Allow me to elucidate why the roll is called Pain in the Ass.  On the inside rests shrimp, crab, tuna, salmon, white fish, and avocado.  On the outside, instead of rice or seaweed, is a delicately wrapped thin slice of cucumber with ponzu sauce.  In other words, it’s a ridiculous pain in the ass to make.  I know it sounds like the kitchen sink, but trust me, it’s both delicious and immaculately constructed.

This just goes to show that sushi doesn’t have to have rice, or seaweed, or just one type of fish to be acceptable or delicious.  The Pain in the Ass roll is now on my short list of favorite sushi rolls I’ve ever had, and Sushi Imari’s creativity certainly doesn’t end there.  If you’re in the area, definitely check them out.

What’s the most exciting or unique sushi roll that you’ve ever had?  Share your story in comments.

Sushi Imari
375 Bristol Street
Costa Mesa, CA 92626
(714) 641-5654

As conventional wisdom goes, a trip to a gourmet restaurant should yield a cornucopia of cooked goods, ranging from pork to salmon to beef to frog.  These dishes will likely be preceded by a savory salad and followed by a sweet dessert.  But who says that’s the way it must be done.  Nobody, that’s who.

I had the great privilege of attending a special 5-course wine dinner at 118 degrees last night.  Now, 118 degrees is not your standard restaurant: they only serve raw food.  What?  A whole restaurant dedicated to serving uncooked dishes?  Yes, it turns out they do exist, and from the palpably excited atmosphere I witnessed last night, they’re thriving.  I admit, I was surprised myself to learn that there existed such diverse-enough spectrum of food to support a fine-dining restaurant, but indeed there is and I sampled quite a bit of it over five courses.

The name 118 degrees comes from the idea that any food cooked above 118 degrees Fahrenheit begins to lose its healthy aspects, or in some cases takes on actual harmful qualities.  While I might (and do) debate whether the trade-off of outright health versus taste and texture in the setting of a restaurant is a good one, I suppose the more interesting point is that this harsh restriction on the chef clearly forces them to become more creative with ingredients that other chefs may only see as periphery or garnishes.

The upshot of this obviously is that each dish is unlike any you’ve ever seen or tasted in your life, but the downside is that because the tastes are so unfamiliar and the textures so unique, it may be a tough hurdle for some to leap over.  This isn’t the first time I’ve been to a raw food restaurant, so I wasn’t entirely uninitiated, but it was still what I would deem challenging food.  If you’re willing to experiment, eating raw food can introduce to a whole new world of culinary adventure.

The theme of the evening was a five course wine dinner that paired 100% organic wines and champagne with dishes that aren’t usually on the nightly menu.  The result was filled with ups, downs, lefts, and rights, but if anything it was remarkable.

We began our meal with a compressed summer berry salad paired with an organic cava sparkling wine from Spain named Can Vendrell.  To be honest, the organic champagne tasted like any other champagne I’ve ever had, so nothing to report there.  The summer berry salad was quite a creation, though, visually and otherwise.  It certainly struck a beautiful pose with its bright red strawberries contrasting sharply with the dark, sensuous greens below.  To be frank, I’m not generally a fan of overly sweet appetizers, and this may have been the sweetest I’ve had in a long while.  Though the strawberries were fresh and the dressing was wonderfully concocted, it was simultaneously too sweet in taste and too thick in dressing to be a pleasant beginning to the meal.

Onward and upward as they say!  I refused to let that oh-so-sweet misstep get me down, so I barreled through unperturbed to the next course: sweet coconut noodle soup.  If there was one dish during the meal that successfully paraded the culinary prowess of raw food, this was it.  While not boiling hot, the warm soup was an exercise in textural dexterity, adeptly blending thin slices of squash, noodles made from coconut, and the semi-creamy, semi-airy, and all-delicious soup itself that was so vigorously unadulterated that the coconut was given center stage.  Truly a heart-warming soup.

