The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Still pretty crazed at work right now, but we're closing in on the goal. Even though I'm 11 days into my second 13-day week this month, I feel good today. Maybe I'm just getting acclimated to working until 1AM. Maybe being on the summer side of the vernal equinox has given me some added strength. Maybe I'm just as beat and delusional, but I can't tell any more. At least it's not Public Enemies.

Today is our second preview, and we're in much better shape than we were for the first, both in terms of the content and the execution. That makes for a positive attitude and outlook as well as a chance to breathe today. Last time, we used our emergency time to take care of emergencies. This time, everything has gone smoothly thus far.

Even though I was at work until after 1AM, I still was up by 9, so I took advantage of the time to do a little shopping.

Cheap wine and expensive liquor kinda sums up my drinking habits, and it certainly describes this particular trip to Beverage Warehouse. 

I had some Miller's gin at Ford's the last day off I had, and one of my crewmates got a bottle of Plymouth for the cutting room the other day, so I've been thinking about small-batch gin lately. This Leopold's certainly passes Count Reeshard's label test, so I decided to try it. I have the opportunity to indulge in Taco Thursday this week, so I grabbed some 1800, and the Blavod is in memory of Dr. Amelia Haygood, who was a big fan and one of m drinking mentors.

I also got a chance to stop at Ronnie's Diner and have some good old American breakfast. Ronnie's is in the same strip mall as Fioretto, and just up the street from Beverage Warehouse and the LA Wine Co. I like that neighborhood.

Notice how the contents combine with the egg in the omelet rather than just being wrapped inside like a crepe. You probably can't tell from this pic, but those red potatoes have a really nice griddle sear on them. The coffee is strong and dark, and salsa is the preferred condiment. This is SoCal after all. Never disappointing, and $11 with tax (now 9.25%!) and tip.

After our setup, the crew went across the street for a little sushi at Sugarfish, the Marina Del Rey outpost of the famed Nozawa. Nozawa is known as the "sushi nazi." He only serves omakase, and is known to fiercely ridicule American trends in sushi, like California rolls and dipping everything in soy and wasabi. Of course, our tastes as consumers have developed, and we're all beginning to realize how right he is.

Sugarfish takes his "Trust Me" concept to the casual diner. The "light" lunch is $13.50, the full combo is $23.50, and a full complement of à la carte options is available. Drinking was not an option today, but I will return to sample some of their small, but varied sake list. Highlights of the meal included tuna sashimi; buttery albacore; thin, nearly transparent snapper; and delightfully fresh and mild uni. The house ponzu was especially tangy and refreshing. It made you feel like the yuzu was grown out back. The knife work was excellent, especially for the price, yielding perfectly thin, delicate slices of fish, respectful of the grain and texture and providing a more than satisfactory level of taste ad texture. 

All in all, it's a pretty good day to go to a favorite spot and discover another that's really good. Of course, at this point, any meal not served in a clamshell or cardboard box is a thing of true joy and beauty.

 

I am still here, kinda.

In the few minutes I have before heading out to work this morning, day 10 of a 13-day week that has included 4 16-hour days thus far, I am somehow compelled to blog. I can no longer be satisfied by mere facebook status updates or snarky comments. I must speak and have you listen. Both of you.

Partially, I am a little inspired by bikesnob, my hero of the blogoshpere. His recent work has bee among his best, and today's skewering of single-speed culture was particularly wonderful. As a fellow child of the 80s, the snob has a similar appreciation for counter-culture scenes as I do, having the same reaction in 1991-92 when al of a sudden Metallica and Nirvana became platinum sellers. You can't suffer that kind of disillusionment without it changing you forever. Hell, I listened to nothing but Phish and Miles Davis for at least a year after that. It was a long time before I got back to my punk rock roots, as my friend Rotary Rachel cautioned me to do.

On the plus side, I listened to a lot of Miles Davis.

It's also the start of racing season, but I haven't been on a bicycle since my last day off work. I've been daydreaming of the new steel I intend to reward myself with (that decision is not yet fully arrived at) and looking at pictures on pez, but I have no commuting stories or epic jaunts to share as in posts past.

Even my eating has been curtailed. I have eaten often and sometimes well, but styrofoam boxes and plastic clamshells are not the stuff that blogs are made of.

I did have another (oops, never mentioned the abalone and truffles from the last trip there!) near-religious experience at K-Zo on Saturday. It was a short day: 10-8, so I told BoW that I wanted to have a really good dinner out and asked her to look for a res in Culver City for the evening. Ideally, I would have gone to Fraîche, but that's just because we can never get in.

She got us a reservation at the bar and told them ahead of time that we wanted omakase, and we were seated in the center of the bar in front of the chef who was clearly the stud on duty that night. We ordered some Kikusui draft sake (it's the best drink to come from a can ever!) and did some positive modeling for the younger couple at the bar next to us.

What followed was a truly wonderful dining experience. We had the complete attention of the chef who made only two dishes the entire night not intended for us. Most of his time was spent on an amazing parade of fish and fish accessories: cooked, marinated tuna with a ponzu-like gelée, beautiful snapper, halibut, Santa Barbara prawn two ways, seared halibut fin (!), real bluefin, Spanish mackerel, premium Japanese mackerel with (!), premium golden-eye snapper with seared skin (!), some kind of crazy sweet clam thing (!), fresh raw octopus tentacle, sea trout (it looks like salmon, but it's sooooooo much better), fried octopus suckers, uni, seared black cod with eel sauce, and premium Japanese baby sweet shrimp.

I think that's everything.

One of the best parts of the night was when he brought out the whole prawns and showed them to us. BoW was so sad when he took the heads off. "I want to eat the eyes." Can you blame her? Something distracted her (probably the delicious butterflied tail that was the most delicious shrimp I have every had - why do we cook tis stuff again?) from noticing him carry the heads on a plate back to the kitchen. Imagine her joy when the head returned, split in half and tempura fried. Delicious brains.

I felt a bit self-conscious about photos in this context, but I plan to return and make friends with that chef. My Japanese friend is actually moving to the neighborhood, an K-Zo is where she takes her mother when she visits, so that will boost my cred a bit. After we establish a bit of a rapport, I may give you a visual taste.

By the way, he introduced himself and gave us a fist bump at the end of the meal. His name? K-Zo.