After eating mom’s cooking for dinner all week, we ventured out for a friday night dinner at Sushi Bistro Masa. It’s one of my bro’s favorite japanese joints in the Columbus area. The chef/owner has been in the japanese restaurant business for awhile, starting out in Manhattan Beach, CA. He came out to Columbus awhile back and opened a spot. When he moved to the latest location in Dublin, he sold the old name and opened up Masa, a bistro. Seeing as how it’s a “bistro”, it definitely does not have a japanese restaurant feel, other than the sushi bar. But I wouldn’t call it swanky, as it has colorful picture menus underneath the glass on top of the tables. The last time I was in Dublin, OH, for work, my brother recommended us to go eat here. But they weren’t open yet for dinner, so we had to end up eating at the Tim Hortons in the same shopping center. I love me some Tim Hortons, but omigosh, Masa is so much better!

My bro’s Noodle Special with shoyu ramen and sushi. You can pick the kind of noodle soup you want and you also pick an additional item. What a deal!

My ma’s Dinner Box with sushi with veggie tempura. It also comes with with side salad, a couple of other little sides, miso soup, and steamed rice. You can pick two items or three items for your dinner box. My mom only picked two, but damn, it was still a ton of food.

My katsu curry udon noodles! I love tonkatsu, I love udon noodles, and I love japanese curry, so here we have them all combined into one. The curry sauce ends up being the soup for the udon noodles, and the katsu on top goes great with the curry. And it’s tons of food! We’re talking about a whole entire pork cutlet on top of a big bowl of curry gravy and thick udon noodles. As usual, I stuffed my face. Great food, nice atmosphere, what more can you ask for? And at this japanese restaurant, it’s actually japanese people making the food. You can’t go wrong with that.

Columbus has some excellent japanese food because of Honda being located nearby. With all of the japanese transplants, you know they want to be able to eat some good japanese food, like at home. There are also a healthy number of japanese grocery stores as well. The one my brother likes is nearby Tensuke Market. They now have a little sit-down restaurant next door, called Tensuke Express. They serve standard quick japanese fare – noodles of udon, soba, ramen, rice bowls, teriyakis, and appetizers. They don’t have sushi, but they have everything else you would love. My sis-in-law got the pork cutlet. It’s an absolutely ginormous portion and comes with a side salad and miso soup.

My mom got one of the combinations, which is hot noodles along with a mini bowl. She got udon and a beef bowl. This is definitely the best value as you get your normal size hot noodles, plus a rice bowl! And it’s only like a quarter more than if you’d just gotten the noodles. So if you have a big appetite, this is definitely the way to go!

I got the spicy kimchi udon. I thought it was spicy kimchi ramen, but I just read the menu wrong. It was indeed udon, not ramen. No biggie there, as I love udon just as much as ramen. This was so good! This is a japanese restaurant, but the japanese definitely love their kimchi. I don’t know if they buy their kimchi or if it’s homemade, but the kimchi was great, and was perfect for the noodles. It just kicked everything up a notch and made it extra special. I like plain udon soup as it is, but it can be a bit bland, so the addition of the kimchi made it more delicious and spicy. But really, I could throw kimchi in just about anything and love it that much more. Try it yourself! Oh, and this food is mad cheap. I miss it already!

For my vacation out to central oregon, I connected through SFO. I got a nice surprise when I was upgraded into first class for my PHL to SFO flight. As you can see by my outstretched stump legs and the inability of the bottoms of my flexed feet to actually touch the divider, first class does not really matter to me, at least not comfort wise. I only get excited for it because of the free food. I’ve been reading this book called “Near A Thousand Tables” which is about the history of food. I highly recommend it!

The dinner choices were chicken quesadillas or pasta with mushroom sauce. Since I don’t like mushrooms, I went with the quesadillas. These really weren’t very good at all. The quesadillas themselves were pretty bland and the tortillas had gotten crunchy. The pico de gallo was the worst part though. They absolutely tasted like nothing. Nothing at all. It did not taste like tomatoes nor did it taste like onions. It kind of defied logic. But the saving grace was the warm oatmeal raisin cookie. Seriously, this might have been one of the best cookies I’ve ever had in my life. And it was on a flight. The flight attendant said it was a good cookie, and damn he was beyond correct.

So our flight to Redmond/Bend, OR actually got cancelled. They gave us the runaround for a very long time and delayed the flight for hours and hours until they finally cancelled it right around midnight west coast time, saying they couldn’t find a first officer. When the cockpit deplaned, two pilots got off. They totally screwed us. But with that cancellation came a free hotel stay and free breakfast vouchers. At least we’d be full on our flight the next morning. The food options at SFO are pretty darn good, especially if you go to one of the main food areas in the United terminal. Since it is airport food prices, the $15 actually doesn’t get you very far. J got a shredded chicken salad.

I tried to go as luxurious as possible, even though it was breakfast, and ordered the nabe yaki seafood udon at a japanese joint. The one thing you can count on in san francisco is the ubiquity of japanese food joints, even at the airport. The broth was a little bit on the bland side, but it was still damn good as far as airport food goes. I’ll take this over a sbarro pizza slice, any day!