Olive and Sesame II has healthy and delicious Asian food

Sometimes love comes when you lease expect it: I have to admit, I fell in love this weekend. Not with my friend who came to visit, but with a restaurant. Yes that is correct: as usual, I'm in a committed relationship with cuisine. And as in the best relationships in life occur, this wonderful restaurant and I found each other by chance.

Since I was handed the duty of entertaining my friend this Saturday, we California natives headed north -- to Towson -- in search of fine dining. We walked around for ten minutes, thoroughly discouraged by the long waits at many of Towson's eateries. So we decided to pop into a cute looking restaurant, Olive and Sesame II on Pennsylvania Ave in Towson.

Olive and Sesame touts itself as a "healthy Chinese restaurant," using only -- you guessed it -- olive and sesame oils to cook, as well as a healthy amount of steam cooking. They also have a complete Japanese menu, not to mention the separate three-page sushi menu, made in house at the stylish bar.

Before I even got a chance to look at the menu however, I ran to the bathroom. And I was impressed. I have this obsession with nice bathrooms in a restaurant. Who cares if you serve me deep fried cockroach in a cardboard box? If you have a nice bathroom, you're already on my good list.

After I returned from the Home Depot Design Catalogue that was the bathroom (feeling very confident about O & S), I had to set myself to the task of deciding on an entr??e from the ample menu. After flipping through soups and salads, pastas and noodles, Japanese grill dishes, chicken, beef, seafood and house specialties, all of a sudden, my heart stopped. O & S had just become my new favorite restaurant this side of the continent. They had the "Revolution Diet."

What, you may ask, is the "Revolution Diet," and why did I nearly have a religious experience when I saw it? O & S offers classic Chinese dishes steamed without salt, sugar, cornstarch or MSG, converting them from sinful to slimming. In fact, the menu even has calorie counts for each of the dishes!

I couldn't believe it when I saw orange chicken and veggies, Pacific prawns in ginger sauce and ocean scallops, bean sprouts and veggies in garlic sauce, all for less than 300 calories! I almost cried?... well, the extreme dieter in me anyway. I had found a dieter's paradise.

Unfortunately, I am a sinner by nature, and could not keep my eyes off the seafood flatbread, an interesting pizza-like combination of seafood, pesto sauce and cheese. Pizza in an Asian restaurant -- my diet could wait, I had to try this. We began our meal with some sushi -- he went for the traditional California roll and I decided to bridge the continent with O & S's own Baltimore roll, filled with crab and Old Bay seasoning. The portions, not unlike those of our flatbread and Moo Shu chicken, were plentiful -- even though I was filling up fast, I forced down every bite of my amazing flatbread.

I cannot say enough about how much I love Olive & Sesame II. The service was quick and friendly, the d??cor crisp with modern elegance, the menu so extensive it would take years to get through and utterly delicious food. The prices were not even anything to complain about. Most Chinese-inspired entrees range from $7 to $17. The Japanese meals, about $12 to $18. Sushi was about $5 to $8 a role. O & S also has daily lunch specials, ranging from $7 to $14, including soup or salad and rice.

I could go on forever about this wonderful food find, but I will end my litany of praise with this: Olive and Sesame has free parking at the Towson Commons for those blessed with vehicles (it is a five minute walk from the Colltown shuttle for us poor children), and secondly, they deliver... for free.