Canto CDVIII: The Best Instant Miso Soup at Mitsuwa

Gentle cabrones:

Apologies for the one-day delay, but it was a slammed week in a slammed summer that’s about to end with even more WERK to do, good and bad. I cut my hand, I’ve got got a coat of drywall all over me, and my trick toe is aching again, which means I either have arthritis or it’s going to rain.

But, hey: at least I don’t have food poisoning.

I’ve eaten in easily over 1,000 restaurants in my time — low-end and high-end and tasting menus and tamales from trunks and some cherries that my Uber driver gave me on Friday and a bag of homemade naan that someone once gifted me at a book signing in Tempe. And out of all those times, I’ve only gotten food poisoning four times in my life.

I remember each instance distinctly, not just for the gastric mess that ensued, but because they were high-end places. I’m not gonna name them, mainly because three of them don’t even exist anymore. But I always bring up this point to people who malign street food as unsanitary – dirty is dirty, no matter what the bill is, and anyone who thinks fanciers spots are better by virtue of class no sabo nada.

The last time I got food poisoning, a couple of years ago, was the worst one. People make fun of me because I always order my hamburgers well-done, and you know why I do it? Because of the last time I let a chef insist he could do a burger medium rare — PASS.

It was so bad that I dragged myself to the emergency room at three in the morning, where they hooked me up to insulin to get my levels back to normal and let me go home with a few hours with no antibiotics but instructions: eat nothing but soup for a few days, then rice, then slowly transition to more solids. So I decided to do an experiment I had long wanted to do.

I really should eat better than I do, but what saves me is that I was never really into fast food, my food critic years had me always eating a mix of foods, and my honey‘s restaurant is almost exclusively healthy food. I knew probiotics are good for your digestive tract, and I enjoyed food rich in them forever, from yogurt to sauerkraut to pickled onions and carrots (not kombucha – I don’t like the fizz or the funk).

One foodstuff I didn’t realize for forever that had probiotics? Miso.

So once I left the hospital from my last case of food poisoning, I said I was gonna find the best instant miso soup at Mitsuwa.

It’s a Japanese grocery chain with an outpost in Costa Mexico. When the Infernal Rag was in the city, Mitsuwa’s food court was part of my lunch rotation, specifically the stall that sold soba noodles, which are severely underrated. When my honey wanted to buy burdock root, I would go there. One of the things that always struck me from my visits once I inevitably checked out the grocery aisles were all the types of instant miso soup.

To me, miso soup was akin to chips and salsa – something that Japanese restaurants would give to you before the actual meal as a way to fill your stomach and keep you at ease while they hurried to make your actual meal. How much variety could there possibly be?

I’m a Mexican, so I obviously grew up on instant ramen, specifically Maruchan soup, which my family called sopa maruchana, then sopa marucha because Mexicans always shorten words. But I had never purchased instant miso soup and was curious about how it tasted. With my stomach completely empty from my food poisoning, I figured miso of any kind would slowly bring back my gut’s health. But which one was the best?

The day after I left the hospital, I went to Mitsuwa and bought a pack of every instant miso soup they had — at least 20 types. I tasted good ones and bad ones and vegetarian ones and ones with dehydrated clams. Chef Masaharu Morimoto made a really good instant miso soup product that cost more than the others — and it wasn’t the best one. I tasted Marukome, the one whose logo is the boy Buddhist monk lifting his finger and long delighted my drives down the 55 — good, but not the best.

I whittled my way through all the packs over a week and a half — I was eating miso soup breakfast, lunch and dinner. I returned to Mitsuwa when I chose the top four, then narrowed it to the top two, although it wasn’t as full-fledged a contest as my #tortillatournament, which I REALLY need to get to this year — but we’re talking instant miso soup right now.

Finally, I decided on the best one and vowed to eat it forever, so good and healthy it was.

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Miko Brand’s parent company has been around since 1662 and has made its miso soup since 1916. Instant anything has a lot of sodium aka salt in it. I have never particularly cared for salt, so I’m sensitive to it. Miko Brand is not too salty. Miso can be very funky, and I enjoy the funk of miso, but this one has a light flavor that makes it palatable to nearly everyone.

I liked the one with green onions more than the tofu one — and wakame seaweed is the best of all with its extra umami oomph — but each of them were delicious in a way the others weren’t: brighter flavors, more filling, and priced better than most. Its packets are good for 8 ounces of soup — one is the dehydrated ingredients, the other is the miso paste — so I usually do two at a time for a sizeable, filling bowl.

Pro tip: throw in veggies and rice and you have a full soup!

I vowed to eat Miko Brand soup forever, because when I pick a brand, I stay with it forever unless I age out of it (Canto LVII). My bad food poisoning would’ve happened in 2021 – I remember both the doctor and I wearing masks so we were still in the pandemic years. But after about a year, I began to not buy Miko Brand until I stopped altogether.

It’s rare the food that I will drive out of my way for, and as much as I ended up liking miso soup, it wasn’t enough for me to drive the 20 minutes to Mitsuwa — really a hop, skip and jump away, but something my mind makes out to be as far away as Moreno Valley. But a few months ago, my honey needed to eat light foods after a visit to the dentist so I returned to Mitsuwa to try and remember which brand I had chosen as the best.

I had a photo of the label somewhere in my phone, but of course lost it because mankind is careless when there’s limitless possibility. But I vaguely remembered the label so I bought one pack just to make sure. I was right, because I truly have a puppy’s memory (Canto XXI) and Miko Brand’s comforting flavors were apparent after just one spoonful of soup.

