la.foodblogging

Sandwiched between more casual fare, Orris is the type of place you could easily miss. It looks like a posh izakaya, a single room of close-set tables and some counter seating, pleasantly packed and respectfully low-key. A big, chiseled Okinawan (a man you could mistake for Beat Takeshi’s gangster brother) lords over the open kitchen: [...]

A few days ago, I went to celebrate a friend’s birthday. He is an avid fan of Sushi Nozawa. In fact, he was the one who took me there for my birthday last year. For his birthday, he said he wanted to try a new place, sugarFISH… by Sushi Nozawa. [...]

Step inside this restored 1928 Spanish mission-style cottage, located on Riverside in Toluca Lake, and you might think you’ve been transported to somewhere in the exotic Spanish or Latin American countryside. D’Caché is a lively restaurant where they serve modern Latin-fusion cuisine, tapas and fine wines and great drinks. Try a fresh Columbian mojito made [...]

I took the BF out for a surprise birthday dinner last night to a nearby restaurant called Upstairs 2. It’s actually part of the Wine House which is downstairs. The place features tapas-sized plates of food as (obviously) a variety of wines.
They were offering a prix fixe menu that night and the items on [...]

Despite living within walking distance of Bar Hayama, I finally went for the first time last night for dinner. The outside is unassuming and easy to miss, but inside is a nice spacious shelter from the traffic on Sawtelle. The seats around the large fire pit were already taken, but we nabbed a table [...]

To celebrate our anniversary, the BF treated me out to a wine and tapas restaurant called AOC. The food is roughly mediterranean and comes out in small dishes to be shared with the whole table. The space itself is sleek and modern while still being cozy and warm. We were seated upstairs in [...]

I had dinner at Musha, an izakaya in Santa Monica, recently and wanted to highlight some or our favorites on the menu. The place is small and gets pretty crowded at night so we made a reservation a day or so beforehand just so we didn’t have to wait thirty to sixty minutes for [...]

I moved to Los Angeles straight from college and landed here a naive 22 year with a freshly printed engineering degree and a knowledge of the city built from Raymond Chandler novels. Contrasting with the cozy comforts of my collegiate Boston existence, LA was a cold distant mistress. Everywhere I turned, the rule was detachment [...]