I love cheese.  In fact, if I were to become a raw-food vegan, cheese may be the thing I miss the most.  So when I saw that there was going to be a raw, vegan variation of caprese, the classic Italian tomato-mozzarella-basil salad, I was overjoyed.  The tomatoes were exceedingly fresh and juicy, and the organic olive was superb–but how was the cheese?  Well, let’s just say it wasn’t as picturesque as mozzarella.

The pignolia cheese, made from nut milk, was a thoroughly unattractive sight and I’m sad to say it ruined the presentation, an important part of each dish for me.  Aside from that, I was extremely surprised to taste the concoction and discover that it tasted almost exactly like caprese.  Who knew?!  If you eat with your eyes closed, you may be hard pressed to tell the difference between this raw-food creation and a sumptuously authentic Italian caprese.  Well, maybe you should eat with your eyes closed anyway…

Up to this point, I haven’t yet pointed out explicitly that one issue casual, non-raw-foodist may have with eating this food is that it is typically phenomenally fatty because of the extensive use of nuts in each dish.  This tends to yield a sometimes-pleasing but always-filling mouthfeel and creaminess that some may like and others may shy away from.  The first three dishes managed to control the fat levels by offsetting it with either fresh, juicy fruit or sharp textures.  Unfortunately, the main course failed to avoid this crisis.

It felt like I was eating tasteless thick cream wrapped in rough, unpleasant seaweed.  My main course was saffron cannoli stuffed with marinated vegetables and garlic creme.  The cannoli itself, presumably made from some plant composite, was leathery, tough to chew, and on the whole unpleasant.  The stuffing of marinated vegetables could easily have been confused for chunks of tofu or any other bland, unrecognizable substance since the overload of sauce completely obscured any semblance of taste whatsoever.  What’s the deal with oversaucing and overdressing everything?  Chefs — just let the ingredients speak for themselves!  I would have loved to taste fresh, seasonal marinated vegetables, but all I got was creme (no garlic) wrapped in rawhide, a truly disappointing dish that had high potential.

At this point, I was a bit downtrodden: maybe I’m just not cut out for raw, vegan food I thought.  Maybe I just “don’t get it”.  But no, I’m open-minded, I know a bit about food, and I’m not crazy.  Then dessert came, and wow did it make up for the the cannoli.  We were presented with a beautiful assortment of cinnamon plums topped with vanilla custard, cherries in a deep, rich, velvety chocolate, and a hazelnut bar with espresso and vanilla gelato.

The star of this show was definitely the hazelnut bar — it was boldly rich, though no sickly sweet, and it allowed for a ballet-like interplay between the robust taste of espresso, the crunchy texture of the hazelnut, and the smoothly sweet flavor of the gelato.  When mixed with the fondue-like chocolate accompanying the cherries, the cake was elevated to raw-food nirvana.  While the plums were impressive in a minimalist way, I found them lacking as they were noticeably under ripe.  Admittedly, I think the dish requires the plums to be somewhat firm, but in that case a different fruit may have provided a more pleasant combination, perhaps a pair or an apple.

After five courses and countless mouthfuls of food I’ve never encountered before, I was finally done and I enjoyed the adventure immensely.  I’ve already pointed out what I considered the faults of individual dishes, but I’d like to briefly touch on what I found to be a shortcoming in raw food dining overall.  For me, a “traditional” dinner, with its vast spectrum of options and possibilities, provides for a more sensorially exciting experience.

Let me explain: if you think about the world of different textures available to a traditional chef, from the succulent crispiness of shrimp to the deep, chewiness of a well-cooked filet to the creamy, melt-in-your-mouth foie gras, I can’t help but the think, at least from my experiences thus far in raw food restaurants, the potential for a meal to continually surprise your mouth is greater for the traditional chef.  Raw food chefs have to be content with using vegetables, fruit, nuts, and variations thereof, and to my pleasant surprise much can be done with those seemingly restrictive ingredients.  However, where traditional food is perhaps lacking in degree of sheer creativity demonstrated by raw food, it more than makes up for it in both variation and accessibility.

