Monday nights just got a bit better thanks to the late night happy hour at Habana in Costa Mesa. I know, late night happy hour on a Monday?!?

For those of you who can hang with such hours on a school/work night, the 10 p.m. happy hour yields $4 sangrias, $3 Modelo beers and $3 carne asada/carnitas/fish tacos that are grilled outside on the patio. I’m told the grub selection will vary week to week. Last Monday for example, we were treated to BBQ jerk chicken slathered in a tangy sauce.

You can choose from white and red sangria, but by all means, fork over a few extra bucks for any of Habana’s mojitos ($8 to $10), particularly the blackberry. The fizzy mint and rum concoction is laced with sweet blackberry liqueur and it’s become my go-to summer cocktail. Don’t be surprised if you find Jen and I there tonight, guzzling, I mean, sipping on a few …

P.S. Not sure the cozy hub of hipsters that flock to Habana will appreciate that I’m spreading the word but I’m secretly plotting to get more non-hipsters there. Diversity is good, no?

Habana at The Lab

2930 Bristol St.

Costa Mesa, CA

714.556.0176

This week in Gluttonista:

• Cafe Beau Soleil at Fashion Island has spendy salads and sandwiches galore if you don’t mind the spotty service
• Jit Fong scopes out Charmed Cupcakes in Long Beach and discovers tempting treats and even $6 cupcakes
• A chicken-pox free Jen encounters a brick-sized monster of a breakfast burrito at George’s Hamburgers in Fullerton
• Kat gorges on Asian-style shaved-ice desserts for four days straight
• Kat gets denied at Sushi Momo’s shiny new location in downtown Fullerton

This week in other OC food blogs:

• Dan over at Eat in OC hits up The Crab Cooker in Tustin to help the Mrs. satisfy her shrimp cravings but they fall for the potatoes instead
• Griffin Eats OC discovers a quirky Thai restaurant in Lake Forest that dishes up so-so Thai but a mean Fish N’ Chips
• Monster Munching’s Edwin Goei finds homestyle Vietnamese grub like charbroiled pork — cheap and quick at Huong Huong Food-to-Go in Westminster
• Ryan over at Only Eat What Feeds Your Soul experiences sodium overload at Charlie Palmer at Bloomingdale’s
• OC Mexican Restaurants‘ Christian Z cools down with some guava sherbet at Frio Divino in Santa Ana
• Rawfishionado professes her love for ikura bowls even while slurping ramen at Santouka in Costa Mesa
• Edjusted over at the Ramen Blog dares to try ramen at a non-ramenya: Honda-Ya in Tustin

This must be my lucky week.

I am still unpacking boxes in my new apartment on the Balboa Peninsula. And the other day my roommate came home gushing about a new fresh fish market — Bear Flag Fish Co. — just a couple minutes away. Um, yay!

So I stopped by yesterday to pick up something to grill for dinner and found out I didn’t have to wait till later. There’s no menu here yet (they literally just opened their doors on Monday), but every day this week owner Thomas Carson has been offering a different fish dish. On Wednesday, I had a choice between a rice bowl or a salad topped with my selection from the seafood window. I chose the rice bowl topped with slices of this salmon (for $8.95) …

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Fullerton’s much beloved sushi joint — Sushi Momo — is back, this time with a new, much glossier and modern location in downtown Fullerton. Faithful fans of sushi chef Minoru Suzuki have long been packing his old restaurant near St. Jude Hospital, even when the development of a new commercial center in the area forced patrons to wade through heavy construction zones for months.

Word is the grand opening party was held this week and the first night drew a crowd of more than 300. We tried to go there last night around 7 p.m. for dinner and found a harried staff still figuring out how to use the new computer systems. We were told that they would only be honoring reservations and promptly turned us away. Bummer! Did get to take a quick peek and it’s a pretty large dining space with an expansive sushi bar that appeared to seat 20. I’m glad to see the fresh space with everything new and gleaming. As much as I enjoyed the old location, I do remember that they had really worn plates and utensils and I doubt the family-run sushi joint had much if any renovation since it opened in the early 80s. Nice to see that Suzuki-san brought all of his giant and colorfully mounted fish art over, too.

I can’t wait to have the Tiger Shrimp Roll, basically a giant handroll with fried tiger prawn, vinegared rice and lettuce instead of soy or seaweed wrap. It was one of my favorite offerings there. (These pics above are from a previous visit to the old location.)

So word to the wise, wait a week or two before you attempt to eat there. Alas, I wish I could give you a phone number to call to make reservations, but I didn’t see any business cards and 411 doesn’t even have the new number listed yet.

