I like reviewing high-end restaurants, but sometimes, I like to step out for a quick meal with friends without having to sit through an entire tasting menu or ordering multiple courses to properly assess a restaurant’s offerings. I still take photos at those spots too, but never enough of them to warrant an en­tire blog post dedicated to that restaurant. I still want to share those photos though, so here is a photo dump of some of the food I’ve had over the past two months.

Here is a chirashi bowl from Izakaya Osen in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.

The following three photos are from Summer Canteen in Burbank, California. Here is some slow-braised pork belly with Thai herbs. It was a bit dry.

This is stir-fried shrimp with fresh garlic, black pepper, and a side of steamed vegetables. This tasted clean and refreshing.

We had mango sweet sticky rice for dessert, which I liked.

Here is a Greek yogurt strawberry blueberry waffle bowl from Jamba.

The next four photos are from President Thai in Pasadena, California. Here is some orange chicken…

… garlic sole with mixed vegetables…

… green curry with zucchini, green beans, and basil leaves…

… and a side order of broccoli and sliced carrots.

The next three photos are from one of Noodle World’s full-service locations. This is chicken Thai noodle soup…

… charbroiled pork chop over vermicelli noodles served with fried onions, peanuts, and fresh vegetables…

… and deep-fried egg rolls stuffed with ground pork, carrots, bean thread noodles, onions, and black mushrooms served with a side of sweet sauce.

Here is a pack of pink Kit Kats my friend Billie-Rae brought back for me from Japan.

The next batch of photos is from Wa Sushi & Izakaya in Alhambra, California. Here is some soft shell crab…

… an avocado cut roll…

… some specialty sushi roll, but I forgot its name…

… a rice bowl with blue crab, sea urchin, salmon roe, caviar, egg yolk, and tamago…

… two pieces of eel nigiri topped with avocado slices…

… mixed vegetable tempura…

… and two pieces of salmon belly nigiri topped with salmon roe.

Taking a brief intermission, here is a Spicy Spring™ pizza with pepperoni, mozzarella, pecorino romano, and fra diavolo sauce from Prince Street Pizza. It looked extremely unhealthy and I could almost feel my cholesterol rising from all the processed meat and saturated fat, but it was delicious.

Back to some more sushi. Here is some salmon carpaccio…

… another specialty roll, but I forgot the name of this one too…

… a rice bowl with salmon, sea urchin, salmon roe, caviar, egg yolk, and tamago…

… and a cut roll with yellowtail and avocado, topped with slices of yuzu.

This is a chicken sandwich from Hattie B’s at their Las Vegas location inside the Cosmopolitan.

This is a Korean pork shoulder sandwich with house kimchi, chili mayo, cilantro, and lime from Lardo in Las Vegas, Nevada.

And finally, these last two dishes are from Raffi’s Place in Glendale, California—Scottish salmon…

… and chicken, charbroiled with tomato and bell pepper.

While still in California for a string of travel and before heading back home to Las Vegas, I met up with one of my friends and her parents to try the chef’s tasting menu dinner at YakiYa in Pasadena of Los Angeles County, California.

When we arrived, we were given warm hand towels and yuzu refreshers to prepare us for our meal.

Our appetizer was raw ground A5 Miyazaki wagyu with ponzu jelly, truffle, and arimo sancho pepper.

The wagyu had a surprisingly mild flavor and was a bit gelatinous. I didn’t spend any extra time to carefully inspect it before eating it, but I’m guessing that it was intentionally made to be lighter. It was overall pretty refreshing.

Here is a random photograph of our golden utensils.

Next was USDA Prime ribeye tataki with ponzu, garlic, and Kaiware. This was served raw like carpaccio. I thought it would have probably been better with a light sear on the outside, but it wasn’t bad as served either.

My friend and I got two non-alcoholic beverages. Mine was the Soft Pagoda with yuzu, honey, lime, and a yuzu gummy; my friend’s was the Cherry Blos­som with Amareno cherry, grenadine, and lemon. The Soft Pagoda tasted almost exactly like the yuzu refreshers we got at the beginning of the meal; the Cherry Blossom tasted like a citrusy sweet cherry juice.

