I often don’t feel like cooking, so one of the easy ways out is the H Mart food court. Here is the pork tonkatsu with a couple of fried shrimp from the sushi joint. Oh, and also a smattering of fried dumplings. And these strange round potato type croquette things. We had no idea what they were. There was also some obligatory salad with ginger dressing, rice, and miso soup. The ginger dressing was not very good. The pork cutlet and the shrimp were fine, but the sauce for the tonkatsu was unpleasantly sweet. If you want good tonkatsu from the H Mart food court, go to the other place that serves tonkatsu, even though I can’t go there anymore ever since the food taking 45 minutes incident.
I’ve never actually gotten the food from the sushi place before. My mom nearly always gets food from there, and I always remark that it looks good, but then I never get it. Well, I was craving udon, so I actually decided to take the plunge! I got the udon with a california roll. California roll – good! Udon – good! It’s not the most exciting, but it’s a good deal for a nice hot bowl of udon soup and a fresh california roll.

It’s always random the hours that restaurants have on weekends. We failed at going to one place that wasn’t going to be open for a little bit, so we headed over to Pei Wei instead. I hadn’t been here in awhile. I don’t remember being able to get beer there before, but you definitely can. And you can get big ass beers.
We totally got bamboozled by the menu. We read Japanese Chile Ramen and totally thought this was going to be a bowl of ramen noodle soup. Total order fail! Instead, this just ended up being a noodle dish with ramen noodles in it. You cannot imagine the disappointment. Anyhoo, this was a heaping bowl of egg noodles with a slightly spicy soy mirin sauce, scallions, garlic, bean sprouts, carrots, onions, lime, cilantro, chile peppers, and tons of tofu that we’d picked. It tasted fine, but it was totally not what we thought it would be. So it made us a little sad.
This is the Thai Dynamite with crispy chicken. It’s cooked in a sriracha sauce withh lime, scallions, garlic, red bell peppers, carrots, and thai basil. While there were some visible scallions, the carrots and bell peppers were few and far between.
I’m a creature of habit with certain restaurants, so here’s my Japanese Teriyaki rice bowl, which is my favorite dish here. It’s got a nice thick sweet soy glaze, onions, napa cabbage, carrots, spinach, scallions, and sesame seeds. And as usual, I got mine with brown rice, some of the best brown rice, ever! Why would two people order three entrees? Well, we thought we were going to share a nice bowl of ramen. Cue the sadface! At least we got to drink the crap out of some mr. pibb.

Even though I’d just stuffed myself with ramen a few days earlier, that wasn’t going to keep me from eating some more. This time, I was outside of the city, at Ramen Dojo, in San Mateo. This place is great because the menu is so small. You get ramen. That’s pretty much it. And they all come with pretty much the same thing. You can pick from between a few broths, and you can get extra toppings if you want. You can also pick the spiciness of your broth. But otherwise, ramen is what you get, and you get it with what they give everybody. I like the ease of this place.
All of the ramen come with roasted pork, fried whole garlic, kikurage mushrooms, chives, a little quail egg, chicken gravy, ground chicken, shiitake mushrooms, chopped ginger, dried shrimp, sesame chili oil, and shredded red pepper. A got the soybean broth, skipped the chives, and got extra mushrooms. This is good stuff. The whole red leaf lettuce thing is weird though.
I got the soy sauce broth and added kimchi. Yo, this was amazing. And there was tons of food. The bowls look deceptively small, but there’s quite a lot of food in this. I could have eaten this all day. I could have done without the chives and the shredded red pepper though, as they didn’t do anything for me. I found the red pepper rather annoying and stringy. The quail egg also wasn’t that fantastic. I would have preferred a simple hard-boiled chicken egg instead. But the noodles were fantastic, so was the broth, and whoever supplies them with their kimchi deserves a medal. This is quality stuff. Oh Ramen Dojo, why can’t you be near my house?