Pacific Square Shopping Center — Attraction in Gardena

Pacific Square is a great little gem in the heart of Gardena! It is primarily Japanese dominated, with a Japanese super market (Tokyo Central) as the main attraction. Here are some of the stores:

Tokyo Central Market - Japanese super market / souvenir store with everything from snacks, packaged desserts, spices and condiments, rice and noodle supplies, alcohol and drinks, Hawaii snacks, and Japanese bentos and musubis. There are a few to-go restaurants inside like Shin Sen Gumi, Beard Papas (cream puffs), Mammoth Bakery, and a crepe shop. There unfortunately is very little produce here and prices are a tad more expensive than Marukai down the street.

Tea Station - great place to sit down, study (free wifi, although very few electrical outlets), grab a nice boba or milk tea drink, and some great food!

Pizza Machine - great little pizza shop with fantastic (and cheap) lunch specials.

Sea Empress Chinese Food - great place to get Dim Sum for lunch. Gets pretty crowded on the weekends.

Toraji Ramen - great ramen shop. Get the tonkotsu shoyu ramen.

Fukugawa Japanese restaurant - one of the best places to get chicken or ton-katsu, in my opinion.

There's a lot more, but that's...

Went to Empress Seafood Restaurant for a private luncheon. The food was okay. They had a set menu. The restaurant itself is old, dated and doesn't feel very clean. They had part of the restaurant converted to storage area and it was stacked with empty boxes haphazardly which was visible from outside the restaurant as you were approaching it and it was visible once you were inside. It was rather unsightly to see in a restaurant and not a good impression. The food was okay but the chicken dish was very salty. Overall this restaurant needs an overhaul, deep cleaned and updated. It has definitely seen better days. Since we didn't have din sum, I can't really comment on that. See photos for the dishes we ate. I did not get photos of all the dishes. The chashu was good and so was the shumai which we finished. (Sorry no photos of...

The Japanese grocery store here although not as great with regards to sales prices as it used to be when it was part of the modded Kai department store chain is crammed with a lot of interesting groceries and staff that strives to be very helpful. I find that they have some very well priced lunches to go. In particular some of the rice bowls are well priced for how they are made in the ingredients. My favorite is the Bibim Bop Rice Bowl which has kimchi, fried egg and some type of Korean BBQ style meat with some veggies...