Today is the last day of astronomical summer, with the autumnal equinox happening tomorrow during the late morning in my local Las Vegas time zone; I felt like this was a good milestone to share some of the miscellaneous food photographs I’ve taken over the past handful of months.

During the last two seasons, I dined in at quite a few restaurants that I thought were blog-worthy: Stubborn Seed Las Vegas, ikigai, Sushi by Scratch Beverly Hills, Bello by Sandro Nardone, Kase Sake and Sushi, The X Pot, Peacock Alley, Petrossian Bar, Sparrow + Wolf, A Different Beast, and Kabuto Edomae Sushi. For the restaurants that I thought didn’t warrant their own dedicated blog post, here is a round-up photo dump with everything else.

 
While in Los Angeles County housesitting for a friend, I met up with another friend to help her do some furniture shopping. We sat on several different couches from a bunch of different stores, and I concluded that all of them felt nearly identical. Then, I sat on the last couch on her list of couches to test out and realized that it was about 20 times better than every other couch, and that we probably should’ve just started with that one to begin with.

After successfully debossing our butt prints on many different couches, we got sushi for lunch at Mills Alley in Pasadena, California. Here is my chirashi bowl and tako wasabi.

During one of my trips in spring, I flew transcontinentally with JetBlue Mint on one of their new Airbus A321neos configured to allow all Mint passengers to have direct aisle access (as opposed to the older Airbus A321s that have “throne” seats in the even-numbered rows and a 2-2 configuration in the odd-numbered rows).

I don’t know if this has always been the case, but I found it enjoyable that they gave me a bottle of Saratoga Water, considering the recent Ashton Hall Saratoga Water meme.

While waiting for the flight attendants to prepare all the meals, I received a glass of Diet Coke and their signature zero-proof “Mint (Under One) Condition” with seltzer, ginger, lime, cucumber, and mint. I also got a small brass snack bowl of what I think was vegan rinds, potentially made out of rice.

I always like to sit in the last row of lie-flat first class and business class cabins because they offer the most privacy; in this case, I was in seat 8F. This meant I would be the last one to receive my meal, but I don’t mind; I feel like receiving your meal deeper into your flight helps partition out the journey a bit better so that you’re not done with your food right away and left with a bored mouth for the rest of the flight.

For my meal, I got some shrimp, lasagna, and a chicken salad. I think this is literally the most dry chicken I have ever tasted in my entire life. The food was incredibly disappointing, and I think the bread was probably the only decent thing they served for dinner.

For dessert, I got this wild-looking fruit and nut ice cream. This was significantly better than the meal, though I don’t know if I thought that because it was actually decent ice cream, or if I had been so let down by dinner that this only tasted incredible in comparison.

One of my friends recently visited me in Las Vegas for a bit. She was craving some late night sushi, so we tried out Japaniero Asian Fusion in the southwest Las Vegas Valley. We were pleasantly surprised at how high-quality the fish was. We enjoyed some sashimi and ceviche, but my favorite dish was the rock shrimp with spicy yuzu creme.

Back on a plane—this time with American Airlines.

Although my cholesterol levels are no longer as dangerously high as they used to be, I am still mindful of my health and try to eat fish and birds whenever possible to maintain heart health and avoid hereditary-prone disorders and diseases. Thus, I requested grilled salmon with vegetables, pita bread with hummus, and a side salad for my in-flight meal.

The person sitting next to me, though? He requested nothing, because he completely knocked out right after boarding the flight. He didn’t regain consciousness until I was more than halfway finished with my meal, but after he woke up and realized that everyone else had either received or was in the process of getting their food, he looked around in panic as if he was too late and he would not get dinner that day.

The guy was young, and he seemed genuinely concerned, so eventually, I told him something along the lines of “don’t worry, you’re in first class, they will come back and give you food after they’re done serving everyone else.” Lo and behold, when the flight attendants were finished fulfilling everyone else’s requests that had already been put in, they asked my next-seat neighbor what he wanted for dinner. I think he picked some kind of pasta meal.

In addition to the regular portion of the meal, in-flight meals also usually have a “from the bakery” section where the flight attendant will walk around with a basket of fresh bread and allow you to select what kind of bread you would like to have to go along with your meal. They brought the bread basket to the guy next to me, and he picked a roll. He then proceeded to jab at every single dish, literally not eat any of it, then eat only the bread with a gigantic portion of butter.

When he had the chance, he flagged down the flight attendant and asked for some more bread and butter. He then proceeded to eat only the bread and butter again, and not eat anything else. This was so funny to me that I felt I had to take a picture. I didn’t want to make it obvious so the framing is a bit weird and I just barely got his tray in the shot with the wide angle mode on my phone’s camera, but you can see the comical stack of butter wrappers atop the rest of his uneaten food.

Also, if you’re wondering about the discrepancy between my photograph here in seat 1A and the statement I made earlier about preferring the final row of the first class cabin, my last-row preference only applies to lie-flat seats that have direct aisle access. For United States domestic first class in a 2-2 configuration, I always try to grab the bulkhead window seat if I can so that I can go in and out to the bathroom without my seat neighbor needing to move, and also so I can sleep without my neighbor bothering me to go to the bathroom.

Anyway, this was my dessert. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I do recall it being pretty good, albeit a bit too sweet.

Back in Las Vegas, I had a tasting menu dinner reservation with one of my friends one day, but we had a few hours to kill before our time slot. We were on the Strip, so I figured it would be a good opportunity to visit the Coca-Cola store on the Las Vegas Strip.

