Tag: food

Happiness on conveyor belts

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s not often that I will point out a single business on my brog that nobody can read, but it’s not often that I come across restaurants that bring me such enjoyment and hope for future visits.

KULA is supposedly Atlanta’s first ever conveyor belt sushi joint, and I had been looking forward to this place as soon as it was announced to be coming to the area.  Since I’d never been to Japan, I can’t say that I’ve ever had conveyor belt sushi before in its native land, but I have had it before a long, long time ago when I was out visiting Seattle.  I really loved it then, so it wasn’t a surprise that I would enjoy it in my own home city.

Needless to say, after my first visit, I’m completely smitten by the place, and I’m already looking forward to my next trip.  It’s a place that is a fun atmosphere, the quality of the sushi is pretty good, and all that shit is served to you on conveyor belts from the convenience of your own table. 

It’s dangerous in the sense that it’s very easy to lose track of just how much you’re eating, but at the end of the meal, my company and I demolished 39 small plates of sushi and rang up a little over $100.  We cleared them pretty furiously at the start, but I think it’s safe to say that everyone was well full by meal’s end, and honestly, at like $25~ a head for a good sushi meal, it’s not out of the ordinary.

Needless to say, this is a place that easily lifted my spirits and made me extremely pleased.  I know that I will definitely be back in the future, and now that I’ve been there and experienced the joy myself and don’t feel the need to keep to keep quiet about the place, I implore everyone in the area try this place out.  I know that this is going to be a definite go-to option for friends and visitors alike from now on.

Writing because I suddenly have nothing else to do

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Ever since the move, things have been pretty busy, to say the least.  Between all the unpacking, resolving of the old apartment, clearing out my storage unit, and doing stuff in the new place like painting and organizing, and on top of it all, planning and preparing for mythical gf’s birthday party, I began to make a joke about how I was going to work so I could relax.  While at work, I could sit down, not be doing physical activities (except for going to the gym) and actually be somewhat dormant.  In my downtime, I could actually write a little bit.

But then work got busy, and I didn’t have time to write, and the workload at home didn’t relent, so I couldn’t really find time to write there either.

Fortunately, the party has come and gone, very nicely I might add, and suddenly the rush and the urgency in which things needed to be done, came to a screeching halt.  Whereas I’ve been working my ass off for the last three weeks and change, suddenly I don’t have to have my foot lead-footing the gas anymore, and I’ve hit points where I’m actually hitting walls of progression where I can’t actually accomplish tasks without requisite materials or conditions.

Needless to say, I have time again, and frankly I don’t know what to do with it all of a sudden.  My televisions and computers haven’t really been properly set up yet, both of which are also relying on requisite hardware/conditions in order to do so, so I can’t just do what I’d been doing in the past, and marathon some show to pass the time.  I can’t really do that many more chores or tasks just yet, because some require more time than I have after a day of work, and are better suited for weekends.

So last night, I did something that I haven’t done in what feels like ages; I retired pretty early, crawled into bed, read a book for a little while, and then went to sleep at a sensible time.

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Add sour rancid milk to the list

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Worse than carcasses: truck carrying 48,000 gallons of milk crashed and overturned on GA-316 involving several other cars and trucks, causing numerous injuries

It has been hot and humid as hell lately.  I’m not sure whether or not it’s at all record-setting, a fact that I’ve pretty much been endlessly working on things involving a lot of physical movement, or a combination of all of the above, but it’s been hot, humid and miserable as shit over this summer.

That being said, if there was absolutely anything at all that would be a miserable truck-full-of-food-spill, milk would undoubtedly have to be at the top of that list.

On its own, milk is already a volatile, diarrhea-inducing agent, now imagine it spilled all over the roads, baking into the surfaces under the hot and miserable Georgia sun?  Rapidly souring, going rancid, and cooking its way into the asphalt and soil.  Bacteria growing like a petri dish, and the sharp odor soon to emanate from everything that the shit spilled all over.

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FRIED TO DEATH

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I know there’s inherently something wrong about finding humor in someone else’s grief, but it’s not every day that you find out that a person died on account of them falling partially into a Publix deep fryer.  Sure, the article’s headline is misleading, and the title of my post is as usual exaggerated for irony, and ultimately it really makes me wonder how a person dies from just their leg getting deep fried, but it’s still an incident involving a person and a deep fryer with unfortunate results.

Before I proceed, I will say that if there was ever an opportunity to put into writing about how good Publix fried chicken is, this is as good as any, ironic as it might be.  No seriously, I put Publix on the Mount Rushmore of fried chicken, along with Royal Farms and Stroud’s, and I will fight anyone on their behalf who questions their honor as a legit best fried chicken contender.

But anyway, a story about a man who died because he accidentally deep fried his leg.  As sad as it is for his family that they have suffered the loss of a member, I can’t help but feel that it’s one of those Murphy’s Law scenarios where the victim in question, was kind of a dumbass.  I mean, sure it was his job to clean kitchen vents, but he also made the decision to stand on top of a deep fryer full of hot cooking oil in order to access the vents. 