118 degrees is a journey not to be undertaken by the faint of heart or the weak of stomach.  I was continually impressed by what could be accomplished with such an apparently limited set of ingredients and “cooking” techniques, but I was unfortunately less enamored with the actual results.  Because of this, 118 degrees is likely to continue to cater mostly to those who are raw foodist, vegan, or even vegetarian themselves.

For those who don’t possess any personal qualms against eating cooked food, the overall experience is lacking in the requisite reward of exquisitely memorable tastes and flavors for the dining sacrifice of man’s best culinary friend for millennia: fire.  Unless I become a raw foodist overnight, I doubt I’ll be returning to 118 degrees anytime soon.

To see more pictures from my visit to 118 degrees, please visit the photo gallery.

Every interaction with your public runs the risk that some people just won’t get it. They won’t understand the protocol at your jazz club, or figure out how they use that new thing you just built. They won’t get your verbal shorthand or they’ll be frustrated by your presumption that they’re insiders.

He makes a fair point, and the dilemma risk taking poses is supremely palpable in the food world as well.  I would assume that the vast majority of diners are "n00bs" when it comes to exotic food — we know what we like and we stick with it.  But, without risk taking, there is no excitement.  Seth ends with such a notion:

Once you dumb it down so every single person gets it, you bake out the magic and the mystery and the elegance.

So, when applied to restaurants, this can lead to one of two results: either the restaurant is remarkably challenging (like wd-50 where every morsel of food is a world of unique exploration), or it is indistinguishably boring.  In my ideal world, there would be at least some restaurants that could find an in between.

Here’s my earth-shatteringly new idea: take a restaurant like wd-50 where most dishes are an incredibly different take on an otherwise recognizable course.  To the uninitiated, that might be confusing.  In my fantasy restaurant, diners would be presented with two options for each course: "Challenging" and "Comfortable". 

For example, at the French Laundry, Chef Thomas Keller makes serves a dish called a "Caesar Salad", but his variation features thinly diced strips of lettuce atop a thick parmigiano-reggiano custard, dressed lightly with anchovy dressing.  The entire creation lays on top of a small, perfectly sized flat crouton and is garnished with a dash of balsamic glaze.

Clearly, this is a challenging Caesar salad.  The  "comfortable" Caesar salad would be the variation we all know and love, simple romaine lettuce tossed with Caesar dressing and topped with croutons.  This way, a restaurant can take risks as well as hedge against n00bs, who are invariably around every corner.

Well, after this brief lesson I hope you’ll add one more delicious, though difficult to pronounce white wine varietal to your summer list.  Behold: Gewürztraminer!  It’s a mouthful, I know, but let’s break it down: gah-vurts-trah-mee-ner.  Or, even easier, you can call it Gewürz for short (all the cool people do it).

Why is the Gewürz grape so interesting that I’m writing an entire lesson on it?  Well, for starters, variety is the spice of life and limiting your wine spectrum is truly a gastronomic crime–there’s a whole world of new experiences just waiting for you!  More to the point, though, Gewürz is an excellent summer wine because its primary aroma is lychee, that delicious Asian fruit that is becoming a de rigueur ingredient for hip New York mixologists.

Gewürz is German for “spicy”, and it truly doesn’t disappoint: be prepared for a rich, spicy white with a mouth-filling texture that is reminiscent of the buttery richness of a Chardonnay while remaining light on the tongue like a Pinot Grigio or Sauvignon Blanc.  It also lends itself well to thirst-quenching summer libations because of its low acidity and high alcohol.

By now I’m sure you’re saying to yourself: well, yea Mark, that all sounds  good, but when I’m chugging 4-7 bottles of wine every couple days just to stay sane this summer, how can I afford such a wildly exotic grape?  You’re right that Gewürz is exotic (it’s native to the Alsace region of France), but you’re wrong about the price.

