Eating Out In Tokyo with Jon

My work here is done, Tokyo (十分できたよ、門前仲町)

2011-08-15T03:08:00.001+09:00

Folks, that's it. As of right now, I'm on Delta 636 to LA, and I don't know when I'm coming back. Although I want to. A lot.

For people who have stumbled on the site and don't want to wade through 1,300+ posts, can I suggest that you start with the summary pages? They include izakayas, Japanese junk food (with a dozen ramen recommendations), and the other titles just under the header.

For everyone else, it's been fun. I'd like to thank my sponsor, Nomura Holdings, for the time and money that it took to work on this project. I'd also like to thank the friends I made through the blog, who are the best there is, and someone, for being patient with it.

I'll be checking the email listed here, and will blog whenever I'm back in Japan and go to new places. Which will be every time I'm back in Japan.

Bistro Bar Ku, Shibuya (ビストロバークー)

2011-08-11T23:11:00.000+09:00

You know how much I like my powers of observation, right? I always maintained I could spot good places from half a mile away in the dark. As a second place for this evening, I realized that we were just around the corner from a really cool-looking place that I'd been eyeing for years but never found myself in Shibuya of an evening in the right circumstances to visit.

Ku is on the street that I like to think of as "Ikebe Music's street", because they have 4 or 5 shops there. The general one is OK and big, but undifferentiated. There's a drum store, a dedicated amp store, and of course a sweet high-end guitar store. But in between, across from the crappy Chinese place and just down from where someone got her last pair of running shoes, is this place. How cool is this? The low entry, the big slabs of stone, the vegetation, the empty bottles?

Moody lights on the stairs inside, since we were ushered past the nice downstairs counter. They don't offer hookahs, but they might as well.

Because that ashy taste in your mouth might be better than the boring, crap food here. It's a darn good thing we were already well into the evening and just wanted to sit and talk.

And it's certainly a cool place to sit and talk, right? Coming up the stairs, you turn a corner and go past two horikotatsu booths before wobbling down the stairs (your mileage may vary, but I was wobbling) into the other seating area - just another two tables. Congenial, stylish, pleasant.

And not at all recommended.
03-3462-5790

As an aside, look at their gurunabi page. When one of their lead pictures to demo their warez is the mixed dessert plate with happy-birthday chocolate plaque, you know you shouldn't have high expectations. I can say that with the benefit of hindsight.

Fujiya Honten Dining Bar, Shibuya (富士屋本店ダイニングバー)

2011-08-11T19:34:00.000+09:00

On the road again...this time taking the train down to Shibuya to celebrate a last night as a resident of Tokyo before taking up residence at the New Otani. I still can't believe I stayed at the New Otani.

You'd also think this was the Tozai line, because almost every train trip I've taken in my life (by %) started on the Tozai line. But it's not, it's the Ginza line. You can tell because the stripe over the door is yellow.

And you should know where this is without asking. Pulling into Shibuya at twilight, seeing the buses, the crowds, getting ready to pick up underage girls at 109 and then drinking until dawn, that's what it's all about!

Unless you're me, and then what it's all about it meeting Poshand and looking for a place to eat. Someone came later since she was working.

Here it is. I've never been a fan of standing and drinking (the two kanji of the sign), and while I'm a fan of DINING, I certainly don't think standing and dining go together. So I was skeptical. But I liked the back-alley appeal of the place, and it was early so it wasn't crowded.

Plus it looks pretty stylin', doesn't it? They've done a thing like at my favorite bar, Fal, where the wood is chipboard, but some stain and varnish and soft lighting makes you think it's polished oak. And the brassy fittings help.

You know what, maybe they actually made good on it - this looks pretty 'dining'. I mean, putting some sauce on the sashimi and calling carpaccio is sorta destined to annoy me, but it was good. And macaroni salad is a lame thing to serve, but it was tasty, and that tomato coloring in the mayo is just a little kick. The tuna steak buried under the salad is nicely grill-marked, and the burnt mackerel with the green sauce is really pretty. So yeah, this is pretty cool now that I think of it. Wow, blogging sure can open your horizons.

It looks very dignified and refined at this semi-official link. Not quite THAT good.
03-3464-9044

Taiyo, Monzen Nakacho (海鮮立飲み　太陽)

2011-08-11T17:45:00.000+09:00

A final joke on my Japanese capabilities, which were mostly a joke anyway, along with a fond farewell to this street leading to Hachiman Bashi, and an even fonder farewell to standing bars that open in the afternoon and getting drunk therein.

My last evening in Monzen Nakacho, and I spent it in Shibuya with Poshand and someone. But first I got hammered at this place, one of the highest-ranked in Monnaka.

What's the joke? The name evidently means 'sun'. For years and years I've been thinking it meant 'fat intestine'. I dunno why.

And it's this kind of place - a much cheaper and somewhat more cheerful Kanemasu. Same really old master who has a hard time hearing you, or at least a hard time caring after all these years. Same snacky food. Same limited selection of sake.

More cheerful, as I said. One patron here is really into the whole experience. The other is wondering what's going on, and feeling fairly strange in light of the need to leave soon to go to Shibuya and then return to sleep on the floor of an apartment already ravaged by movers.

Also feeling fairly strange in light of pounding several glasses of room-temperature sake. But hey, look at that fish! Sure, I'm writing this about 22 weeks after the fact, but I can tell you without looking that the lighter one at top right is kisu, and you never get that. The other one is probably kohada, don't you think? Below that is tailagai, and to the left some nice, soft stewed octopus. And Edamami Beans. I wasn't terribly excited by this, but it's also quite cheap. Value gets high ratings.

While again, I'm not getting high ratings for friendliness. What can you expect - it's 5:30, it's hot as a dog's nuts outside, and I've been drinking warm sake and talking about how I come from America? I do hope everyone else enjoyed meeting a real, live foreigner though.

I usually hope other people had fun, actually.
090-2169-3255

Yattai Soba Hachiman, Monzen Nakacho (屋台ソバ八幡)

2011-08-11T13:03:00.003+09:00

You just never know, you know? This place has been hanging around on one of the most boring streets in Monnaka, and I always thought it might be OK in that dumpy-but-delicious ramen way. I was put off by it being across from a chain fugu place, the kind with the sad fish swimming in the window tank.

This ended up being pretty much my last lunch in Monnaka, and in Japan. The others, I lost the pictures. I know, that was very naughty of me.

You never know - I'm pretty sure the place belongs to this guy, but a lot of things about his manner kept saying "chain employee" to me. Still, when I told him how much I liked his bowl, he beamed.

Then again, one of the great things about Japan is that even chain employees can seem genuinely happy if you like their product.

And I did indeed like this product, 30+-degree day notwithstanding. The soup was excellent - about what you'd expect from a place with a densely-packed poster of text on the wall describing the complex and arduous process of distilling their broth. The noodles were as you see 'em, but a bit soft. Everything else was lackluster, but for soup like that, it's worth it.

Geez, I miss Tokyo.
03-3630-6600

Cattlea, Morishita (カトレア)

2011-08-11T05:05:00.001+09:00

'Ganso' is a funny concept. I think it means something like 'the original' or 'the inventor'. Maybe 'authentic' would be better, but more detailed reading certainly shows that this place claims to have invented curry bread. For years I thought it was just an undistinguished bakery a few towns up from mine, but when someone started exploring things to do in her new neighborhood, this came up as an exciting destination. Authenticity and all that.

If you've never had curry bread, I do think you're missing out. It's like a fried donut pocket filled with very thick Japanese-style curry - the dark-brown sludgy stuff (that I love).

Are these extra-authentic? They're certainly made in small batches, at specific times of day, and sell out quickly. We called ahead before riding the bikes up to get a pair, still a little warm, and very, very oily.

Which I don't mean in a bad way.
03-3635-1464

Toraya, Kita Senju (虎や)

2011-08-10T19:11:00.008+09:00

Now it can be told, the sad tale of my last night on the town. More an afternoon, really. Any day that starts with ice cream for lunch and finishes by 8 at the 3rd restaurant deserves its own special naming convention.

Big Bird is connected in convoluted and barely legal ways to the shady back-streets of Kita Senju, and more specifically to this pleasant and cheap izakaya.

There was some joke about this, some perversion of English. The master is a jokey guy who is clearly happy with staying down market, having a few drinks behind the counter, and chatting with his customers. It beats office work, is what he'd say if he could speak enough English that it wasn't limited to funny little oyaji gags.

It's nice how he has a funny little twist on things too, like a decent skate wing that's left in bigger pieces. I mean, these are just the small points that you ruminate on when you're drinking

Alps Wine. I was in a weird state of mind, obviously. Getting ready to leave your home of 7 years will do that to you. Obviously my state of mind was weird enough to make me drink this old-fashioned Japanese wine. This is wine that comes in 1.8 liter bottles in the supermarket. Skiers will not that it's made in Hakuba (or at least the label says something about that). On the night, I found it kinda pleasant. You need to know that it's 'built to last' in the sense that it kinda tastes like Madeira right off the bat. You could interpret this as 'spoiled' or 'gone bad'. That would be your right. When you're down-market, and pleasantly refrigerated port in a storm.

Go on, sit down at the end of the counter like we did. The Alps Wine and the sake is then in a little fridge just at your right hand. Feel free to remove the bottles and pour for yourself. The master would probably appreciate your honesty, but if a glass goes missing here and there, what's the bother? The prices aren't high here, but they are ample to cover some shrinkage on sake like Takashimizu and Dassai.

A thing that I grew to love about Japan, more over time and then less, was duck. I've always liked a nice piece of duck, and I liked how you could often get a plate of it in restaurants of all stripes. Then I realized you could get whole, pre-cooked duck breasts in almost every grocery store. At that point my cheapness kicked in and I started eating it happily at home, but being less impressed when an izakaya would pull the package out of the fridge and whack off some slices for me. Cheap bastard. Whatever, it tastes good.

Speaking of 'Birds' and 'tasting good',
No, that's a different story. But the evening, and the day, and the whole romantic-lunches-with-Big-Bird thing, had to end eventually. This was it. I'll miss you buddy.

Tokudawara, Kita Senju (徳多和良)

2011-08-10T18:06:00.044+09:00

Really, Tabelog readers? Tokyo's 6th best izakaya is a standing place in Kita Senju? Might as well find out (especially since we went to #2, 3, 4 and 5 in the last few weeks. Some were repeats. I disagree about #1, but it's mostly an illustration of the broadness of the category.).

We rolled up early, because that's how we roll, and then the lazy family that operates Tokudawara didn't open until about 4:10. We had time to stroll.

And make some friends. Actually, while I was taking pictures at this intersection, a youngish, biggish guy came out of the stone-cutting shop and went into the 100-year old house across the street. When he came back out, I thought he was going to warn us off, but instead he wanted to try speaking some English. Friendly neighborhood, KSJ.