Our next appetizer was bluefin tuna and hamachi with Kaluga caviar, scal­lion oil, and wasabi. The fish had very low fat content so it was fairly firm, but it was still very clean and fresh. The caviar was as expected, and the scal­lion oil added an interesting uniqueness to the sashimi.

From here, I started questioning the ordering of the dishes, because our next dish was chawanmushi with Dungeness crab, ikura, and shiitake mush­room. I feel like this could’ve been better served between some of the meat dishes or later on in the meal, but it still had good flavor and wasn’t bad early on in the menu. The texture was a bit strange, though—it started out with the slightly firmer and custardy texture you’d expect from chawanmushi, but it was way too watery once I got to the bottom.

Next was local farmer’s market crudité with multigrain rice cracker and red miso. This, again, felt like it would’ve been better elsewhere in the meal—namely, near the beginning. The rice cracker was good, the vegetables were clean and refreshing, and the red miso added a nice richness to the veggies.

At this point, we were confused if we would ever actually use the grill in front of us, because the waitress brought out wagyu meatballs and radish in ox­tail broth. Again, it tasted great, but this would’ve been better in between meat dishes as somewhat of a palate cleanser to change up the texture se­quence of the dishes, as opposed to just having back-to-back non-grill dishes right at the beginning.

It was finally time for the grill… and unfortunately, this is where things sort of started going downhill. First up was American wagyu beef tongue with scal­lion kosho. Tongue is my favorite cut of beef, so I was looking forward to this one.

Unfortunately, we found out that it wasn’t actually a real chef who was cooking our wagyu for us, but instead, just our waitress. A big part of good wagyu is making sure it is cooked properly, and just by looking at the way our waitress even picked up the tongs, it showed that she was neither experienced nor confident.

The tongue came out overcooked.

Our next batch of meat was USDA Prime ribeye, USDA Prime outside skirt, and A5 Miyazaki chuck with a side of wasabi sauce.

By the time the waitress thought she was done grilling this and moved it onto our plates, it was still very undercooked. I’m someone who likes meat rare, and it was still raw to my standards. After I took a bite into it, I put it straight back onto the grill.

Our palate cleanser between plates was heirloom tomato, shishito pepper, and truffle mushroom.

Our next batch of meat was American wagyu short rib and USDA Prime filet mignon chateaubriand.

The filet mignon was served with bone marrow, garlic miso, kimchi, and nori.

Our final meat dish was A5 Miyazaki wagyu strip loin with poached egg and a sprinkle of Maldon sea salt.

The waitress once again improperly cooked the meat—not only did she take it off the grill too quickly, but she immediately placed it in cold raw egg (which was not poached enough), and that killed all the heat momentum on the meat and left it as-is. This left the consistency of the meat too stringy and the egg too watery.

Our first dessert was lemon sorbet with basil oil.

This was my favorite dish of the meal. The basil oil added a very special and one-of-a-kind twist to the lemon sorbet. I had never tried this combination be­fore, and this was a fun introduction to a new flavor profile.

Our second dessert and final dish of the dinner was matcha balls.

Here are some photos of the interior of the restaurant…

… and one of the front entrance.

The table on the right shows how much we paid.

I mentioned this a handful of times throughout this blog post, but I cannot emphasize this enough—the ability to cook wagyu properly is just as important as the quality of the wagyu. You can have a wag­yu steak worth hundreds of dollars, but it’s not going to reach anywhere near its peak potential if you don’t prepare it well.

Wagyu also needs a lot of salt to bring out the rich flavor. Yakiniku restaurants will always give you a side of salt—either a salt-and-pepper mixture or some flaky salt—to dip your wagyu in to enhance the taste. YakiYa did not give us a side of salt… or a side of any seasonings or sauces, for that matter.

