Nosmo King: Trippin': McAllen

7100 N. 10th Street
McAllen, TX 78504

A couple of years back, a friend moved to McAllen to help his friend open up a high end sushi restaurant. His friend would be the money guy, and he would have full reign to design the restaurant any way that he wanted. I think most of us were initially skeptical of how successful this business venture would be. He explained to us that there are a lot of people in the health care industry moving to McAllen to work. I can attest to that! We were just there visiting our health care worker friends. And so these health field folks make all this money and got nothing to spend it on and nowhere to spend it at. Enter fancy sushi restaurant where fancy people can eat and then drink it up all night long at the fancy and hip bar. A bunch of us took a road trip almost two years ago to attend the grand opening. They invited all the well to do folks of McAllen, mostly doctors, and every one's meal would be comped that evening. Score! So of course we were there! Hah! The place has been doing pretty well ever since and the food is pretty decent. Because we were already in McAllen visiting our friends, there was no way our trip would have been complete without having dinner at Osuka. Big poppa called up our friend to let him know that we would be coming. Unfortunately, said friend was out of town that weekend but no worries, he called the owner, Oscar, to let him know that we would be stopping by and to COMP our meal! SWEET! So we all got to enjoy a wonderful meal at Osuka for FREE.

No on to the food! I'll have to remember from July on what was good and what wasn't. First up: Sunomo Salad - Japanese cucumber salad with ebi, kani, and tako served soaked in a vinaigrette.

Traditional miso soup, which supposedly had a hint of pho flavor.

Tuna Tar Tar - fresh tuna lightly battered with nigori over spring mix. This was really good. Nicely marinated and flavored.

Lobster Creme Puffs - lobster, crab and cream cheese wrapped wonton. Also yums. How can you go wrong with cream cheese fried puff pastry. I take that back. I've had some horrible crab puffs before.

Brown Butter Scallops - seared scallops tossed in a red pepper garlic sauce with white rice. A second one of this dish was ordered cos it was so good.

Wasabi Crab Cakes - spicy house crab cakes served with lemon sauce. I ordered this cos I like crab cakes. I can't remember for sure but I'm almost certain that this was another item we had to order a second of cos everyone really liked it.

Osuka Hot Rock - your choice of seared beef sashimi style served with a special hot rock. Ah yes. The most raved about dish of the night. Not from me but from big poppa and Transam. Kobe beef (prolly US raised) cooked on a hot rock at the table.

The gorgeous marbled kobe with the huge mound of butter.

The hot rock. You can't tell, but it's really hot! Hah!

Butter sizzling and smoking on hot rock. It was smelling pretty good right about now.

Kobe cooking on hot rock. You don't want to cook it all the way, instead, just give it a slight sear on both sides. Big poppa loves raw beef.

This was some sashimi dish that is not on the menu and they wanted some of us to try it out. According to those who tried it, it was delish but they had an excess of garnish and marinade and whatever else that just seemed kinda wasteful.