But smorking is never OK, alright?

Before too long we were back and managed, like the other places, to be the first people inside. It's easy when lunch rolls into afternoon drinking and then dinner. 'Easy' also describes the atmosphere here well. Stand, mingle, no unsightly overcrowding, only a few people waiting,

Friendly staff who are keen to talk about stuff before it gets too busy. Friendly customers who want to know why you:re there and how the heck you picked the place. They'll ask you this too - in a town that has 5 or 6 substantial shopping streets, the kind most suburbs would be proud of, this is on a minor alley with no other stores.

But plenty of water eggplant! Can't get enough this summer, we can't.

Lemme just race through the other plates quickly before getting to the kicker.

Isaki (Grunt)

Heck, I've forgotten. I think it was tai, and I know it was cured in seaweed to suck out some water.

Komai, the fabled 'under ice fish' that I was fortunate enough to receive from the Reso Samurai at Christmas.

Komatsuna greens, fried tofu, Bird fingers, new shirt.

The fry chef as a woman. I thought this was really cool, an old master cutting the fish and letting a woman into his kitchen to do a lot of the other work. Then I realized she looked a lot like the older waitress, and it all started to look more familial.

Pickled mackerel.

Fried asparagus with green-tea salt. Her frying batter and technique were exemplary

especially in the shrimp and onion kaki-age.

whose green tea salt went delightfully well with green tea mixed with cheap liquor!

so nice they ordered it twice.

and finally a fairly boring and gummy plate of squid, marinated in soy and squid livers before grilling.

As if sensing our boredom with this dish (though not with the food or atmosphere), the waitress approached us at this point with a big X made out of her arms. Strict 2-hour time limit. Who woulda thought? And more to the point, who woulda thought two hours standing could go by so fast?

There's a simple reason why this is ranked so high: all the plates above cost Y300 plus tax. Drinks too. But it all tastes good too. .
03-3870-7824

Kikuya, Kita Senju (菊や)

2011-08-10T14:05:00.034+09:00

I used to ride my bike along the Arakawa almost every morning, and at some point I read about this place. Then it started bugging me to know that it was just over the levee. And like so many of these places, I finally gave in and found the time to go.

'Found the time' is a misleading way to put it, because Big Bird and I used our non-working Wednesday to spend the whole afternoon in Kita Senju, a place with which he has a passing familiarity. This was not the wisest choice, because the sun was out, and temperatures were high - 40 in the shop.

The thermometer was near the noodle pot, but so were we. In fact, everyone is near everything in this place. There are maybe 6 seats, but the front wall / window is so close to them that it would be hard to close the door if you had two supersized men like us sitting down.

As Virginia is for lovers, so Kikuya is ramen for hot days. This is because you can order ice cream as well as ramen.

No wait, the ice cream is on the ramen. The cold, vinegary ramen. with lots of wet seaweed. The dried seaweed flakes. And the boiled egg.

You would think this place was mostly a novelty, and you'd be right. But it satisfies the nostalgia and wacky-Japan criteria, and the ramen under the ice cream would have been quite a nice cold ramen if it was left alone.

One disappointment is that he's started using monaka, the rectangular ice cream bars wrapped in cone-like pastry (or a chemically-formed simulacrum of pastry). It looked cooler in older blog posts where he had one of those pre-frozen cones cut in half and put on top.

'If you don't stir it up, it tastes like cold ramen. If you stir it up, the soup becomes very rounded.' The chef repeats this mantra to everyone who gets ice cream ramen (three while we were there), perhaps to convince himself that it's a good idea.

Bird did not think ice cream ramen was that good an idea, and had settled in advance on getting purple ramen. The master clearly has a bent for low-budget science expeeraments and jokes, because he first boiled red cabbage to get purple color, then made me take a picture of it.

Meanwhile, my ice cream was melting into an unholy mess.

The reason we had to take the picture of the purple ramen is that it turns blue when you put soup in it. And then pink if you add vinegar. All of which the master made Bird do, with step-by-step photos.

Well heck, a nice store to visit, a decent ramen, an oddball topping story, and a great friend.

If the ice cream worked well, it would be almost too good.
03-3888-5032

Phew, this brings back memories.

Shishi Uo, Kanda (すし魚)

2011-08-09T14:05:00.002+09:00

It's kinda dumb, right? Here I am, not working, and what do I do for lunch? I ride the charinko over to Kanda and have donburi with Todd.

It's also not that smart that I cruised up alongside a rightwing nutjob van, banged on the window and gave them the finger, but that's what I did.

To tell you the truth, it wasn't very smart to go to this place. It's just a mediocre chain izakaya, and lunch at those places can be fairly dreadful.

The interior is pretty nice though - this grill counter was nearly stylish, and there was a big wall of colorful shochu bottles. I might appreciate that more if I drank 'em.

As far as this negitoro don, I might have appreciated it more if it didn't SUCK.

Well, at least it was a new place. I can't find a link. Who cares.

Sakari, Sumiyoshi (らーめん屋盛)

2011-08-08T13:01:00.019+09:00

I've had this thing for Ganko ramen...pretty much since I met the guy who started the style 20+ years ago. It's sort of like meeting someone who started Nouvelle Cuisine or whatnot. Now every time I see a bone outside, and a black sign, I get all jazzed up.

This one is funny because they have a wider menu of prepared food (ganko is usually 'salt or soy sauce, and do you want pork or an egg?), and for a minute I even thought it was a sole proprietorship with a woman doing the cooking. Then I thought it was a couple doing it. Now I'm not sure, because there's also a branch store in Ryogoku.

But you want to see noodles. And here you go. Clear, light soup from the beef bones, eggy, curly noodles, fatty but very thin pork that almost dissolves in the soup...it's all there. Ganko places don't make bad bowls.

It's really more a question of whether they're good or great. Picture here is the salt ramen, and I'd say these were good+.

But more study is clearly required before I can attain any level of expertise in Ganko.
03-3648-5353

Kushiya, Kiyosumi Shirakawa (KUSHIYA こぬた)

2011-08-07T23:01:00.045+09:00

Thassit baby, kinjo-jiman. I don't give a good goddam if it's lower-class, it's my home. We rolled around a lot on this balmy summer night, speculating on whether we would be caught in the rain.

Eventually we ended up back at the original intention, where they seemed to have been saving seats for us.

This is not the place, by the by, but I plumb forgot to take an exterior shot. Sorreez.

Inside it was crowded to just the right degree.

Now, I thought that since this place was called Kushiya, it would be a grilling specialist.

In fact, I thought it was called Kushikei, because I can't really read. I was also wrong since it's a fried things on sticks specialist. You can tell because you immediately get cabbage to go with the big metal pots of dipping sauce that sit at intervals along the counter.

Should you be concerned about the hygiene aspects, eh. Maybe lighten up a little? But you'll be happy to know that all of the containers bear the legend 'Second time attach is no thank you!' If one was making any effort to be idiomatic, one would say 'No double dipping!'

...which turns out to be sorta the motto of the shop. The staff had it on the back of their matching shirts, and the manager had it embroidered in red on his. They offered the shirts for sale in the bathroom, which turned out to be a cruel joke as supply was 'chotto' limited, which means 'We got none'.

So we just ordered one tray after another of fried food, sometimes interspersed with the other things they offer

Like Hoppy Dark, which I have to say is a quite pleasant approximation of dark beer with very little hop bitterness. Which is funny when you think about the name.

More fried food. I'm sure no one's forgotten that someone has a ring, but just in case.

I think there was a monster shrimp in here. Fortunately it was dead and fried.

After the first drink, I went all haywire. This is a Giant Grape Makkori, and my neighbor. He sensibly stuck with the black Hoppy.

Who needs a picture of a cucumber? You do. Didn't know that, didja?

As I was saying, you could mix things up by not ordering fried sticks for a course and instead ordering...freestyle fried octopus.

Lamuna makkori. Oh god.

Or should I say 'Woo hoo!'

Or should we just get some more fried food? Sure. They have these delightful little order slips where you check off how many of each variety you want. This is easy and fun for you, and I'm sure results in the restaurant selling a lot more food.

and, errrr, drinks. This is a shot of $2 shochu that you can get to freshen up your Hoppy - one bottle makes more than one mug of beverage, so you need to amp it up. Well, maybe not need, but I bet you've had that experience where you

Oh that one, where you and then and in the bathroom, they had they had like this picture of Bluce Lee and he was totally my idol when I was in high school.

I liked Bluce Lee because he would come down from his townhouse in heaven to kick the ass of the evil drug bears that waited in the corner of the bathroom in my dreams.

More fried food. More fried food. In our defense, this did take up 4 hours of Sunday night.

And finished up just fine. If you could see anything in this black blob, it would be two bikes happily parked side by side at Tomioka Hachiman.

Happy because their drunken idiot pilots didn't wreck on the way home.
03-3630-9490

Mignonette, Iriya

2011-08-05T13:48:00.034+09:00

You've noticed that photo-taking is an increasing hobby for me, right? It's temporary and very low-stress, but I still spent 8 hours today cruising around - from Monnaka to Otemachi, Kasumigaseki to Kappabashi, Asakusa. Getting around, you know? Tokyo by bike is the best possible way to see it.

At left, the fauna of Asakusa. Someone says Koto ku is known as low-class; I think Taito and Adachi are more so. I'm not saying, I'm just saying.

And I'm also saying that while buying a present for my cousin Little Chef, I went to this place that I've eyed a dozen times. It's on Kototoi Dori, which goes from the bridge of the same name over through mid-Asakusa and then curves past Nippori into Nezu. Useful street, if a bit non-linear.

Non-linear could probably describe the thought processes of the chef. I asked why he started a French restaurant in this godforsaken location. 'Well, there was a French restaurant here before, so I got the fridges and stoves and plates and glasses real cheap.' His kitchen is small and cramped. He said 'It's just me, so it'll take a while, OK?' Peering over the counter, I saw a guitar.

'Hey, Can I play that while I wait?'
'Ha ha ha!'
< >
'OK, I guess so.'

For some reason I have only recently discovered that one should use the camera's timer liberally and to good effect. I am also reminded in looking at this picture that someone needs a shave.

This salad of grilled pickled mackerel could be a meal in itself. I swear there was a whole mackerel in there, in large pieces. And lots of salad. And a good deal of yumminess.

Midway through: 'Hey, I forgot to put on the tomatoes. Can I just dump them on top?'
Why sure.

The high point of the meal, pun intended, was this cannabis-infused, cabbage-wrapped, pork-based hamburg steak. With a poached egg on top. Good lord and butter, look at the height he achieved! You could probably dunk if you stood on top of it. It was also very tasty, which is no mean feat (in my book) for boiled cabbage and pork meatball.