Overall, I was a bit disappointed by YakiYa. I feel like they took the chef’s tasting menu concept and tried to mass-produce it to be able to serve a lot of people at once. Chef’s tasting menus and omakase experiences are usually done in an intimate setting bar-side next to the chef and are usually capped at about eight people per round so each diner can get an appropriate amount of attention from the chef. YakiYa had a chef build the menu, but then del­e­gated the rest to regular staff members who are unable to properly execute on the chef’s instructions.

The portion size of everything also seemed underwhelming. For some of the shared dishes that came combined in the same bowl or plate, it made me won­der whether we ended up with less food, e.g., rather than each person getting 1 portion, it might have gotten scaled down to 0.8 each as more por­tions were being added. I ended the dinner pretty hungry and drank a Soylent meal replacement shake right after to get some more calories.

Considering this is in Los Angeles, US$128.00 per person isn’t too bad, but I still wouldn’t consider it to be a top pick. For example, the omakase at Masamitsu, a restaurant less than a ten-minute drive away from YakiYa and still out in the suburbs, was absolute top-tier for only $22 more per person—good enough to be one of my all-time favorite restaurants.

So, the final verdict? It was fine, but there are better alternatives for the price. If you do still end up going to YakiYa anyway, just keep in mind that, at least in the way that they structured it when I was there, this is not indicative of what you should actually expect at a real high-end chef’s tasting menu res­tau­rant.

While I was in Anaheim a week and a half ago for VidCon 2024, I joined some friends at the Anaheim White House Italian steakhouse for dinner. The restaurant was decently close to the Convention Center near where we were staying, and it was marketed as a nice and high-end restaurant, so we fig­ured it would be a good spot to check out while we were in town.

We were wrong.

We were seated outdoors on a microscopically small table cluttered with four people’s worth of eating utensils plus a rose vase and an aggressively or­ange light in the center. The table was barely large enough to accommodate two people, let alone four. The strange light made all my photos im­pos­si­ble to color balance.

Our napkins were laid out on the table in the shape of a suit jacket with a black paper bowtie on top. Our waiter came around and said “let me tuck you in,” swiftly grabbed the napkin, sent the paper bowtie flying airborne across the table, then plopped the napkin down nearly as-is on my lap without even unfolding it.

While we were browsing the menu, we received some complementary bread. Rather than giving us a bread basket, they instead gave each of us one single roll with enough butter for an entire loaf of bread. The roll honestly wasn’t that bad, but it was tiny, and considering that they didn’t actually give us the basket, I couldn’t help myself to seconds.

After a fairly long wait after ordering, our first appetizer came out—oven-roasted pork belly with maple balsamic and orange sauce. We were con­ven­ient­ly served three pieces for a table of four, so we split each piece into three-quarters, with the lucky fourth person having three one-quarter pieces.

The fatty part of the pork belly tasted as you’d expect from pork belly, but the meat was pretty dry. Overall, it was pretty underwhelming. At US$15.50, it was nowhere near worth the price.

Our second appetizer was White House salad with iceberg lettuce, mixed greens, carrots, and cherry tomatoes tossed in the house signature passion fruit and ginger vinaigrette.

I didn’t have more than a few bites of this, but it was clear that this was nothing more special than a regular salad. Unfortunately, it was US$12.50. You’re literally better off just going to the grocery store, picking a premium pre-made bagged salad, and buying a small bottle of dressing—at that price point, you’d probably get three pounds of better-tasting salad.

After another long wait, our entrées came out. One of my friends got a 22-ounce Angus Midwestern T-bone steak rubbed with Hawaiian sea salt and re­fined demi-glace. Comically, their menu called it “demi glaze.”

The portion size of this was too big for him, so I finished his leftovers. It wasn’t bad, but it was pretty unremarkable. His dish was US$59.50.

The best part about his dish, though, was the side he added on—Belgium white chocolate mashed potatoes for US$14.00. That tasted exactly how you’d ex­pect—it was like taking a bite of mashed potato, taking a sip of melted white chocolate, and gargling it together in your mouth. The fla­vors did not com­ple­ment each oth­er at all what­so­ev­er. It was absolutely horrid.

