I’d been to Versailles a few times before, but maybe it was before I had been to any other Cuban restaurants. First of all, my wife and I ordered mojitos before we realized they didn’t have a full liquor license, so they were somehow made out of wine. Not only that, but the mint was grounded like it was for seasoning, and it had lemons instead of limes. Terrible. My ropas viejas wasn’t bad, definitely not amazing, and the wife’s calamari steak was very rubbery. Service was mediocre at best. I don’t plan on dining here again.

[yelp reviews of versailles restaurant in manhattan beach]

last night we had dinner with the campys at gyu-kaku, a yakiniku restaurant in torrance. according to wikipedia, the gyu-kaku chain has over 800 restaurants in japan and now have a handful of them here in so-cal.

on tuesday and thursday nights between 9:30-10:30p they have a happy-hour special with 50% all harami and kalbi beef and $1 beers and $1 sake. =$2 sake bombs?!

the food was delicious; we ate 8 plates of meat, an order of vegetables, salad, edamame and 8 beers within the happy-hour hour. the total bill? $63! needless to say this is going to become a tuesday night tradition.

http://www.gyu-kaku.com/

i’m trying to eat healthier as summer gets closer and subway’s making it easy for me. through the end of may, any 12″ subway sub is only $5 including tax. eat fresh!

yesterday when i was chomping on my morning breakfast burrito, i accidently swallowed a peice of super crispy bacon without chewing it and i could feel it scraping along my esophagus all the way down to my gut. it only took a few seconds to get down there, but i could kinda feel my esophagus for the rest of the damn day, and everything i ate felt like it was as sharp as that damn bacon.

chew your food guys!

last night me, eric and ben ate at hakata ramen in gardena (just a few blocks away from all the other places we’ve been eating at). with all the good japanese restaurants around, we’ve started to migrate our weekly in-n-out lunches to bi-weekly japanese dinners, which is healthier and has beer, so our arguments about how the brain reacts in a threatening moment and self awareness are all the more entertaining.

we’d been excited to go to hakata ramen, because it got some of the highest reviews on yelp.com, and both my dad and taka recommended it. but now with a bit of ramen expertise under our belts, or above our belts, i wasn’t terribly impressed. the ramen was good, and i liked how i could choose the thickness of the broth, the firmness of the noodles and add options, but it wasn’t amazing. it’s probably my fault for building it up so high. the noodles seemed too thin, the edamame was overcooked and the gyoza was pretty small and unspectacular. we did order these bacon ball croquettes which were really good, but the artery-clogging imagery i got when i ate them prevented me from enjoying them fully.

taka wants to go there, so i’m going to give it another shot and try ordering another type of ramen with different options. the place was packed, and there were only a couple of individual tables, we and most everyone else were sitting either at the bar or around a large community table. i must be missing something. b-

thanks for the pic ben!

hakata ramen shinsengumi
2015 Redondo Beach Blvd
Gardena Ca. 90247

taka and i had dinner at kitayama in newport beach. it’s a fantastic japanese restaurant, with excellent sushi. i’ve got nothing bad to say about the place, except that there was a fucking recommendation for the amount i should tip on the receipt! i’m assuming it’s mainly for the japanese peeps that might not know that tipping is customary, and if so how much.

while it was convenient to not have to do the math in my head or on my phone, i would have preferred the effort over the unlcassiness.

haha, and i just noticed in looking over this post and that picture, that i filled out the “customer copy” and didn’t sign it anywhere. do they just go ahead and charge it anyway?

seriously though. 100% more means twice as much, right? i bought a spicy chicken burrito at lunch, and it felt pretty thin, so i opened it up, and there were 5 small pieces of chicken in there! i felt like going back to complain, but realized the futility of it, and was pretty hungry so i just ate it. why go through such a huge campaign about 100% more chicken when there’s obviously not? grr.

the fact that there’s capital letters in a kentomatic post should speak volumes in itself. taka and i figured we’d try a new japanese restaurant to add to our list of date-night places and chose tokyo wako in shorline village/downtown long beach.

as soon as i walked in, i had a bad feeling about the place. the girls were dressed in kimonos but there wasn’t a japanese girl in the bunch of ‘em. they told me it would be a few minutes before they could seat us even though there seemed to be plenty of tables available. some of the girls were even talking on their cell phones… great.

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jesus, when korean people say something is spicy, they ain’t lying. kyochon is a fast food chain in korea, and they have restraunts in k-town and now in torrance. taka picked up a box of their “spicy” chicken, which is double fried, in a delicious garlic batter (it’s kinda like tatsuta chicken if any of you guys remember getting that at the japanese izakaya bars) and then drowned in the spiciest sweet sauce ever. we were tearing up and actually couldn’t even finish it, but i’m craving it again already. i’m guessing it’s prolly too hot for most of you (eric, maybe you could handle it?) but they also have regular which is supposed to be just as good, just not as painful. best served with a plastic jug of hite beer.

before my my bike ride yesterday, i was a bit hungry so i looked in the fridge and saw some girl scout-like fudge cookies. i even conciously thought, “hmm, sugar + caffeine = fast kent” well, that might’ve been true, and i was feeling fine, until i got down to the beach and had a swig of gatorade. my stomach almost immediately cramped up completely and i could barely breathe. if i stretched it out, it’d feel ok for a couple minutes, but then just cramp up again. dave had come up from hb, so i didn’t wanna bail on him and i did pretty much the whole ride, but towards the end before we did the final loop, he even called me out and said we should prolly head back ’cause i wasn’t looking right, and dave’s not one to let me off the hook unless he knows i really need it.

so i cruised back home and by the time i got in my door i could barely move. i laid down, ate a banana (potassium), popped some rolaids (calcium and magnesium) and drank copious amounts of water and i was feeling better about 30 minutes later. anyway, that’s a food combo you wanna stay away from. taka said the same thing happens when you eat tempura and watermelon together, so stay away from that one too.