It's just come to me that my posts usually end very weakly. It must take some effort to bring things to a stirring close, leaving the reader wanting more. With the limited effort I put in, things usually just putter to the finish, trailing off.

Like this meal. Sad to say, the creme brulee was lousy - must have started too warm, and then he torched it way too long, so it was almost hot custard under a thin, burnt crust.

Story of my life.
03-5827-3240

Sakaoto, Yotsuya (日本酒BAR 酒音)

2011-08-03T22:00:00.018+09:00

Someone's on the go. Part two of our Arakicho adventure...honestly, it was part 4 after we walked out of the first two places without ordering. Finicky we are.

This 'Sakaoto' place caught my eye on the first walk around the half-dozen blocks that make up Arakicho. It looked small, cute, maybe friendly, and after all it's self-described as a Nihonshu bar.

But it turns out to be weeeeeird, and is very much best left for those on expense accounts. I can't even bring myself to do the boilerplate text at the beginning.

The master focuses on vegetables from his wife's farm in Saitama, and also sake from that area. This means there will likely be a bunch of brands you've never heard of. It also means they may be more interesting than delicious, unless you really like old-fashioned sake. I think most foreign people find it confronting; I'm barely getting into it now - like room-temperature sake. For hard men it is.

You'll start with the vegetable plate in the back. It's not bad, but I feel you should know the charge will be Y1k. Also, there will be an unannounced Y500 charge per person for service.

Drinks are generally served in the 3-variety sets, sort of 1-go for Y980, which is toppy but OK since you get variety. If you choose not to get the set, pricing is quite punitive.

Actually, punitive pricing is the theme here. The smoked platter of the day comprised oysters, scallops, and tsubugai - that last a first for me. They were nice, but this was our second place of the night. We just finished up, got smacked in the face by the bill, and left.

Sometimes Tokyo tries my patience.
03-6231-9366

Bistro 18-ku, Arakicho

2011-08-03T21:00:00.002+09:00

Aaaaaaarakicho. We finally made it here, months and months after starting to think it was worth a return visit. This was really the first time I've explored it seriously, and it turns out to be a 'difficult' neighborhood. The places that look good also look scary in the no-menu-no-prices way. Believe it or not, we sat down and then immediately left two places in quick succession - just something wrong with the vibe, and once we saw the food we said "no".

So while we were walking around in circles obsessing over which establishment to favor with our custom, we kept smelling something good from Bistro 18, where a 50-ish, stylish, married-ish couple was bustling about a mostly-empty restaurant.

Come to think of it, Arakicho was pretty much empty tonight. Not sure why a summer Wednesday should be so dead.

Nor why the flavor of the ratatouille should be so ordinary. Too bad.

Chef was pretty mellow. I mean, he didn't talk to us at all even though we were sitting right in front of him for an hour. That's too bad, because he had cool hair and glasses for an older chef.

Country-style pate was lame-o.

But the healthy portion of crusted lamb chops was really good, pan fried and then oven-finished.

And the stewed tongue was appropriately good enough to be called the house specialty, as the stew often is in places like this. Sometimes it's tongue, sometimes it's cheek.

Around here, we prefer cheeky. Or naughty, up to you.
03-3351-8765

Obana, Minami Senju (尾花)

2011-08-03T13:25:00.042+09:00

Tokyo is on the march. Walking through this old, beat little part of Minami Senju on dead hot, overcast August days.

Riding bikes, converging from all directions.

To wait in line.

In the rain. In a LOT of rain.

Actually, my fault entirely, we arrived only 25 minutes before opening time. That meant we were #30 and #31 in line...and were thus the very first people to be turned away to the waiting area. "It'll take about an hour," the waitress said, briskly and unsympathetically, before pushing a menu in our faces to get our pre-order for the happy time when such an eventuality as our entrance might eventuate.

Once we were seated, more waiting ensued. That's how these shops are, these shinisei, old-fashioned places. Notwithstanding the 10-years-ago renovation that's left the room very clean and...hmmm, I was going to say 'modern', but there's nothing modern about the big shrine, or the tatami-only seating. Just clean wood, lots of it.

Ooh! Ooh! Food!

No, just a small dish of pickles. I mean, the kitchen is theoretically killing, fileting, steaming, and grilling your food only after you order it. None of those things are fast.

Even the boxes were made slowly. This is probably the nicest box I've ever gotten one of these in.

'One of these' is an una-ju, an eel-box. This is the luxury Y4k size, and I can say that because I wasn't paying, woo hoo!

I wonder what this looks like if you've never seen grilled eel before. I shan't describe it as 'burnished' or 'delicately grilled'. I will say that it's the best una-ju I've ever had. Not the best eel; the one a few weeks ago at Sasahana was certainly better-quality fish. But the amount and depth of flavor here were beyond any other eel.

I mean, it is ranked #2 for eel on Tabelog. It oughta be good. I'll tell you this though, it's not worth the trip and the wait. Stay around town, spare yourself the trouble, and you'll get eel that will satisfy anyone. I'd go here if I were you. Only someone who's eaten a fair amount of good eel could reasonably say this was great. You're checking the tags, aren't you? I've got 11 unagi listings (in the last 3 years). See, that doesn't even qualify.

But someone certainly liked it!
03-3801-4670

Chez Andre du Sacre Coeur, Ningyocho (シェ・アンドレ・ドゥ・サクレクーレ)

2011-08-02T20:52:00.029+09:00

Chez Andre, or Chez to his friends, has been making homey bistro fare ever since immigrating from his native Bangladesh following the poultry riots of '89. He's managed to put together a long-standing restaurant that captures a little bit of the magic of the Sacre Coeur, which is a Bangladeshi ritual involving chicken hearts and #2 pencils. It's full most nights, so something's going right, and I advise you to book a little in advance, as Ponkan did for our dinner.

I can reasonably advise you to try the terrine too. It's very much in the 'cooked mince' style, not a smoother, richer one, but it's good.

This cold seafood special was OK, some fresh dill spicing it up (or herbing it up, I suppose, but in Bangladeshi there's only one word to cover 'herb' and 'spice') but nothing to write home about in ingredients or cooking.

and I was kinda let down by the acquapazza too - I think of it as something swimming in herbs, but Chez makes it more the way they do in the eastern highlands, so it comes out kinda stewed together and with mashed potatoes. It might make you feel like you were back home in Chittagong, but not the thing for me.

The pork was great though - crusted with a mix of cheese, herbs, and breadcrumbs before roasting. This is called 'Dhaka yaki' since it originated in that capital city.

Another quirk about this place, as if Bengal-French fusion food wasn't quirky enough - it closes very early. Ponkan warned me that 7 PM seemed late for them, and they last-ordered us right on time at 8 PM. By 8:15 they were asking if we wanted coffee or dessert while we were just getting through the pork, and by 8:30 sweeping was in progress. I can see this being OK if you live in the neighborhood and can pop in early, after work.

But really, who works these days?

03-6228-1053

Mazeru ramen, Akihabara (麺処マゼル)

2011-08-02T13:52:00.014+09:00

Mazeru? Yes, yes I will. With an offer like that, how could you not get excited?

It means 'stir', and the implication of the name and the sign is that you're going to get maze-soba (pronounced mah-zay), a lot like the junk from Junk Garage, for example. And that is a gooood thing.

I'm fond of places that are scrappy and trying to make a go of it. Although for ramen that might even be part of the chic, in some subcultures. Down this crappy hallway, a cheap office building, past the used camera store (cheap vintage Leicas), in a hole on the right,

they're doing it up.

ba-BOOM!

Geez, I don't even think that requires explanation, except to say "There's a lot of noodle underneath."

That is all.
No phone

Inonaka, Kinshicho (井のなか)

2011-08-01T19:50:00.000+09:00

Yooooooshta. It's official. I have now been to all of the good sake places in Tokyo. Think you know another? Nope. Not good. This is the last one. Boo-yah! Good, I'm glad we could all agree on that. Back to work.

A few months ago, I spent a chilly evening on the bike exploring Kinshicho and Kameido. Didn't find much other than the OK sake bar I went to, and this excellent-looking place that was full. At long last, in good Peacocky company, the dream became reality.

I do love how they have all kinds of sake paraphernalia - even the bench outside is from a sake brewer.

As is the water. After walking around all afternoon in the heat, we musta drunk 2 whole bottles of this. That was tough when they kept trying to pour into the little cups, but once we managed to hold onto the bottle, OK. Remember that if you go.

They have a terrific counter here - the U-shaped kind, but not all old and desolate like some places. This is certainly an upper-class izakaya, and one that's self-conscious about it.

Also remember that their sake list is quirky and cool. For instance, they have a few 'anchor' brewers from whom they have a whole range of sake. Fusou Tsuru, on the right here and on the water bottle above, is a new one on me.

So was Asahi Giku, I think. What I was really excited by though was the several varieties of Gasanryu that they had. Can't go past that stuff, and it doesn't disappoint. We had their contest sake, 'Extreme Moon' (no kidding; all their sakes are called something-moon), and it was as awesome as the bottle I drank at home the week before.

The food is on the edge of very good - the starter of chicken and beans in mustardy, olive oily sauce was delicious, as were the beans, as were the lovingly plated slices of seaweed-cured snapper. The soba croquettes were quite decent, but the miso-cured cheese and sake lees pizza were dull.

Still, what were we here for? Right, just to say goodbye to Peacock, and drink some nice sake. Now that I think about it, maybe they're going for cult sake or something? Yuki no Bousha is getting there, and Yorokobi Gaijin certainly qualifies. Koigawa is kinda rare too.

As are good friends, so make the most of 'em.
03-3622-1715

Bernini pizza, Ginza (ピッツェリアロマーナベルニーニ)

2011-07-31T13:50:00.003+09:00

Someone came up with the idea that we needed Roman-style pizza after our slightly life-changing visit to Il Tamburello. Have you noticed, gentle reader, that food is the last thing I should need at this point, and yet also the first thing on my mind? By which I mean, who's to say no?

There are far fewer Roman places than Napoli places in Tokyo. The fact that you can distinguish at all, let alone choose from such a long list, is something extraordinary, but there it is. Bernini gets kinda low scores, but reviews say the pizza is the only good thing. Plus the place we really wanted to hit was closed on Sundays. Off we went, by bike as usual.

The reviews may be right. We forgo-ed the set lunch menus because of the reviews and also the generally lacking appearance of the pastas on others' tables (and all the tables were full, so consider reserving, even for lunch on a Sunday). While waiting for the pizzas we got the bruschetta to start. There's probably some poetry about being happy with a crust of bread and thou, but this was a silly excuse for restaurant food. No effort.

