Japanese Eats and Drinks: Yuzu

My weak sauce Shochu and Calpico mix

Shrimp salad with sesame dressing

Grilled Yamaimo with nori

Grilled beef with mushroom and bean sprouts

Karaage Chicken

Grilled beef tongue

Grilled kurobuta pork

Lately, Kirk and I have been exploring the Japanese eats and drinks in the Torrance area. Luckily, Kirk's friend and now our new drinking buddy, Shin, is not only knowledgeable of Japanese cuisine, he is an expert Japanese alcohol drinker! He's great to eat with because he knows his Japanese alcohol, food, and speaks in Japanese! On our second drinking evening (first was at Torihei, but forgot to blog), we went to Yuzu in Old Town Torrance. It has a very modern feel inside, but the food is pretty traditional. I think a great date night place.
We started off with some Shochu which kind of reminds me of Vodka without the heavy alcohol taste and less of a hangover effect. I like the lighter tasting ones and I love adding Calpico drink to kill the alcohol taste. I got my own bottle because Shin and Kirk wanted to more manly, stronger tasting one. We ended up ordering a bunch of food. We started off with some grilled shrimp salad with mixed greens and vegetables. They serve some really large pieces of shrimp with some tasty sesame dressing. Next, we had grilled yamaimo....yum. It was lightly dipped in shoyu or teriyaki sauce and grilled, then sliced. For those of you who don't know, yamaimo is a root vegetable that has a sort of crunchy, slithery texture. I also love it grated and eaten with soba. We also had some other typical grilled items like beef, beef tongue, kurobuta pork, which was grilled just right and so easy to bit into. We finished the meal off with some cold soba, hot udon, and grilled rice balls. Of course, I was pretty toasted at this point, so there are no pictures of the food towards the end of the night :)
Japanese eating and drinking is such an art of pacing. You eat a little, drink a little (or in Shin and Kirk's case, drink a lot). We were there for over 2 hours enjoying the food, Shochu, and conversation...albeit the conversation was pretty geared towards the video game Call of Duty. I'm quite excited to keep exploring the restaurants out here in the South Bay. If anyone wants to join us for some good eats and drinks, let me know!