[This Hole-In-the-Wall Life] Bowled Over Again at Mos 2

We all live in our Orange County islands, assuming that our city's charms are unique and unimaginable elsewhere. I'm wrong; you're wrong. All you need to do is get out of the cave for grub. For instance, I've been noshing at MOS 2 in Anaheim since high school, mostly because it's across the street from Anaheim High. It was my first brush with Asian cuisine after pizza and Cup Noodles, if by "Asian," you can grant latitude to teriyaki bowls drowned in Tapatío and teriyaki sauce, crowned with green onions, and washed down with horchata.

It was really more of a deconstructed burrito than anything vaguely Japanese, but my friends and I ate it up. Everyone did—white, Asian, Mexican. People packed the restaurant from morning till night, carrying off bags to take to work or eat off dirty tables under the shade of a metal canopy. Mos 2 fed me through Orange Coast College, through Chapman University, and was the first important step that weaned me off my mami's cooking and toward becoming a food critic.

I figured only in the city of Anaheim could you find such a mash of cultures united under food. Imagine my surprise then, years later, when the Weekly moved to Santa Ana, and I found not one, but dos Mos 2 eateries. I never bothered stopping in either of them, only because we had reviewed the Anaheim location years earlier and there were just too many other restaurants to share with ustedes. I did ask SanTana amigos about Mos 2, and they all laughed at my claims it was an Anaheim institution—it was a Santa Ana landmark, according to them. No way a loser city like Anaheim could imagine such a wondrous place!

I finally visited both Santa Ana locations last week, trying to confirm a Yelp.com rumor that Mos 2 was no longer bueno, that the owners were replacing the glutinous rice with dry grains. Don't believe the hype—Mos 2 remains how I remember it: beef, chicken or pork sliced down to nubs, then burnt like carne asada; sticky rice that soaks up meat juices. The bowls are still plentiful, and everything is more than affordable. And horchata is still the best drink for a Mos 2 order, its sweetness combining with the teriyaki sauce and meats to form something out of Top Chef in your mouth. Only Santa Ana and Anaheim are genius enough to house such a dive—that is, until I find something similar in another town.

Mos 2, 1008 W. Lincoln Ave., Anaheim, (714) 772-8543; also at 221 S. Grand Ave., Santa Ana, (714) 835-8288; and 1933 W. 17th St., Santa Ana, (714) 541-5997.