Pizza's good though, yes yes. The crust is more crisp, that's the roman thing. But I liked the copious toppings, especially the really delicious sausage (not on this pizza, on the one below). And anyway, it's fresh and hot and quite well-made.

Someone's been complaining that she's not featured in pictures. No time like the present to start. Not a bad view across a pizza, I think.

Meanwhile the other pizza arrived and got cold, so I had to go all Scott Summers to reheat it.

This being Japan, there are probably 3 better pizza places in Ginza that also imported their brick ovens from Italy. But they won't be Roman-style, and there's nothing at all wrong with this place. Tasty.
03-6228-4774

Les Enfants Gates, Daikanyama (レザンファン　ギャテ)

2011-07-30T22:28:00.041+09:00

The style and food at the now-departed Les Enfants Terrible in Juban were both good; didn't you always wonder what the main shop was like? Wonder no longer. It's s stylish place, pitched a bit to appeal to stylish women, but with food good enough to keep anyone happy.

And terrines. The point here is terrines, which we didn't know until we walked in and saw this fridge packed with Staubs. The menu ranges from terrine to terrine, and on to dessert terrine. This is an oddity. In fairness, they do give you the option of having proper main dishes, but why not go all the way? We did.

Incongruous, no? A place that focuses on terrine, and is associated with bistro-style brethren, and yet is this elegant. It was confusing for a while, but nothing you couldn't get used to. Didn't even reserve the Baccarat heart crystal. Didn't even make the reservation myself, come to think of it.

They started with little fried objects, light and fresh, topped with shaved summer truffle. I'm still not a fan; it tastes awfully funny, doesn't it?

And then it was terrine time. Everyone got to start with this mini terrine, which was aji surrounded by cheese, wrapped in spinach and topped with tomato sorbet and bottomed with cucumber sauce. That's summer right there.

And this is for the bread, right here. The bread was outstanding, by the way, but the salmon-cream terrine they supplied (and supplied again, and supplied for a third time) was awwwwesome.

It's just going to be a parade of terrines from this point onward, so I won't go crazy saying how good they were. This is lobster and shrimp with cooked fennel filling and shaved zucchini wrapping. I don't remember what was in the glass.

Lots of lower-class places have vegetable terrines on the menu and/or go so far as to describe them as a specialty. None of them are as beautiful as this. To top that, this terrine has no filler - no gelatin was harmed in the process of getting it into a smooth and compact loaf. Pretty incredible.

Oh, the foie was pretty incredible too. I mean, you'd expect that, but it's nice when it works out. I've had plenty of mediocre foie terrines and this sure wasn't one of 'em.

Someone thought this was a bit mediocre though - potatoes and pork, wrapped in ham. You might want to avoid it if you go, because there wasn't much to create coherence. Just tasty potatoes and pork products that happened to be in loaf form.

This was a coconutty foam and some tropical ice cream and a biscuit on top. And it was tasty, and not a terrine. The staff seemed put out just to be serving it.

We kept it balanced, though, with this peach-raspberry terrine. It's cool how the jazz up the presentation here, isn't it? Peach-raspberry desserts can be very trite, and a scoop of ice cream doesn't always help, but this is great. Throwing in some green beyond the obligatory sprig of mint is a good idea.

As a finisher, they brought us cigars of chou pastry with tea, passion fruit, and coffee-flavored creams for hand-filling. Quirky and puzzling, but a fine way to finish.

They didn't even offer coffee, if I heard right. Just herb teas, which they brought to the table in a rack of 20 varieties for you to sniff and pick. The serving style was lovely here as well.

As was the whole dinner, really. The staff were good enough that I didn't mind the service charge, and the food was creative and delicious even within its rectangular bounds. Easy to see why this ranks as one of Tokyo's best.

While also being possible to reserve a mere week in advance.
03-3476-2929

La Balance, Ginza (ラ・バランス銀座)

2011-07-30T15:11:00.000+09:00

Despite their booming popularity in Japan, I still think macarons are a great thing. The king of pastry, if you will. There aren't a lot of places that make good ones - you often see them wrapped individually in plastic, and that just can't be a positive sign.

Still, I'm always willing to try a new place, and this new patisserie in Ginza looked pretty good. They're open until midnight, catering to the hostess-gift trade (and less disturbingly than the pet shops, don't you think?).

No, I take back what I said about looking pretty good. When someone and I saw these in the case, we said "Oooh." Then we said "Those look right. They look like Pierre Herme macarons. They're beautiful."

Holy cow, they really are beautiful. The style is different from Pierre Herme, with a firmer shell, but the flavor is right on, beautiful. As we found when we stood outside and ate these with the staff watching us. The chocolate-orange and caramel were standouts for me; the pistachio lacked nut flavor, and the rum raisin was just OK.

One other beautiful thing to mention is the counter girl. She was startling.
03-6255-6300

Cafe de l'Ambre, Ginza (カフェ・ド・ランブル)

2011-07-30T14:22:00.003+09:00

Coffee only. Only coffee. While things like that ordinarily make me want to request a danish on the side, maybe a sugar cookie, I feel a lot of respect for this place and have always wanted to go. It's just down the street from my Ginza bar of choice, Fal, so it's weird that it took me...let's see, from the first time I saw it, probably 12 years. Ah well. It's a big city, bigger than any one blogger can know.

Another unknowable is the number of beans Mr. Sekiguchi has roasted. If the shop has been open since 1948, and he's now 98 years old by my reckoning, and this was a Saturday in July...we'd be estimating, but I'd say it's a lot.

You'd expect that they put a lot of care into the thing, being 'coffee only' and Japanese and all that. Sure enough, the coffee is roasted in small batches, ground when you order it, and veeeery slowly dripped through filters handmade from the finest Colombian hemp, rolled on the thighs of virgins. It's fun to watch. You can feel like you're getting your money's worth.

Actually I have no problem with that feeling at l'Ambre. While other traditional kissa charge you ten bucks for a cup of coffee they poured through a musty filter earlier in the morning, here you're getting beans harvested in Guatemala in 1989. Or if you're more aggressive about it, 1954 in Colombia.

How this works, I don't know, but it's some damn interesting stuff. They do the fancy pouring ritual while all the tourists get jiggy with their fancy cameras,

and you get a cup of something that may or may not resemble coffee as you know it. We had two varieties from the 80's, and one of them was a bit like boiled twigs. I don't mean this in a bad way, because you're getting some weird and fascinating chemicals that you otherwise would have no way of tasting.

Except, like, on aaacid, maaaan. You can taste the colors, you know?
03-3571-1551

Narita sushi, Monzen Nakacho (すし成田)

2011-07-29T21:33:00.030+09:00

A couple years ago, this place Sushi Yata popped up south of the river in Monnaka. I went there and got really excited, because I thought it was reasonably-priced, sorta creative, and really delicious. Over time, I came to feel like the master was weird, uncomfortably so, and that he had a solid habit of feeding me things I hadn't asked for, and charging for them.

Well, when we went in to Narita tonight, we had a creative starter of okra in crab brain sauce...

and there was Narita san, the chef from Yata. We eyed each other for a couple seconds like "What the..." until I said "What are you doing working here?" and he said "It's my place." Then his kimono-clad wife and (?) mother-in-law intervened to smooth things out and get conversation going. It's a very upscale place, too nice for Monnaka, but the set prices on the menu outside suggest that the pricing will be reasonable. Only a suggestion, mind you.

And he really does have a way with fish; akagai, torched mackerel, squid.

but then he started cutting up a plate of vegetables for each of us. "Did we order those?" "Oh, everyone orders vegetables here."

Mmm hmmm.

Well, certainly everyone orders sushi. Some of the quality here was outstanding, with the highlight for me easily being the seaweed-cured whiting, top right. It was almost like it set into a waxy texture, which I mean in a good way, somehow, instead of the softness and lack of structure of raw whiting.

This is the type of crowd they're looking for here - businessmen on expenses who are happy to order a bottle of Narita-branded shochu and have a kimono pour it for them. Sadly, I have never been on an expense account, and was uneasy by this time. The way they kept trying to force drinks on us didn't help.

So perhaps to quell my unease, they gave each of us a dobin mushi, which is expensive pine mushrooms cooked in soup in a teapot. It's delicious, and they said it was 'service', meaning free. So I guess I should have disclosed the free treatment we got right up front.

Except that when we got the bill, there wasn't much question that we paid for every last drop.
03-3642-5323

Fish Center, Misaki (三崎さかなセンター)

2011-07-29T14:46:00.000+09:00

Misaki is one of the two famous fresh-tuna ports of Japan, along with Oma in the north. But today we were here for other reasons. You had arranged a schedule that included lunch, some sightseeing, and now a trip to the Misaki fish center. Here, I'm pondering what made us come here, and why his whole family was tittering so much behind their hands.

Let me digress a moment to say that, as far as country town fish markets go, this one is cool. Cool in a 'wackiness index' sense, because there are few places that you can get fresh maguro (happily cut into small saku so it's not prohibitively expensive), big frozen cuts, and also a whole freezer full of tuna eyeballs. What the hell do you do with tuna eyeballs?

How about tuna intestines? How about tuna eggs?

I soon realized that the reason they were tittering was that they were about to make me try this once-in-a-lifetime delicacy. The sign says "The only place in the world!"...

Tuna gelato.

In fact: tuna, seaweed, another seaweed, and salt ice cream are all on the menu. Along with green tea, strawberry, vanilla and 'mangou', for the less adventurous.

Or maybe just for the more sensible, because the hijiki ice cream had little flavor, and none of said flavor was hijiki, while the tuna ice cream was just icy, bland milk-flavored ice cream with flakes of tuna mixed in.

The You's kept looking at me like I was going to throw up, and saying I didn't have to eat it, but as usual I'll be damned if I buy food and don't eat it. There's a really high bar of badness to clear before that happens.

As usual, we clowned around a bit too. You's a good guy and a good friend. It's sort of too bad he doesn't know about the blog.

This guy is less impressed.

Kamotsuru, Kamoi (鴨鶴,鴨居)

2011-07-29T13:20:00.046+09:00

You got transferred out of our team a couple months ago and became the manager of the branch down near the navy base in Kanagawa. He's gotten pretty into the area, and invited me down to check it out for a day. He took the day off, brought his car over from home (it's too far to commute, so he has an apartment near work), and he got his family to come down for the day too. Lunch was carefully selected, and it was down the coast at Kamoi, which in pirate-speak would be "Arrr! Here be ducks."

This place is a bit famous, and not only because there's a shrine behind the restaurant and the parking lot is behind the first gate. I don't think they charge extra for the blessing your car gets automatically. Couldn't help thinking it was rude for the car not to bow, and that if we had been in a hydraulically-equipped low cruiser instead of You's BMW wagon, we could have made the front bounce to mark our humble entry into the honorably parking lot.

