Ecco in Costa Mesa, CA + Foo Foo Tei in Hacienda Heights, CA

Another food post, but I promise I've been working on gal-related posts and will be released in the future! Although I will be pretty busy with school soon (tests from Thursday-Tuesday) :/


I went to Ecco in Costa Mesa, CA during Haunted Happy Hour Week. It's located in The Camp, which is another hipster plaza like The Lab. It's modeled like a summer camp and they even have gardens there where they grow produce for the restaurants there. Pretty clever, but parking is a bitch because it gets crowded!

Ecco's happy hour menu is located only at the bar from 4-7pm everyday with some deeply discounted food and drinks. My boyfriend and I went for $4 well drinks and pizza, and later on a group made us move over a few seats at the bar BUT they gave me a free specialty drink for the inconvenience! So I had 3 drinks and got drunk (Screwdriver, Moscow mule, Sophia with pear vodka and St. Germaine), so I ordered an order of calamari fries for myself to sober up. No such luck, I was drunk for the rest of the night and woke up with a hangover :(

Overall it was definitely worth the visit and I would like to come back. The pizza is only $8 at the bar ($14+ in the restaurant part) so the value is there and the service was pretty good.

2937 Bristol, Suite A103
Costa Mesa, CA 92626
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After recovering from my hangover the next day, we were supposed to go back to the Blackmarket Bakery to eat some Burnt Truck and Dogzilla. No such luck! We weren't ready in time and we decided to make a trip up to Foo Foo Tei, a favorite of Keizo from Go Ramen. It's a half hour trip, but it was definitely worth it. There were huge crowds waiting to get in, but luckily with only 2 people you can get a seat pretty quickly. However, a lot of the customers (mainly Chinese) were really rude and even blocked Tony away from sitting next to me! WTF? I hate to say it but if I didn't have photographical proof I would say otherwise :(

I'm sure you recognize me in the middle as a sad person by myself because people were blocking Tony's way to me :( But besides that, the service was normal and the food was excellent!

People are spot on when they talk about the gyoza, and especially now that it's been recently improved! These are housemade and that char on top of them is made by steaming the gyoza in ramen instead of water. A brilliant idea, because you often lose flavor when using water. Tony and I were so impressed we ordered another order of them to-go.

This one is the cruel joke known as the Nanchatte Tonkotsu Ramen. In Japanese nanchatte means just kidding, meaning that this wasn't really tonkotsu (pork bone) based! According to Keizo it is tofu based of all things! So it would actually be a vegetarian soup if you took out the chasu! So many exclamation points because the flavor is so good and it tastes like tonkotsu but isn't! Ahhhhh!!!!!!

Tony got the Negi Daku Ramen. I didn't try any because he's selfish (nanchatte, ilu <3) but I'm sure it was good because he ate it all to the last drop.

Prices are incredibly affordable, as our bill was just around $28 for 2 bowls of ramen, 2 orders of gyoza and 2 drinks.

15018 Clark Ave
Hacienda Heights, CA 91745