Ron "Stuck in Third Gear" H.'s Profile

Noooooo it's gone! Valhalla was a great place to hang out after work. Good beers, good fries, good entrees. All gone. So sad.

Friend asked me to compare against Ajisen (which he likes, and for the few edge-case militant ramen peeps out there, he is not Asian). I paste here with little modification out of laziness:

Ajisen imo is closer to the original Chinese dish. It's just riding on the modified Japanese version for marketing. As I described it in my yelp review, like a game of telephone =p. At Ajisen, the broth seems actually made to be drinkable, like a soup, which I think is more inline with the spirit of Chinese cooking.

Japanese style ramen on the other hand...the broth is nigh undrinkable; it's more of a sauce than a soup. Santouka and Kohryu sometimes give me a gag reflex when I try to drink the soup. It's all about the power overwhelming, punch you in the face, hadouken flavor sauce. To me, Japanese ramen is notably different than traditional Japanese cooking in that respect, which is one reason I'm not the biggest fan of ramen all the time. Traditional Japanese cooking seems more harmonious to me.

At Yamadaya, i found the sauce/soup to be actually drinkable compared to its peers, and I like the firm thin noodles. Oh and they have fatty cuts of chashu that were really good. Still, I overhead a few Chinese patrons saying, "the soup is salty!" And yeah, when you compare to other noodle soup dishes, like pho, and original Chinese ramen, it IS salty. But still good.

So far, Yamadaya might be my new current Japanese ramen fav.

3.5 Pro tip, or maybe more like common-sense tip: if the dish you're going to serve is totally different from the description on the menu, please say so before the customer orders. Thanks.

Came by for OC Beer Week. I got the grilled steelhead salmon with brussel sprouts, purple potatoes, mushrooms, and umami (which I thought was a flavor?).

What I got was salmon with quinoa, large cuts of beets (it's purple, too, right?), and a side salad. Huh...If you're gonna surprise me, why not go all out and make the protein a rack of a lamb while you're at it.

My friend got the roasted chicken with farro, brussel sprouts, cranberry, and walnut. There was none of that from what I could see. 'Cept for the chicken.

When I inquired about the differences, the server said the menu in my hand, dated today, wasn't going to be fully active until the following Tuesday. Thanks for the 411.

Anyway, it's my second time here, and it ranges from "pretty tasty" to "nothing special." The hummus is very good. The soft tacos are very good, but pricey for what you get. The pizzas can get tiresome depending on what you get. The salmon was cooked well, but the surprise sides were nothing to write home about. The quinoa and beets were actually pretty boring.  You can get a vastly superior quinoa salad at the UCI farmer's market. The thai-style curry is pretty tasty.

2.5. A 3 to me would mean I might bother coming back, but I won't. Pretty mediocre burgers. Also, I highly suspect their aioli sauce isn't a true aioli. Tasted like flavored mayo, you know, the cheaper, quicker hack for making "aioli."

They have pretty good chowder here. It's tomato based, so if you like your chowder acidic, you've come to the right place. Add in a bit of tabasco, and it's delish.

My friends seemed to enjoy their entrees, but I found their halibut special to be pretty dry. I mean, if I'm going to pay $18.5 for a underwhelming portion, the fish better be cooked damn well, otherwise, I'd just go home and botch it myself.

Oddly, someone tried to contend that spending $18.5 for overcooked halibut was acceptable. Wut?

Meh. The spicy miso soup base wasn't very flavorful. The beef didn't taste particularly delectable either. They do give you a lot of food, however.

The miso fish appetizer was also not very good.  My memory could be fuzzy, but I think miso fish should be a bit sweet, light, and delicate. Here, it's heavy and sharp in all the wrong ways.  This place just made me wish I had gone to an izakaya.

Service was pretty awful. Our server seemed like a nice guy, but it was kind of like being served by Ted from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. I think he was a newbie. Our drinks came very late, behind two other tables that seated after us, and he never seemed to be around when we needed him.

Usually I would forgive, but at the end it took 27 minutes in total from bill request to receipt. Yeah, I was counting. All of us had used metered parking, and we had gone well beyond the 2 hrs purchased at this point. On my way back to my car, I started wondering, "Hmm, I wonder how vigilant Laguna Beach is about expired meters..."  Minutes later, I'm making a dash for my car after spotting the meter maid making her rounds in the parking structure I used.  Thankfully, no ticket.

