coriander-mint pesto. It was fresh, light, and would have gone well with the duck had it been better prepared. Placed in a potsticker, where it's essentially steamed, duck loses the depth of flavor that searing would have given it. The fat needs to be cooked at high temperature to bring it all out. Also, who the hell sells 3 potstickers for nine dollars?!

The Japengo prawn salad, which was pretty good. I'd say their strength is using fresh ingredients, so the avocado, lettuce, and pineapple-honey dressing held up well against freshly fried shrimp.



The only thing that was really worth the price were the desserts. The money isn't paid for quantity, but for the details. Gorgeous, eye-catching desserts that tasted as pretty as they looked. My tasting platter of creme brulees was something to write home about. Green tea, lemongrass-coconut, espresso, and chai tea were literally explosions of flavor from shot-glass proportions. Given there were about three tiny spoonfuls per cup, the fact that I could easily and clearly distinguish the flavors says a lot about the custards. Texture was absolutely perfect.



Other desserts ordered were the assortment of sorbets and the bread pudding.



Absolutely gorgeous, aren't they? They were pretty good, too. Thus, the conclusion on Cafe Japengo is this: dress up, go to happy hour, and splurge on dessert.

Sushi Ota

(From November 14th)

This place is arguably one of the best sushi places in San Diego. Darebear (hehe... gotta love a nickname that irks) and I met for dinner with plans to take on a proper omakase. Not an omakase menu, but true chef-chooses-adventure omakase. I wimped out at the last minute and opted for their omakase menu: a preset of not-advertised nigiri and rolls. Sigh. I'll take the plunge some day soon.



It comes with clam miso soup. From the top left: fatty tuna, cockle, albacore tuna (I think), mantis shrimp, red snapper, saltwater eel. From the bottom left: yellowtail, squid, sea urchin, salmon roe (my favorite!), and rolls of a crunchy root and shiso leaf (white center) and tuna/cucumber (red center). We ordered one plate each, then followed it with a rainbow roll. Excellent fish, excellent sushi chef and waitress, and a good time overall. The only downside is that the hostess was rather insistent that we leave by 7:30pm and made a point of reminding us three times. Ugh. I understand that you're busy and you have a reservation schedule to maintain, but that's just rude.

Morimoto (Tuesday, Oct. 23)

This was the meal I'd been waiting for the entire trip. We spent the day exploring exhibits at the Mint and the Federal Reserve. Lunch was another trip to the Reading Terminal Market. It was a very relaxing day and I was really excited about dinner at Morimoto. Yes, as in Iron Chef Morimoto.

I have to apologize for the quality of the pictures, as I didn't want to use the flash in a dark restaurant. In hindsight, I should have said "to hell with it" and done it, since others were doing so. I used Photoshop to adjust for the lighting, but the pictures are still very dark. However, it seems their omakase menu hasn't changed in the last couple of years, so there are various food blogs with the same dishes on them. Google "Morimoto omakase" and there is at least one blog with similar dishes and much higher-quality photographs.

What is omakase? Well, the "omakase menu" is basically a chef's tasting menu. Omakase traditionally means that you entrust your meal to the chef and they make whatever they feel like making for you. It's an opportunity to show off their creativity. Thus, "omakase menu" is rather oxymoronic, especially in Morimoto's case, because it's a set menu. It's not advertised and it is creative, but it's set.

J. and I decided to go for the highest tier omakase and let our wallets take a beating for it. Holy cow, I have never spent this much money on a meal and am not likely to do so again in the near future. D. could only watch in vague horror. Well, he also ranted about the fact that the omakase menu was a static menu and didn't change at all, not even from day to day.

