Wakasan

A lot has been said about Wakasan. Some people are quasi obsessive followers of this hole in the wall Izakaya on Westwood Blvd, while others can't seem to accept what they view to be an excessively stringent adherence to traditionalist Japanese food. While the latter couldn't be further from the truth I'll be the first to admit that Wakasan isn't for the casual sushi eater. It isn't a sushi bar at all. I like to think of Wakasan as almost a private club in which Wakasan himself holds court at the bar leading a brigade of Japanese chef's that can and do give the top Japanese chef's in the city a run for their money.

This is where the Japanese chef's go to eat after work. This is where you sit at the table and a hush falls over the room when Mr. Nozawa the sushi Nazi himself walks into the room and you happily slurp noodles side by side. This is where a certain breed of foodie/drinker comes to indulge in both of their preferred activities.

I try to make it out to Wakasan at least once a week, but sometimes I end up making the trip more often then that. Not only because I love the food and I love the drunken late night conversation with Taku, Wakasan's son, but they serve food late. I'm talking past midnight late. Take that Taco Bell 4th Meal.....

So tonight was special. We were out with good friends introducing them to a favorite restaurant and we had a special bottle of sake. Kubota Hekiju, is a Junmai Daiginjo sake from Niigata. The sister sake to Kubota Manjyu, the Hekiju offered everthing I was hoping a premium sake would. With tons of floral aroma and a bit of vanilla on the palate.


So let's start with the food. A brief note on pictures, while Wakasan is a darling in the blogger world we have built a personal relationship with the staff there and don't want to disrespect them or their food. They a) don't understand the blog hype b) we all think it's distracting when we see a blogger with their notepad and photo-shoot setup at the table. This is dinner not a school report. and c) frankly too many pictures of everything is distracting to the goal of everyone in the restaurant getting drunk and having a great time. That being my long winded explanation for the fact that yours truly got too drunk to remember to take a lot of pictures. Oh but the ones I did take....

1st Round:
(I like to order in rounds not courses at Wakasan as we end up staying for a while so we try to pace it out)

A Sashimi Plate which included: Tuna, Red Snapper, Yellow Tail, Amber Jack, and Rock Cod.
Followed by, now please forgive the lack of pictures...

Hamachi Kama - Grilled Yellow tail Collar....Awesome...Wakasan is a grill master...

Also grilled were the Tukune, chicken meatballs served with a raw egg dipping sauce...I found a picture here in another blog entry about Wakasan. This is actually the blog in which I first found out about this restaurant so I guess I owe the author a debt of gratitude. This is her new blog, check it out....

We were also served a speciality of the restaurant, Tamagoyaki, Egg Omelet with Beef tendon and yam cake. Mindblowingly good. For some reason when I eat this I'm transported back to the breakfast table mixing my eggs with ketchup, food takes us strange and happy places sometimes...

To finish out round one we went with some deep fried whitefish with ponzu. A simple close to the opening salvo.

At this point we had some thinking to do. I knew we would be ordering some of my favorite off menu items like the beef shortrib and the udon "vongole," but when I asked Taku for something different and new that I hadn't tried I thought we might get something weird like fish innards or raw beef, which we did have and was killer, but what we got was better than I could have even dreamed up.

Duck and Foie Gras nabe.I've had their kamo(duck)-nabe before. And fellow blogger Kevineats had some with his recent Wakasan meal, but this was special. On my previous visit I had been shown the lobe of duck foie sitting in the fridge and wondered what they would possibly do with it. While many people know of Hiro Urasawa's use of foie in Shabu Shabu, I'd never seen it pre-seared before. In fact I was worried that somehow doing this would cause the foie to loose some flavor. Boy was I wrong. We let one small piece of foie dissolve into the broth "for flavor" and than went at it full bore. Duck green onion and foie. Killer...

At this point we were pretty well full and pretty hammered. We'd already been there for 3 hours and the restaurant was starting to empty. My favorite time to be there. We killed the bottle of Kubota with the staff than moved on to Sochu. Feeling that if I was going to throw up because I was too drunk I might as well go out in style I had Taku get me to final "shime" dishes. Tempura shrimp over rice with the most amazing sauce, and raw octopus with pickled wasabi root. Bar non one of the best and slimiest drinking snacks I've ever encountered.

We asked for some kind of desert and we were delivered a wonderful green tea crepes with strawberries inside and blueberries on top. Perfect.

Wakasan is an ask and you shall receive restaurant. The chef's have tons of the freshest ingredients on hand and aim to please. A note on the menu. Forget the printed menu, use it only as a guide but rely on your server. They know better than you. Wakasan and team took amazing care of us and obviously we'll be there again soon. I'm there all the time, I'm the big goofy American eating all the weird stuff.

Wakasan
1929 Westwood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90025
(310) 446-5241

I Met Alice Waters Today

Yeah, I did...It was awesome. She's such a wonderful down to earth woman, aside from being one of America's best chef's...ever...Alice was one of the first and continues to be a very loud proponent of local and organic produce. How cool is it that a "hippie chef" from Berkley California helps influence policy at The White House.

Megan and I had the pleasure of eating at Chez Panisse this past summer on our swing through Napa and San Francisco. I wish I had been hipper to the whole blogging thing at the time, I would have taken pictures and written a full post. I'll have to do that next time, but suffice to say Chez Panisse and Alice Waters have changed the American culinary lexicon for the better and we owe her a debt of gratitude for all of the wonderful local produce that is available to us now.