I digress.

What a nice interior, with a pleasant counter, sunken kitchen, country-style wood, and lots of staff bustling around. Blow up that picture and you'll see a big bowl of boiled octopus sitting out.

Blow up this picture and you'll see some egg, two boiled sea snails, and some potato salad. They come with most of the lunch sets.

You and his daughter are not included in anyone's lunch set except mine.

Little Mai chan had the sashimi bowl, which meant she got a much bigger portion of the fish of the day. The rest of us got the snack size, and the katsuo was especially impressive.

The sensible thing to do here is to get one of the rice-pot sets. These are cooked individually so you get a nice portion of burnt rice at the bottom, and are topped with your choice of stuff.

Snapper topping is perhaps the most traditional way to have kamameshi, but You had shown me his guide mag, and the picture for the restaurant was octopus. I was also slightly entranced by the opportunity to confuse the staff by ordering 'taco rice', which is the kind of dumb joke I love. For the record, the rice was interesting in this, but the octopus was tough. The snapper rice was dull, and You's choice, the sea eel, was unanimously acclaimed as the winner on the day.

Just a three-way vote, mind you.

046-841-0731

Ajisai, Kanda (味彩)

2011-07-28T22:35:00.054+09:00

This one has been settling in and gathering rust just above Iroha Sushi, on the Kanda shotengai. You'd recognize it by the sake signs on the wall - and if you're like me, you'd be put off too. The signs are for Hakkaisan, Shimehari Tsuru, Kubota, and the other leading or major quality sake brands. Periodically I'd see them, think about going, decide it was likely to be focused on boring drinks, and slide it back in the 'forgotten' file.

That was just me, of course. The other 15 customers packing this place to capacity and taxing the speed and ingenuity of the chef and waitress hadn't forgotten anything. But I'm also not sure if those customers know what they have. What they have right here, is they have a sake list that needs to apologize to no one, plus competent food at good prices, in a cheerful atmosphere. And that is more than enough for me.

Just a quick view of the fridge, OK? It didn't look like this when we came in, because the bottles of Nabeshima, Jikon, Fudo, Senkin, and Toyo Bijin just naturally rotated to the front as I ordered them. So there are 40-50 bottles here, and they're all about that good. Which is to say, as good as it gets. The regular customers really don't seem to be that into it. In general they were asking for recommendations, whereas the chef seemed very happy to see someone who wanted to pick between his 4 varieties of Jikon.

He really doesn't have to apologize for his food either. This is cold tofu with a little fish-sweet-sour dressing, and daikon shoots (which compress the bitterness and nutrients of daikon into a convenient little package). It was a lot tastier than it looks.

As was the sashimi, which looked a little rough but was good quality. One of the highlights was the snapper, which in this picture is unfortunately obscured by clouds.

Well, we had a few drinks. Left is that Toyobijin 611, so-named because it's single-origin rice from the 611 area of their town. Then the Juyondai 'Seahorse', which proved as always the amazingness of the brand. The Nabeshima and Jikon to the right were specifically ordered to be a 'fruity' round, and they were. Just great stuff.

Not much needs to be said about the remaining brown food except that it was competent. No, I lie - we looked at each other while eating this skate wing and haltingly admitted that we were both thinking it was really good for some reason. The previous picture probably had something to do with it.

Chicken, undistinguished.

Chicken, better. That's spicy miso on top, and the while it's brown and sloppy, it was filling and tasty.

Damn, why didn't I go here years ago? It would have been perfect for impressing foreign visitors while still having a great and interesting time. The food could reasonably be said to be less than excellent, but it's certainly not the crappy food that many great drinking places try to get away with. This should be on your list at some point.

Although it's not like I suffered without it.

03-3254-6051

Devilcraft, Kanda

2011-07-28T17:27:00.066+09:00

Devilquest!!!

Nuts, I've been excited about writing that ever since I heard of Devilcraft from Woody several weeks ago. Now I find that Devilquest is just the Japanese name for Season of the Which, witch came out early this year in America.

Well, Devilcraft's opening has been anticipated for nearly as long, and they are now fully and publicly open after a longish soft-open, reservation-only period. There should be rejoicing. It's not Ant 'n Bee, or Ushitora, or Popeye, but it's more than enough to make anyone happy, and it's closer to the center of town than any of those. Because the center of town is the bridge, people. Don't forget it.

There's a devil in the bottle, or in this case the tap lines. The custom-built fridge has 15 of them, which Mike the co-owner describes as "ridiculous for beer people" and promises to expand asap. Personally I think 15 taps is enough - it gives them space to have a few beers each from the principal genres, to wit "Japanese", "American", and "major". The Japanese options are likely to include Shiga Kogen, Ise Kadoya, or Iwatekura, while the Americans look to be West-coast, with Bear Republic, Green Flash and others on the menu (at least today. The blog is up-to-date.).

In this picture, counter-guy Dio is working it. I'd love, nay love, to think that all the staff have devil-referencing nicknames. This could be something to work on upgrading, along with the number of taps. Or I might have misheard the guy's name.

You may want to wait a few weeks to go. Right now they're full most nights with people who love beer and have been gasping dryly for a shop just like this, around this neighborhood. They're reserving most of the seats, with the remainder going to curious industry types, like the Ant 'n Bee people who were in a few nights ago (who Bird and I had to call for directions), and the Baird Harajuku guy on the right of this picture. For good or ill, the atmosphere is entirely too bright, welcoming and pleasant to appeal to salarymen. Maybe not great for business considering who people's the neighborhood, but really conducive for pleasant drinking.

The food menu is conspicuously pizza-focused, and in fact has a leaning toward small Chicago-depth pizzas. This is no bad thing, and what we saw looked pretty good, but I am less in the market right now for American beer and Chicago pizza.

If you take my meaning.
03-6265-1779

No. 8 Bear Pond espresso, Shibuya

2011-07-28T15:50:00.002+09:00

You'll notice right away, because you're clever people, that this sign doesn't say 'Bear Pond'. It says 'ON THE CORNER' (although if I'm giving you credit for observatorial powers, you prolly knew that awready too).

This is because Shimo Kitazawa's famous and fairly fabulous espresso maniacal genius at Bear Pond has a branch shop in the front of On The Corner, an American diner-ish restaurant (that I would be into if I felt like eating diner food).

You should know a couple things. First, the master doesn't work here. That means you can't get a shot of espresso. He and he alone is qualified to pull shots from his special beans. The drinks are all espresso-based, but they won't serve you a separate one.

Second, like the head store, they have a strict no-photo policy. Yes, I am childish about such matters.

But the macchiato here is certainly up to scratch, at least by my uninformed standards.

Still, I recommend a pilgrimage to the original.

La Rochelle, Minami Aoyama

2011-07-28T13:55:00.062+09:00

The happy couple. Big Bird and I are discussing wedding venues as our Thursday-romantic-lunch series continues, and La Rochelle bills its chapel as Tokyo's Most Romantic. Not many restaurants have chapels at all, of course, so it's awfully convenient.

Also convenient is being expected, and they were nice enough to thank us for our coming. Even in retrospect I think we can agree that it's a good idea to say you want the 'web menu', wherein they take the chef's tasting and knock 20% off the price. 7 courses, ends up being pretty good value even though the kitchen is not quite on A-game. Maybe it's just because it was Thursday lunch, or maybe that's why we could book Thursday lunch.

Gol-lee, the starter plate was one of the weakest two of the course. The white asparagus soup with unidentified chunks was OK (one chunk seemed a lot like pork fat, but the other was squid, so maybe I wasn't thinking clearly on the first). A cube of vinegared fish in jelly. A chicken rillette spoon. And a mousse made from carrot leaves, with a curious lack of taste.

Fortunately things looked up with the steamed-lobster-raw-shrimp course, where the bugs were succulent and tasty, the sweet onions were interesting, and the middling taste and texture of the pink mousse filled in some gaps while also not attempting to take center stage (read as: didn't taste like much). The asparagus was erect.

The light shellfish sauce was poured on at the table.

Not for the first time, another smaller plate came with the main one. This was a shot of shellfish and vegetable dice (I'd like to say shrimp and asparagus) with a shrimpy soup and a shrimp foam. Nice.

The fish course was middling; again some attempts at technique that could be said to be middling successful. I'm not sure what to make of the plate design, with the parsley breadcrumb-wrapped flounder cigar on a stripe of pea mousse, the roasted red pepper stuffed with ratatouille-like mince, and the walabi and green beans wrapped up at the bottom. Interesting.

The light fish sauce was poured on at the table.

And the cigar turned out to conceal a sea urchin surprise.

We were kinda looking at each other by this time, like "Do we really want to have a reception here? Do we really want to get married at all, or should we find someone better?" The meat course saved the day, with a cylinder of Iberico pork wrapped in salami and roasted perfectly. Loved it. The purple potato and stuffed zucchini flower were mere distractions.

The light meat sauce was poured on at the table.

And the side plate was a cube of stewed pork belly bestrided by a hot cube of crumbed foie gras. Less good than it sounds.

The palate cleaner was herbal, not in an identifiable way. Also not in a way I found appealing. At all, really.

And the dessert, boy was this weak. It's supposed to be several preparations of a particular flower or herb; I thought the menu said fleur de mais, and I'd like to think that's 'cornflowers', but without the right accent mark..and certainly without the blue color. And without any particular flavor. Blah.

The light vanilla sauce was poured on in the kitchen. [HA! Gotcha!]

These chocolates, tiny cold souffles, sort of, were better. Ginger, lavender, and another flavor, and they were edible and tasty to varying degrees if not up to the technical standards that a lot of other restaurants achieve in their petits fours. I don't mean to be pissy here (even though I know it's sounding like it), and I don't mean to sound spoiled (ibid), but this costs the same as lunch at l'Effervescence, and the contrast in technical skill and flavor is stark.

The light lemongrass tea was poured in at the table after we sat for long enough to make them think we were settling in. Not that they were rude or anything; this is a perfect way to keep things going.

'Keeping things going' is almost certainly the theme of this restaurant. It's been open for a long time, and Iron Chef Sakai has been famous for many, many moons. Certainly they're doing stuff that was great in the 80's, and if it's gotten a bit tired, it still has some elegance and charm. Some.

By the way, what do you think of the ring I got Big Bird? Not too much, is it?

Such dainty hands.
03-3478-5645

Ta, Meguro (和創作　太)

2011-07-27T22:57:00.001+09:00

Yooooooshta. It's official. I have now been to all of the good sake places in Tokyo. Think you know another? Nope. Not good. This is the last one. Boo-yah! Good, I'm glad we could all agree on that. Back to work.