Here was our delicious meal, which began with a tuna tartare topped with caviar, chives, and sat in a pool of sweet shoyu (soy sauce) mixture (I don't know what else was in it, but it was kind of sweet). It came with a Japanese mountain berry (kind of tart, a bit like a raspberry, but not as sweet) and a dollop of wasabi:



The "bonus course" (bonus, my ass, everyone had this course) was oysters. From left to right was ceviche, Japanese salsa (it looked and tasted like Mexican salsa), and jalapeno fish sauce. As oysters have a very domineering salty flavor, that's pretty much what the dish tasted like:



Next was my favorite dish of the night, a scallop carpaccio. I didn't know it was possible to slice scallops so thinly. They were served in a flavorful pool of hot seared oil and soy sauce. They were topped with Japanese wild parsley, which are these tiny leaves that really pack a lot of flavor. I could seriously top anything with the parsley and enjoy it. The light pool of oil and soy sauce was so yummy that I almost licked the plate.



Next was a micro-greens salad, which I loved. It was topped with a bonito flake. Bonito is smoked and dried fish, so the flake was a bit like a chip. The salad had two slices of sashimi served with it. J. and I agreed that the sashimi was way too tough. It was halibut and snapper, I believe, but my memory is a bit spotty. I remember it was a sport fish and while sport fish like tuna and salmon certainly make great sashimi, these slices were too chewy. It took effort to bite into it, which defeats the delicate presentation of the dish. The dish was dribbled with a vinagarette, but the components escape my mind.



Our first savory course was lobster. It was five-spice and quite heavily flavored. I had to use a little elbow grease to free the meat from the claw, which isn't the most polite thing to do at the table. Thank goodness I only had to spend about a minute cracking the claw. The lobster was very good, but I thought the flavor was a bit overwhelming. It came with a yummy yuzu creme fraiche as a pallet cleanser.

Yuzu has totally become my new favorite flavor. It's Japanese citrus and tastes kind of like grapefruit/lemon/orange. Yeah... it's weird. Also, unlike most citrus flavors, I can't imagine it as a sweet, but rather a savory flavor. I'm thinking of trying to cook with it or even doing a semi-savory dessert. Anyway, I digress...



Next dish was Kobe beef slices. They were drizzled with chive oil and soy sauce and topped with micro-greens. I read in other blogs that this dish used to be served with foie gras and sweet potatoes... I feel vaguely robbed, but then again, I'm anti-foie gras. The beef was very interesting. I think J. and I were expecting to be blown away from highly-hyped Kobe beef, but we... weren't. Neither was D., who tried this course and generously shared chunks of his rib eye steak for comparison.

Compared to the rib eye, the most noticeable difference is the texture. The Kobe beef seemed to separate along the grain, whereas the rib eye was one solid chunk. The sauce was a little overpowering, so I couldn't taste too much of the beef itself, but I swear I tasted a bit of nuttiness to the Kobe (J. and D. disagree). Otherwise... it's beef. Expensive and rather delicate beef, but still beef.



The last savory course was a nigiri platter. From left to right: fatty tuna, yellowtail, snapper, albacore, and mackerel. Very classic and typical. The quality of the fish was outstanding. I do have to say that I'm not definitive on the identity of the yellowtail and the albacore. They were good, just not that memorable. The snapper was the same as the sashimi salad and it was meh. I liked the smoky flavor of the mackerel, but the fatty tuna was definitely the best. It was flavorful and literally melted in the mouth.



Dessert was interesting. It was a sweet potato cake topped with powdered sugar and served with a side of fluffy whipped cream (which was flavored with apricot, I think) and a slice of dried apricot. It was good and like many Asian desserts, wasn't overly sweet. It tasted like the classic Asian sponge cake with a hint of sweet potato.



Morimoto also has his own beer, brewed in Oregon:



After the intense sticker shock when the bill came, there are mixed feelings on whether or not it was worth it. I think J. and D. are on the side of "not worth it" and I'm on the side of "worth it just this once, but I'll never do it again".

This was our last dinner in Philly. Next stop, New York City!

