San Francisco’s Richmond district is a long BART and bus ride away from where I once lived in the East Bay, a distant land as far as college me was concerned. But in 2003 I made the trek for a noir film festival and thought, maybe I’d try Russian food. My Russian teacher had recommended [...]
Baseball season is back. That means I’m going to eat some hot dogs soon. And I’m excited. I shouldn’t be, not considering the cost. Those between-inning lines are a bitch, standing in front of angry fans looking for beer number three, and behind slow dads buying meals for big families. The condiment dispensers never work [...]
I’ve had the good fortune to dine finely on occasion, to dust off the ol’ wingtips and drop stupid money on one meal: a tasting menu in Vegas or Napa, an omakase marathon into the triple digits, and other edibly metaphorical attempts at winning life. Sometimes those dinners leave stellar impressions, but none escape some [...]
I leaned my head against the Shinkansen window, snacking on train station fast food. Japan passed by at 300 kilometers per hour, while I counted golf ranges and Ferris wheels at an astonishing clip. Then the track doglegged, and there was Mount Fuji, emerging from sparse countryside and hogging the view. Even the regulars paused, [...]
The city of Yokohama boasts the second biggest population in Japan, but looking out the Shinkansen window, I never saw Tokyo end or Yokohama begin. The buildings lost their height and their charm, transforming more into suburbia with every stop. Meanwhile, uniformed men checked our tickets and uniformed women pushed carts down the aisle, whispering [...]
About half-an-hour up the mountain from Okawa is a house on stilts, balancing over a ravine, abandoned. A handful of rickety structures lean into the hillside nearby, the homes of old hermits who tend their own rice paddies and manage to survive without driving to the convenience mart in town. We didn’t see any people [...]
The first time Mele and I stepped into a car in Japan was at the Kochi City train station. Josh met us in front of the Anpanman Terrace, and after we awkwardly waved hello at each other from two feet away, our host led us toward his tiny car, a white Daihatsu with enough horsepower [...]
I’ve known a few people who have attended the University of California at San Diego, a large public university condemned to the city of La Jolla, and each of these friends has harbored certain resentment toward this fate. La Jolla is a beautiful city, the kind of beautiful that has come to represent the city [...]
I moved from Los Angeles to San Diego, then to Los Angeles, then to San Francisco, and I drove into this city with a promise to myself: when it came to Mexican comida, I would keep an open mind. I would allow for the possibility that Mexican food in the Mission style is every bit [...]
Don’t be so modest, Tara. You can take that question mark off the sign. Yak is the enlightened meat. It’s lean like buffalo but juicy like beef. It’s raised at high elevation in the Himalayas and in Colorado, this mystical creature that exists, in my experience, in exotic children’s books and adventure tales, up among [...]
