Anger Burger

I think that establishing a home is more than just renting an apartment and handing over that heart-stopping check (actually owning a home is so far beyond my comprehension that I won’t bother making comparisons here) – it is that, yes, but also the following:

• Collecting a full quiver of carefully-chosen nicknames for your neighbors.
• Recognizing which heinous yapping dog lives in which apartment.
• Knowing the shadiest (or driest, depending on your latitude) path to the local library.
• Knowing where the closest, reliable, cheap-ish genre of restaurant is.

In this instance, I bring this up because we have our local favorite Japanese restaurant, one we are already so capable at mindlessly ordering at that I’ve forgotten time and time again to take photos while I’m there.

Also needing explanation: a habit of ours is to name a restaurant after something the business serves.  It helps with memory (how many Asian-fusion restaurants have the word “ginger” in the name? LOTS) mostly, but also suits our generally antisocial ways.  So anyway, in this case we named the Japanese restaurant after an item it serves – and oh yeah,  we also renamed that item.  We’re really intolerable as human beings, I know.  So meet Squeaky Cheese, the restaurant and the food:

This reminds me of an acquaintance of mine that once criticized my boyfriend at the time by saying of him: “He’s so why-be-normal, you know what I mean?”  Maybe you don’t.  What she meant was: he was quirky (read: bad), and he was self-awarely quirky (read: double-bad).  As a point of fact, she was wrong; I would call a Hot-Topic addict why-be-normal, but he was genuinely weird.  There’s a reason I’m still friends with him and not her.  My point was: we call it Squeaky Cheese (on the menu it is called Mochi Cheese) because we couldn’t for the life of us remember what it was called, and then we couldn’t remember what the restaurant was called.  Welcome to the tangled web of our brains.

Jesus, this post is going to be all over the goddamn place, and for that I am only vaguely sorry.

I’ve since discovered that the restaurant is called Sake House Miro, and that their entire menu is pretty much delicious.  It’s not the cheapest Japanese food I’ve ever eaten, but the quality has always been high and they have $4.95 giant Sapporos on Monday and Tuesday nights, and that’s pretty much all you need to know.

One of our favorite sushi rolls they make is the Happy Roll, a salmon, yellowtail, tuna and green onion roll — no “spicy sauce” drizzles, no fried bits, no mega-mouth bites.  A perfect fish roll on all accounts.

And here!  At the very opposite end of the spectrum!  The Papa Roll, which I find delightfully terrible, embarrassingly delicious and totally absurd.  It’s a potato croquette and crab roll, which to those who don’t speak Japenglish means deep fried mashed potato roll.  Ha-haaaaaa!  And then topped with a mayonnaise-based drizzle just so you cannot ever possibly dig yourself out of the shamehole you just crawled into.  Frankly, I’d be offended if you didn’t order it.  It’s like going to In-n-Out and not ordering something animal-style.  You’re in SoCal!  As the neo-hippies say, be here now!

One of my favorite things about Squeaky Cheese is that they serve everyone a dish of free cucumber spears dressed with mildly spicy red miso sauce slopped over it (I’ve watched them serve it, the sauce comes out of a keg-sized plastic tub with a plunger-top).  Even today, when the cucumbers were bone-dry from being prepped far, far too long ago it was still eye-gougingly addicting.

But, ultimately we come back for the Squeaky Cheese.  Pockets of tofu skin are stuffed with mozzarella cheese and broiled until crispy/greasy, chewy, hot, salty and without argument the ideal drunky-snack.  There’s no getting around it: it’s the Japanese version of fried mozzarella sticks.  Which is to say: now you know how a rad thing gets radder.