*sigh* The blog times, they are a-changin'.
Right around this time last year, I ate dinner at Musha in Santa Monica for the first time, and blogged about it. I clicked back into The Delicious archives and re-read what I wrote about Musha. It totally made me chuckle. The highlight of my post was the "personal ad" in the ladies' room.
That year-old post about Musha - it also made me *sigh*.
In the grand scheme of a delicious life, a year is not long, but at blog speed, a year is like an eternity, and so very very very much can happen. Change. Transformation. Evolution. You start to capitalize your sentences. You take a lot of pictures. You use a lot more words. And when you read your blog today as compared to a year ago, you wonder, "What on earth was I thinking back then?" And then..."What on earth am I thinking now?!"
A year ago, I cared a lot more about going out with friends, enjoying myself at a restaurant and just being with everyone. I would remember the funny moments, try to forget the embarassing things I did because I drank too much, and if I could put a few words together, I tried to blog about the experience. But the most important was always just going. A post on a blog was always a possible, but not always assured, by-product of going out to eat.
But now? Oh, oh, oh the here and now. Blogging now. Blogging has become its own animal. It is no longer merely a by-product, but it is the beginning, middle, and end. Blogging is the mise en place, the step-by-step process, and it is the final product, sliced, plated, sauced, garnished and served with a smile. And what was once a cursory introduction about the atmosphere, a few details about the food, and a couple of sentences about the good, the bad, or the ugly service, punctuated by dark, blurred snapshots is now paragraph after paragraph of...myself.
I have become so very personal in my posts, recalling childhood food memories, referring to friends and family, bemoaning my daily, petty, mundane, unimportant trials and tribulations, and writing about how food and restaurants affect me personally, emotionally, psychologically (or psychotically, as the case may sometimes be). It’s almost like therapy, and I wonder how interesting it really is, if at all, to anyone else other than me.
I have always believed food to be an emotional experience, and have been skeptical about simple, objective restaurant reporting. And yet, I find myself struggling, trying to find the right balance between one extreme of plainly listing menu items and prices and the other extreme of allowing a garnish of parsley to stir up a memory of that one time, back when I was four years old, living in San Antonio, and going to People’s with my family and trying to eat the pretty curly vegetable on the buffet and...and...and...holy-oh-my-smokes, by the time I’ve gotten to the end of the blog post, I’ve delved so deeply into my silly psyche that I understand why curly parsley makes me *shudder*.
There’s a lot more I could write about, details of how The Delicious Life has evolved in this way over the period of a year. That in itself could be a series of posts, but I will save that all for another day, and just try to focus on the parade of food that saved my sobriety at Musha.
Musha is tiny. The storefront is probably no more than ten feet across, and no matter what day of the week it is, there are at least a few people waiting for tables who have overflowed onto the sidewalk because the “waiting area” just inside the front door is about as big as a Welcome mat.
There’s a small bar up front, though it doesn’t appear that people ever actually sit at the bar. But there is a bartender back there, pulling bottles of Asahi, Kirin or Sapporo from the glass front door refrigerators with a white, backlit top panel. They are the kind of commercial refrigerators in a Mom and Pop convenience store for self-serve sodas that also seem to be the hallmark of Japanese and Korean restaurants. I guess the refrigerators would take up too much room back in the kitchen.
A walk-in wait could be 45 minutes or longer, but we had a reservation so we were ushered to our table right away. It’s a short sashay through the dining room that’s really no bigger than the living room in my apartment. It's decorated in the same, comfortable, casual way. It’s crowded with a lively mix of customers, some pairs with heads bent across their table in conversation, some groups with heads thrown back in happily buzzed laughter. To catch up with the atmosphere, we asked for a carafe of sake before our butts even hit the chairs.
Musha calls itself an izakaya, which, in the purest sense, refers to a Japanese pub or bar with the primary purpose of serving drinks, but also serves small plates of food, presumably to keep patrons from falling over in a gleeful stupor too soon. Usually, the food is simple, traditional, and easy to serve and eat with drinks, parallel to Americans’ traditional bar foods like Buffalo wings and French fries. Musha, however, is not tradtional. Musha is foodie-forward, with a touch of sass. Dishes are a creative combination of Japanese ingredients, ideas, and presentation with some decidedly non-Japanese adaptations.
