Beni Hana Lunch Boat

I like food. Always have, always will. The problem with this is that most of the tasty food is not good for you, and the really healthy food is either bland or disgusting. Really healthy food is also expensive and I'm a cheapskate and I'm more about money in my pocket than health food in my stomach.

The Japanese have found a nice way to marry a love of cheapness and tasty, and they call it sushi. Now sushi can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be for it to be good. As a matter of fact there's a fruit market around the corner from where I used to work that would sell good California rolls for six dollars a pound. But that's not what this is about.

Most of the time, lunch leaves me feeling flat. Either the food is so greasy I feel like dying, or I've eaten too much and feel like dying, or I go somewhere where they expect me to be full on like half an ounce of food or something, and then I'm hungry and my blood sugar bottoms out and I feel like dying. As you can see, lunch is a perilous journey for someone like me. To be honest there is only one restaurant where if I order lunch I feel good after I've eaten it. That's Beni Hana.

Now Beni Hana is actually a little on the expensive side if you order sit around the hibachi and let one of the chefs grill you up something, but if you hit the sushi bar, it's not too bad. My favorite thing to order there is the lunch boat. To start it comes with a small cup of miso (bean) soup. The onion soup is better, but miso is good too. Then I order it with all California roll instead of the mix of that and Sashimi, which doesn't really sound appetizing. It comes with a bowl of rice, several kinds of tempura, a small cucumber salad (which I normally skip too), a portion of teryaki chicken and half an orange. Really it's a well balanced meal, and by the time I'm ready to walk out the door, I feel good, not like dying. Not dying is a good thing, at least as far as I've been able to figure it.