Hello World!

Wow - my first blog post. Since I currently have a bit of free time (haha), I can concentrate on blogging! I plan to make this a "diary" type blog where I'll be posting about a variety of topics: food, travel, investing, food, random thoughts, and finally, food.

To start things off, let me do a re-cap of the past few days.

Saturday (8/4/07):

Saturday afternoon, Patty (my wife) and I went to Boba Tea House in Chandler to get our boba fix for the month. We had a Jasmine Green Tea w/ Boba and a Red Bean Slush. The Jasmine tea was a bit too light but the Red Bean Slush was great.

We killed a bit of time at Chandler Mall and then decided to go Lee's Sandwiches for a light dinner. We had a Grilled Pork Banh Mi and Grilled Chicken Banh Mi. Both were good, as usual.

After dinner we headed to Tempe for the DCI (Drum Corp International) Desert Classic. Aside from a bit of rain, the event was awesome. My hometown corps, the Madison Scouts (Madison, WI), gave a fantastic performance and I thought they were one of the top teams of the evening. The crowd seemed to agree and gave them a standing ovation. Unfortunately, the judges saw things differently, and the Scouts placed 9th (out of 12 corps). I thought the Scouts performance was better than The Academy (Tempe, AZ) and Spirit from JSU (Jacksonville, AL) but both these teams ended up placing higher. In any case, it was very cool to see some of the top ranking teams perform. This was our second DCI event - the first was in Glendale back in July. If you haven't been to a DCI event before, I highly recommend checking one out.

Sunday (8/5/07):

For lunch we decided on sushi. I had read that Takamatsu had just opened a location near us (in Goodyear), so we drove there to check it out. When we got to the location and pulled up there were no cars in the parking lot and the place looked more like a bar or lounge from the outside. We discussed a bit and decided to pass on Takamatsu and try Ichiban (Goodyear) instead. I felt kind of bad, as we were pulling out, a chef popped his head out there door (maybe to communicate to us that they were open???). In hindsight, maybe we should've stayed and tried Takamatsu.

Ichiban has to be one of the worst Japanese restaurants I've ever been to. Actually, it is one of the worst restaurants (in general) that I've ever been to. The service and food were seriously lacking. I didn't see any of the employees smile. I got the general feeling that the employees didn't seem to care (about anything). I was shocked at our Caterpillar and Soft Shell Crab Rolls. Both were way over-priced for the quantity and quality of food received. The sake (salmon) and tempura were also not so good. For restaurants, my opinion is that if either service or food is lacking, strength in one can definitely make up for the other's shortcomings. If both are lacking, then we definitely won't be going back. To make things worse, I was "on the toilet" 15 minutes after we left.

For dinner, we tried another place that we had never been to before - Wong's Chinese Restaurant (west Phoenix). What a difference that good service can make! We were greeted with a smile...is that so difficult?!? We ordered: Orange Beef, Home Style Tofu, and Wonton Noodle Soup. The Orange Beef was great - it reminded me of what we used to offer at my parent's restaurant. The Home Style Tofu and Wonton Noodle Soup were both just ok. There was a bit too much sauce in the tofu dish and the tofu itself was an odd orange color that I've never seen before. The soup was good, although the noodles were tasteless. Oh - I almost forgot to mention another important part of any Chinese meal, the rice. The rice was really bad...

But as I said above, the service was good so there's a pretty good chance that we'll be back again.

OK - I think I've written way too much (thanks for reading this far) so I'll call it a night.