Chalk up another one, Jimmy, another of Tokyo's best i-zaka-ya's gone under the bridge. While it's only been open for a while, and resides in humble premises in a shabby corridor across from Meguro's west exit, Ta has got itself ranked among Tokyo's top in the genre.

Part of the problem is that it's crossing genre boundaries. The name tells you that right off, doesn't it? "Japanese Creative", big as life. I read this as an ambitious young chef who decided to do his own thing, without really worrying about whether it's izakaya or kappo or kaiseki or Japanese or not.

Of course, he can't get away from the fact that it's a tiny space with 9 seats (three couples and a threesome? It was last night.). And I'm not even sure he's ambitious. This seems more like a guy who loves to eat and is making stuff he loves, rather than a chef trained in the classics and executing innovations with laser-like precision, eyeing the big time of a larger restaurant in a nicer area. It's fun food, and very tasty, and he clearly loves what he does (one speculates that the 'Ta' of the name is either part of the master's name or else a reference to his slight globularity).

Enough digression; as he said, let's bochi-bochi and gradually look at things. We started with a nice sazae (as much as any boiled sea snail can be nice, but I think you take my meaning).

And then he sorta pulled out the stops with a cold, sour, summer medley - tomato and boiled eel topped with myoga, okra, lotus root, sea urchin, pickled plum, and a delightful dashi-vinegar jelly. This was very tasty, like a mashup of two or three summer kappo classics, but the toughness of the eel skin and the size of some remaining bone fragments showed limits in the technique.

For part the second, another mashup dish, this time shrimp, octopus, eggplant and sweet potato, all boiled together. Actually I'm sure they were boiled separately, which is a good thing. The octopus was a little slimy and fishy for my tastes; the other bits, excellent.

The sake is limited but quite deserving. I think there were maybe 8 varieties, but really they were all good. I was mildly irritated at first that the hand-written, single-card-sized menu just said what style it was for some of the offerings (I like to know more than "summer weak cloudy", don't you? That one is pictured, by the way.), but I got over it. It's a good list. There's no need to ask for more.

Hey, this is corn soup with yuba and junsai. I kinda feel like I can leave it there, and it could sum up the whole approach - east-west fusion in a good way, interesting but not egregious or condescending. And gelatinous and slimy.

Sashimi course (you'll see, especially from here on out, that we're in a pretty traditional course format) had sardine, Indian tuna, and...snapper? I've already forgotten. The Indian tuna is just not as good as real or 'black' tuna, but the other two fishes were excellent.

This was perhaps confronting - the squid rings and legs were barely cooked. The girolles were from France, and the tapenade had capers and anchovies mixed through it. In short, a weird but very engaging dish, especially if you like squid and don't mind who knows it.

Followed, as night follows day, by a fried course. This is eel (hamo) and snapper - where the most interesting points were the gummy, too-low-temperature-frying texture of the eel alongside the crispy, fun fried scales of the snapper. Try this at home.

What I wrote above about the sake list wasn't that convincing. The truth is, it's 2 AM as I write this, and a big bottle of Hato Masamune is getting the best of me. But let me present this as further evidence - it's an 'experimental' bottling from Hakuin Masamune. They brewed this 'old fashioned', they say, meaning they put a lot less water in after making the moromi mashi (if I understand all this stuff correctly. And who cares if I don't?). In practice, this means it comes out tasting like kimoto or yamahai, in any case thick and full of umami. And deliciousness.

Speaking of same, I love pork that's been marinated in miso. And here it is. Doesn't taste like this when I make it at home. Not sure who's at fault.

No fault can be found with this miso soup. It's got the smoky grilled eggplant from the summer dish at the top, plus myoga and mitsuba and other interestingly, adultily bitter veg and greens. It's a neat way to twist up the soup without overt complications.

It's simple, it's humble...no, it's mango cubes, passionfruit bits, and an orange sorbet. It's practically a real dessert, and a more than fitting end to an interesting and diverse meal. I feel quite mellow and appreciative toward this place in retrospect.

And the retrospect is what it's all about.
03-3779-0002

Hakata Ramen Center, Iidabashi (博多ラーメンセンター)

2011-07-26T13:34:00.001+09:00

Meeting everyone's favorite 'Cock is a good opportunity to explore rare neighborhoods. I mean, Kudanshita is rare for me, and he doesn't go out to lunch. For some reason Ikaruga wasn't doing maze-soba today, and I decided to boycott out of protest. As if all the other people in line cared. And on a back street several blocks farther north, there it was, a clean and new Hakata-style ramen place.

The funny thing about Hakata ramen is that they can serve it practically before you get a chance to sit down and look around. I always get 'tough' noodles, and the girl working the pot (wow!) boiled them for all of 10 seconds. Since they're thin, they come out perfect. I love everything about Hakata ramen, and this was a good bowl. Although from the nasty stink of boiling bones in the shop, you could tell it would be.

OK, now that we've got noodles, let's take a look around. What's up, ma peeps!

One of the best things about Hakata ramen is the interactivity. I like to eat some of the noodles, then pump up the soup by piling in the spicy pickles (sorta like kale) that should be in a jar on the counter (and call bullshit on any place that asks you to pay for them). After finishing the first batch of noodles, throw in some garlic - which these guys give you whole and fresh

and call for your replacement ball of noodles. Props to these guys for giving you extra onions on top (and these are onions imported from Hakata) and serving out of Indian curry dishes, even if they charge you Y150 for the noodles.

Which isn't cool.

03-3263-1023

Taniyan ramen, Monzennakacho (深川谷やんラーメン本店)

2011-07-25T13:33:00.027+09:00

This is on the outskirts of Monnaka, where Kasaibashi Dori bends down to meet Eitai Dori and it's hard to cross the street if you're walking to work - which I was, for several years. And the grease and stains on the yellow awning here kept calling me. Plenty of evenings I'd wobble by on my bike and think about trying it, but always resisted.

Well, it's pretty good. The inside is surprisingly big, and packed with crap, like they cater for three more restaurants and send all the food out the back for delivery when you're not looking. It's pretty boring, which is why you'll end up watching TV like me.

Wait, what's that box under the TV? Does it say 'live carp?' Are they putting them in the ramen?

No, they're keeping them in a tank in the corner.

Make that three tanks. Can anyone explain what carp have to do with ramen, other than being the hobby of the owners? They have carp-related posters on the walls, and the front door features a life-size cutout of a prize-winning red, white, and black beauty.

Incidentally, and in their spare time, they turn out a very decent bowl. The soup smelled like it was beef-derived, but after drinking it a while I just thought it was pork. Noodles, very nice, and coming in trays with their name on it. Old-fashioned fatty pork, but tasty and not objectionable. In short, a tolerable bowl that would like impress a dilettante and still please an expert.

Not meaning to imply I'm either.
03-3641-6824

Tetsu ramen, Shinagawa (つけめん煮干そば TETSU 品川店)

2011-07-22T22:36:00.051+09:00

Yeah, it was a pretty long night. After two izakayas, I just couldn't resist the Shinagawa ramen street on the way back to the station. At least I was able to split a bowl with someone, which in theory helped with the calorie count. In practice, don't be silly.

Tetsu is a really popular place. I mean, #14 nationally on ramendb as I write this. This is not the original - the end game for ramen these days is definitely to branch extensively - but it's still ranked #100 nationally (and second of the Tetsu-related shops). You could argue that the rankings are too skewed in favor of heavy, porky, fish-mixed soups, or you could get on with getting people seated like this guy was. Respect. Didn't blink when we asked to share a bowl.

It's very open-air, which would suck when it's so hot if they didn't cover the openings with clear tarps and use some aircon. Setsuden, my ass. It's a quite sort of place, and there were a lot of single diners.

But there's no option smaller than this, a regular tsukemen. The noodles seem good without being aggressively chewy or wheat-y, but of course the soup is the real point.

And it's a heck of a soup. Sometimes the fish-and-pork things can be tilted too much one way or the other. I think the common failings are insufficient fish or too much sugar, you may differ. This was very fishy, in an integrated way (note that it's niboshi, little dried fish, instead of bonito-based soup) and not so thick as to be gross.

Solid egg. Rather, gel-like egg. Good.

One other gimmick is the soup re-heater. Once we read about thsi and saw someone else do it, we had to get one. Wouldn't you? Your soup gets cold, you call for a heater, they bring over a pan and a spoon and one of these eggs,

And hell is unleashed in your bowl. I don't know if it has a lot of effect, but it has a lot of style. And that's what counts.

All that walking and fooding and hot-rocking is enough to tire anyone.

03-3443-2102

Hyotan, Shinagawa (和風居酒屋ひょうたん品川店)

2011-07-22T22:00:00.032+09:00

We pretty much struck out at the first place, not even completing our plan to wait there until our friends arrived but at least adding an amusing one to the file of losers. The next most likely-looking establishment was Hyotan, a few hundred meters down the road, and it turned out well. Certainly it had that yellowed and smoky look that comes from a lot of businessmen doing their time, but there weren't that many of them, and they weren't that smoky.

For some reason I liked the serving style on the night even though it's quite normal. This is basically a shochu 'library' place, with...ohhh, 50 or 60 varieties, maybe more. Who's counting? The sake is about 15 types, but good stuff. In particular they had a Kudokijozu jundai ('44', I think it was called) that was as predictably excellent as I expect their top end to be.

So let me just look at the food with you for a second. We were here for a while, and were 4 people most of the time, and that explains the volume.The pickled mackerel was quite good - sour and juicy. Grilled snapper, decent, quite fatty. Fried balls of something that I can only guess were fish-based, and have slipped my memory. Fried chicken butts, not as good as you'd hope; the best grilled ones are awesome. Chicken meatballs, a really weird version, not bad, but not to be repeated; I think you can tell from the color and shape that they're oddballs. Todd has become a big fan of 'tonkatsu salad', also known as shredded cabbage with wooster sauce, and while the waitress fairly quaked with fear at the strangeness of the order (it's just not done), we received it anyway. Finally, grilled bits included delicious duck, decent beef tongue, average chicken.

There you have it. Possibly the best place on the street, but I wouldn't even mind exploring the street for another night. It's long.

03-3471-6318

Kirakutei, Shinagawa (きらく亭)

2011-07-22T19:17:00.032+09:00

After a leisurely recidivist lunch at l'Effervescence we gradually worked all the way down to Shinagawa to meet the Todds...who were late because their kitchen went up in flames. Definitely a worthwhile excuse. Kirakutei was the most obviously 'sake' of the izakayas along the north Shinagawa shopping street (a piece of the old Tokaido, in fact), so we hit it.

The atmosphere is really nice! I love these long tables, and the display of vegetables, and the prolific if old-fashioned sake menu on the walls (broad range of Hakkaisan and Kubota, then more interesting stuff). Why the heck did this place stay empty for the whole time we were there?