The best part about Gewürz is because it’s relatively undiscovered, or at least under-hyped, the prices are quite reasonable for the amazing quality you’re getting in each bottle.  Expect to pay only between $10 and $20 for a quality bottle, but also expect to search a little longer for it than you would for your fallback butterball Chardonnay.  Trust me, though, it’ll be worth it.

I’ve always envisioned myself living in a cozy neighborhood with a local wine bar which I can walk to, relax, perhaps listen to some jazz, and pass the time with some small but delicious morsels.  Unfortunately, such an idyllic establishment rarely presents itself in the cultural desert that is Orange County.  Walking is impossible, and "neighborhood" is such a loosely defined term that it loses basically all meaning.

I was pleasantly surprised, then, when I found out that a new wine store, bar, and bistro opened just down the road from my house.  Pinch me, I must be dreaming!  But it was no dream–Wineworks has managed to firmly establish itself in a niche I wasn’t aware Orange County could provide for.  It is at once a small, personalized wine store, a local wine bar with countless wines by the glass, and a delightfully cozy bistro with precious few tables but overflowing hospitality.

As I’ve made reference to time and time again, more menu options are not always better.  In fact, they are often the chagrin of my dining experience, leaving me staring at the menu in desperation, groping in the dark for something palpably familiar.  It should go without saying that a restaurant presenting itself as a bistro should never fall prey to such faults, and Wineworks deftly and successfully avoids such problems.

Here’s why I like the Wineworks model: they have refined their menu to only a handful of appetizers, an equally limited selection of entrees, and even fewer fresh, seasonally varying desserts.  The "choice" is directed towards the wine, and though that can be a tad overwhelming at times, when isn’t it?  I like that I know and remember exactly what’s in each of the seven or so entrees, and that between my family and myself, we’ve basically tried everything Wineworks has to offer. 

Why is this important?  Well, the way I see it there are at least two distinct types of dining experiences.  The first is one of excitement and brave culinary jumps of faith.  These are the types of experiences when you go out thinking, "I want to try something new tonight, how about some fried mayonnaise and white Belgian beer ice cream?"  The second is one of familiar hospitality.  You know what to expect, and you dine more to socialize and enjoy the comfort and ease that only such a well-traveled restaurant provides.

Wineworks, as you may have already guessed, provides the second of these two experiences.  The small menu, warm and welcoming interior, and kind staff all combine to produce a soulful and heart-lifting night out.  There’s something about engaging in small talk with the wait staff and the owners during the visit that can’t be replicated in an austere, formal environment, no matter the food quality or number of Michelin stars.  And the owner of Wineworks, Darren Coyle, is no stranger to the dining floor: he can always be seen floating from table to table, welcoming the regulars and effortlessly persuading newcomers to feel right at home.

All that said, though, Wineworks wouldn’t be much of a pleasant retreat without equally dependably delicious food.  Not only is the food excellent and beautifully-presented, but the small menu still manages to afford quite a diversity of dishes.  Ranging from the inventive chili-mint sliders on sliced baguette to succulent Moroccan lamb cous cous, Wineworks really does work for everyone.

During my meal, I had three wonderful courses, and two of them were entirely unique.  The first of these was an appetizer called brie fondue, which was baked brie in a creme brulee-esque dish served alongside fresh baguette and sliced pear.  Despite the potential this dish had at being an overwhelmingly filling appetizer, it skillfully avoids such a fate by pairing the heavy cream of the melting brie with the light, delicate sweetness of the pair and absorbent texture of the baguette.  The powerful trio coalesced into a fantastically indulgent sensory overload, stimulating and perhaps even scaring my excited taste buds.

My second course was Moroccan lamb cous cous with yogurt sauce, and I’m happy to say it was the most boring of the three.  I’m happy to say that because despite not being entirely unique, it was easily one of the most tender and juicy rack of lambs I’ve ever had.  The meat literally was falling off the bone, forging its way through the exotic journey of cool, semi-sweet yogurt, fresh cucumber, warm cous cous and fruity raisins.

