tl;dr: order the goddamn rolls. i don’t care what else you order. everything is good.
when people talk about ma’ono, they always talk about the fried chicken. well, i’m a natural born hater, through and through, and i’ve gotta say the fried chicken was one of the worst things on our table.
that being said, we ordered seventeen things, and all of them were spectacular. do you get what i’m saying here? fried chicken was the worst of the best. everything else was better, and fried chicken certainly wasn’t bad.
the best of the best was easily a tie between the rolls and the saimin. the rolls were the best combination offoodadjectives; light, dense, huge, not filling. how were they both light and dense? i don’t know. i truly can’t wrap my brain around the idea that these rolls are real. that’s how good they are. they are simultaneously light and dense in a world that doesn’t allow that to happen. how are they both huge and not filling? i don’t know. these rolls are fantastically huge. absolutely gigantic, and yet, i could eat piles and piles of them. they must have paid off the same people lay’s did, because they are like potato chips in that you can eat them forever without feeling the slightest bit full.
after that how could i possibly recommend the saimin? well really, nothing can top those rolls. i think i’m actually doing myself a disservice here by having this be the third article, because honestly, after those rolls, nothing matches up. grass just isn’t as green anymore, the sky isn’t as blue, and babies aren’t as cute. they’re so good, they’re depressing.
if you must follow up the rolls with something other than another plate of rolls though, the saimin is your best bet. the broth in that bowl is as close to gravy as broth gets. fatty, rich, opaque, it’s a beautiful masterpiece of liquid, but the real star of the show is the soft-cooked egg. it’s marinated in soy and sesame, which doesn’t sound especially spectacular, but when you bite into it, it just feels right. it feels like all eggs should be marinated in soy and sesame. these eggs are living their true egg destiny.
if you really want to fat (and you should), go for the banana cream pie. i geek out over dessert menus and ma’ono was no exception. even though i was absolutely pushing the limit by ordering a seventeenth plate offoodfor the table, i had no choice. banana cream pie is a fantastic indicator of how good a restaurant is, and ma’ono hit it out of the park. not only is there no fake banana flavor to be found, but there were cacao nibs in the graham cracker crust which were addictively crunchy, and the whipped cream that topped the entire slice was freshly piped on, which was just about enough to send me into convulsions right there in the booth.
the only regret i have about ma’ono was that i didn’t get to try more than seventeen things.