Oh, right - the service is horrible. The woman working here is grumpy enough to turn anyone away, and as soon as we sat down we regretted being there but felt trapped. It's the style of service where she doesn't look at you, listens to your order, and walks off without acknowledging it, all with a grimace on her face. Other than that, great place!

Oh, right - there was salmon in the sashimi. You probably know by now that I regard this as the kiss of death. It's just that it all comes farmed from Norway, even if it's picked up at Tsukiji in the morning. And even if it tastes just fine (which I think).

So once our resolve to leave was set, the master brought us the other half of our first-round order. And this agedashi tofu was surpassingly light, salty, and delicious.

So we left a little confused, but with no intention to brave the waitress again.
03-5479-4740

Edamura Liquors, Tsukishima (越後屋枝村酒店)

2011-07-21T19:33:00.003+09:00

Ahhh, the depths of summer, when lonely single men's fancy's turn's to thought's of

Miss July! We stood right next to this calendar, and with the locals studiously ignoring us, had plenty of time to consider what day it was.

Miss July may have been the most attractive thing about Edamura,

Which is a classic-but-messier example of the liquor store that slaps a board across the counters, drapes a plastic marijuana-leaf sheet over same, and gets beers out of the cooler for a small charge. This one is messier; my favorite was the one I went to in Kamakura when my friend lived nearby and was a regular. They had draft beer in plastic cups, and that trumps canned Sapporo.

Nothing trumps the enjoyment of standing around with other marginally-coherent guys though, discussing the tribulations of the day, or in fact of life.

Perhaps one thing can trump that, actually...

Miss August!

03-3531-1715

Kanemasu, Kachidoki (かねます)

2011-07-21T19:13:00.059+09:00

There's nothing like an expensive and deeply disappointing French lunch to put you in the mood for an expensive and pretty gratifying...standing izakaya?!

Yes, this is the place Big Bird and I failed to enter previously because we arrived on a random closure day ("We will humbly take and honorable holiday on this day.") Fortunately we had had a late lunch, and thus after a short walk and brief train ride were able to arrive right before the 4 PM opening.

Along with half a dozen of our friends. Really, it was half-full by 4:15. I'll say this though - the atmosphere and prices are such that people are always coming and going, so if you stand outside for a bit, you'll get in.

Once you're in though, you'll be faced with the menu. I was feeling really dim-witted about my inability to read this, and had to keep asking the nice couple next to us for pointers. I kept asking if they could really read it, and they said yes, yes...until they admitted they were regulars and had at some point had to ask the staff what the heck the menu said. It doesn't change too much, so now they sound like pros. They like to say this is written in 'Kanemasu font', and you can't read it if you don't have it installed.

Well, let's eat. I do like junsai, and hadn't had any this year. These were excellent, really plump and slimy (er...), and of course I loved how they were kept in a coffee jar in the fridge. (Also pleased to see it was Koumibaisen, which is really good for instant coffee.)

The menu remained confusing...I didn't order hamo sashimi, which I love, because I was puzzled that it would be raw eel. Turns out you're supposed to know 'sashimi' means 'boiled' in this case. Now you can act like a regular too. This is hamo skin and cucumbers, tasty.

And this is what people come in for. I think everyone orders these, and I dunno why I couldn't take a good picture. This is some very fatty beef, I presume of high rank (I've only seen this 'fat, lightly marbled with beef' a few times), stuffed with excellent sea urchin. In fact the uni was from the same Hokkaido island that gave up our dinner uni in Ginza several nights before. Bird and I agreed, this is a little much - it's just uni wrapped in fat, and it's not clear the fat adds a lot. It's not beefy.

Here's the crazed genius behind Kanemasu. With his nonresponsive attitude, poor hearing, and general lack of interest in work, I wondered whether it was just a bad day. Our neighbors pointed out that he's about 83, so I think I can forgive him. Anyway, his son is working too, and will seemingly be in charge soon (if he's not already).

Dad was trained in Kyoto,which explains why this fish is called 'guji' on the menu. Nice try, but that wasn't enough to fool me, and it was cured in seaweed to firm it up, because amadai is gummy in its natural state.

After 30 minutes, the place seemed full. Fortunately, their policy is tantamount to 'no one turned away', so if there's half a space at the counter, a regular will wedge into it without so much as a 'seeemasen'. There's also the area at the back where they convert the kitchen door into a counter, and people just cram into that area. I can't see that it's much fun, but they keep doing it.

Another thing that seems popular is the kohada; pickled, butterflied and filled with a slice of cucumber, it's a nice idea.

Meanwhile, there's no such thing as a bad idea with tuna of this quality. I've seen other writers describe this as Oma tuna, the kinda that are caught on fishing lines, one by one, and sent fresh from the top of Aomori down to Tokyo. I have no evidence except my own tongue, and this was astounding (as it perhaps should be, for a Y1.8k hand roll).

The only hot thing we endeavored to assay was this Kyoto classic - duck meatball wrapped with a dumpling of lily root powder. While not as transcendent as the best versions of this classic (I mean all that - it can be transcendent, and I feel like I've had it enough times to know), the hidden nugget of sea urchin roe inside the duck was a neat touch.

Still a mystery to me how this place came to be. Did dad start with this purity of concept, "I shall craft a standing bar from the best ingredients," or did he set out to take over the kappo world and gradually downscale his ambitions to a standing format? Still, with the extraordinarily low overhead and high prices, this place must an absolute mint.

But we'll have to keep wondering , on all counts.

03-3531-8611

Aile Blanche, Azabu Juban (エルブランシュ)

2011-07-21T15:06:00.054+09:00

Juban, damn your branded hide. The last time I was this disappointed in a well-hyped restaurant was at Piatto Suzuki, just around the corner from Aile Blanche. In this case I at least had Tabelog on my side, saying AB is 25th best out of Tokyo's 1700 French restaurants, but for once even the rating failed.

I'm afraid my entry into the ladies-who-lunch club may be delayed, and my dining companion may defer future engagements.

This is a small restaurant - it's rather like a reasonably-sized apartment that was converted, and it has only 15-ish seats in this room, plus a small semi-private room behind a curtain, and what must be a tiny kitchen. I was puzzled by the service right away, but that's never enough to put me off my feed.

We didn't get to choose anything; the course just started. And we saw right away that we were in the land of large plates. This is a gazpacho, which was very herbal and quite good, topped Kitakata-style with small slices of cured ham, and cleverly hiding a set of melon balls (did I ever tell you that story about high school?). The melons were extremely soft and ripe.

And then...the magic happened. No, the home page describes the lunch course as "magic of foie gras plus 4 other plates", and this is the magic. A few bits of foie with sherry vinegar sauce and half a cherry. Pretty good, and probably enough at single-spoon size (picture not actual size).

I tend to look forward to quail; this was an exception. Actually, before I deride the quail, can I supply the most damning indictment possible of the fish course that preceded it? I forgot to take a picture. The horror. Anyway, the tai was a nice piece of fish, cooked reasonably well, and the accompanying vegetables were dull.
The quail was pretty dull too. It was a bit gummy, and there was something disturbingly artificial-tasting in the sauce (which I'm sure was laboriously crafted).

Fortunately the quail came with a nice bowl of palate-cleansing soup.

The light lemon flavor was quite refreshing.

And we finished up with the coconut panna cotta (I sure hope this was supposed to be a frozen dessert, because otherwise they didn't take it out of the freezer soon enough) with caramel sauce and passion fruit ice. The ice was extremely tart but also the best thing about the dessert (which was basically frozen coconut milk).

Honestly, the most interesting thing about the restaurant for me was the bathroom. This is the view you see while doing your business over the (auto-lid, tankless, Satis) toilet - a stalactite statue, crystal light fixture, and double-framed card of shapely hips and buttocks. This kind of quirk was the last thing I expected after our pedestrian meal, and it made me wonder if there's something better lurking in the kitchen, only coming out at night.

You want to find out? Go right ahead without me.

03-5439-4338

Maruzen tempura, Morishita (満る善まるぜん)

2011-07-20T14:24:00.020+09:00

Occasional visitors to Japan (hi Mom and Dad) will recognize this tiny, fading place as the one where we had lunch one day around 2005. Or not. It's in the row of places across from the north entrance to Morishita station, along with Fuji. It's a real get-there-before-they-die sort of place. So many of them are.

It was a late day today - on-off rain from the threatened but never quite instantiating typhoon kept me in and then got me wet when I went out. Maruzen was still open, and the master was quietly doing his thing. He's been here a long time - I remember on my first visit that he said he'd been running the shop for 42 years. If that's right, it's now 47 or 48. A man gets tired, frying every day like that. He doesn't look up a lot. While I ate, he kept his hand in a pot, gently kneading the dry flour he had just poured out of a new bag. Does that improve the texture?

His wife has been working alongside all those years. I wonder if she signed up for this or if it just happened.

They make a very classic tendon. I got the luxury version, 'cause I'm a luxury guy, and there were 2 shrimps, a piece of squid, a butterflied whiting, and another medium-small fish that I'm betting was a megochi. It would be just like an old-fashioned shop like this to throw in some real Edomae fish to round things out.

The two cucumber slices round things out too, but not very far.

03-3631-1931

Uoshin, Akasaka (赤坂とゝや魚新)

2011-07-19T13:45:00.064+09:00

It's a task, folks, picking restaurants all the time. When someone visits from out of town as has time for lunch, it's not such a burden. Chewy lives in Singapore and was staying in Aoyama, so Japanese in that area was required, and Tabelog came up trumps as usual. Uoshin is a quite expensive kappo at night, but does (relatively) reasonable lunch sets that show off the quality of their ingredients and cooking. It's part of a small group with divergent styles, but no relation to the other Uoshin chain you may be thinking of - higher-class.

It's a very adult place, a little dim, a tiny bit musty, a few spots on the walls; nothing that should turn you off, just the comfortable feel of an older, well-used restaurant (at dinner I'd be more put off by this). Getting there at 11:30 we were first, and we were also youngest. The staff seemed pleasantly puzzled by us. By the way, it's fun to have an assistant, because I can appear in my own pictures, sticking my ears out like this.

They also claim to specialize in sake, but it's not quite true. Of the famous brands they claim to carry, they had one bottle of each, and less-exciting selections at that. Just because I can, I tried this super-dry from Toyo Bijin, one of my favorite brewers.

Is this guy just the lunch master? It's possible, but he was awfully competent and well-informed. This is the kind of place that encourages food geekery, what with their laborious preparations and unusual ingredients.

Aaaaaand I've completely forgotten what kind of fish these eggs came from. You're thinking it's bream, I know, but it wasn't. As a starter for whatever course you get, this is cool.

