Why is it that when you hear eye-witness accounts on Bigfoot and Nessie, it's always the chance encounter by the drunkard who just sauntered out of his local pub? It's never the guy who actually goes out looking for them -- like that determined scientist with grant money and expensive equipment?

So when I accidentally stumbled across salteñas while aimlessly meandering through Tustin the other day, I felt like the former: the village idiot who just got lucky. Why? According to Gustavo Arellano, only two local restaurants serve this Bolivian take on the empanada. Fortunately, I had a camera on me, ready to snap a picture as proof of my discovery.

So here it is: the third place in O.C. to serve salteñas.

Food fact: Some of the best French bakeries in Orange County are run by Asians.

There's Japonaise Bakery in Tustin, whose custard-and-strawberry-stuffed croissants would make Escoffier weep. For baguettes with crusts as shatteringly crisp as potato chips, go to Little Saigon, where Vietnamese bakers have perfected the French loaf for use on their banh mi sandwiches. And at Irvine's Layer Cake Bakery, it's not Frenchmen, but two Indonesian sisters who make the macaroons.

The newest is Paris Baguette, a South Korea-based boulangerie and patisserie that would rival those on the Champs-Elysées.

Where can you find it? Inside Zion, a Korean supermarket in Irvine; near its refrigerated jars of kimchi, of course!

If you are at a sushi bar and the guy slicing the fish is the also the guy from which the restaurant is named, you are all but guaranteed exceptionally great sushi. In this category, there's Ikko, Hamamori, and Shibucho -- just to name a few in Orange County where the chef responsible for your meal also signs the rent check.

But when you talk about the majority of sushi joints out there, this isn't the case. Most restaurants merely employ their itamae, who might be there one day, gone the next. As such, if you wait too long between visits, you might discover that the journeyman sushi chef whose creations you admired has left, leaving you to settle for the dreck made by the guy who replaced him.

Irvine's sushi bars are particularly susceptible to this game of itamae musical chairs. So when my friend and fellow O.C. food blogger Chubbypanda invited me to eat at Gen Kai, I was hesitant. This was, after all, a place I had already tried about a decade ago whose sushi left me unmoved.

But I agreed because Gen Kai had nowhere to go but up. And if there was a different chef holding court now, that meant a completely new dining experience -- perhaps a good one.

And I'm happy to say, it was.

The master currently behind the counter is an itamae named Juuji, who's held the post for the past two years. We did him the honor of ordering "omakase", which is the equivalent of bowing reverentially, and saying "I trust you to serve me what you will".

Grand Avenue was busy that day I ate lunch at Gammy's Cafe. But I suppose it's always busy. Looking out towards it from one of their concrete picnic tables, I saw truck after truck roaring past. Trailing every rig was the rumble of diesel engines, whirring of gears, smoke and dust.

Above my head, a speaker blasted Mexican ranchera music at an ear-piercing volume. Together, the noise of the road and the polka-beat combined into a crazy, cacophonous soundtrack.

Suddenly midway through my meal, a thunderous bang and deafening crunch jolted me half bite. I looked up and saw that a car had just plowed into another. A woman stormed out of one vehicle with a cell phone clutched to her ear. She hunched down to survey the damage to her rear bumper.

It's dented, but the car that hit her fared far worse. Its driver, a guy with a beard, had already begun picking up pieces of his front end from the road when the woman started yelling at him.

"They should get off the street," I thought as I gulped down the mouthful of taco I was still chewing. They did eventually, turning into a nearby strip mall to swap insurance information, but not before snarling the rest of the traffic on this four lane thoroughfare to a halt.

It's Saturday morning around nine-o-clock. I'm at Champion Food in Fountain Valley, sitting in a plastic chair, resting my elbows on a fold-out table, waiting for my order to be prepared.

In the corner, with a commanding view of the room, next to a rickety shelf of imported foodstuffs, two old Chinese men sat, their faces hidden behind newspapers, visible only when they took a sip of hot soy milk from a styrofoam cup and a bite from a crispy, deep fried cruller called youtiao.

Meanwhile, the owner -- a middle-aged man with kind, sleepy eyes -- shuffled out from the kitchen, carrying a serving tray of freshly-made Chinese onion pancakes to a group of women at another table.

Throughout the morning, customers would trickle in, though most would just grab a Chinese newspaper from a stack next to the door, walk up to the counter to plop a few coins down, then leave without saying a word.

Besides seagulls, no other group has monopolized eating by the shore than Ruby's. Along the O.C. coast, at the end of almost every pier, there's a Ruby's.

But it doesn't stop there. Ruby's owns and manages The Beachcomber, a beach-side restaurant set inside a rickety cottage in the Crystal Cove Historic District, which is so close to surf, people track sand in on their slippers.

Then there's the Crystal Cove Shake Shack, previously a family-run landmark that Ruby's claimed about two years ago.

Drive southbound on PCH from Newport to Laguna and you can't miss it. There's a turnout, a few parking spots, and when the weather is warm, a line of people. This is where I found myself yesterday, squinting from the sun, waiting to order a date shake.

A few months ago, I drove to L.A., paid for parking in one of those Little Tokyo parking labyrinths, and waited for over an hour to get a seat at Daikokuya, a highly-regarded L.A. ramen shop -- all for a bowl of noodles that would've disappointed me if I had only waited a minute.

