With eggplants and miso sauce. $13
Wasabi Bistro, San Francisco CA
This was actually really good! I loved the thick eggplant medallions supporting each tender, juicy scallop. The miso sauce was also delicious.
Edamame. Complimentary
Sake (salmon), hamachi (yellowtail), hotate (scallop), maguro (red tuna), shiro maguro (albacore), escolar (butterfish), saba (mackerel). Pre fixe dinner
Barracuda Sushi, San Francisco CA
I love good, fresh sashimi and it’s pretty decent at Barracuda. It’s not the best cuts ever, but they’re good quality and they taste great!
Edamame.
Served with rice, miso soup, and salad. $10.95
Wasabi Bistro, San Francisco CA
This was plenty of food for a lunch set, and decently priced too. I wasn’t a fan of the miso chicken – it was just grilled chicken slices with a miso glaze on top. The saba shioyaki (salt-grilled mackerel) was interesting. It was super crispy on the outside which was nice, but it was also way too salty! The interior was still moist and juicy though.
Side salad.
Miso soup.
Broiled mackerel fillet. $6.50
Izakaya Takonoki, Honolulu HI
This tasted good, but I always forget how oily mackerel is before I order, lol! I glad they broiled it pretty well though.
Asahi beer super dry draft. Medium $5.50
Ha’i Mo’olelo (The Storyteller) sculpture, by Shige Yamada, Kalakaua Avenue.
Hazelnut, cherry tomato, salsa verde, pesto and shallots. Family style supper $46 per person
Staple and Fancy, Seattle WA
This tasted good, but I wasn’t a fan of the fish texture. It was an odd combination of flaky and mushy. I loved the sauces and garnishes though, hehe.
Eye Benches III, Louise Bourgeois, black Zimbabwe granite, Olympic Sculpture Park.
Happy Sushi Ro Ba Ta, Palm Springs
FAIL!!! This has possibly been my worst dining experience to date, no joke! We arrived a little after 5 on a Saturday and there were 3 tables taken outside and a few people at the sushi bar. Regardless, after getting our drinks and the extremely sad Dynamite Bites, it still took 45 minutes to finally get our sushi! Way too long!
Some food highlights:
The Dynamite Bites ($5) are billed as crabmeat baked with dynamite sauce. Sounds delicious, right? Wrong! In actuality, this abomination is a pile of imitation crabmeat on a scrap of aluminum foil with an indistinguishable sauce on top. They do provide some lemon wedges with it, no doubt to kill any lingering bacteria on this laughable heap!
The spicy tuna roll ($6 happy hour) is huge! Awesome, right? Wrong! No one wants to eat more of a crappy roll. There was enough rice on this thing to feed a small Japanese prefecture! And the tuna wasn’t spicy at all, but it was mutilated to the consistency of Whiskas cat food.
And how about some avian bird flu with your sushi?!!! The outside tables are conveniently situated under an eave where a menagerie of feathery locals hang out to take their dumps. Once we heard the rain of bird poop showering the hibiscus plant beside our table, and saw well-aimed poo bombs land on our table and splatter onto our food and my arm, we called it quits!
And no, our food was NOT comped! I wanna barf just recalling that catastrophic experience.
Note: Although they overtly display a happy hour checklist menu at the front, they sneakily hand you a normal checklist when you’re seated. So be sure to request a happy hour list.
Or save yourself some time and bird flu vaccination costs and don’t go there at all!
Other forgettable dishes:
Samurai Rock sake cocktail. $5
Albacore nigiri. Surprise, it comes seared! No doubt to kill anything on the outside of this not-so-fresh cut of fishy fish. $3.95 happy hour
Mackerel nigiri. I’ll admit that this wasn’t bad. $3.75 happy hour
Eel and avocado roll. Tasted ok until it was splattered with bird poo! $8 happy hour
Edamame. $3
Asahi beer. $4.50
Spanish white mackerel slices over sushi rice, with pickled ginger and wasabi. $6.50
Tokyo Go-Go, San Francisco
This was on their nightly special list so we decided to try it. The waitress told us it was Spanish white mackerel. I’m not sure if that’s correct because Googling “shima aji” comes up with many different results, none of which are for Spanish white mackerel. This just adds to my frustration with the use of common names in communicative nomenclature, but that’s for another blog – lol! Whatever we ate, I really liked it! The shima aji wasn’t fishy tasting at all. It had quite a firm texture and a mellow flavor. I loved the peach color that gradated to a bright pinkish red.
Vittle Monster 