Cream Pan has been and always will be known for its strawberry croissants. Many have pondered how three simple ingredients–custard, croissant, and strawberry–can come together and become the stuff of legend. If you've not tried it, you should go now and wait in line. It's the reason people go there in droves, and it always will be.
While you're there, you should know they do other things well, and not all of them sweet. Some items are savory, such as the onigiri we wrote about a few years ago. Also great: the crustless finger sandwiches stuffed with cucumber, tuna, and egg salad that are begging to be served at a tea party.
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Now they've introduced something that's a merger of the two: the tuna musubi. There's again just three ingredients–tuna salad, rice, and nori (four if you count the mayo). But when these components come together, they turn into an object greater than the sum of its parts.
When you get it, you want to eat it as soon as possible. Never store it in the fridge for any length of time. The rice hardens when it's refrigerated. You don't want that. You want to have the musubi melt into your mouth, and that only happens at room temp.
There's also a SPAM version with an omelet rolled inside. It's good; but just like the banana strawberry croissant isn't as good as the plain strawberry croissant, the SPAM musubi places a distant second when compared to the tuna. So what are you waiting for? That line isn't going to get any shorter.
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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.