After their first slurp, my friends -- Daikokuya devotees who had convinced me to meet them there -- also admitted that it wasn't as good as they remembered. We thought of a myriad of excuses for it. An off-night? An absent chef? Ultimately, I decided that the commute was too ugly for another go round.

But despite that lackluster bowl, I was hopeful when I heard that Daikokuya was unveiling a branch in O.C. With its soft opening a few weeks ago, it makes Costa Mesa -- a city that already has Santoka and others -- the ramen Mecca of Orange County.

Pizza isn't something you'll see very often on this blog. Don't get me wrong. I eat plenty of it. But this is Orange County, not Chicago or New York. Pho, tacos, and ramen we got in spades -- just as good as those served in in Vietnam, Mexico and Japan, some might say. But pizza? So far, what I've found fits into the lowest common denominator. Most are harmless, serviceable at best, but for me, not worth writing about.

That is, until I saw a pizza topped with avocado. And I don't mean layered on top raw and after-the-fact a la California Pizza Kitchen. No, these were baked on the pie itself, along with the cheese and crust.

If you don't find this strange, consider this: The California Avocado Commission -- the marketing organization representing California's avocado growers -- has a recipe for California Avocado Pizza Pie that explicitly instructs the reader to leave out the avocado until the pizza is fully cooked.

Who would dare defy the CAC? Stonefire Grill that's who, although it is unclear if they pioneered the idea.

A few things happened to Manila Groove since I visited last.

First, about three months ago, Gustavo Arellano tipped readers about the little-known Tustin eatery and its constantly updated website menu in his This-Hole-in-the-Wall-Life column.

Second, they've expanded by taking over the store next door, effectively doubling the space with new tables and chairs. And when I say "new", I mean it -- the place was nothing more than a take-out counter before. Now, there's framed art, posters, and hanging plants. Though, sadly, no big wooden spoon and fork.

It's Thursday. I'm standing near the boxed sushi section at the Mitsuwa Marketplace. I look at my watch. It's about a quarter after five. He should be coming out of that door any second now -- the man with the red Sharpie.

There are others like me waiting for him, milling around, trying to not look like obvious cheapskates. But as we attempt to blend in, we are still coiled like sprinters waiting for the gun.

Finally, the door swings open, and the man with the red Sharpie strolls out casually, oblivious that his entrance has been anticipated for the past ten minutes.

He removes the cap to his marker, hunches down to the remaining supply of boxed lunches and slashes away. He marks every container, one by one. He subtracts a whole dollar there. Fifty cents here.

What was $4.99 a few minutes ago is now $3.99. In most cases, his discounts amount to about a 20% reduction. His job is done to spur movement of the inventory. He is the Ben Bernanke of bento boxes.

A robot vacuums our carpet when we aren't home. With a button push, a metal box in our kitchen turns a frozen, inedible block into a hot meal. We don't go bowling anymore. Instead, we mimic the motion with a handheld remote that sends a virtual ball hurtling towards virtual pins. And last night, I went to a restaurant called Pastagina where my pasta dinner was cooked by a machine.

That's right. A machine. One that was designed and built specifically for a single purpose: To transform dry pasta into perfectly al dente in the time it takes for a Cup Noodle to steep.

When I ordered, a chef (I use the term loosely) took a pre-measured fistful of uncooked spaghetti and dropped it down a funnel. The funnel was on top of a metal box that could be easily mistaken for a soft-serve ice cream dispenser. As if acknowledging its payload, a circular light on the machine turned on, not unlike HAL 9000 before it turned murderous.

Amid the sad news that owners of L.A.'s hot dog carts were being hauled off to jail for wrapping bacon around their wieners (that sounded wrong. . .), eating food from a street vendor has never been more exciting. Perhaps it's because the anti-establishment rebelliousness, the perceived covertness, and the fleeting nature of it all has always been a tastier condiment than bacon itself. Leave it to prohibition to make something even more appealing.

Above all, it's the absence of formalities and pretense, where ambiance, waiters and silverware go out the door. In fact, there is no door. There is just food -- you won't get closer to what you consume and to the person preparing it than when you order from a street vendor.

Throw a stick anywhere in Westminster and it'll hit a pho joint. Not so in Irvine, where Vietnamese restaurants are as rare as the slices of steak in the soup they serve. At my last count, there are exactly five eateries that serve this foul-weather food.

The stalwarts are the two Pho Bac Ky's and the Pho 99 on Jeffrey. But the rest changes hands more often than a basketball. The latest to get passed is Saigon Grille, which enters the open court as Pho Ha Noi, managed by the same people who brought you Pho Hung Vuong in Tustin.

If you are reading this after February 18th, 2008, you might as well stop: Asameshi Maeda Honten will have already packed up and left for San Diego, its next tour destination. Sort of like a band that belts out noodle soups instead of tunes, you can find this Japanese ramen shop here, at the Costa Mesa Mitsuwa until Monday the 18th, as part of the supermarket's "Legendary Ramen Fair."

Well, that last part is a misnomer. It's not a "fair" as much as it is a rotation of three popular ramen chains out of Japan exhibiting their wares. And as far as the Costa Mesa's Mitsuwa is concerned, only Asameshi Maeda Honten is involved, and only until Monday.

According to Rameniac, the food blogger who broke the news, the other two in the trifecta aren't stopping here at all, just at the Torrance or San Diego Mitsuwa.

The official tour schedule reads as follows: