Immediately upon touchdown, Kendrick and I drove – well, I drove (shockingly, you can’t rent a car without photo identification) – to one of my absolute favorite restaurants in LA, Sushi Mon. It’s a pretty unremarkable place located directly across the street from the Beverly Center, but the baked rolls are absolutely to die for.
Baked rolls, if you’ve never had one, are an entirely different animal from traditional sushi – I wouldn’t even really put them in the same category. Basically, they remove everything that people traditionally enjoy about sushi (the clean, fresh, simplicity, the protein buzz) and trade it in for creamy decadence. I wouldn’t eat these things every day, but sometimes I say screw the sashimi…give me dynamite! Given the LA fixation on…you know, abstinence from eating anything fun, I find it odd is that they’re much more common out here than they are in NYC – I haven’t actually been able to find baked rolls of this caliber anywhere in the city.
At Sushi Mon, I always order the 3rd Street Roll, which is basically a California roll drenched in a creamy mushroom-scallop-rice cake combo that I could happily bathe in. Pictured above, the perfect way to eat a 3rd Street Roll: top one piece of California roll with two mushroom slices, one scallop, and a rice cake. I die happy.
Seriously, does anyone know where to find great baked rolls in NYC? It’s simply not in the budget to hop a plane to LA whenever I’m craving one.
