Summer is good for a couple of things. Hunting down the best nigiri bento box in the area is one. Going on Netflix or Amazon Video and rewatching police procedurals is another. Alas, the best nigiri bento of years past will not take first place again. Waka House does still offer a nigiri bento, but it isn’t as well populated as it once was.
The white rice used to be house fried rice with chicken, pork, shrimp and egg. The potato croquette in the upper right compartment used to be two mini-yakitori skewers, usually chicken and shrimp. A sad day compared to what once was, but what has not changed is the wonderful atmosphere and the pot of loose leaf green jasmine tea.
We all want what we once had to be as good as we remembered it to be. We also want to be able to experience it again now. To me the only way to do that is to hunt for music on You Tube, reread classics, and binge old shows when they arrive on Netflix or Prime or some other video service. Two summers ago I went through all the old NCIS episodes. Last summer was NYPD Blue. Earlier this year I found old episodes of JAG (Harm and Mac showed up on the season finale of NCIS: Los Angeles this season) and now I’m digging deep into In Plain Sight, The Closer, and Rizzoli and Isles. One thing you gain from going back to the days of television before cell phones is more of a sense of how long we have been struggling with the same issues of inclusion. Television series have always poked and prodded at our shortcomings. Police procedurals have the advantage of being able to steer the narrative toward any class or subset of the populace. The push to accept non-straight, non-white, non-male people as human has been going on for quite some time. Old television shows illuminate both progress and the lack of progress in any number of areas. I’m pretty dug in with my watch list this summer, but I think next summer I’m going to try to hunt down All In the Family and Ally McBeal. I think that would be a really interesting pairing.
So now it is time to say goodbye to Waka House, perhaps for good. Sherwood Forest is a long trek to a non-scenic area (although Waka remains beautiful inside) and the astounding nigiri bento they used to serve was what always captivated me about the place. There are other places closer to me that I’m more likely to visit, but if Waka is in your area, you should slip in sometime. Enjoy a pot of jasmine tea, the nice wall art and unique furnishings, and top notch sushi.
