Rollie's Bakery was one of OC's few Bolivian restaurants, specializing in salteñas, which are “ostensibly empanadas, but few in Latin America are so sturdy that they can contain broth inside their shells,” as Gustavo wrote in his Hole-in-the-Wall column back in 2009.
The restaurant opened in 2008 and has graced these pages many times for those salteñas, winning “Best Empanada in 2010”.
Now it has been replaced by a new yakitori restaurant called Kaminariya that competes against Honda-Ya, which is still packing them in a few blocks away. The yakitori is made from from Jidori chicken, but so are the karaage (sesame chicken), simmered giblets stew, and fried cartilage.
You can see what else is made with the chicken on their Facebook.
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The rest of the menu is filled out with okonomiyaki, ramen, and rolls–pretty much what you'd expect out of any Japanese restaurant calling itself an izakaya these days, which is liable to be anything and everything. There's even a “sushi pizza.”
Kaminariya is still in its soft opening mode. The address is obviously where Rollie's used to be.
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Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.