Umami Mart

I spent my summer of 2012 in California, my favourite place in the world — after my couch (ok, maybe Japan comes in as a close second). It was a pure blast, from the moment I landed, designed and help build out the Umami Mart shop, just to get on the plane again a month […]

I’m in LA for my best friend’s wedding. I love LA, you know that? There’s an energy here that doesn’t quite exist in sleepy SF. Plus, this is the city where my family first landed in AMERICA. We lived in the cuttycuts of Koreatown with cockroaches. Nostalgique. Driving around with my brother, I noticed something: […]

Being a single gay nerd means the only sausage you’re gonna get is down at the hot dog stand. Eating a ho tdog is part of being Danish– or at least it used to. The fast food army of America and the growing health awareness has overturned the old wiener kingdom, and now eating a […]

“Yoko, they have rattlesnake and alligator sausages,” my friend told me of this place called Wurstküche in Downtown LA. For some reason I imagined Lisbeth Salander goth types sitting around a table eating rattlesnake sausages with forks and knives. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t at all interested in the rattlesnake or the alligator– […]

I know a lot of folks who love to hate on Guy Fieri for reasons that include his overt enthusiasm and hair do, but I’ll be the first to admit, I think the dude is completely lovable and has the best damn job in the world. I mean, really… he won a reality TV show […]

We stumbled across this place, Wow Bao, on the ground floor of a huge, blingy, 80’s-style mall on Michigan Avenue. My friend Ido had mentioned it to me, so I was ecstatic that we randomly came across it. A fast food joint of exclusively Chinese steamed buns! Their tagline is Hot Asian Buns, which is […]

PREQUELThe Good: Ode to JG’s Molten Chocolate Cake, Pt. I I should’ve known that the whole thing was a bad idea, but curiosity got the better of me yet again. I had been mesmerized by the omnipresent Domino’s commercial touting its Chocolate Lava Crunch Cakes. Try as I might, I was losing the ability to […]

One of the best things about Hakodate, Hokkaido was that there were no McDonalds. This seems very odd, considering Hakodate isn’t such a tiny city. But not so odd, when you know that it has its own home-grown fast food chain Lucky Pierrot that could take over the world, just like McDonald’s, if it wanted […]

By Jane Stillwater I was raised in the most Republican town in Northern California. Very early on in life I learned to always expect the worst. And guess what? The worst always arrived — like clockwork. Now I’ve gots a new view on life — “Expect the best!” That’s the new me. Do we have […]

as Matt and I walked down Atlantic Avenue last weekend to browse their row of mid-century modern furniture shops, a Vietnamese sandwich, or bánh mì, at Nicky’s was definitely on his agenda. it was a beautiful day, people were out, indulging in as much of the springtime tease as possible (Saturday- warm, sunny; today- snow!)– […]