A Flower Girl’s Dream doesn’t just tiptoe through the tulips

PHOTO by JEFF GOULD
It’s not uncommon to find Sheri Cervantes running around her store in a wetsuit, sopping wet with sand still dripping from her hair, rattling off plant facts while putting together the most perfect, colorful bouquet of flowers you’ve ever seen.
“This is the only [...]

It takes about 20 minutes for the kitchen to ready an order of sesame bread, but when the bread ships out with slices spilling off the plate, you know the wait was worth it. Every batch is afforded the option of having green onions kneaded into the dough (a must for more flavor), but the [...]

Fuji’s Famous Burger
Fuji’s Famous Burger, a Huntington Beach institution since 1973, specializes in offering fast food given the Fuji’s touch via teriyaki and/or avocado (avocado tacos, teriyaki beef sandwiches, you name it). There’s also Japanese-Hawaiian cuisine (Spam musubi, which is a block of salted rice with Spam on top and dried seaweed wrapped around it), [...]

Go rice-less at Lotus Chinese Eatery

PHOTO by RICK POON
Portion your order just right at Lotus Chinese Eatery and your meal won’t contain a single grain of rice. The restaurant does serve the stubby little staple (steamed as a side, fried as an entrée), but rice, a near necessity of so many Chinese meals, is left [...]

The Consumerist blogs on a reader report about the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory in the Bella Terra Center in Huntington Beach denying a 5-year-old access to the bathroom:
“I explained she had diarrhea and couldn’t hold it and told them she was about to go on the floor. They refused again and never offered me any [...]

Down deep on Mangia-Mangia’s menu is the restaurant’s Sicilian training, represented best by its bucatini. Bucatini is long, spaghetti-like pasta, the difference between the two being that bucatini noodles are actually tubes, thin little cylinders that fatten up to the size of pipe cleaners. But the bucatini is just an accent here—the dish belongs to [...]

Mangia-Mangia says hello from Sicily

PHOTO by RICK POON
There isn’t much to show for Mediterranean tastes these days—disposable houses sewn up in the sloppiest villa-like style, restaurants reduced to nothing but plates of the blandest red sauce. Mediterranean flavors and style have been co-opted, cut up and retouched until the influence is sometimes unrecognizable.
It’s because of [...]

Every plate is a small one at Izakaya Zero, but some are more suited to a start than others. And for the best possible beginning there’s the okonomiyaki, a Japanese-style pancake loaded with octopus, pork, cabbage, green onion, ginger and topped with scribbles of citrus aioli and tonkatsu sauce. But it’s the heartier dishes that [...]

This Week: The Firewater Jacuzzi Grotto, Illegal Gardening and Batman
Tues | MAY 27 Soak and shrink.
Wed | MAY 28 Development trouble down in Huntington Beach as American Indians protest the construction of 300 new homes atop an ancient burial ground even after an Environmental Impact Report warns of potentially toxic levels of sacrilegiosity. [...]

Izakaya Zero balances bar food with grace

PHOTO by RICK POON
Before dark, Izakaya Zero seems a clinical place—the white walls and white menus and white chairs aren’t so much clean and modern as they are austere. But at night it transforms, shedding the orange shadows of sunset for some carefully controlled lighting, which hits all those [...]