I ended my experience at Wineworks with a most  singular dessert: sliced fig topped with mascarpone cheese and drizzled with honey.  A fig newton on steroids, if you will.  Really, though, to try this dessert you may have to summon a degree of culinary curiosity, but I promise it’s worth it.  The tartness of the mascarpone is adroitly masked by the thick sweetness of honey, and both toppings hitched a ride on a fruit that manages to be both smooth and rough at the same time–a unique sensation that pops in your mouth.  A dessert I certainly won’t soon forget.

While Wineworks is deserving of commendation, the young bistro still has room for improvement.  My biggest complaint is that the size of the dining area coupled with the bar-like atmosphere often results in noise levels necessitating shouting conversations.  Another complaint is that service, while on the whole very good, seems to be inconsistent.  I like to be able to expect a certain level of service from a restaurant, whether good or bad, on every visit, and while Wineworks benefits from a few truly hospitable and excellent servers, there are also some that seemed to miss the proverbial boat. 

Finally, restaurateurs should never feel that there is shame in having a small dining area.  Momofuku Ko in New York has only 12 seats, Per Se has less than 16 tables, and the French Laundry has less than 14.  Where size starts to be a problem is when restaurateurs see small size as a crutch and attempt to hide or disguise this by packing tables closely together and creating a boisterous atmosphere.  Wineworks suffers from this to a degree — a small, cozy bistro is good, but it’s no longer cozy when tables are too packed in.

These are all relatively minor faults, and Wineworks is well on its way to becoming my local favorite.  At once it has become a favorite of mine for a casual drink, a serious dinner, and light conversation, a niche few restaurants can claim to fill.  I applaud Wineworks’ foray into the oft-depressing Orange County restaurant scene and I can’t wait for my next visit.

As always, you can peruse more interior and food pictures of Wineworks in my photo gallery.

In my initial list, you can find all restaurants I’ve traveled to as of today going back about five years in four convenient geographic locations: Orange County, New York, Providence, and France.  I’m only listing restaurants where the average bill per person amounts to more than $15 per person, because there’s no way I’m listing all the In-’n-Outs and Wahoo’s I’ve been to.  Sorry.  Also, I hereby charge you readers with a solemn duty: if you’ve been to a restaurant with me that is not listed, you must notify me in a comment post-haste and forthwith!

You can find the list in the navigation bar as a new page named “Restaurants” at the top of BlackNapkin.org next to Photos, or you can click here to be brought there directly.  Enjoy!

Afternoon tea usually consists of a selection of small, light sandwiches, scones with jam, jelly, and clotted cream, then some assortment of cakes and pastries.  Sometimes I take issue with afternoon tea service because the sandwiches are typically my favorite part yet you may only get one chance to choose just a handful.  Not being able to choose your exact quantity when it comes to finger foods is a bit annoying, but another quandary I often face is timing.

A relaxing afternoon break should ideally be set at a leisurely pace, but as restaurants do I’ve been rushed through my sandwiches and scones much to my chagrin.  Fortunately, a buffet fixes all that: you choose what you want, when you want it, and how long to wait in between courses.  Unfortunately, though, I have little to no self-control, so I plow through those sandwiches and sweets like there’s no tomorrow.  I’m not a model student when it comes to learning the art of pacing a languorous meal, but you see my point.

I’m happy to report that the St. Regis did not disappoint at all.  Beginning with the sandwiches, there were six different types and all of them were as good or better than any I’ve had elsewhere.  The cucumber with creme fraiche and dill was my favorite, followed by the roast beef (though it was well-done and a bit dry) and the salmon (the bread could have been more complimentary to the fish).  All were classics, so the smiling face of innovation did not make an appearance, but afternoon tea isn’t really about innovation is it?  It’s a classic experience on the face of it, and should remain so through its soul.