Sushi Momo

208 N. Harbor Boulevard

Fullerton, CA

If I wasn’t sure that ice melted, I would say that if you could look inside my belly right now, it would be nearly bursting with shaved ice. I’ve eaten it for three, four days straight? Anybody who is reading this that knows me at all would not be fazed by this quirky behavior of mine. I would like to blame it on my tough job, but no. I get into food kicks and this time, it was for both work and pure tummy joy. As I mentioned, I’ve become somewhat addicted to the shaved-ice treat at the newish milk + honey in Costa Mesa.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about (read: my non-Asian peeps), Asian-style shaved ice has many names. For Koreans, it’s patbingsu, for Japanese it’s kakigori, for Taiwanese it’s baobing, yadda yadda. They’re very similar to each other, really. I’d like to think of them as Asian-style banana splits on steroids. It’s typically ice cream or frozen yogurt under a mound of flavored shaved ice and then topped with everything from diced tropical fruit to sweet red beans, condensed milk and toasted rice powder. It’s not for everybody, but the great thing about this kind of dessert is that you can really make it your own by selecting what toppings you want. Stick to the fresh fruit and frozen yogurt/ice cream with condensed milk variety. That one up there with all the Oreos and condensed milk from Guppy House in Anaheim was a great idea but not so much when you’re having to dig out whole Oreos and eat it with ice. Now, if they had crushed the cookies, I might be raving about it. Otherwise, bring an entourage if you want to make a go at Guppy House’s gargantuan, $25 shaved ice. It’s enough to feed 6 to 8. Or 10.

And if you’re looking at that lower picture on the left hand side, try to refrain from saying something a 3-year old might accuse it of looking like. Actually, the first time my mom made me a chocolate cake was when I was about four or five and I started crying when she presented it to me and tearfully asked her why she was making me eat poop. I digress. That goopy brown glob up there is actually azuki bean paste, made of sweetened red beans and it was delicious with my mango-flavored shaved ice at Sakura Saku in Huntington Beach.

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Related posts:

• milk + honey’s special icy treat

*photo of ginormous Guppy House shaved ice (lower right hand corner) taken by Cindy Yamanaka/The Register

“Holy be-Jesus, this is huge!”

That’s what my brother’s girlfriend Maureen shouted when she saw the hefty breakfast burrito my brother brought home for us earlier this month – the day after Kat and I returned from our eating adventures in Europe.

First, an explanation: I haven’t written about this burrito until now because in addition to the five pounds I picked up during our travels, I also got the chicken pox. And I haven’t really felt like doing anything for the past couple weeks except scratch.

Little brother Russ brought over this burrito when I still thought the little red bumps were bed bugs or spider bites, potentially exposing himself to sickness just to satisfy my craving. And I have to say, there’s no better way to re-orient yourself in Southern California (and distract from itchy skin), than by grinding on a warm, oversized treat like this one from George’s Hamburgers in Fullerton.

Russ stumbled upon this greasy spoon a couple weeks ago when he was getting his car smogged. The mechanic at an auto repair shop nearby told him the work would take 45 minutes, so he walked over to George’s for a $3.50 burrito.

Apparently, the breakfast burritos and chili cheese fries here are legendary among people who grew up in Fullerton. One Yelper wrote that she had a high school teacher who allowed students “extended bathroom breaks” so long as they brought back chili cheese fries.

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The cupcakes just keep coming! Around the same time Kat ran her definitive OC Cupcake Challenge, Charmed Cupcakes opened in the Fresh & Easy/Rite Aid strip mall on Spring Street in east Long Beach.

Charmed Cupcakes sells vanilla, chocolate and red velvet every day, and rotates other flavors throughout the week. I picked up four to try: chocolate banana, peanut butter cup, pineapple upside down and Dutch apple pie.

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Whenever I’m out shopping, all I really want is some sort of salad or sandwich to refuel after doing some damage to my pocketbook. At Cafe Beau Soleil, there’s no shortage of choices on the dizzying menu: 31 salads, 30-some sandwiches (including a few croque monsieurs), a dozen burgers and a dozen pasta dishes, too.

Now I know when I’m at Fashion Island, my meal prices are likely going to reflect the swanky zip code (South Coast, too) — we’re talking $15 salads, so lunch for two can run at least $50 with beverages and maybe dessert. I’m willing to swallow that but it better be worth it. I don’t know what’s going on with Cafe Beau Soleil — it’s adjacent to the super cool American Rag Cie boutique after all, but the service has been lazy and brusque at best as of late. We arrived about 45 minutes before closing one evening, and when we politely asked whether it was OK for us to still grab some salads, the waiter hesitated and mumbled, “I guess.”

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My friend Anh and I stopped dead in our tracks when we saw the restaurant sign: ORIENTAL FOOD. Um, are we in Kentucky?

We were actually in Tustin when we chanced upon this tiny eatery. Let’s backtrack a bit. Us gals had just slurped down some ramen at Kairakutei across the street and had exactly two bucks left after our meal, so we figured we should buy a lottery ticket at a nearby liquor store. That’s when we saw the restaurant next door. Apparently, Oriental Food has been around since 1988. Our guess was that 20 years ago, there weren’t very many Asian-owned shops so the owners opted for a name that made sense at the time. Eh, we had a good laugh over it. Despite the dubious name, I’m happy to report that the food is pretty legit …

Take that bowl of bun vit sao mang or rice vermicelli soup with duck and bamboo (above), a particularly enjoyable noodle soup because of its fragrant but earthy broth. At OF (please don’t make me write ‘Oriental’ 50 times), the soup comes with a separate plate of boiled duck meat atop a bed of shredded cabbage and herbs with fried shallots and crushed peanuts ($6). Just scoop some of that into your bowl and you’re good to go or eat separately and dip the duck into the little dish of nuoc mam dipping sauce. I did wish that the soup would have included fresh or canned bamboo shoots and not just the dehydrated stuff (it’s the tan sort of wrinkly sheets you see floating). The broth was a bit delicate, perhaps because the dried bamboo didn’t steep long enough in the broth?

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