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My Turn by Wayne Chan

From The Asian Reporter, V36, #1 (January 5, 2026), page 6.

I am what people might call an equal opportunity foodie.

Expensive or fast food — it doesn’t matter. I’m all in. That’s not to say that there aren’t some problems that accompany this type of food mentality. But I’ll address my expanding waistline in a future column.

My beautiful wife Maya and I recently celebrated our 34th anniversary. Unfortunately for me, I did not realize this important milestone was coming until about a week before. The period upon realizing it and the day itself can officially be called the scrambling-to-come-up-with-a-plan phase.

Fortunately for me, whether it was just my lucky day or the stars perfectly aligning, it didn’t take too long to find a perfect way to celebrate.

I managed to score a reservation at Lilo, the only restaurant in San Diego to earn a Michelin star this year. And to top it off, Lilo is inspired by French cooking with elements of Japanese flavors. What’s not to like?

In all honesty, I was a little hesitant to reveal the name of the restaurant, not because we didn’t have an amazing experience (we absolutely did), but because of the challenges I experienced during our visit, which were completely self-inflicted.

To be perfectly clear, Lilo was amazing and they can’t possibly address how clueless I can be at times.

I’ve been lucky enough to eat at a few Michelin-starred restaurants in my life, and they’ve all been amazing. There’s another thing they have in common. They tend to be pricy. And because they are expensive, I want to get as much value out of my meal as humanly possible. How this objective manifests itself is that no matter what is served, I will eat it.

For example, Maya, and pretty much anyone who has ever met me, knows that I absolutely can’t stand bean sprouts. They are vile weeds. Ever since I was a kid, if I was served a plate of noodles with bean sprouts on top, I would pick them out one by one, using a magnifying glass if I had to. Maya jokes that if she ever needed to "do me in," she would simply sneak some bean sprouts into a cupcake or something. What I’m trying to say is that in my world, bean sprouts would simply not exist if I had my way.

And yet, this becomes a conflict when I’m at a Michelin-starred restaurant. It’s the one exception where I could be served emulsion of bean sprouts topped with bean sprout as jus layered with shaved bean sprout a la mode and I would reluctantly scoop it into my mouth.

Happily, Lilo didn’t force me to make that choice — there were no bean sprouts listed on the night’s tasting menu. Since I always try to savor every bite and experience every nuance of flavor and texture in my meal, my challenge this time fell within the fact that there were a number of items served that I had no idea what they were.

Each course was small, delicate, and presented with a variety of ingredients — which the servers dutifully explained — but in my inexperience, I had no idea what they were. Each course included a main ingredient — scallops, sea urchin, crab — which I definitely knew, but they were served with things I’d never heard of before. What is lemon verbena? What is white alyssum? What is kohlrabi?

But that wasn’t the real obstacle. Each course was an adventure in flavor and I savored every bit of it.

The real difficulty was discerning which items in each course were meant to be eaten and what was just part of the presentation. One course had two shells filled with seafood and other exotic ingredients, but was centered on a plate with various plants and what looked like a river rock. Were we supposed to eat the plants? And I normally wouldn’t think of eating a rock, but maybe they made foam that was supposed to look like a rock? (It was just a rock.)

Another dish was rock crab with marigolds and an infusion of cucumber and lime, but was served on an intricate plate made entirely of ice. It was an ice plate. And it was about the size of a small frisbee. Were we supposed to eat the plate or wait a while and drink it? Next to the ice plate was a small plate with two black items that looked like cylindrical rolls of chocolate on a bed of more river rocks. By now, I already knew I wasn’t supposed to eat the rocks ("fool me once"), but what about the rolls?

Was I supposed to use the rolls to soak up the crab and the sauce from the slowly melting ice plate?

It took me a minute to figure out that those rolls were actually steamed towels meant to clean our hands after eating the crab.

Let me just say I didn’t eat the towel. But if I had, as with everything else at Lilo, I’m sure it would have been scrumptious.

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