Happy New Year

Happy New Year!   Do you believe it's the end of the first week of January already?  Didn't we just celebrate New Year's a couple of days ago?

I spent this week in the Los Angeles area by Cal State Fullerton.  I came out here to help a friend.  Being in a college town felt like being a desert of good places to eat.  In fact, I was a little worried.  Most of the restaurants around were Jack-in-the-Box, Tony Romas (I remember being taken there YEARS ago by an old boyfriend during my high school days.  At the time and not knowing any better, I DID think that Tony Romas was such a fancy place that my boyfriend took me to that served ribs!).  My girlfriend is more of an Asian food type of girl, so we tried a bunch of different cuisines -- Thai, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese.  Most were uninspiring and basically sated our appetites.  One restaurant we found, turned out to be a gem. 

The place was called Mitsuyoshi Japanese Restaurant.  You know the feeling.  You go to a Japanese restaurant and wonder if it IS run by Japanese and not some American guy who thinks he can roll out an imitation crab stick roll and think it can pass for a California roll. 

We walked into Mitsuyoshi and the women servers were Japanese Japanese.  The clientele was distinctly ALL Japanese.  The food was.........amazing.  At every table was a salted and pickled cabbage.  Like Korean kimchi without red spices.  It wasn't salty, rather caused my mouth to water.  I ordered a super dry sake made by Harushika.  It was fruity and mild in my mouth but felt dry once I swallowed it.  It went perfectly with the cabbage. 

One day for lunch I had the grilled mackeral bento box.  For an oily fish like mackeral, it did not taste oily in the slightest.  Tonight my girlfriend had miso marinated Chilean sea bass.   It was sublime.  I had the chirashi.  The quality of the fish was high and just what I felt like having.  For dessert, we tasted a vanilla ice cream with ground soy beans and caramel sauce (photo bottom).  The soy bean powder had a texture to ground peanuts and actually tasted like peanuts with caramel sauce.  Like a sundae.

What a find Mitsuyoshi was!  We really lucked out with this place AND the 84 degree weather this week!  My girlfriend and I had a splendid time together.  I'm looking forward to getting back home to Guiseppe.  Not the weather!  Just the man and sleeping in my own bed.

Links:

http://www.mitsuyoshi-restaurant.com/