So we were in the city of Torrance attending a business conference working on generating connections for our business and as lunch time came around, we began feeling hungry. We asked one of the locals who works in the area what restaurants in the area would they recommend, and one of the restaurants the individual mentioned was Ichimi Ann. Since we both enjoy a good Japanese meal from time to time, we decided to take a walk through old town Torrance to try our luck.
The menu was simple and small which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you can do a few dishes right, then you don’t need an extensive menu to satisfy the customers. We ended up ordering mixed tempura over rice and a pork cutlet with soba noodles on the side. I had never had soba noodles before, but was willing to give them a try as I generally love noodles.
Trying the tempura first, I was quite happy with the selection and the flavors of the tempura. They included all the normal vegetables that you would be used to, broccoli, pumpkin, sweet potato, shrimp and a surprisingly tasty jalapeno tempura. Quite the treasure find in their tempura mixture. The tempura was crispy as expected with a sauce included on them which wasn’t expected but still flavorful.
Unfortunately, the tempura was the highlight of the meal as when I turned to the pork cutlet, the breading wasn’t crispy or crunchy as I was hoping but instead was a soft breading over the pork. The flavor was passable, but certainly not a style that I enjoy. It also came with a fried egg inside a breading which was very similar to the pork in that it was soft.
What about the soba noodles? Well maybe I should have gone with my more favorite udon noodles instead as the soba noodles were just not my style. They were noodles all right, but just no a flavor that I was hoping for. Think of having wheat bread in noodle format and that’s what I felt like I was having. Now I like a good wheat bread, but in the form of noodles it just didn’t strike my fancy.
But one thing I can say is that I certainly did not leave the restaurant feeling hungry. The portions were good enough to fill up both happy healthy wife and myself. It was just unfortunate that the flavors weren’t to my liking. Now maybe I chose the wrong dish, maybe the udon noodle would have been more to my liking or maybe even just getting an udon soup. But as with the meal, both happy healthy wife and myself agree that if we had it to do over again, we would choose a different restaurant.
