faulker056

Chinatown, Los Angeles. A one square mile area that some call their weekly lunch spot or see as purely a wasteland of elderly people, junk shops and wandering tourists. For those that have ventured and tasted SGV, it is futile to search for better food in Chinatown. Understandably it’s a spot for people that don't want to make the drive out to the San Gabriel Valley, where the real food is. You won’t find lip-stinging Hunan food. You’ll never kiss a juicy pork dumpling. Nor will you slurp a solid bowl of beef noodle soup. It doesn’t exist in Chinatown because it’s not what the people want. You’ll most likely find all of your food drenched with sweet n’ sour sauce and receiving your bill with a fortune cookie on top. Sadly, a lot of people consider the food to be authentic “Chinese” food. If that was Chinese food, I’d rather go vegetarian. And what a lot of people don't know about Los Angeles’s Chinatown is that it's not really comprised of Chinese. In actuality, m...

Hello from Japan! I haven't had time to upload the things we ate. It's been less than a day here in Tokyo and we've already eaten some amazing food including grilled ground chicken with torchoned cheese, flattened blocks of crispy gyoza and of course, orgasm-inducing Hakata-style ramen. Just wanted to share with you a very critical piece of food geekery. When in Japan, you're going to be eating the best yakitori ever, but how do you tell the waitress that you're more interested in trying chicken testicles than white breast meat? Or that you're ok without the chicken head mcnuggets? Feel free to use! More to come.

If you remember the opening scene of Lost in Translation , you can see a red-eyed, groggy Bill Murray wake up in a cab. The amazing array of Japanese characters in neon light form reflecting off the windows of the cab. Cut after cut of city life and a blank stare provide us with the confusion Bill experiences. For the whole movie, everything he was accustomed to, interactions, mannerisms and customs were either flipped upside down or thrown out the door. And it was the same way I felt when I had first arrived in Japan. It was already the evening when we landed in Narita International. From there, we cabbed it into the city and it was just like the scenes in Lost in Translation. Lights - of every possible hue. Signage - working every single one of your sensory glands. Black-haired people - walking around aimlessly. All of this happening within a tightly packed concrete jungle. This was the system known as Tokyo. Being tourists in Tokyo was a challenge. Everything was writte...

Summer is here along with that nasty cake of humidity and heat we have to cope with for most of the day. But if you're lighting up the grill and cracking open beers, you'll find yourself less distracted by the weather. Or at least, throw midnight BBQs like us. Here's the latest WonderTune mix for the summer. And by the way, we're very excited for our upcoming trip to Japan and Korea... ramen and kimchi overload is about to happen. The Summer Mix features dancey-pants songs from Breakbot, Caribou, Chromeo, Delorean, Grum, Aeroplane, Hot Chip, Javelin, Sia, Yacht and Yuksek and guarantees body-moving. Thanks for reading. Download from Zshare Download from Mediafire

When it comes to creativity in soup noodles, you've got to hand it to the Japanese for their undying passion for creating bowls of ramen fit for the gods. It was almost as though the Japanese replaced the arts and crafts class in elementary schools with Ramen 101 courses. Contrary to many soup noodles from all over Asia that follow standards in taste and preparation like Vietnamese pho and Chinese beef noodle soup , ramen is one dish that has no boundaries or hard-carved rules. When the Japanese adopted the art of ramen from the Chinese, ramen was in its simplest form. You had your soup base of pork bones, flavoring such as salt, soy sauce or miso, fish and seaweed with toppings – a style of lighter soup noodles referred to as assari-kei . But after many conversations with ramen enthusiasts like Rickmond of Rameniac , I learned that that arena expanded with the long and arduous techniques in cooking pork bones, chicken bones and even seafood, including shrimp shells, to produ...