Breaking from tradition, though, the St. Regis did have an assortment of salads that were quite out of place (caprese and Waldorf salads come to mind), as well as hummus (always good) and spring rolls (what?).  The food quality was excellent across the board, but since the St. Regis has a well-attended and absolutely fantastic Sunday brunch with all of those items, I question their choice to include the seemingly random assortment of Sunday food along with the classic Saturday afternoon tea.  Pick a theme and stick with it, I say.  If I wanted shrimp and dumplings, I would come on Sunday.

I must say that it was an interesting dynamic to be able to serve myself my small sandwiches and scones, since the foundation upon which afternoon tea is built is a relaxing seating.  However, given the buffet format, I found myself standing up every 10 minutes or so to move to the next course or get seconds of the current one.  Perhaps this was because I’m not very good and strategically planning my buffet trips, but either way I found that it disrupted the normal flow of the experience where moments of tranquility are punctuated only by nagging calls of nature.

Regardless of this relatively minor bother, the St. Regis truly shined in its dessert selection.  Beginning with the scones, a staple of any proper afternoon tea, I was quite pleased with them.  They were firm, but crumbly in the right places.  They were fresh and soft, and buttery to the core.  I appreciated the inclusion of authentic Devon clotted cream, but I was a bit disappointed by the homemade strawberry jam, which was really just sliced strawberries in a sweet sticky goo.  Maybe that is somebody’s definition of jam, but the texture was distracting and the taste was overly sweet.

And the rest of the desserts?  Well, what can I say, just look at the pictures!  All in miniature format, I tirelessly (and thanklessly I might add, you’re welcome) sampled creme brulee, chocolate mousse, blueberry muffins, carrot cake, lemon-almond cake, vanilla mousse, and chocolate truffles and ganache.  All were superb, if a bit sweet, and were as always an overwhelmingly unnecessary end to an entirely satisfying meal.

As for the tea itself, the St. Regis got it 90% right.  My problem with their tea service was that they brought the teapots with the tea leaves still in the pot (and not visible).  Without alerting us that we can (and should) remove the tea leaves soon, all too often the tea will be completely overbrewed, bitter, and unpleasant.  The best afternoon tea purveyors I’ve visited have waited the extra three or four minutes to allow the leaves to steep the correct amount of time, and then have brought over the teapots at the perfect balance.  This had the potential to make the experience slightly less exquisite, but fortunately my mom noticed and I promptly saved my blessed tea.

In sum, afternoon tea at the St. Regis hotel in buffet format exceeded my expectations.  I entered thinking that a “true” afternoon tea had to be served to you, possibly on multi-tiered silver platters, but definitely in a set order and a set pace.  Turns out, that’s not true.  Buffet-style, at the quality of the St. Regis, has become a new favorite of mine, and I hope to return on another Saturday in the near future.

Check out my photo gallery to see all the pictures of the tea, because some of the dishes were remarkably beautiful and they make my amateur photography skills look a lot better than they are, such as the macaroons pictured below.

Tonight I had the distinct pleasure and joy of dining at my favorite teppanyaki restaurant named Ichibiri, and my was it a feast both for the eyes and my now-humbled stomach.  For those of you who don’t know what teppanyaki is, it’s a Japanese method of combining dining with entertainment.  8 guests sit around an elevated table-top grill, called a teppan grill, and watch as their veggies, rice, meat, and fish are grilled to perfection by a sometimes dangerous, though always exciting chef.

Since the teppanyaki experience is so photogenic, I thought I would keep this post brief and cut right to the good stuff: the photos.  Above is a photo of the classic onion-ring-volcano, and trust me there are quite a few more golden shots where that came from.

You can find the full photo tour of the visually compelling experience in my photo gallery, or by clicking here.  Enjoy!

