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.

So today is the second say of the transit strike in New York, which, according to my cousin Izzi, would be called the transport strike in London. Honestly I have not followed this story too closely, as of yet. Looking through the New York Times on the web just now, I read the second article about how New Yorkers are coping with the strike. Some are getting up at 2:30 AM to endure a clogged commute in cars so they can beat the 5:30 AM ban on cars with fewer than four passengers. Some are crowding onto LIRR trains to Penn Station. Many are walking in the brutal cold over the Brooklyn Bridge. That's what you see in the picture below.



Now, something I notice in this and another picture is people walking with bike helmets or with bikes. I also notice the cutie in the matching white hat and scarf. This is actually a very well-composed photo. She almost looks angelic, with the glowing light surrounding her and putting her into focus as those around her are blurry and obscured in darkness. Ok, getting a little carried away...

Ok, back to the subject. I wonder why these people are walking with bike helmets on. Could they be wearing them for extra insulation against the cold? If so, they are foolish, because the air vents are sure to admit enough frigidity to render the helmets ineffective in that capacity. My best guess is that they are walking with their bikes, but we just can't see the bikes because they are blocked by the corpora populi. Sorry, I made that Latin expression up. It probably means nothing.

So this raises the question: why are they walking with their bikes when they could be riding them? Again, their are several possibilities. I would guess that they are walking their bikes so as to not crash into the multitudes perambulating in their midst. Alternately, they may feel too cold when they are riding because of the wind. My guess is the former, so I want to publicly disparage these bicycle wimps for not taking the Brooklyn Bridge carway. If the traffic is as clogged as they say, and this is such a liminal moment, a time outside of time, surely such a rule as not biking on the roadway can be flaunted with impunity. Bikers! Here me! You are the vanguard! You ride the future! Take heed and take what is rightfully yours!

The thought of thousands of bikers gleefully riding between lanes of influid traffic, howling in a combination of joy and pain at the absurdity of the situation is enough to almost make me happy. But of course, any person with a brain would not feel happy that millions are stranded. Millions who do not have bikes, or, God forbid, don't want to ride theirs. I understand this. Biking is not for everyone, especially in subzero weather. This strike is a shame. A big shame.

Reading this one article, aware that I am lacking much of the basic background information to pass judgment, I am struck by Mayor Bloomberg's confrontational tone. He is calling the strikers "thugs," for example. Last night, as we wrapped up a dinner in which I used several recipes from the Jose Andres book, which I will discuss a bit more at length later, Gillian began a discussion with the other attendees that didn't seem to be making much progress. It seemed to be everyone against Gillian, and at first I was tempted to agree with everyone else, but I didn't want to gang up on her. The thing is, Gillian was speaking on a principle that the unions are always the victims and that they are the workers who make relatively little money but serve a vital function. She was saying that there is plenty of money in New York, and people shouldn't blame the unions for wanting to maintain their standard of living slightly higher than the working poor. Now, I don't know the facts in this case. I do know that a starting MTA operator in Los Angeles makes about $18/hour. So one can assume that in New York the pay is comparable. So this is decent pay for that type of work, driving people around. It's not going to make you rich, but it would work out to about $35,000/year, I think. Yeah, corporate lawyers make a lot more. Stock brokers make more. Doctors definitely make more. But starting teachers don't. Of course they should, but not all union members struggle. Registered nurses do pretty well for themselves, as they should, but they certainly could not be called working class, despite representation by the nurses association. Unionized dockworkers of the ILWU make a fortune, I think six digits, and perhaps they should. But the main reason they make so much is that they have skilled jobs that cannot be easily replaced. And they are a crucial link for millions of dollars of cargo every day.

So not all unions are protecting working people from dire poverty. Unions are self-serving and they try to get what they can from their employers. Generally I have no problem with this. God knows I am grateful to have the teachers union getting me a decent wage and excellent benefits, although I could stand to make a bit more. I do have problems with the teachers union as well. I don't appreciate how they protect mediocre teachers and cling to an arbitrary pay structure based solely on seniority and salary points, which are college credits that you earn beyond a bachelors. An amazingly effective and dedicated teacher who only has a bachelors degree could be earning almost $10,000 less than a lazy, ineffective teacher with the same number of years of service, because the indolent educator has paid some fly-by-night online university for bogus college credits. It's a scandal, and the union does nothing to change it.

In this case, therefore, I am reserving judgment. Bloomberg should quit the grandstanding and stop making people blame the transit workers for trying to get their piece of the pie. However, the workers had better be doing what they can to reach an agreement and get back to work, because they are not helping their case by making millions freeze their New York butts off, on the saddle or not.

East in Little Tokyo

So Saturday was an unusually food-centric day. I got up in the morning and decided it was time to actually go down to La Española Meat, Inc. in Harbor City. So first thing was to look through the new Spanish cookbook that I stole from my mom. That helped me to get a sense of what types of products I would need to make the recipes. Then I went online to check out what they have and what their prices are like. It was a good approach, because it made shopping much less confusing and much more efficient.

Ok, so I can't do much with this Flock blog editor, like paste photos or change the font, so this review is going to sort-of suck. Oh well.

So I got all kinds of Spanish meats and cheeses, but it was friggin' expensive. Like $16 for a half kilo of beans! Ok, so I should have asked the price before I went to the register, but who would've thought. The beans are these special Asturian beans for making fabela asturiana. I also got this nice packet of meat called a champango, which has chorizo, blood sausage, lacon, and tocino, which are both types of salt pork. Yum!

I took the bus all the way to Harbor City. It was actually pretty fast and really nice to have the time to read the whole paper. On the way back, I had the whole bus to myself a lot of the way. Talk about traveling in style!

At Tony's we baked all day. I was going to make a fruit cake, but I didn't time things well, so I didn't actually have time to cook it. Later, we all went over to a gallery opening downtown. It featured some of my students' work on street vendors, so I was proud, of course.

After the opening, it was long overdue for us to eat something more substantial than cookies. After some discussion of pho, thai, and Spanish, we ended up in Little Tokyo. The original goal was to go to the new izakaya, Yazu, which we had tried and liked a few weeks ago. Instead we ended up at East, because Yazu was too packed.

East is a cute little place on First Street. They have dark wood tables, and a menu that has a lot of sushi, especially rolls, and some grilled, baked, and fried dishes. At my table, we ordered a bunch of different dishes. Overall the quality was good and the prices were decent.

That's all I have time for.

Hospitals

Los Angeles Police Department officials agreed that the hospitals have few other options. But they said the practice worsens the already grim conditions on Skid Row. They also disputed the hospitals' contention that the patients taken to Skid Row are always ready for release.

Hospitals Are Discharging Patients to Skid Row - Los Angeles Times

Recently I went hiking on Mt Wilson.

First Test of Flock

I am testing a new browser that is coming out in Beta soon but is currently only a developer version, which I guess means it's not reliable or something. So far it looks pretty good. I am putting the pictures here from my Flickr account. I didn't even have to login. My only complaint about that is that it only finds my public photos. What if I want to blog my family or friends photos? Maybe that makes no sense, since why would I have them private on Flickr if I am going to just go ahead and put them on a public blog? I don't know, but it would be nice to be able to enter my password, like I can with the del.icio.us manager and be able to access all the photos I have on Flickr.

Here's a picture of a tree with my parents' garage behind it. I guess you could say that I am trying too hard to take arty looking pictures, but I guess that's one of the fun things to do with a camera. Let's see now if this works.

Oh, one last thing: Brian, my blog kicks your blogs ass!