Gaja Okokonomiyaki Restaurant in Lomita



Last night I went with Shig and Bim Bim to a new restaurant in Manhattan Beach that our friend Leilani had designed. It's a Greek place called Petros in a new upscale mini mall.



She did a really nice job with the design, especially the bar and some of the details, like the way the patterns of the floor lines up with the ceiling.


The food was ok there, but nothing to blog about.

After a while, we decided to go get a real dinner, so we were off to a restaurant that Bim Bim recommended, called Gaja. It's an unassuming little spot in a little shopping plaza near Crenshaw and Lomita on the westside of Lomita. We got there at 9PM, and it was pretty full, but luckily tables cleared fast and our group of 11 was able to be seated after about 15 minutes.

It was a little hot next to those griddles, and the menus showed the damage of too many indecisive diners flipping back and forth through the many options, letting the menu hang over the griddle.



At my table, we settled on the mix okonomiyaki, the hiroshima-style okoniomiyaki, and the vegetable yakisoba. The next table over ordered the monjayaki, which I also got to sample. I also ordered myself a yuzu chu-hi, which is a mix of the japaneze citrus (that also figures prominantly in ponzu sauce) with sho-chu and soda water. This one was surprisingly unsweet and even a bit salty, which I was happy about, because I don't really like sweet alcoholic drinks.

Soon enough, the onomiyaki mix came to the table. Bim had asked them to cook the Hiroshima-style in the back, since it is a bit too complicated for novices, but we had a go at the simpler Osaka-style.


The first step was to take the pork, octopus, and scallops from the top of the bowl and let them brown on the oiled griddle.



Personally, I would have put a bit more oil on, but I am a little to loose with my fat. The meat seemed to cook ok, and then we threw on the rest of the batter and shaped it into a nice disk, about 14 cm in diameter and 2 cm in thickness, as suggested by the detailed cooking instructions.



This step caused a bit of a conflict at my table. I thought it was best to allow the pancake to brown for several minutes, ensuring an easier flip and less risk of breakage. The others worried about burning, and after barely 30 seconds were already chomping at the bit to put the spatulas to use. We compromised, cutting the frisbee into four quarters, which my tablemates flipped a couple minutes ahead of me. This was probably a good move, since it meant that no one had to try to toss the whole okonomi at once, an almost certain disaster.



The pictures of the finished okonomiyaki all came out a little blurry, so this is the best I have. You can see that I hadn't yet added the seaweed flakes or enough mayonnaise. To cut to the chase, the okonomiyaki was delicious. Good texture, with the play of crispy browned outside and soft, molten interior. The flavors and textures of the meats, vegetables, and sauces all balanced each other beautifully. Everything was fresh and clean-tasting. Perhaps mayonnaise, sweet brown sauce, bonito flakes, and seaweed flakes might seem like too much going on, but it works, it works.



If you are already an okonomiyaki lover, know that Gaja's is of the highest quality. You may wonder: Why bother going out when you can cook at home? If you don't like to cook, you might not like Gaja. or you might ask them to cook the food for you. That's what we did with the Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, which you can see here. The picture which reveals the fried noodle interior didn't come out. basically, there is pancake on the bottom, noodles in the middle, and a thin, smooth omelette on top. Nice, but I preferred the Osaka-style.



When they brought out the raw ingredients for the vegetable yakisoba, Bim Bim asked the waiter to cook that for us as well. Fortunately I was able to stop him immediately and retrieve the plate. I was having too much fun and wanted to re-live the experience of seeing yakisoba cooked at 3AM in Kyoto while seeing double due to the shiso shochu we had been enjoying in the bar above, served by a Japanese guy who wanted us to call him DJ Babu (he was a big fan of the truly World Famous Beat Junkies). Yes, my wacky night in Japan memory. My Lost in Translation moment. I remembered how much oil the old lady put in the yakisoba that night as Wes, Akiko, and I watched in awe, and I wanted to follow her example. My tablemates were skeptical, so I held back on the fat once again. Regardless, the yakisoba was very tasty, although not quite the greasy, sloppy mess of comforting, goodness that I remembered from four years ago.





You can also see here the monjayaki that the table next to us so skillfully prepared. It was tasty, but I didn't bother to put my serving on the griddle and use the mini-spatulas to scrape of the browned goop. Next time I will, as I am sure the result is divine.



For dessert, we shared an order of green tea mochi with some azuki-bean paste in the middle. Very tasty.




After dessert I ran to the restroom to investigate the menus I heard were pasted to the wall. It was true! Not only the top three most ordered dishes, but also a plea to try Gaja for lunch, when it transforms into a completely different restaurant!





After a nice afterdinner mint:



We headed outside, where I took some final shots that will hopefully guide you to this special spot. I really wish Gaja was in Little Tokyo and stayed open until 4AM. Alas, I will have to content myself with an occasional trek to the South Bay for a far soberer meal, much more likely to buffer against an impending night of drinking than to soak up the already-consumed.



Gaja can be found at http://www.gajaokonomiyaki.com
Look at the picture for the hours.
The address is 2383 Lomita Blvd #102. Lomita, CA 90717
Tel / Fax: (310) 534-0153

The first time I heard someone refer to food photography as "food pornography," I thought it was kind of funny. It made some sense, since porn's purpose is to stimulate your sexual appetite and food photography's purpose is to stimulate your ingestive appetite. But as I began to hear the term a lot, it bothered me a bit. Something about the connotation just doesn't fit to me. Maybe it's my puritanical New England upbringing that makes me feel shame at the suggestion that I might enjoy any sort of porn. Perhaps the more liberated among us would think that the term food porn has a positive association, of pleasure and excitement.

But I don't think so. It seems to me that this is just another example of people finding ways to dismiss any art that actually attempts to be affecting. Sure, it is manipulative, if you choose to see the negative side of things, but all good art must induce an aesthetic reaction in the viewer. If we feel nothing, why bother? The same is true for cooking, which is a kind of art, or craft, if you prefer. There is a strongly visual element to the eating experience, and good cooks always consider the message that the diners' eyes are going to send their stomachs.

Any good writer, filmmaker, painter, or poet will do the same. They are writing with the hope that they will get to the reader, hit them on an emotional level. So when I read this passage today in an op-ed by Meghan Daum about "Brokeback Mountain," I was annoyed by the further descent into cynicism that it represents:


Though what "Brokeback Mountain" amounts to, in effect, is female-targeted emotional pornography, both sexes of all inclinations could learn a thing or two from it. By acting like men but emoting like women, by embodying both sides of the divide, Jack and Ennis cover all the bases of the romantic equation. This makes more conventional movie characters — male or female — seem woefully one-dimensional by comparison.

A breakthrough called 'Brokeback' - Los Angeles Times


Although I agree with her that it was a great movie and her overall assessment of the characters, I just don't like the implication of the term "emotional pornography." This is a plea: Let's stop using pornography metaphorically, especially to belittle genuine art by dragging it into the realm of cheap fuck flicks designed to provide visual fodder for male masturbatory exercises.
Watching "Brokeback Mountain," I was not jacking off my emotions. I was thinking and feeling. Please don't try to make that into such a cheap and gratuitous experience.