After my long flight, I was still extremely hungry. The last full meal was about 9 hours before and the snack had only made my shakes go away. I needed real food, stat. And some groceries, so we headed out to H Mart to take care of both. I keep telling H/A that he should break out of his mold and get something besides bulgogi or galbi when he eats korean. But then he ends up ordering bulgogi, like in this case, and then regrets it. I mean this wasn’t bad, but it was fairly boring. And it really wasn’t the best gulgogi out there. It was just super sweet. The banchan wasn’t that great either.
I can also be a creature of habit when it comes to eating. A few weeks ago I had eaten the jjamppong by itself. And a few weeks before that I’d eaten the chajangmyun by itself. This time, I wanted both, so I got both. I love these little dual compartment bowls. I love trying everything, so this is one of my favorite dishes at the good ol H Mart food court. I wish all restaurants would let you have two half portions of all dishes instead of just one.  I’ve never ordered anything from the japanese/sushi spot at H Mart. This was from awhile back when I was at H Mart with my mom and she got the udon. Look how beautiful it is! Next time, I’m eating this!

I had to travel to Michigan this week. So flying into Detroit and heading westward, my research led me to Shiro in nearby Novi, MI.

This restaurant is in a mansion. Seriously folks, “historic Rogers Mansion”. I’ve never been to a japanese/sushi place this fanciful before. There’s a giant grand staircase in the middle, and tons of original details. The bathroom was nuts. It had crazy original colorful tiles and a weird sink fauce with hot, cold, and ice knobs.

I was seriously feeling the need for some greens, so I got the shiro salad, which is the typical japanese salad with the ginger dressing. It was nothing exciting, but the dressing was decent. The place is pretty big, and there’s a big sushi bar and a separate booze bar as well.

I also got the sunomono salad. Why did I get two salads? No idea. Actually, I like sunomono because there’s usually tons of cucumbers, and I was really wanting some cucumbers. But this was much more heavy on the seaweed salad side, and of course the octopus. It was a beautiful salad, but nothing exciting here either. There were only a bit of cucumber sticks, and it just didn’t do it for me. I should have skipped it.

This was some of the most attractive sushi that I have eaten in a long time. They put tons of effort in presentation here, and it shows. It’s beautiful, and tasty too!

They have a large selection of rolls, some of them typical, and some of them crazy. They take things to the extreme here. I ordered a couple of the spicy rolls. Instead of the fish being made spicy, their definition of spicy is to squirt a spicy mayo on top of any roll. Everything tasted fine, but it was a bit on the heavy side. They go a little overboard with the squirting.

For whatever reason, maybe this is something they typically do, they gave me a couple pieces of one of their special rolls for free. It was a roll with all kinds of stuff in the middle, and then topped with salmon, and then blowtorched! Sometimes, watching your food being made can be partly entertainment. These little suckers were good, and are probably good for people who may be afraid of raw fish. It was also a bit on the sweet side, so probably also a safer dish. All in all, a nice dinner in the middle of nowhere, in a random mansion. If ever around Novi, MI, stop by!

The day before snowpocalypse 2 of 2010, I went up to NYC for a quick overnight work trip. I met up with J in his Lenox Hill neighborhood to grab some sushi. We went to Matsu, which is a little sushi joint. The shrimp shu mei. I’m not the craziest shu mei fan, but these little babies weren’t half bad. Quite shrimpy.

A bunch of rolls and sushi. Very delicious and also not expensive. None of this was new york city prices, it was just normal!

I got some tempura udon, which was just fine. I liked that it came with a whole bunch of random fixins thrown in, in addition to the plate of tempura. It was kind of funny, when I ordered tempura udon, the waitress said to me, you know that’s a noodle soup, right? Um… yeah… considering I ordered it from your noodle section and it was clearly marked as noodle soup,  yeah. Do I look like a person who wouldn’t know what udon is? And it’s not like it was august, it was a freezing february evening, who wouldn’t want noodles in soup? Weirdo. Service was fine otherwise. Is it extraordinary? Certainly not. But it’s definitely good food at good prices, especially for NYC.