Dinner companion #2 got Midwest beef braised in Cabernet Sauvignon reduction, served with horseradish cream over yellow polenta, for US$41.00. I did not try any of this dish.

And finally, dinner companion #3 got a 10-ounce hanger steak in a chimichurri marinade of parsley, garlic, cilantro, cumin, and red chili flakes for US$44.50. I tried one piece of this, and the restaurant somehow successfully managed to overcook and undercook it at the same time.

For my meal, I ordered two small plates. When I told the waiter I was planning on doing that instead of ordering a regular full entrée, he glanced over at me through the corner of his eye as if I had just landed from Mars.

My first plate was braised frog legs a la Provencal with tomato, roasted garlic, extra virgin olive oil, and white wine over pasta, for US$18.95.

This was way overseasoned so the flavor of the frog legs was basically completely absent. It was also overwhelmingly salty, yet somehow bland at the same time—the salt had no actual base flavors to enhance, so it ended up sort of just being bitter. The pasta was slippery and watery, so it could not re­tain any of the sauce.

My second small plate was Louis Laulhère Bourgogne escargot with garlic, Pernod liqueur, and herbs for US$16.50.

This had the same problem as the frog legs—the garnish was way too strong, the entire dish was way too salty, and it felt like I was pickling the inside of my mouth while I was eating.

We shared two desserts as a table. The first was a banana tart made with layers of baked puffed pastry, Chantilly whipped cream, chocolate ganache, and caramelized bananas, served with crème anglaise and vanilla ice cream, for US$14.95.

For some reason, the waiter decided that this was the moment that they would take away that repulsive orange lamp. Take it away during our meal when we had so little real estate left on our table that plates were literally on the verge of falling off? Of course not. Take it away after we have one single des­sert plate in the center of the table? Yes, no better time.

Anyway, this was the one and only dish of our entire meal that I thought was decent. With that being said, as you can see, ours apparently suffered a mild earth­quake on the way to our table, as it was tipping over and about to slide off the plate. This lack of proper presentation seemed to be exclusive to our tart, though—I saw a different party order one too, and theirs completed the journey to their table remaining upright.

Our second dessert was a flourless Grand Mariner soufflé with chocolate ganache, crème anglaise, and Chantilly cream for US$17.95.

This literally tasted like sweetened scrambled eggs.

The interior of the restaurant had fairly over-the-top regal decor, which I guess was nice. Too bad we didn’t get to enjoy it during our meal, because we were seated outdoors on artificial turf instead.

One random quirk about this restaurant was that there were advertisements everywhere trying to convince you to donate to some cause. It was marketed so aggressively that my brain literally mentally filtered it out as spam, so I don’t even remember what it was for. There were donation collection stations near the entrance of the restaurant where you could swipe your card and it would automatically charge you your preferred denomination. I’ve never seen anything like it at a restaurant before.

After finishing our meal, we went outside and my friend gave his valet ticket to the attendant. The restaurant has a decently-sized parking lot to the west of the building, but they chose to block that off and make it valet-only for US$7.00. To earn the valet fee, the attendant made the treacherous trek of ten steps to my friend’s car and drove it the gruesome few seconds it needed to be moved so we could get in without having to make the epic voyage our­selves.

They didn’t even charge his car for him while we were eating. You know, just to make sure that his Tesla charger at home wouldn’t get upset that the car was cheating on it.

My friend tried to pay the parking fee with a credit card, but apparently they accept cash only at the valet stand. The attendant had to take my friend’s card and spend a few minutes going into the restaurant to run a charge on the card using the terminal, then brought out a full-blown check pad with a pen, along with a merchant and customer copy of a receipt for him to sign.

Oh, and they parked his car in a handicap spot. Just so the valet can make sure they’re not overworking themselves by having to walk too far, I guess.

Do not go to Anaheim White House.