a bite of brownie

i've been to two brazilian steakhouses before espetus: texas de brazil and fogo. you'd get the same ambiance and dining experience from here. i liked texas de brazil and fogo better though because of its wider options of cheese but i guess it's not fair to compare them based on that. it should be based on the variety of meat. among the three, i would say fogo has more and tastier meat options. i still remember its lamb chops. espetus has lamp steak but it doesn't have lamb chops. the three of them serve tasty, fresh and hot cheese bread rolls. i didn't enjoy the polenta but i liked the fried plantains. espetus has a good variety of steaks. it also serves grilled pineapple which i didn't see in texas de brazil and fogo. we ordered pudin (leche flan) for dessert. i liked that they garnished it with slices of strawberry, blueberry and raspberry. espetus is a nice place for fine-dining. the service is excellent.
 
Espetus Churrascaria Brazilian Steak House
710 South B Street
San Mateo, CA 94401

Verdict: 4/5 (fogo is better in terms of sides and steaks selection.)

N: What can I say, I'm a sucker for Korean BBQ and AYCE at that :) so for my birthday I invited my friends to try out this restaurant, partly to try out the place but mostly because birthday celebrants eat here for free if they bring at least 5 friends with them haha

they say that if you ever visit los angeles, you shouldn't miss stopping by at any korean bbq all you can eat resto. not only is it cheap but the quality and variety of meat is impressive. the resto we picked didn't have a very decent sign from outside. a very loud music was also booming from outside that will make anyone deaf. i guess it's the restaurant's way to advertise itself through loud and distracting music. we waited around fifteen minutes before we got a table considering it was lunch time on a work day. we chose set c which had 16 options of meat, the most options of meat they had for $15.99. the bad thing i didn't like about this place is customers are limited to 4 meats per order. we probably ordered almost all in their menu except for three items. 

1. Beef Brisket
2. Sliced Pork
3. Chicken with marinate
4. Pork Chop with marinate
5. Sliced Beef with marinate
6. Squid with marinate
7. Beef Intestine
8. Sliced Beef
9. Pork Steak
10. Spicy Sliced Pork
11. Beef Tongue
12. Skewer Fresh Steak
13. Boneless Ribs
14. LA Short Ribs
15. Shrimp with marinate
16. Boneless Ribs with marinate

the beef brisket was like bacon. i like it the most maybe because it was so easy to eat. i enjoyed the squid and shrimp too. the sliced pork, boneless ribs and steak were good too. after our last order, i felt i had too much already that it was difficult for me to finish the food even though i barely touched my rice.

Castle II Korean BBQ
3600 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90010

Verdict: 4/5 (-1 for limiting customers to order 4 meats per batch) 

For my friend's birthday. her housemates took her out for a sushi dinner, it's an hour drive from Buffalo Grove but it was all worth it. After feasting on sushi in Vancouver, which costs really cheap over there, somehow a $20 sushi place looks so expensive to me.


Sea Ranch is a Japanese grocery store with four or five small tables where customers can sit down and park their bags as they order freshly made sushi and ramen - they serve both ala carte and AYCE. For the latter, they give you a checklist and you can just mark everything you want to order then give it to the counter and wait.

I love that they have salmon roe here, I could eat this all night =) we also ordered a few other rolls for the non raw eaters but half a dozen ikura was good enough for me, I wish we had something like this in Cebu.

Verdict:

N: 4/5

When this restaurant first opened a few years ago at the ground floor of Ayala center, it became our favorite place to eat since we can choose what ingredients to put in and what sauces to top them with. However, as time passed by, the selections dwindled and the quality sucked until the novelty faded and it wasn't worth it anymore.

Six or so years later I'm back in Cebu and wanted to check out if KK improved since my last visit. They moved their location to The Terraces where all the happening is and they changed the look to some sort of cafeteria like ambience.

The choices were not exemplary and I wouldn't really want to go back here even if they paid me. They chop the meat and tofu to invisible bits like they were spring onion garnish and my dish looked like mixed ground sawdust when it came out. Ok yeah, the taste was ok, after all I chose all the sauces that went with it, but the presentation could be better. Well what can I expect, when their motto is "don't blame the cook, he just put fire". Maybe the minced cuts were done for a reason - so that they would cook fast, but it didn't look very appealing.

Oh well, I gave them another chance, it was a major fail!

Kublai Khan
The Terraces
Ayala Center Cebu

Verdict:

N: 2/5

Back when I used to work at Boundary and Kingsway, we used to just cross the street from the office and head over to this sushi place for a quick lunch. It was our comfort sushi, with fast service and ok food.

My usual order is the salmon sushi, salmon head shioyaki, kimchi, beef teriyaki and chicken teriyaki. My workmates are a big fan of their mango pudding, one of them can even finish five plates of that stuff. As for me, I don't really like mango, I guess I literally got fed up with it coz I grew up in a place surrounded by mango trees.

Today my friend was craving for deep fried stuff to drown her sorrows in oil and cholesterol, and since this place also serves karaage and all those fried goodies, she invited me to join her here.

The place was packed as usual, and the food was still the same, it's not bad, and not exemplary either. Just enough to get you to your next meal. For a little over 10 bucks, this is a convenient ayce sushi restaurant in the area. Three years ago, we used to walk 15 blocks to go to Fish On Rice near Metrotown just to have ayce sushi, now Japanese food is just 15 steps away.

Verdict
N: 3.0/5.0 [-2 because the guy who takes orders isn't attentive enough]


Kingsway Sushi
110-3665 KingswayVancouver, BC

Just before we watched Sherlock Holmes, we decided to grab a quick dinner at Sui Sha Ya. I think the only striking thing about the place is its signage and ambience when you enter the it, makes you think you're going to an expensive sushi place, which it actually is compared to others I've been to, but not really as good at all.

We chose the AYCE menu and got more than we can finish. We picked the miso soup, ebi sunonomo, kimchi, chicken teriyaki, ebi and veggie tempura, ika karaage, chicken karaage, house roll, crab cone, salmon sashimi, tuna sashimi, spicy salmon sashimi, spicy tuna sashimi, unagi, tobiko, cuttlefish and grilled beef short ribs.

It was a lot, and yes there were only two of us to finish all those. I have tried a lot of AYCE sushi places and several other Japanese restaurants here but I haven't really been to one that is owned by a Japanese. It's usually owned by Koreans or Chinese, not that I'm complaining but wouldn't it be more authentic if food from a certain country is actually served by people from that same region?


Anyway, nothing from the dish really stood out, I'm not sure if we should have tried one of each item on the menu but that would have been food coma and we would be falling asleep on the movie house. One thing I noticed though was that the unagi was actually twice as long as the rice ball and not as sweet as it is on other sushi places - which works for me. They were also generous with their grilled short ribs servings, one of my favorites.

Verdict:
N: 2.0/5.0 [-3 because sushi is a dime a dozen in Vancouver and this one didn't justify its hefty price tag]

Sui Sha Ya Japanese Restaurant
4820 Kingsway, #236 Burnaby, BC