U-miya, Yaesu (う~みや)

Notable today is...the heat. I definitely feel like I'm melting after walking back from lunch. Still, I like the fact that lunch can include 20 or 30 minutes of walking. It's good to burn off some lunch, and excellent practice should one be approaching a period in one's life where one will need to walk a lot around an exotic destination in high heat. Barcelona, say.

Also notable is that I don't think EOITwJ has ever featured Okinawan food. That's all about to change, though not in an exciting way. Just in a weird way, which is what Okinawan food always is to me.

What's famous there? There's the healthy diet, which makes people live longer than anywhere in the world. And that healthy diet consists of a lot of pork, some scrambled eggs, a bit of veg, and a lot of the local distilled spirit, awamori. Famous dishes? chanpuru, which is bitter gourd slices (they're seriously bitter. Don't try this at home or you'll think you've done something wrong.), and scrambled egg, and spam, and tofu and some other vegetables. Pan-fried.

So I don't know if it's famous there, but out of sheer contrariness I ordered the 'taco rice' at U-miya (the menu, like the name, features lots of elongated syllables - the name is like ooooo-me-a, and they describe dishes as oooooomai and such. Again, I don't know if this is dialect or what.). Taco in this case is not octopus, like it was on Sunday night when I bought some fresh octopus and stewed it up in Jon's Own Tomato Sauce (I recommend pounding it first so it comes out with that soft, chicken-y texture that I love). Taco in this case means you're going to take some white rice and top it with stuff that you'd put in a taco. Ground meat, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese. A little salsa. Don't ask me, but it's fairly common in Japan. It reminds me of the 80's, when Mexican and Italian foods were 'ethnic' instead of just plain old food. Come to think of it, the Shop Rite in Glassboro still has a kinda Italian Specialties aisle, but I support this strongly because it has roasted peppers and big jars of artichokes and stuff, not Prince Spaghetti masquerading as authentic Italian goodness.

I digress. There wasn't much to report on the taco rice here; it was fine and came with a bowl of soup (delicious soup, with weird thick handmade noodles) and a piece of sponge cake. It was good enough that I wasn't too tempted to detour through Daimaru and buy some macarons on the way back.

I told a lie. I went to Urizun in Shin Maru a couple months ago, and I really liked it. That's the only other Okinawan place though, I promise.

A thousand pardons.
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