For the longest time, I’ve wanted to do the “Around the World” beverage tasting experience but never got around to it until now.

I’m glad that I brought my friend along for this, because the portion size for the drinks was actually more than I expected. Even though the plastic cups look small, the liquid adds up pretty quickly, so it was helpful to have her help drink some of this.

It was definitely interesting, but still probably just a one-time-only kind of activity for me. My conclusion after trying all 14 beverages was that plain old regular Diet Coke and Coca-Cola Zero Sugar are still my preferred Coca-Cola soft drinks, and my all-time favorite is still Coca-Cola Zero Sugar out of a Coca-Cola Freestyle dispenser with either lime or peach syrup mixed in.

I don’t know where this was from because I was with a group of friends after dinner, one person picked a place in walking distance to go to for dessert, and I basically blindly followed her to the restaurant’s front door. We picked two desserts to share amongst ourselves, and this strawberry ice cream dessert was my selection; I thought it was very good.

Anime Expo happened over the summer, and I had some friends visit Los Angeles from out of town for the convention. I also happened to be in Los Angeles County at that time (though not for Anime Expo), and I took the opportunity to meet up with some friends who I hadn’t seen for a while.

With one of my friends, I went to Shinkai Sushi Japanese Fusion in Alhambra, California. My friend told me that she’s not really a sushi expert, so to spare her from the decision-making, I decided to order two different combo plates of sashimi along with a side of sushi rice. The fish was high-quality and cut satisfyingly thick.

In the evening of the final day of Anime Expo, I joined one of my friends and her group of convention-goers for dinner at Hanu K-BBQ. While at the restaurant, I happened to run into someone else I know, so I went over to chat with her at her table while I was waiting for food to come out. Apparently, Hanu K-BBQ has very fast service, because by the time I was back at my table, the waitress was already done cooking our first batch of meat.

The quality of the meat was great, but we ordered a comically small portion of food considering the number of people who were in our group, so I left hungry. This restaurant is one of the rare spots in Koreatown that has plentiful parking, so if I’m in the area again, this is definitely a place I’d be willing to try again (but order a more reasonable amount of food).

Now we teleport to the San Francisco Bay Area, to which I traveled for Open Sauce 2025. I had a travel companion as a +1 for my trip, and on the day that we arrived, we walked over to a nearby strip mall to get some food and buy some filtered drinking water and snacks.

For lunch, we dined in at Otoko Sushi in Redwood City and ordered a chirashi bowl and “treasure box” off their sushi combo menu. Both of these were pretty mediocre, and I found the market price on the treasure box to be fairly overpriced compared to what we got (though I don’t remember exactly how much it was; I just remember that it was too expensive).

This was such a funny moment for me that I felt like I had to share it, and I figured that its relation to food is close enough that it would make sense to tell the story here.

After our sushi lunch at Otoko, we walked to the nearby Nob Hill Foods to buy a gallon of spring water and some protein bars. My friend initially picked a KIND bar, but then she remembered that she had an app on her phone where she could scan grocery store barcodes and be told how healthy an item is.

She then proceeded to scan literally 30+ different items from the shelves in an attempt to find the healthiest protein bar, periodically expressing comical frustration and confusion at how unhealthy so many of these options were. At one point, she was so bewildered that we decided to fact-check her app by scanning the barcode on our drinking water… to which the app declared that it was 100% healthy. Now more confident in the app, she proceeded to squat back down and scan even more items.

We weren’t in a rush because our next scheduled obligation was quite a bit later on in the night, so I stood there in pleasant amusement while doing curls with the gallon jug of water in an attempt to make more efficient use of my time and get a light workout in.

The best part: she ended up just buying the original KIND bar that she had first picked anyway.

For lunch during one of our San Francisco days, we went to Echigo Home Cook. For our beverage, we ordered an iced coconut hojicha. The flavor profile on this was very unique and distinct, and I think this might have been the most delicious tea I have ever had in my entire life.

For our main entrées, we got one deluxe chirashi bowl and one uni-toro-kani rice bowl. My friend also added on a creamy scallop hand roll, which is not pictured here.

The fish quality was unbelievably high. The food here was very pricey, but the quality was also up there to match. The salmon roe in the chirashi bowl was unlike any I had ever had before—it tasted almost like it was a more naturally watered-down version of the roe, but only to the perfect level such that it reduced some of the more intense saltiness you expect from ikura so that the flavor profile comes out a bit more pure and clean. I also remember it having an unusual citrusy freshness to it. It’s almost as if each roe was individually injected with a tiny portion of yuzu juice and then resealed.

Jumping back to Las Vegas, here’s an octopus appetizer I had at Javier’s in the Aria Resort and Casino. I also ate the fish of the day as my main entrée, but I forgot to take a picture of that.

And finally, to wrap up the photo dump, here are some photos from a seafood restaurant. I don’t remember where this is from because I was conveniently chauffeured there by my friends. As you can see, we ended up ordering a lot of dishes. The portion sizes were smaller than we had hoped, but overall, the food ranged between decent and solid.

And that, along with the individual dedicated blog posts that I linked above, concludes my past two seasons of food adventures. I’ve had more to share recently than I usually do because I’ve been traveling together with friends more often lately, which encourages me to go out and try local restaurants’ dine-in experiences (as opposed to there being a higher likelihood while traveling alone of just ordering a simple chicken or fish dish for takeout and eating it in my hotel room while working or watching YouTube).