Our server pops up to take our order, and when I say “pops up,” I mean he has the look and the shiny happy energy of a Japanese anime character, as it always seems to be the case for servers in Japanese restaurants. He’s young, tall, lanky, with darker skin and a 10 o’clock shadow on his face. His hair is wildly spiky with purposely uneven highlights, and he talks in short, fast clips that sound like I should be reading English subtitles to Kanji-filled cartoon bubbles that appear
over his head. We haven’t quite looked at the menu yet, which doesn’t change much from season to season, and apparently, it remains the same from year to year, even the funny English translations and misspellings that, if they were done on purpose, I wouldn’t be surprised. We started with the nasu kani, a Japanese eggplant stuffed with crab, and could you leave one menu with us so we can keep ordering? “Sure, sure!” and he sprung off. I want to say his name was Yoshi-toshi-okie-dokie-san-tokki.
When Yoshi came back with the nasu kani, we ordered a couple more dishes to keep him busy. The nasu kani is a cold appetizer, presented beautifully on a ceramic plate, but still looks like whoever put it together was talking to me in rapid-fire, high-pitched, Japanese peppered with mini-bursts of giggles. That’s what it looked like to me, so please, don’t rain on my parade by telling me that the cook speaks Spanish. Or Korean. LOL!
The rest of the meal went the same way. When Yoshi bounced back with a plate or two, we ordered one more along with a large beer or another sake, and he’d take away the empty plates on the tiny tabletop. We tried the locally famous fried chicken jokingly identified as “MFC” on the menu, fried shrimp doused with a creamy sauce (The Colonel's popcorn shrimp?), yakitori, and broiled saba (mackerel).
The tofu “fries” were served with condiments made to look like ketchup and mustard, but were a sweet and sour sauce and that ubiquitous Japanese kewpie mayo that must be laced with crack, for how else do you explain that no one in Japan except the highly respected sumo wrestlers, weighs in like Paula Deen.
You would think we were a birthday party or a group of hipsters pre-Holly Trolley for the amount of food and drink we were ordering, but it was just two of us. Either we were crazy or drunk. Or crazy drunk, because we kept on ordering. We thought about trying the risotto, which is served from an enormous wheel of Parmesan that gets wheeled out on a cart tableside with TGIFriday’s flair. The risotto is stirred into and scraped from an ever-widening, ever-deepening crater in the center of the cheese. “Is risotto too heavy?” so instead we went with beef – totally logical in a sake haze.
Beef is done in the style of Japanese yaki niku restaurants. The server sets up a tiny charcoal grill on your table, slaps down a plate of raw beef, and it’s up to you to do the cooking. It’s fun, but I highly recommend doing this open-flames activity earlier in the meal when sake-beer-sake-beer-sake hasn’t yet numbed your sens-abilities to distingiush “That’s hot, I shouldn’t touch it” from “Oh, how cute! (touch) Oh, s--t! That is effin' hot!”
At Musha, you cannot expect an apple pie a la mode to be a simple apple pie a la mode. YoshiToshiOkieDokie brought out a ceramic plate with a poached apple and a small scoop of vanilla ice cream that certainly looked harmless enough. An evil grin crept up over Darth Yoshi’s face. He threw his head back and with a high-pitched cackle of an insane Japanese waiter, he brandished a tiny blowtorch. Ok, so that’s not entirely true. It was a pretty big blowtorch. The blowtorch emitted some crazy “ssshhhrrrssshhh” sound and in a few seconds under a crazy cartoonish blue flame, Yoshi had bruleed the apples right before our very eyes. The dessert wasn’t too bad, but there was more fun in the spectacle than the taste.
Somewhere in the course of our eating, drinking, laughing and chatting with our table neighbors, we got up a couple of times to go out front for a “break” to get some “fresh air.” It must be usual, since Musha has small chairs set up on the sidewalk behind a tiny wooden fence. The atmosphere, the menu, the food, the service, and even little details in the bathroom like entreatises in the ladies’room for not stealing the artwork, make Musha feel less like an izakaya and more like a h
yperactive stirfry of Iron Chef and the Cartoon Network, garnished with pink peppercorns.
It certainly wasn’t thought-provokingly personal, but my Musha experience was absolutely deliciously vicious fun.
Musha
424 Wilshire Boulevard (between 4th and 5th Streets)
Santa Monica, CA 90401
310.575.6330
tags :: food : and drink : japanese : izakaya : restaurants : reviews : los angeles
Neil says
This is the only blog about food that I read. And I read it because I can see you in the posts, which makes it so much more than a description or review of a restaurant's food. I can get that from the LA Times. It is because you use this blog as a mild form of "therapy" that makes it so special.
K says
I just discovered your blog--and oddly enough, really started to embrace the blog world. Glad I did though--for a new reader just happening upon this site--I love the feeling, can taste the experience, and think your blog is great.
Foodie Universe says
I know exactly what you mean about the evolution of blogging. When I look at my posts from a year ago, I can see how far I've come. It's also become pretty much impossible for me to eat restaurant food without reviewing it!