And rightfully so.  I’m indescribably happy that frozen dessert establishments the likes of Cold Stone and Marble Slab are on their way out and are being supplanted by ostensibly healthier options.  Frozen yogurt is typically fat free, and many of these Pinkberry-esque shops have no-sugar-added yogurt as well (don’t even ask me what that means, but I figure it denotes less sugar…).  Not to mention that I would sooner take fresh pineapple and strawberries as a topping long before crushed oreo or cookie dough, though they offer those too for any of you who feel otherwise.

Yes, overall, I think this is a good fad in the food world.  I’ve eaten at three of these new-age desserteries recently, and I’d like to share my comparative thoughts on them.  I’ve visited Pinkberry and Yogurtland in Orange County, and Juniper in Providence, Rhode Island.  I’ll skip right to the point–my favorite by far is Yogurtland.

Read on to find out why…

Why do I like Yogurtland so much more than anything else I’ve tried?  I’ve already discussed what I like in general about these yogurt purveyors, so I’ll now list the reasons I don’t like Pinkberry and Juniper:

• Too expensive. A small with one topping at either place costs upwards of $5 with tax, and that’s a bit ridiculous.
• Limited flavor options. Juniper only has two flavors (original and blueberry), and Pinkberry only has three.  Not only that, but to swirl the flavors costs more than getting any flavor individually–can someone explain the reasoning behind that to me?
• Sizes are too big. It’s not just me–my friends also think that a small is almost unfinishable at either Pinkberry and Juniper, so you’re stuck paying $5 for something you can’t even finish.
• Additional toppings cost more. Meaning, it costs more to get 3 toppings than 2.  This may seem like the norm, but there are better ways to handle this, trust me.

So how does Yogurtland solve these problems?  With a healthy dose of creative thinking.  Instead of being served a pre-set amount of yogurt with a pre-set amount of toppings at a pre-set price, Yogurtland flips the standard ice cream model on its head and lets customers decide how much yogurt of any flavor they’d like, and then you apply your own toppings to your pleasing.  And price?  It’s by weight: 30 cents per ounce.  To put that in context, an equivalent amount of yogurt in a Pinkberry small at Yogurtland would be about $3.50, but at Yogurtland you could have up to 14 different flavors and 30 different toppings in your cup, all personalized ad infinitum.

Above is a photo of the entrance facade.  The wall is lined with yogurt machines dispensing a spectrum of flavors ranging from cookies and cream to peach to green tea to peanut butter.  You get your cup, fill it with as much (or as little) yogurt as you want in any combination, and then you head over to the toppings:

You have the now-standard fresh fruit and the requisite candied and sweet toppings at your disposal.  They all cost the same and you can get any amount and any combination you like.  Your cup is then weighed and they hand you a delightfully branded spoon to enjoy your personal creation with:

It’s probably clear by now why I like Yogurtland land so much, but in case it isn’t, here’s a quick list:

• The pricing actually makes sense. You pay for what you want: I wanted a small ice cream today, so I made my definition of small and paid only $1.81 for it.
• You decide everything. The flavors, toppings, and serving size are all matched to your wildest desires.
• It’s good! The store isn’t just pretty colors and fancy spoons…the yogurt is on par or better than Pinkberry and Juniper.
• Personalization is always better. People love choice, myself included, and being able to eat something of your exact specifications is always more pleasing than choosing from a limited set of dull options.
• It’ll keep me coming back. With more than 14 flavors and more than 30 toppings, there are nearly limitless potential combinations to explore.

I’m not sure if this froyo craze is here to stay, but I do hope that any new upstarts take a lesson from Yogurtland, because they’re definitely doing it right.

I’ve written about David Chang before in the context of his uniquely egalitarian reservation system for his white-hot new restaurant in New York named Momofuku Ko.  He’s definitely an integral part of this young, popular, and inspiringly different New York chef crowd, and hearing about his life’s adventures was telling to say the least.  At 56 minutes, this is a long interview, but if you’re at all interested in restaurants, cuisine, or even golf, it’s certainly worth watching.

[Via Serious Eats]