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.

People are going to think that I planned my vacation in Bend on purpose at this time to coincide with Bite of Bend, but I swear I did not. I only found out about it the weekend we arrived in Bend. And it just ended up that we were going to be back in Bend in time for the festivities. Bite of Bend is a local food festival. But really, it’s just an excuse to get drunk outdoors and eat street food. Aren’t all food festivals that? There were food vendors, sellers hocking their wares, live music, a beer and wine tent, and a top chef competition. This one vendor, who was selling sauces, was giving away 25 cent samples of pulled pork on tortilla chips with a little of their sauce on top. All we knew was, they were the cheapest, most filling, and delicious snacks there! We certainly got our $1 worth!

Sushi seems like a crazy thing to be trying to dish out at an outdoor food festival held during the summer. But we weren’t complaining. These ended up being really cheap too. It’d cost you a lot more to go to a restaurant, or even pick this up at a grocery store. And I felt quite comfortable with them being on ice.

The same spot also had little bites of appetizers too – crab cake and skirt steak.

Dumplings too!

Cheap, fresh, street sushi! Come and get it!

Bite of Bend actually was an all weekend affair, so on Saturday night, we did go in for a sneak peek. And since we were hungry for dinner, we did get some of this “thai” food. I’m not sure what about it made it so thai, that’s why I didn’t really consider it thai food. But I love me any street meat on a stick and a plate full of noodles.

Here they are grilling up the sticks. I always wonder what makes these suckers so orange/red. They’re not spicy, so where does the color come from and what purpose does it serve?

Speaking of thai, there were three thai vendors at Bite of Bend. That’s a lot, don’t you think?

Any good food festival has to have bbq, and we had a few here in Bend. Trails End BBQ came from the nearby town of Sisters, and had a pretty impressive setup. Another vendor had a much smaller rig, but they still had a nice pile of meat going on.

These people were selling sourdough scones with honey butter! They looked delicious!

And while there were fancy treats, there were standard treats as well. Little mini donuts! Definitely John Belushi’s favorite vendor of the entire festival!

Wurst, anyone? They even have curry ketchup!

Bend is also starting to have their fair share of food trucks (aren’t they all?). Spork was offering up this variety of options. $2 pork tacos! So cheap!

But the grossest thing we witnessed at Bite of Bend was this stuffed banana vendor. He would core out a hole in a banana and then stuff it with crazy things, like nutella or chick-o-stick. This was a level of decadence beyond me.

F had sent us a link to a byob sushi place weeks ago, and we finally were able to make plans to check it out. A fairly newish spot, open since February, Fat Salmon is a sleek and modern place in Washington Square. The decor actually reminds me of Morimoto’s a bit, probably due to the waviness in some of the design elements. All of the furnishings are clean and white. On a weekday evening, the place was pretty packed. Since it was a byob, M brought along a japanese cocktail concoction. It was delicious and strong and had me at first sip.

I love the standard green salad with the ginger dressing that is offered by pretty much any and every sushi restaurant. But not all of the ginger dressings are up to par. I’m happy to say that the green salad here was one of the best. There’s even cucumber and green bell pepper slices and the dressing is zesty and amazing. And it’s a good sized salad. The miso soup is perfectly nice as well.

On the right, that slop of mess, is the Rolling Fire. It is a roll with shrimp tempura and cucumber, topped with broiled spicy scallop sauce and some imitation crab meat. And oh, it’s like totally spicy. Man, it surprised me. You can see that it’s sort of sitting in a red pool of firey oil. It’s still good, but it is quite the shocker. So be careful! On the left is Mr. Shiro, one of my favorites of the evening. It is eel tempura, avocado, crunch w/spicy sauce on the inside, topped with broiled spicy white tuna and tomato.

Here is the Dragonfly Roll, which actually does look like a dragon. It has shrimp tempura, cucumber, and spicy sauce on the inside, and is topped with eel, avocado, and eel sauce. There’s nothing about this roll that anyone could dislike. It’s great.

On top is the White Forest, my absolute favorite roll of the evening. It was shrimp tempura on the inside with spicy sauce (you could also get salmon tempura), topped with a heap of pico de gallo and our cream. It was like a sushi salsa roll, and I absolutely went crazy for it. On the bottom is the Lost Rainbow, with spicy crab stick, scallion, and masago on the inside, topped with tuna, salmon, white fish, ikura in sesame soy sauce, and cucumber. This would have been really good, but the ikura on top was super salty and it kind of ruined it for me. It overpowered everything when it could have been a nice compliment. So it turned out to be my least favorite roll of the evening. All in all, this was great food with great friends. Fat Salmon is a nice find. Their main thing seems to be crazy rolls. Their menu had dozens. So if you like a great variety of special rolls, then this is the place for you!