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When to not fuck with Wawa

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TL;DR: Wawa suing New Jersey convenience store named Dawa for infringement of copyright, citing that their name and wordmark is too similar to theirs

I’m torn – on one side of the field is Wawa, the convenience chain that I went to a lot when I got my license, whose sandwiches and iced tea I love more than many people on the planet.  But on the other side, Dawa is Korean owned and operated, and I always have a soft spot in my heart for my people just trying to make a living and minding their own business.

Ultimately, as much as it pains me to take the side against Koreans, the reality is that they don’t really have much ground to stand on when it comes to going up against a vastly larger company such as Wawa.  And honestly, Wawa’s not wrong, since Dawa’s storefront and wordmark are pretty much copied straight out of Wawa’s identity.

The defense isn’t wrong, and “dawa” in Korean (다와) is roughly translated to “come all,” which is a pretty positive name for a convenience store, but the unfortunate reality is that when the day is over, Wawa came first, and they have the high ground when it comes to who gets to use the goofy-sounding word and what all imitators are based off of.

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Judging a book by its title

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When it comes to Chinese food, I’m not particularly picky.  I mean, let’s be honest here, Chinese food in America is about as American as McDonald’s is, so going to Royal China in Atlanta isn’t going to be terribly different from Lucky Golden Buddha in Seattle or China King 3 in Oklahoma.  Furthermore, I usually favor my Chinese food either delivered to my house so I can be lazy, or going to a buffet where I can stuff my face like a miserable fat fuck and regret it terribly later on in the day.  There’s almost no appeal at all when it comes to going to a Chinese restaurant where the food is not unlimited.

Until I discovered the existence of this place.  Where the name of the restaurant alone is enough to elicit an opinion of “no fucking way,” and eventually “I want to try this place out if they’re so audacious to have such an iconic name that triggers so much nostalgia.”

I mean seriously, when you’re going to name your restaurant Double Dragon, you have to know you’re going to be putting a bullseye on yourself from snarky gamers that are 30-years old and older at this point.  You also have to know that you’re seriously not trying hard to hide the fact that you’re seriously infringing on some copyrights, from the name itself, to the logo they’re using, but then again, it’s hard to really nail down who owns the rights to the franchise these days; so maybe there’s no concerns that Technos or Atlus or whomever develops and publishes the game is going to bother coming after them.

Seriously, the logo could be slapped onto an NES cart and look like a legit edition to the series, it’s so blatantly based on the video game franchise.  The dragons are even the fucking colors of Billy and Jimmy. 

Regardless, a Chinese restaurant in Atlanta named Double Dragon.  I think that might be kind of racist, but the game is a Japanese development featuring white guys named Lee, and dragons are so very prominent in Chinese culture, so it too is hard to really nail down.  But I am most definitely piqued, and it’s now on my list of places that I would like to try.  If anything at all, this is kind of the closest thing I might ever see to restaurants named after video games, like I often hope to find an Indian restaurant called Yoga Fire.

Unfortunate demise of a cultural icon

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I remember telling any of my friends from out of town whoever came to visit Atlanta that we would have to go to Gladys Knight’s Chicken & Waffles.  Seldom did anyone disagree, because regardless of how they felt about fried chicken or waffles separately, nobody could deny that there was some bit of intrigue about having them put on the same plate and served simultaneously.  It didn’t hurt that the food itself was decent, and the location was pretty central to the city, making it easier to do anything else afterward.

Throughout more recent years however, myself along with many other kind of stopped going to Gladys Knight’s.  Maybe it was too touristy, maybe being featured on Man v. Food and other travel shows made the place too mainstream and too avoidable for hipsters like me.  Not to mention the idea of chicken and waffles has been borrowed by so many other restaurants throughout the city, many of which have found ways to make it better than the originals.

Regardless, it’s still to hear about a culinary trailblazer like Gladys Knight’s restaurant getting shuttered and basically condemned now.  Especially, in the manner in which all this transpired, which is long story short, Gladys Knight’s shithead son using the family restaurant as a drug front, getting busted several times and murdering the business in a slow agonizing death.

Seriously, it’s bad enough that Atlanta lost an iconic restaurant that, but it’s sadder to hear that it basically ruined a family relationship between mother and son because the son is greedy, selfish and an asshole, and mom just wanting to distance herself away from his bullshit.

No, Gladys Knight’s wasn’t the best chicken and waffles in town, but they were amongst the first to bring the cult-like combination to the city in the first place.  Furthermore, they were in a location often times mired in political strife and kind of a key point of contention for the future of the city.  Had the Peachtree/Pine area ever gotten back on their feet and improved, Gladys Knight’s was basically at the center of it, but instead, they’re not just another boarded up storefront in an area that’s already plagued with ghetto and failure, and not even the Empress of Soul herself could withstand the hood.