But when I went to Mitsuwa, there were no longer as many instant miso brands as before. I don’t know what happened. Maybe those brands went out of business. They weren’t sold out of the missing instant miso soup because other items had crept in. Maybe they were elsewhere? Maybe.

Brands are an interesting thing. Corporations put millions of dollars — if not hundreds of millions — to win over consumers. Humans affix so much emotional baggage to them that we think they truly care about us.

These companies ultimately don’t care about you. They care about your money. But damnit if you don’t realize that some brands are better than others, and you want to support them. And damnit if a brand or business that you favored shuts down.

You feel like you were part of the failure. You have to move on to something else, wanting to keep supporting the good even if the bad seems to win more than it should.

But good can win. Good must win. So we support however we can until we can’t help no more. It all helps. It must help.

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Bad photo of a DELICIOUS Zacatecano combo plate. Clockwise from top: French roll, birria de res con su salsa, refried beans done in some red chile de árbol way that’s a TOTAL Zacatecas thing, rice, fettucine Alfredo — FUUUUUCK

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Do not walk on the earth in haughty style. You can neither tear the earth apart, nor can you match the mountains in height.” — Surah Al-Isra, ayah 37

LISTENING: “Niamos! (Chandrilian Club Mix),” Nicholas Britell. I long looked down on house music (sorry, Dennis!) because I found the whole scene hedonistic. But good music is good music, and this is a great swirl. And you need to hear this track as part of the closing scene in the first mini-saga of the second season of Andor. Mix an assassination with a righteous slaughter, a sad murder with a long-lost love seen again for a fleeting second, a louche of a husband and the ultimate hero of the Star Wars saga taking Smokey Robinson’s advice and dancing to keep herself from crying — and do all of this in about four minutes — and you have the soundtrack for our times in many, MANY ways. Hence included in Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly Radiola of Randomness YouTube songlist, where I’ve included every song I’ve ever featured in a canto — give it a spin!

READING: “It Was A Good Dinner.” Dorothy Day writing about summer eating in sweltering NYC at the end of the Great Depression for Commonweal is all the summer reading you need.

BUY MY NEW CO-BOOK! People’s Guide to Orange County tells an alternative history of OC through the scholarship and reporting of myself, Elaine Lewinnek, and Thuy Vo Dang. There’ll be signings all year — in meanwhile, buy your copy TODAY. And, yes: I’ll autograph it!

Gustavo Events  

August 20, 5:30 p.m.: You can pitch me ANYTHING as part of the PRSA - Los Angeles’ annual Speed Pitch Mixer. At the ASU California Center, 1111 S. Broadway, Ste. 100, Los Angeles. It’s $50 for members, $65 for non-members, and you can buy tickets here.

Sept. 4, 7 p.m.: I’ll be speaking to the Democrats of North Orange County at Sizzler’s, 1401 N. Harbor Blvd., Fullerton. It’s probably members only, but show up and give them a donation and I’m sure they’ll let you in! 

Gustavo in the News

“LA Times columnist calls for city to bail on 2028 Olympics because of Trump”: Alt-losers just can’t get enough of this one!

“Trump official argues LA Times columnist views everything from the 'poisonous' prism of politics”: Years ago — we’re talking nearly 20 — I actually appeared on Fox News a bit. Hannity & Colmes, Neil Cavuto, and some show called Heartland. They don’t even bother with libs anymore, so tell Monica Crowley she can always reach out to me and directly accuse me of doing what her boss does.

“It Appears the Los Angeles Times…”: God bless the strivers!

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“Should LA not host the 2028 Summer Olympics?”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary is about a columna I did last week.

"Kamala Harris Is Out. How About Pedro Pascal?”: POLITICO asked me to pick my dream candidate for the next California governor so I gave a few sentences.

“The Origins of ‘Hola, Steve.’”: I fill in for KCRW chingona Connie Alvarez on her KCRW Insider newsletter to reveal the origins of my second-most famous saying after “In-N-Out is overrated.” KEY QUOTE: “That means that not only are folks listening to KCRW, but they also care about what goes on with us. It brings them joy at a time when joy is more needed than ever.”

“From Wild West days to 2025, he safeguards L.A County Sheriff’s Department history”: My latest L.A. Times columna checks in with department historian Mike Fratantoni. KEY QUOTE: “Fratantoni is burly but soft-spoken, a trace of a New York accent lingering in his by-the-books cadence.”

“When the going gets tough for L.A., our city rallies like no other”: My next latest L.A. Times columna is a rallying cry for those who care for Lost Angeles. KEY QUOTE: “See how I use “we”? Because while I plan to forever live in Orange County, I want to be a part of this future L.A. — an area, a people that teaches the rest of the United States how we’ll triumph as calamities of all types seem to crash down on this country with increasing regularity.”

“El Aliso, the mother tree that stood over L.A. for centuries”: My latest L.A. Times video finds me looking for a plaque that used to be across the street from a strip club next to the 101 freeway.

“‘Superman’ used to chase Nazis. Now it’s the tamale lady”: My still next latest L.A. Times columna bashes Dean Cain. KEY QUOTE: “It’s his calling card, so when the Trump administration put out the call to recruit more ICE agents, guess who answered the call? Big hint: Up, up and a güey!” [Gustavo note: That last line came from Times managing editor Hector Becerra, who could’ve slayed in the Catskills]

“Can homegrown teens replace immigrant farm labor? In 1965, the U.S. tried”: My even still next latest L.A. Times columna returns to an NPR story I did in 2018 that keeps popping up. KEY QUOTE: “A-TEAM was such a disaster that the federal government never tried it again, and the program was considered so ludicrous that it rarely made it into history books. Then came MAGA..”

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!