Delicious Road Trip

Mario Pacetti Thursday, July 21, 2016 Comments Off on Delicious Road Trip
Delicious Road Trip

mario osaka1

Osaka Sushi Grill

2809 Johnston St., Lafayette, (337) 264-9997

Some time last year, I was taken to lunch at Osaka Sushi Grill in Lafayette by one of the engineers from Southern Lifestyle Development, Ji Daily. I told her to pick her favorite spot, and Osaka Sushi Grill was where she took me.

Since I was there for a business meeting, I didn’t focus much on getting pictures or descriptions of the food. Mainly, I was just enjoying how damn good the food was.

When we were done, I had leftovers to bring home. Chelsea loved the food as much as I did. But the sad part was, I didn’t remember the name of the spot or tell her where it was.

A few weeks back, I was working in Carencro and staying the night in Lafayette. I had Chelsea come up so we could go have some dinner. I asked Ji what we had eaten and where we’d eaten it. It just so happened that Ji and her husband were going to dinner as well, and offered to join us. I figured, “What better person to help us decide to what to eat than the person who turned me on to the place?”

Once we’d all sat down, Ji shared with us a little back story about the location. The husband and wife who run the place are of different nationalities. He runs the kitchen and she runs the front of the house.

Now he is Korean, which brings us to the interesting part of the story. When Ji moved to Lafayette from Washington, D.C., she was looking to find a place that cooked her native Korean cuisine. She was having zero luck until someone told her about Osaka and their secret Korean menu.

She said when she went in for the first time and asked about this menu, they brought out a single sheet of paper on which the menu was written out by hand. The paper had stains from having been used over and over again.

I’m by no means an expert on Korean food. The only real exposure I’d had with it was in California at a place that made these bomb.com Korean barbecue sandwiches. That is the place where my love of kimchi started.

Since Ji was so much more knowledgeable about the food, we got her to order dinner for us.

We started out with Jampong, which is a seafood noodle soup that has mussels, shrimp, squid and veggies in a super spicy broth. This was an interesting dish. It had a very fishy flavor that was overly strong. But after I took my first taste of the broth, I knew I was going to be able to handle it.

There was a large amount of seafood in this dish. The squid was my favorite part, I must say; it was as if it absorbed all the flavor of the entire dish.

I’m positive this dish isn’t for everyone. But if you ever get a chance to just try it, you should.

The next dish was the Beef Bibimbob. Don’t ask me to pronounce the name of this dish. It features beef on a bed of stir-fried veggies over a bowl of steamed rice, topped with a fried egg and a sweet and spicy sauce. Ji described this as being similar to gumbo in that cooks took leftover ingredients and made the dish with what was available.

The sweet and spicy sauce mixed with the egg yolk really tied this dish together. It was spicy, but the sweetness really came out. The beef was so tender that I couldn’t stop eating it.

The last main course we had was the grilled squid. I wasn’t looking forward to this at all. It was a large grilled squid just sitting on the plate; I enjoy my squid fried in some sort of sauce. But the dish was very good. It was a little on the chewy side, but not so much that it turned me off to the dish. I would definitely try it again.

By the way, Osaka has some of the best kimchi around. We also got a dish of pickled bean sprouts, which I thought were just amazing.

Next time you’re in Lafayette and you want some Korean, then you need to get down to Osaka.

mario kaminari

Kaminari Sushi

13394 Highway 73, Geismar, La.

I will make this very short. I was in Gonzales working recently. Somehow I was able to convince the guys working for me to get some sushi. A couple of the guys had never tried it before.

The picture I’m sharing shows two rolls: the Rocky Shrimp Roll Shrimp — tempura and cucumber inside; topped with cooked shrimp, spicy crab salad, spicy mayo and miso dressing; and the Maguro Roll — spicy tuna and tempura flakes inside, topped with tuna and avocado.

The spicy tuna roll was the best roll I’ve ever had. I probably could have eaten three orders of it. The tuna melted in my mouth. The presentation was appealing.

If you’re going to the outlet mall in Gonzales and you want some amazing sushi, then you need to go check this place out.

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