Girls Just Wanna Have Pho

There was no protest whatsoever yesterday afternoon when I suggested we go out for ramen noodle soup for dinner. L and N danced around the house like I'd suggested Disneyland and Stacy sank a little deeper into the couch, knowing she was no longer late getting dinner started. Around 5:30 we piled in the car and headed up the street to our favorite ramen cave, Shisen Ramen. The kids were arguing over how many gyoza, those little Japanese potstickers, they would eat and just how many letters you could make out of two sets of chopsticks. But as we rounded the corner into the parking lot our hopes were dashed. We'd forgotten they didn't open until 6:00.

Fully committed to Japanese soup, we were in quite a tizzy.  We quickly assessed our options (quite a few, fortunately), and the kids recited off a litany of acceptable fallback plans. The various ramen and pho joints suggested were all family favorites and any would have sufficed in our pinch, but I had another idea and suggested it to Stacy. Back on our anniversary last month Stacy and I had tried going to one of our favorite udon places, but it was closed (also for an extended afternoon siesta... Hmmm I should be learning from this...), so we went into the place next door since it was still open. It was called Gaja and specialized in traditional udon soup and in okonomiyaki, which we had never heard of. It turns out it is a Japanese style fritter or savory pancake, with lots of chopped vegetables like cabbage and ginger in it. It can be topped with meat or pretty much anything you want. It comes in a batter and you cook it yourself on a teppan grill right at your table. The staff had been so friendly and helpful and we had had such a good time that we'd vowed to come back. I suggested fulfilling that vow and Stacy hesitated a bit, but agreed. (I think the initial visions of L and N around a hot teppan grill were not easy things for her to get past.)

So we turned around and headed to Lomita to Gaja.

The kids, as we've come to love and trust, were excited to try something new. The first excitement were the set of hand fans set around the table to ward off the heat of the teppan. Once they fired up our grill our pre-dinner entertainment consisted of summoning up mild hurricanes upon on another until the food arrived.

The kids, still focused on soup, got huge bowls of udon - each a little bigger than they were. Stacy and I got the okonomiyaki and managed to fry it up there without inadvertently frying up any family members. Once you are done cooking it you dress it up with all these sauces and condiments, the most bizarre being these fish shavings. They are small and onionskin thin and as soon as you scatter them on top of the okonomiyaki they start waving and wiggling around in the warm air, looking unsettlingly like leeches on the bottom of a bog. But they sure are tasty leeches!

While we were eating L reminded us that Sunday was Japanese Girl's Day, a holiday her school emphasizes because of the large Japanese population there. So it turns out we were able to able to honor our little pseudo-Japanese princess with udon and writhing fish shavings.

Mōichido kite itadaki arigatōgozaimasu!