Yakking it up at Yakko Sushi

J owed me a dinner "out" last night after I sold some lighting trusses that had been hanging in our garage for far too long. The buyer came and picked them up about 6PM...and was long gone by the time J came home from work. I kidded J that he should owe me a broker's fee since I'm selling his business gear for him. "30%!! That is what the other brokers get!" He kidded, "But you'd have to be a broker to get a commission". "What, do you forget so soon...I AM a broker, silly J!" In the end, I lost out on the commish but I won on the dinner.

Or so it would seem.

We drove to Mountain View to pick up yet another piece of J's business gear. It's frustrating that as soon as I sell one obscenely large item, he finds a new one to stuff into the garage. It never ends. And in this case, he was buying the new item within the hour.

We retrieved his item and headed downtown for dinner. We hemmed and hawed over our fav noodle house, Ryowa, but as we were parking I noticed a Japanese restaurant that I had heard tale of from a good friend. I suggested, "Let's try something new...why not? And besides, you owe me a nice dinner for having sold your crap!" :-)

So we moseyed across the street to Yakko.

Yakko Japanese Restaurant
975 W Dana St
Mountain View, CA

I am not one for writing restaurant reviews. I'll leave that to my friend FoodMuse as she does a spectacular job of such things (I have no patience for such things these days). But this place just wasn't immediately impressive. More of a "mom and pop" sort of sushi joint, tables sparsely populated, small sushi bar in the back. I hadn't yet noticed the line of tatami rooms on the way to the bathrooms, but there were quite a few. Now I have no prejudice against small "hole in the walls" as I've found many a great meal to be found in them. In fact, one of my favorite Japanese hole-in-the-walls, Mitsuru in Whittier, has been a favorite haunt since I was a teenager. But this wasn't exactly what I was hoping for. I wanted "nice", this was just average. We both wondered why my friend thought the restaurant was so good and tore into the menu.

We ordered from a Japanese boy who seemed like he might barely be 18 years old. He was polite, took our order, and disappeared for the next 15 or 20 minutes without making further eye contact. Everyone around us received their food before us. Not a good sign.

Finally our dinner arrives, and then our handrolls which I had hoped would be appetizer. No explanation for the lengthy wait ensured. We quickly set into our meal. Everything appeared to be in order, or so it seemed, except that the sukiyaki had an unusual aroma. J said it didn't smell quite right to him, but I noted that there were quite a few shiitakis in the broth and that they can sometimes lend an off smell to things, especially when they are of the dried variety. No matter, I dove in anyways, ignoring a tiny voice in my head that wondered if J was right.

Big mistake.

4 o'clock in the morning. I am suddenly wide awake. Very awake. And hot. I tear my night clothes off. My stomach is pissed off to high hell. I nudge J and say, "Hey, you awake?" He grunts. I feel like an idiot. Of course he's not awake. I say, "I think I'm going to barf...my stomach feels really bad." J jumps into action, rare for a man that sleeps through the loudest alarm known to mankind. I'm truly impressed by his swiftness. He dashes into the bathroom and returns with a trashcan and sits it next to the bed next to me. (Note: Our bathroom trashcan is a metal flower bucket...I cringe at the idea of yakking my innards into something so narrow. I envision quite a mess ensuing on the carpet).

So I get out of bed and head to the bathroom. It was one of those surreal moments where I turned on the light, looked at the toilet, and began to barf up my sukiyaki, all in one very fluid motion, which by the way was still rather undigested. I noticed that the smell of sesame oil was, well, uhmm....rather pervasive. I wondered if it was really the sukiyaki that had gotten to me, but maybe it was the side of stir fried bean sprouts, in sesame oil no less, that looked so innocent on the side of my plate. Whatever it was, it was gone, and quite vacated from my stomach.

The major cramps were gone, but I still didn't feel quite right. I went back to bed and stayed there even through J's awakening at 8:30AM, and on until 11:00AM when I got up only to IM my friend JS that I would NOT be making it to our lunch date today. Then it was back to bed for me. I felt like a total slacker sleeping the day away. My mom even commented that she was, well, kind of bored. I apologized and told her about the 4AM barfing episode. Her boredom turned to concern and she asked if she could do anything. I said now and headed back to bed where I stayed there till nearly 1pm, just getting up long enough to steam J a batch of tamales for lunch. And then back to bed until 5pm. Unfortunately I'd forgotten that I had to get up to take my mom to a diabetes management class at Kaiser at 5:45PM. My god. I had a difficult time staying awake during the class...and I'm only staying up long enough now to blog about this unfortunate incident and get right back to bed.

I am amazed at how totally fucked up I feel after what seemed like a rather innocent looking meal and as Pamplemousse mentioned...it really sucks to spend good money on a meal and then have to suffer for it. I think this is the first time that I've ever had food poisoning from a Japanese restaurant...and hopefully it will be the last.