Xiao-bo says
I love your way of extracting the personal from the food -- I think that's exactly the way food writing should be. Think of Anthony Bourdain. Would he approve of cursory essays on food? Nah. His writing always drips of the personal experience behind them. I skip over a lot of foodie blogs and look at the pictures, but I totally read your entries start to finish.
swati says
Your mundane life sounds pretty exotic to me.
To many of us here, in my part of the world, life in USA is supposed to be hell-and-heaven. The hell being the hard work required and the heaven part being ideas picked up from the hollywood movies(Pretty Woman) and cable tv (Baywatch).
But when I read about your experiences, it does seem that even out there, families like to celebrate birthdays, grandmoms get excited about grandchildren, cook soulfood for daughters and daughters-in-law.
I sometimes wonder, would an average american family do the same or is it the oriental streak predominant here?
I kind of like reading about and seeing pictures of places I will never visit, food I will never taste, but the tantalizing little glimpses of your life are a
big draw with me.
Maure says
dang! what a wonderful post sarah -not only achieving a certain proustian nature in it's content, but also a proustosity in detail and length.
thanks again - always look forward
to your posts and the responses.
but don't spend anymore time reading this - you've got more blogging to do.
except, i know it's a little late to the game but i'd love to have
a basic recipe for that korean
potato salad you mentioned in the
Baby Q post of last month.
sarah says
lac: awww...only since july last year? and i feel like we've known each other for so much longer! or maybe that's just the length of your comments ;)
neil: thank you! i feel like i should hug you or something! really, it means a lot that you say that because, hm, i don't know. it just does. and plus, you're one of like three NON-food blogs i read. and you're the only non-food blog i read regularly :)
k: thanks for reading, and hope my future posts will be some good reads, too :)
foodie u: omy - and do you plan WHERE you will eat based on your blog, too? like "hm, i have never blogged about that place, so we must go!" LOL!
xb: you're so right. and i LOVE tony bourdain's writing. i just read A Cook's Tour for the second time.
swati: i think really, everyone has the same family experiences - we are not all that different from one another. it's just that the way we remember them is different from each other, and actually, if i think about it, the way we remember our experiences even depends on ou own age. i used to hate my parents and would NEVER have said a nice thing about them if i were writing a blog 10 years ago.
maure: thanks! eek! yes, i have a very big problem with wordiness. always have, even in high school english class essays. LOL! oh, and i will ask my friend christina for her recipe :)
Catherine says
What a colorful post! I can almost taste that vanilla ice-cream and bruleed apples just by looking at your picture!
I know, is that all I can comment on after you went through that wonderful story of Japanese tapas? Just this time, as we just got home from having sushi and I can still taste the 4 orders of butterfish sushi we had.
Again, I wish I still lived on the Westside...the only good sushi place we have, besides in little Tokyo, is Niko Niko.
Dolores says
Like many of the others here, I'm a relative newbie to reading your story... and while you may consider it mundane, I find myself looking forward to my daily foray into your 'delicious life'. I love your blog because it's not a regurgitation of the places you've been and the things you've eaten today -- it's a reflection, through food, of who you are. And I'm enjoying the honor of getting to know you.
sarah says
ok seriously, i feel like we should have a group {{{hug}}}. LOL! if this blog is therapy, then allof y'all are like...psychos? just kidding. seriously, i didn'y intend to throw meself a little woe-is-me-what-am-i-to-do pity party (which i realize it kinda sounds like, right?) but even though i did, thank you all for making me feel...hm...what's the word here? affirmed? i'm smart enough! i'm good enough! and garsh darn it, people like me!
seriously, thank you!
cat: butterfish. BUTTER. FISH. and where is niko niko, by the way?
culinarily curious: thanks so much for reading, and for the encouraging comment :)
Catherine says
BUTTERFISH baby! Lemme tell ya, feels like butta, tastes like yummy.
There's a Niko Niko on Vermont Blvd just north of Hollywood Blvd in Los Feliz. I know there's one in the Long Beach area, too. :)
Anonymous says
I am going to guess that the top picture is the popcorn shrimp?
You didn't do much description of the food this time around though. Not a complaint, just an observation. I always enjoy your slightly offbeat, non-review type descriptions of the food.
RT says
Great post, great restaurant. The only problem is that it'll make one of my favorite restaurants even busier than it already is. Oh well.
sarah says
anonymous: it was shrimp, but i am not exactly sure what it was called on the menu.
rt: thanks for reading! yeah, maybe that will prompt musha to open another location! (there's on in torrance too)
hermz says
maybe that's just the length of your comments ;) --- you just made me LOL!