Tag Archive | Japanese food

The Giant Robot Post-It Show

Giant Robot is a store and art gallery in Sawtelle, the traditionally Japanese-American neighborhood on the Westside where I’ve gone to Obon the last couple of years. I’ve been to exhibits at Giant Robot’s gallery before. Every December, they have a post-it show for which dozens of artists (many of whom have exhibited at the gallery or have works available in the store) create art on actual post-it notes. The post-its are then displayed in a wide band around the perimeter of the small gallery; rows and columns are labeled so a given post-it can be pinpointed. The public is invited to view the post-its during a preview event, and then sales begin. People camp out for hours for the chance to buy the post-its they want. Also, there’s now a second drop of post-its on a second weekend.

Isabelle and I caught the end of the preview on the first day of this year’s post-it show, but first, we shared a bowl of Japanese-style dan dan noodles at Killer Noodle. Sawtelle is full of popular restaurants, and Killer Noodle is a relatively new one I had yet to try. Their core concept is two seven-point scales: one for 麻 má (the numbing flavor/sensation of Sichuan peppercorn) and one for 辣 là (spiciness, in this case from cayenne pepper). We got three and three, and it was very tasty, but I’d go for less má next time.

After lunch, we went to the Giant Robot gallery. There were already people parked on the sidewalk, waiting for sales to begin; I couldn’t see how far the line went once it turned the corner. The preview was also packed. We entered a sort of human river that slowly flowed clockwise along the walls. It was hard to take in every post-it, but we spotted a lot that we liked. Here are some of my favorites:

Bernstein, Orff, Arbeau, Susato

Sep27

Last week, two professors in my department were giving away their tickets to the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s Sunday concert at Disney Hall, and after wavering for an afternoon, I snagged them and invited my friend Dustin to the concert. I had been to Disney Hall in downtown LA before but had yet to hear a performance there (I’m starting my fifth year of grad school and still haven’t seen the LA Phil!). Plus the program was Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, and I liked the parts of each that I was familiar with.

Before the concert, we had ramen at Daikokuya in Little Tokyo and then went to the mochi ice cream place, where I got a scoop of red bean ice cream. Then we walked to Disney Hall. I’d never seen the inside of the concert hall, and I thought it was pretty! Mostly for the majestic pipe organ, with its pipes flaring and jutting out at many angles, all dappled in the blue and gold lighting.

Disney Hall 2

I knew the second movement of the Chichester Psalms because a countertenor at my high school sang it. Here, the soloist was a thirteen-year-old boy soprano. It was great to hear a live performance of that, and I also liked the other two movements. There was an extended cello solo (or perhaps cello ensemble?) in the third movement.

For Carmina Burana, the LA Children’s Chorus (in red vests) joined the Master Chorale, and the orchestra got bigger. Dustin and I knew the somewhat ubiquitous “O Fortuna,” but not the rest, and again, I liked all of it! Carmina Burana (maybe just “O Fortuna”?) was one of the pieces I studied in music listening, and I remembered the texts were written by medieval German monks, but I didn’t realize the themes were basically drinking and love. There were surtitles in English, and some of the translations were quite comical. There was also this tenor solo for which the text was the lament of a swan who’s been cooked and is being served up and sees the diners’ teeth approaching. The tenor really hammed it up. Also, the soprano soloist turned out to be the singer who played Daiyu in the world premiere of the opera Dream of the Red Chamber, which I saw in San Francisco just over a year ago!

It was a splendid concert, and I’m glad I’ve finally heard a performance at Disney Hall.

And since this is a music post, I’m going to squeeze in another musical connection discovery: I’ve talked about Arbeau’s pavane “Belle, qui tiens ma vie” before, and how it appears in Peter Warlock’s “Capriol Suite.” Well, the other day I was listening to a recording of Tylman Susato’s Danserye and heard something familiar in an allemande… It’s the first piece in this recording, and if you’ve listened to “Belle, qui tiens ma vie” enough you’ll recognize the first two lines. After that it’s different.

In Pursuit of Omusubi

Jul16

Some months ago, I came across an article online about an omusubi shop in Santa Monica. It sounded so enticing I decided I had to go someday. Now that it’s summer, it’s the perfect time to go on foodie adventures, so last weekend my roommate and I went to check it out. The place is called Sunny Blue, and it mainly serves omusubi. Omusubi is apparently another word for onigiri, a word I was at least somewhat familiar with (though I think I’d only eaten onigiri once in my life before this past weekend). Omusubi/onigiri are rice balls (though in my experience they tend to be sort of triangular) with a savory filling, wrapped in a sheet of nori (seaweed).