PS

Sorry for the lack of real food bloggish updates. I've been stuck in the studio but I do have a backlog of posts coming up, plus Rock and Dinner Roll Special...Rock and Egg Roll. My co-blogger just got back from a trip to China and from the Picture's I've seen I'm sure he has some Epic meals to discuss.

Love...Peace...Taco Grease.

Sharky's Mexican Grill

While most people think that musicians and people from Hollywood in general would rather eat steamed tofu and veggies, I'm here to tell you that most professional artists in their younger days, while they can still destroy their bodies, like fast food.

For me there are lines in the sand. While I will eat In and Out Burger on a regular basis as well as a Fatburger from time to time, I haven't eaten McDonalds, Burger King, Or Jack in the Box in around 10 years. I don't really consider Fatburger and In and Out to be fast food. Anywhere in which you have to sit down at a table and wait for your food to be prepared counts as a restaurant to me. So I guess Sharky's falls into that grey area between fast food and sit down restaurant. Lets call it "medium food" neither fast nor slow.

The standard Sharky's Chicken Nacho with black beans. While nothing new, and in fact eating these breaks most of my personal diet rules I think they are great. As far as "gringo" Mexican food goes I think Sharky's blow's Baja Fresh and Wahoo's out of the water. I'd be interested in doing a side by side Chiplote vs. Sharky's but I think that would be a big waste of time followed by a long period in which I feel very bloated.


The boys in the band currently don't eat much outside of what they refer to as "The All American Feast." This usually means a runner is sent out to a local Deli to pick up Chicken Wings, Chicken Tenders, Fried Cheese Sticks, Pizza, French Fries and Onion Rings. I refer to this feast as the heart attack. After a few days of watching a band kill themselves with that kind of crap even Sharky's starts to look healthy. I'll have to go to Wakasan soon to clear out my system of this crap with some great food. Here is a link to a great write up of Wakasan by one of my all time favorite food bloggers Naoko Moore. A personal favorite for late night dining as well as post album detox. Expect my own Waksan write up shortly.

Food Blogger Syndrome

I don't know about you, but I've read a lot of food blogs. Wayyyy to many in fact, if you ask my girlfriend. I spend almost all of my time in front of a computer screen at work only to come home to check if the food blogs that I've been checking all day have updated. Has ChuckEats posted about yet another restaurant I have to try in some distant corner of the globe???!!!?!?!?!?!? It's only been like 10 minutes since I last checked a blog and my hands are starting to shake... The symptoms are clear now, first a cold sweat, than the shaking, than as if from nowhere a full blown case of delirium tremens. That's when you know you've viewed one too many food blog for your own good.

I think everyone has noticed that just about every single person in the western world has a food blog, or knows a writer of a food blog. So it begs the question, does this create a better dining community? If we're all more informed because there is a wealth of information on the Internet than it stands to reason that we'll be happier more educated diners who are more willing to try what the chef's offer...

Or so one hopes.

On a visit to The French Laundry last summer, post coming soon I'm a bad person I know; after our meal when we were introduced to Chef de Cuisine Corey Lee I made the extreme faux pas of mentioning to him that "we'd read a lot about your food in the "blogosphere," and we were looking forward to trying it." He snapped back, quite tersely if you ask me, "don't believe everything you read," before turning back to his kitchen. It got me thinking, are the blogs really just making us more difficult diners?

At a recent dinner at a favorite Japanese restaurant I was speaking with the owner's son who runs the front of house there. He was saying that the culture of food blogging is not only annoying to the restaurants, but he believes the other diners as well. Firstly, most people who take to the Internet, myself included, are not trained food professionals. Also how much fun is it for you the regular at their resturant to have dinner while a table next to you sets up multiple angles of pictures with lighting that they brought to best document the food. While that doesn't make their opinions invalid, it makes them just that, opinion. Anyone can pan a Michelin 3 star restaurant in their blog, but how many of our blogger friends would be willing to step into the kitchen of The French Laundry or Manresa or Per Se and be able to deliver anything on the level of the lowest commie there.

I'd do it if someone gave me a bottole of McCallan 25 so I can put on a thick enough skin to stand the heat....

In my industry there are a lot of people who judge what we do. As a record producer I'm also still a professional musician. I write and record full time. I've been playing instruments longer than most people working at record labels have known that their jobs even existed. However I have to listen to their opinions about my playing, about songs that were written that hold a deep personal meaning to the artist and myself. Their opinions while completely untrained, and in my opinion unwarranted most of the time, are important; just like the blogs. While I personally can't stand people talking about subjects they know little about I guess everyone needs an enemy. I spend my days trying to think of ways to improve songs and how to force my will on the A&R's the Management, and the band to get everyone to perform at the highest level and come back with a product we can be proud of. I guess chef's spend their time thinking about how they would disembowel and cook a reviewer or food blogger who pissed them off.

To each his own.

My advice to those who read food blogs, take everything with a large grain of salt. A lot of blogs are written by people who love the status they get by eating multi course tasting menu's at the most expensive restaurants in the world and than looking down on everything else. I don't know about you but I can't afford to go to Urasawa every month. But the point is this, these blogs are nothing more than a dining journal. Don't take them to be the Gospel truth, most of us would be lost in the kitchen....


PS

sorry for the lack of lunch updates, this record I'm doing is consuming my life. I'll get back to normal shortly.