Tuesday, May 15, 2007

   Local Sushi
As many of you know - I have recently relocated from the Seattle area to northern California.

I was a bit concerned with my ability to find good sushi, sake, anime, etc. I know if I drove down to San Francisco, I would be in otaku heaven - but that is a 2 hour plus drive each way depending on traffic, so it will not be a weekly event. I am pleasantly surprised at what I found - ok - haven't found a place to rent anime yet, but as far as the others go - I think I will be ok.

As far as manga goes - the local comic shop has a pretty decent selection & then there is Barnes and Noble. I won't find anything really out there, but at least they carry a good number of titles. Anime for sale - there is an electronic superstore in the area called Fry's that has a nice Anime aisle. Also - they are not going to be searching for any unusual titles, but at least they have volume.

As far as sushi goes - I was pleasantly surpised at a place called Wasabi House not too far from our new home (2-3 miles) - too far to stagger, but a nice quick drive when you are hungry. They have a nice selection of sushi with an... almost french presentation. Yeah - not your average place. A normal sushi presentation is on a small sinple decorative plate - normally not much larger than the sushi roll itself. It would come with ginger (to cleanse the palette) and wasabi (to torture the uninitiated). This place served the sushi roll on more of a platter. The sushi roll takes up a small portion of the plate with the rest of the area being taken up by some type of sauce. The sushi roll we ordered had a red ring of chili sauce around the plate. It was a fairly common chili sauce - I forget the name, but it usually comes in a large squeeze bottle with a rooster on the label. I digrerss - what a shock there. Many of the sushi are much more decorative with the sauce patterns in the shape of a fish or '49ers or something else mildly amusing. The sushi was tasty and I enjoyed having the chili sauce dip as an alternative to the wasabi. They did have a few coices for sake. Few. They actually had about 6 on the menu, but in reality, they only had 3 in stock. The one I had was considered a 'premium'. I would call it 'good' - not great or premium, but good. I'll have to check BevMo's selection to see what they have to offer by the bottle.

The local grocery market carries the brand of udon soup I like. In Seattle, we would end up going to 3 different stores to do our shopping, but we found a store close by that allows us to actually do almost all of our grocery shopping in one place. I still have to go to a health food store for the yeast free bread. Yeah - I didn't think you could make bread without yeast either, but apparently you can.

I hope everybody is doing well.

Until next time - bunraku
Comments (12)