Sunny Blue is on Main Street in Santa Monica. It’s tiny. You order at the counter from the cashier, while to her right three other staff members are busily making the omusubi before your eyes. There are maybe four or five stools to sit on, so it’s not really a sit-down place. They have many different omusubi to choose from, with meat, seafood, and vegetarian fillings. There are also some other side dishes to order, like edamame or Japanese potato salad. And there’s frozen yogurt! I ordered a miso beef and a Sunny Blue (chicken) curry, as well as chocolate frozen yogurt.

Omusubi: Miso Beef (left) and Sunny Blue Curry (right)

We carried our lunch to the weirdly sculpted and manicured Ocean View Park, where we had a view of a vast parking lot, the beach, and, yes, the ocean. The omusubi were so tasty! Perfect, slightly sticky rice, delicious fillings, and sprinklings of I don’t even know what savory garnishes… I would go back to Sunny Blue in a heartbeat.

After eating, we walked down to the beach, and I went wading for a bit. Then we wandered up Main Street, which has quite a respectable number of ice cream shops. We came upon the California Heritage Museum, which is located in this very handsome historic house. That giant bust on the left is of Senator John Percival Jones, one of the founders of Santa Monica.

Traffic in Santa Monica on the weekends, especially near the ocean, is pretty terrible, and we wound up waiting half an hour for our bus home. While we languished at the bus stop, I took a picture of this palm tree growing through a hedge. Despite somewhat unreliable public transportation, the omusubi made our expedition completely worth it.

Spring Break: Nature, Culture, and Gastronomy

Apr2

Last summer, when my parents and I drove out to Los Angeles, we tried to have dinner at Newport Seafood (新港海鮮), a restaurant in San Gabriel famous for its Chinese-style lobster. When we arrived, having driven across the desert from Arizona, we found ourselves in a parking lot that looked a bit like that traffic gridlock game Rush Hour. My mother went inside the restaurant to reconnoiter and reported a scene of chaos: an entryway teeming with small children while grandmothers propped themselves up against the walls. Needless to say, we failed in our quest to eat there. Over my spring break, though, we tried again. This time, we arrived before the restaurant opened for lunch, and my brother and I camped out on the sidewalk with half a dozen other families while my parents checked out the Chinese bakeries down the street. And…success! We ordered our lobster, and it was amazing.

The next day, we visited Topanga State Park in the Santa Monica Mountains and went on a gentle hike through live oak groves and chaparral. There weren’t many wildflowers in bloom, probably because it’s been so dry, but we saw some lizards and a California lupine, and we heard the call of the wrentit.

On the way back from Topanga State Park, we stopped by the beach and watched some sandpipers.

The following day, we took a winding road up into the San Bernardino Mountains and rose above the clouds to reach the Rim of the World. We went on to Lake Arrowhead Village, a kitschy tourist town on the shores of a blue-green reservoir populated by mallards, coots, white geese, and other waterfowl. We also walked around the nearby Lake Gregory.

On our way back, we stopped for dinner at 101 Noodle Express in Alhambra. They had delicious dumplings and hand-torn noodles with minced pork and long bean, but the star of the show was this Shandong beef roll. It’s a giant fried pancake wrapped around thinly sliced beef, cilantro, and other greens, with a bit of sauce that tasted like hoisin sauce. Very different from the kind of Chinese food I grew up eating, and so incredibly delicious.

We spent the next day in downtown LA, prowling around Walt Disney Concert Hall, home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic; visiting the Japanese American National Museum; and exploring Little Tokyo. I really liked this flower-shaped fountain made of shards of blue and white china in the Disney Hall community park.

Before walking to Disney Hall, we’d put our name down at Daikokuya, a very popular ramen shop in Little Tokyo. When we returned, there were even more people waiting on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant than when we’d left. The sheet with our name on it was gone, replaced by a new one, but my mother got a server to fish the old sheet out of a wastebasket and find us on it and thus finagled us three red vinyl-covered stools at the counter. And that’s how I got to eat this savory bowl of ramen.

After lunch, we explored the nearby Japanese American National Museum, particularly the exhibit on the history of the Japanese communities in the United States, which rightly devoted significant space to the Japanese American internment. I particularly liked this biwa, though, a traditional Japanese lute related to the Chinese pipa.

Finally, to wrap up this spring break post, here is me at The Huntington Gardens, with a purple-flowered vine whose names include Queen’s Wreath, Blue Bird Vine, and Fleur de Dieu.