I need to bring my bloody camera with me! I've been to several places this past week and could not take pictures. We made hors d'oeuvres over the weekend and I forgot to photograph them before taking them to a party. Oy vay. I'm totally slacking.

Last week, I went to:

• Ono Sushi
• Extraordinary Desserts
• Dumpling Inn (still no pictures)
• Tofu House (still no pictures)
• Dao Son

Ono Sushi's one of those seen-and-be-seen hipster joints in Hillcrest. As sushi bars are all of the rage, this one's filled with people dining on fusion-style rolls. Very little raw fish seen in the rolls. The rolls are quite good. K. and I enjoyed the Baja roll, which had seared ahi and avocado, and the soft-shell crab roll, which had soft-shell crab tempura and was wrapped in soy paper instead of seaweed. The service is excellent, but it probably is better to arrive before the rush. It's expensive, so be prepared for sticker shock.

Extraordinary Desserts used to be one of my favorite hangouts. Emphasis on the past tense. K. and I left Ono Sushi and stopped there for dessert and some more gab. The service, for once, was excellent. The cashier was friendly and the woman who brought our desserts was very kind. However, I'm so over Karen Krasne and her desserts. I still love her pavlova, but everything else is incredibly meh. I had the Moroccan, which I once loved, but now can't handle. It was very, very, very sweet. Shockingly so. It's supposed to be chocolate and pistachios, but the sweetness was overwhelming. There wasn't any sign of the depth of flavor that good chocolate has. The pistachios whimpered because they were stamped out by the mindblowing sweetness. Did she forgo sugar in favor of corn syrup? Krasne also subscribes to the "overpower the senses, so they think it's fabulous but they didn't really taste anything" philosophy.

This place is only worth it for the pavlova. And maybe the tea.

I've heard a lot about Dao Son, most of it favorable, but D. and I weren't overly impressed by it. I ordered the miso noodle soup. I was vaguely intrigued by it, but it was egg noodles with a bouillon-ed broth. And it wasn't soy paste that was doing the flavoring. It was literally water and chicken bouillion. Not terrible, by any means, but not great. Did I order the wrong thing? D.'s chow fun looked like soy sauce, noodles, and chilies on top. He wasn't thrilled with it and he mentioned that the chilies were overpowering. He can handle spicy, but you can't just let the capsaicin speak for the dish.

I'd try it again, because it's cheap and it's hard to judge by only one visit. I'll order something different next time.

Tofu House is a favorite lunch spot. It's not fabulous food, but it's serviceable. I get the ridiculously overpriced grilled unagi (eel). They serve it on a red-hot cast iron plate (think the type of plate fajitas are served in) with onions. YUM. The banchan (Korean side dishes) are limited to kim-chi, kim-chi cucumbers (my favorite), pickled daikon, and slices of pollock cake. I should have taken a picture because it is quite pretty, but whatever... I'll try to remember for next time.

Dumpling Inn... fabulous as always and we had our usual potstickers, eggplant, and xiao long bao.

Wow, this entry seems like a bit of a bitch-fest. Sorry about that, folks!

Yoshi Sushi

What a great lunch today. Yoshi Sushi in Mira Mesa. This isn't going to be a long review, because it's all-you-can-eat sushi and there are way too many dishes to cover. If you're going to go there and do the gluttony bit, I highly recommend:

• salmon kama- grilled salmon cheeks
• agadashi tofu- fried tofu in a delicious tempura-esque soy sauce and topped with dashi
• veggie tempura- fried to perfection
• salmon nigiri- fresh, fatty, and they cut large pieces
• ikura- insanely fresh with that gorgeous salty salmon burst
• fried california roll- this is pretty awesome. I don't normally prefer california roll, but it's great fried.
• soft-shell crab rolls- huge roll with a mixture of crunchy and tender

The service is excellent and the pricing more than reasonable ($19.95 for lunch). The fish is fresh and tastes pretty good. No, it's not Sushi Ota, but it's not bad at all.