Of course, neither of us has really lived, but Ryan came damn close one night in Tokyo during Beggars' Banquet's nine-month hiatus. Now, wanderlust quelled, there is a reawakening in Claremont; armchair connoisseurs -- carefree, careless, or just plain carless -- are hereby emancipated with the return of Claremont's premiere culinary column.
For those of you unfamiliar with the ways of BB, we do not intend to waste our time surveying the local slew of bourgeois restaurants. We'll leave that happy misery up to the carless saps among you. Besides, that scene was covered last semester.
Free from the bonds of our Marriyuk sustenance visas -- the newfound pinkness of which, by the way, now affords us sake with our sushi -- the daily search for food has become all the more pressing, and all the less punishing. Our first recommendation would be to follow suit and kiss those curly fries goodbye.
Our second recommendation would be to find a good friend with a car, or at least a friend with a good car, and head West. In particular, if you're hankerin' for Japanese, seek repast in Pasadena at Sushi of Naples. To be uncharacteristically terse: it's good.
Or, to be more typically verbose: the savory smack of wasabi in a kappamaki roll is somehow akin to the porcelain pang of cymbals crashing in a tiled bathroom.
Sushi of Naples offers some mighty tasty sushi, some mighty strong wasabi and some even mightier beer. Dining there is especially frolicsome during the half-price Happy Hour, which actually lasts all night and whose conditions require only three years of contract law to fully comprehend. Be warned, however, that mulling about outside the entrance is often an eager crowd of would-be Happy Hour hijackers, armed with erasers and prepared to obscure your party's name from the dry-erase waiting list.
We thrice weathered such plebeian attempts to vitiate our anticipated felicity by these wanton delinquents who, like so many rascally scallions, did boorishly deface those representations of that by which we were denominated, and of that by which we were enumerated, on said pigmentless marquee.
Beggars' Banquet -- your official GRE-prep column. And now, for some quantitative analysis.... To quality for the half-price special, you must first dine between the hours of 5:30 and 10:00 PM on weekdays (10:30 on Friday) or noon to closing on weekends. Second, each sushi-eating patron must partake in a minimum of a tetrad of sushi orders, each order comprised of two sushi pieces, or six maki (one roll). Those patrons opting out of the markedly superior sushi option may order an alternate meal from a set menu, and indeed must do so, lest they disqualify the entire party from the half-price deal. Now, your official ETS-sponsored practice question: A, B, C, and D represent the vertices of a rectangle which travel at constant relative velocity from New York to Los Angeles on a train equipped with Japanese toilets. They stop for lunch at Sushi of Naples at 3:00 PM Saturday. Suppose A prefers sushi to maki, B likes only sushi, C would like both sushi and maki, D has moral objections to seafood, and everybody wants miso soup and beer. When does the train arrive in Los Angeles?
(A) 5:00 PM
(B) parsimonious : obdurate
(C) they receive no discount
(D) vertices do not eat sushi, though rectangles do
(E) I, II, and III
The correct answer has been etched with a switchblade into a leg of the fourth barstool from the door. Go check it out.
To cash in on the half-price sushi deal, take the 210 Freeway to Pasadena, exit at Lake, take a left over the freeway and turn right onto Colorado. Sushi of Naples is a few blocks down on the right -- look for the shady characters waiting around outside with concealed erasers. The phone number is (818) 304-9275.