Oh, and sitting outside on a nice sunny day seems like a good idea, but it actually gets pretty damn hot after awhile since their patio faces directly into the sun. Several other patrons played musical chairs trying to avoid the sun. They could use an installation of some slatted blinds methinks for the extra sunny days.

Anyway, the food is above average, but definitely not worth the extra cost of slow service. We got the deviled eggs, braised pork, the fried chicken special, the fish and chips, a side of mac and cheese.

The mac and cheese tasted like it was made with Velveeta. Skip.

I'm a bit skeptical of ordering fried chicken at a nice restaurant - it seems like a waste, but it was actually pretty interesting here: crispy, but not too crispy; almost like a hybrid with karaage. It comes with delicious mashed potatoes.

The braised pork wasn't too shabby, but I probably wouldn't order it again. Just not as flavorful nor as tender as I was hoping for.  The vegetables that accompanied it were cooked perfectly though, and out-shined the pork.

I've had better fish and chips, but it wasn't bad. Not very memorable. The fries that came with the dish were tasty, though.

I usually rate on desire to return, but despite my score, I consider it a fluke and do want to revisit.  Having said that, I think my first visit to a Mastro's is pretty deserving of a 2 star.

First off, my friend raved about the steak at Mastros, so I was pretty excited to try the place out. We all headed over to the Ocean Club, which happened to be serving a 33 oz wagyu rib eye from Australia, which they dub the "tomahawk" (and it does look like one, so that's pretty neat).

A little background on wagyu (sometimes called kobe) for the unfamiliar: Originating from Japan, it's highly marbled beef from specially bred cows - some of those cows are lucky to get massages and beer. Cooked properly, it's melt-in-your-mouth tender. Visit Tsuruhashi for a decent example. Because of how fatty it is, it's very easy to overcook.

Anyway, you guessed it: The tomahawk came out completely overcooked. We cut the steak in thirds, and while one of us got a most excellent piece (we sampled her cut - pretty good), my friend and I got some of the most overcooked and overpriced meat that I've ever had the pleasure of ordering from a restaurant. $90 for an absolutely ruined wagyu steak.  And apparently to make matters worse, when you mess up wagyu, you just end up with tough, super greasy meat. I'm not exaggerating when I say I could have grilled up a better steak that night with any old cut of beef. I kind of feel bad for any wagyu virgins that end up deflowering themselves at Mastros. It would definitely result in a "What's all the fuss about?" if not a flat out, "This is awful." I mean, all those supposed kobe beef burgers out there already do enough damage to the name as it is.

But my friend reassured me his prior experience with their traditional filet mignon was totally different, so I still would like to give them another shot, just not with wagyu.

Despite that downer, their seared tuna sashimi was amazing. It'd give a Japanese place a run for its money. And their bartender deserves some accolades - some of the best martinis I've had.

But then, their appetizers were not that good either. The gnocchi and lobster mashed potatoes were good in an "old American" way, super heavy on the grease. I actually started feeling a little queasy from all the grease.  

Service was wonderful. It's nice to eat at these types of places, because the servers are truly professionals at their trade. She knew the menu and ingredients top to bottom; you could tell that she had personally tried nearly everything on the menu. She did warn us that Mastros runs aggressive on their steak temperature (their rare would be super rare at another restaurant, etc, etc). The only disappointment I had was that she didn't seem to know that wagyu should be served as rare as one can handle, and her warning swayed us to go from rare to medium; to be clear, it was still red in the middle, but still way overcooked and not good.

I think "Meh. I've experienced better" pretty much sums it up. I had high expectations for the waffle part of the sandwich but it was actually quite bland. Seriously, order one, and break off a piece of just the waffle. Bread can make or break a sandwich, so if you're going to swap the bread out, the replacement better hold its own. Although it wasn't quite as much of a fail as Marked5's early attempts to make a rice bun, Bruxie's waffles lack any substantial flavor.

The actual ingredients between the waffle weren't too shabby, but nothing spectacular. The fries were delicious, though.

Overall: meh.

You might resent paying so much for just banh mi when there are so many other cheaper and delicious choices, but there's something different about this place. I don't want to quite call it "upscale" banh mi, but the overall flavor of their sandwiches seem more balanced than somewhere like Banh Mi Che Cali, which lays down the (delicious) sauce a bit thick sometimes.

The whole operation is kind of amusing. You order from a person sitting in a small alcove, and then food comes out of a seemingly tiny room next to him (at least it seems tiny). But they make their limited space work, and it kind of feels like you're ordering banh mi from a frontier outpost.