Happy New Year!  I can’t believe the holiday season passed so quickly, and now we are in 2012.  Soon we will be bitching about the hot summer.

I was in Japan for the holidays, and had quite a few good food moments. I am really thankful to iPhone since I can now take pictures anywhere (and pretty decent
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Five minutes.

That’s litterally how much time I had to decide whether I was going to accept the out of the blue New Year’s Eve dinner party invitation from my friends in Stockholm at 12:30 in the afternoon on Dec 31, 2011. That’s all the time I had including packing my socks/curlers/laptop/night cream, locking up my
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Danran, a little sushi spot in the Sakurajosui station in Tokyo, is no stranger to Umamimart. Yoko introduced us to the place in 2008, and Tmonkey reported on it again later that year. Yoko took me to Danran for the first time several years ago, and I very much looked forward to
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I was in Miami for Thanksgiving, listening to salsa music while eating turkey, which was great. Last Thanksgiving, I had a steak in Fort Lauderdale, but this year we had a very traditional Thanksgiving meal, with nontraditional music accompaniment. Since Thanksgiving Day’s meal looks the same no matter how fancy, or tasty it may be, I will
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Yes, Japanese food in this country is still equated to sushi. Growing up, people would always ask me, “Do you eat sushi every day?” I guess that’s mostly due to the fact that my father is a sushi chef, but even so, it always bewildered me. I mean, sushi is such a luxury! And it
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Iwashi (Sardine) from Mie Prefecture

Saba (or mackerel) is often priced really cheap in the U.S. and hovers around at the bottom of many sushi menus. It’s known to be stinky and not as silky as other popular sashimi like maguro and salmon. But I’d like to make it known, loud and clear that I
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In Junichiro Tanizaki’s celebrated novel, The Makioka Sisters (or Sasameyuki (細雪), loosely translated as ‘light snow’ or ‘a flurry of snow’–titles in translations are always so different but I guess it’s as much about nuance as meaning), the four Makioka sisters, Tsuruko, Sachiko, Yukiko and Taeko, all born and bred
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Go to any sushi restaurant in Japan and notice that “ikura” or salmon roe, is either written in katakana or hiragana. I was curious as to why it was often written in katakana–the alphabet designated to loanwords. I asked the master at Sushi Danran about this curiosity. He told me that “ikura”
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When I first moved to Studio City earlier this year, my friend Trevor greeted me with “Welcome to the city of sushi joints and bong shops.” And I thought to myself, “Heaven?”  I kid, kind of.  According to Yelp.com there’s about 63 places to eat sushi in the 7.11 square miles
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Just in at Sushi Kuni (my pop’s restaurant): RAW OCTOPUS (nama dako)! Kuni ordered this long, spindly tentacled arm last week straight from Tsukiji market. It was over three feet long, with a gorgeous purple-pink tone. I can’t quite put
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