But this is cooler, holy cow. Everything cold, everything pale and pretty. This looks so natural to me, with the lack of reds or oranges or anything.

In the back, the rice is their own chilimen jako, with lots of sansho. The cucumbers are pickled there. The togan was delicious. The potato left of the togan was a Koishikawa potato, from an island whose name I've forgotten. The dark blue-green eggplant down the front was bizarrely colored, and the real surprise was the flavor - cooked in a broth made of cherry-blossom shrimp. Wow. The beans are called 'Sengoku beans' (千石豆, nothing to do with Japanese domestic upheaval). Just left of the beans is, I kid you not, smoked eggplant in jelly (?). Below that, potato shoots and cooked sardines. The balls to the left, squid and shrimp. The beans with black sesame were something like snake beans, a long type. The omelet was hyotan-shaped, the grilled snapper was incredible, and the special addition of snapper liver in the square box in the back was a little gross.

Fortunately I heard the descriptions of everything twice since our neighbor got the same set. Otherwise who could remember all that?!

While we ate, the master made dessert. He already had a big sheet of kanten, a thick jelly made from Tengusa (skyweed?), a bushy, red seaweed. The got out a ruler and cut it into precise strips. The precision was because he was going to feed it into his old-fashioned extruder and make tokoroten, the jelly noodles you see at left. These are then covered with a sauce of brown sugar and garnished with a rehydrated apricot. It is extraordinarily like eating seaweed, but in chewy, slimy form, with brown sugar. No.

Chewy, meanwhile, got a special dessert of tomato stewed in sweetened wine (too stewy for me) with champagne jelly that she made me eat 'cause she's allergic. That's what colleagues do, they help each other.

Good luck in the new job!

Toto? Ya.
03-3585-4701

Sasahana, Ginza (ささ花)

2011-07-16T21:48:00.007+09:00

There are a few places in Tokyo that I believe in enough to go back to, and a very few that I feel compelled to post more than once about. Sasahana is one of them. The attraction here is that you get the full-on Ginza kappo treatment for less money than you'd expect. In the middle row, the beef he's cutting is actually tuna. In the bottom row, the sea bass filet is actually eel. This is what they mean by 'ingredient quality'.

Something I didn't realize before is that the sake list is extraordinary. It's very rare to see a 'toubin' sake, one that's been stored in an 18-liter bottle, but they had about 10 of them. And Kouro, you never see that (but now that I've had it twice, I really think it's another example of the inventor being eclipsed by its followers.).
5250-3317

Botanica, Roppongi

2011-07-16T15:09:00.043+09:00

It's a rare day that I have lunch at 11:30. It's even rarer that I go to Roppongi for it, and rarer still that I enter the rarefied air of the Midtown restaurant floors. Always seemed like they were a bit too fancy, but for a family lunch with someone, it's just the ticket. Botanica was designed by Terrence Conran (and partners), with a focus on plants and leaves and the nice garden that's visible outside the restaurant due to the way they've set up the interior volumes. Being celebratory, we had the top (C) course.

The first plate is salmon; I'm unclear if it was smoked or cured, but was a nice piece of filet and a good fish. Topped with cream and crunchy bits, that could have been a good plate by itself. They went a step further with the salady stuff, and then a step too far with the mango segments and puree.

Asparagus soup; cold, fresh, and positively tumescent with asparagus flavor.

May I point out at this juncture that while the design is Conran-led, the kitchen is Aso-influenced? It's part of the 'Aso Group', in case any manical Aso fans need to go for completism's sake. But it's also part of the Hiramatsu Group. Are they one group? Are there 20 restaurants? Is it in fact a chain? The mine boggles. Please set me straight if I'm wrong.

Lobster risotto, definitely a highlight; the American sauce delicately napping the perfectly al dente rice was a hit at the table (just like that sort of language could be a hit with international readers). Seriously, it's rare and nice to get big pieces of lobster like that.

Chicken from Saga, either topped with bacon or else with the skin cooked in such a way as to precisely simulate bacon. The bacon was the best part of this, although the chicken was delicious too. The fried onions, a bit limp, and the soup bits, a bit soupy (cooked-down turnip, we thought).
A disappointment that this is the inclusion in the top course, considering the trouble they go to in describing their specialty as aged beef.

Who would've thought, but the 'jumble' dessert was a real winner. You know I'm usually quite cranky about Japanese chefs being lazy about dessert and throwing together mounds of assorted ingredients, but here the melon, melon ice, (delicious) panna cotta, and thyme jelly and thyme leaves were a fascinating combination. I could eat this again and again.

Indeed, better than eating cats.
03-5413-3282

Tonari ramen, Toyocho (トナリ)

2011-07-15T15:01:00.032+09:00

This place is right next to one of Tokyo's best ramen shops, Bigakuya...and it routinely has much longer lines. Why's that? And what's a 'tanmen' anyway? I went around 2:30 to find out.

Ohhh, that's why there are long lines. It's Jiro-style ramen. People love that stuff these days, don't they? No-frills, low prices, massive volume. Mostly men, many of them wearing sweaty shirts and dripping sweat in their soup. I wish I could have gotten a picture of the guy wearing a headband to eat. He was serious about his food; the headband and the gut were instant giveaways.

OK, wackiness time. Not for the first time this year, it turns out to be vegetable-only Jiro-style ramen. This is really the list of toppings, so it includes pork and kamaboko, but I promise there's no meat going on in the soup.

There is some meat going on at the bottom. I think they called it 'added protein' or something - side orders of gyoza or fried chicken. Huh?

This could be why there's a line, or at least another reason. In a world where people boil up and pile up mountains of bland bean sprouts, these guys mix all the toppings together in a tasty dressing. They like having their pictures taken too.

Another little twist - they don't put garlic on it. But they do follow the Jiro pattern, asking "Do you want ginger?" Presumably you could then do the mashi-mashi ordering style or something.

Should we pause to reflect on the majesty of this bowl? The volume? The special wide, flat noodles from Kaikarou? The brown meatiness of the soup? Or should we move on to our side order?

Nooooooo! The Y160 upcharge for 'tan-gyoza' gets you a Y400 full order of gyoza. Noooooo!

Well, they were delicious at least.

This is the point where I started to get scared.

Unfortunately, it was also the point where I started to enjoy the soup and get into the groove.

Meaning that this is where I finished up. The soup is really incredible. You can tell there's no meat, but it's so thick and rich you can't stop.

Did I ever mention my high school nickname?
03-5632-8777

Okagesan, Yotsuya (萬屋おかげさん)

2011-07-14T21:35:00.110+09:00

There is a mythical izakaya in Yotsuya. One that's so popular, so well-regarded, that it's booked a year in advance. The web site advises not to bother trying to book. "We'll let you know when we have room," they say.

This is not the story of that izakaya. It's a different one. Sorry about that. How the hell am I supposed to get in to an izakaya that's booked a year out? This is still a perfectly good one, and well-known. I was at Isetan before meeting Woods for dinner, and in the sake section there was a big selection of Kozaemon being poured by a young guy from the brewery. I said I was going to Yotsuya after leaving him, and despite hailing from the wilds of Gunma, he said "Ah, Okagesan?"

So there it is. Sort of ship's galley in aspect, and very much in the dirty-basement class that so often shows promise and yields good things.

As long as you're interested in this type of atmosphere.And most people are, right? I called to book and asked to sit at these two seats in the corner since they looked like the best. The master told me that the seating is first-in, best-dressed, so no, and went on to say that they're a very small store, so I should really let them know if my plans change. I can only imagine this sort of thing is indicative of the crush that must have fallen on them after winning a Michelin star. And I can only imagine that awarding a star to this place, and not to a dozen others that spring to mind, is a tacit admission by Michelin that they'd like to acknowledge the izakaya space, but have no idea how to cover and understand the depth that it offers in Tokyo.

Okage san is a good mix - you can see that atmosphere, the sake list is world-class, and the food is good to very good.

Here's some of it, starting with the sake serving style as usual - generally in kataguchi, with a selection of cups for you to choose from. They told us to take two at the beginning for comparison purposes, but then we just alternated between those. Food-wise, you've got some okala there; then water eggplant, barely pickled; smoked tofu and barley-miso tofu, their sashimi selection including the yellow gratings of bottarga on top; and finally a patch of chopped aji namerou. Again, all good, but not especially great. Not that I'm so opposed to this sort of thing, exactly, but the master really encouraged us to get assorted sashimi. The aji only arrived about 40 minutes later, I think once he had collected enough orders to make it time-efficient to make a whole batch.

The sake list is indeed world-class. So much so that the master advised us it was mostly small brewers, so we probably hadn't heard of any of them. This is a reasonable thing to think about two foreigners, but saying it is a little different. Anyway, the special bottling of Matsu no Tsukasa on the left caught my eye - with my general fascination for Shiga sake and specific resolution to drink more from this brewer. In the middle, the master foisted this very chunky Naraman sparkling nigori on everyone around the bar, and on the right we got back to what we really wanted to drink, which was Juyondai Aiyama jungin. And it's as close to perfection as nature allows.

"How's the hot food," I hear you asking, and if you've been following along you know that we've come to that point in the evening where my grumpiness about pacing dictates we get stuck into the heated options. On the left two types of grilled fish; I confess I can't remember how the bottom one was preserved, but I know they were out of heshiko. Middle, the master again kindly offered everyone the opportunity to order boiled eel, and we availed ourselves further of the pot of oden simmering mid-bar. On the right, deeeelicious fried chicken; fish bones 'n' bits, fried; and fried spring rolls of scallops and cheese. The oden and chicken were my favorites out of this, but the menu should be big enough to support anyone's tastes.

There it is - obviously a very good izakaya. I'm unneccessarily grumpy about being offered things (it all goes back to this time when a sushi chef ignored my clear "No, we don't need that" and served two grilled steaks of Oma maguro. I would say in turn that was a clear ploy to get rid of his expensive, perishable inventory.). It should also be said that there aren't enough staff here, so you'll struggle to get their attention and will also have to wait odd amounts of time for whatever you order. Okagesan has seemingly ascended into the class where reputation is part of the equation and you have to be happy with what you get, when you get it.

Still, less grumpy people could probably love it. Oh, it's pretty expensive too. Did I forget that?
03-3355-8100

l'Effervescence, Nishi Azabu

2011-07-14T14:34:00.091+09:00

Several months ago I noticed this frightening place way up in the back streets northwest of Nizhi Azabu crossing. It just looked too good. But when I started doing my research for the 'degenerate ladies who brunch instead of work' series recently, l'Effervescence turned out to hugely-rated and yet strangely reasonable for lunch. Like a lot of things, my concept of 'strangely reasonable' has changed a bit in the last few years. It seems like only yesterday that I was flabbergasted at spending a similar amount at l'Auberge.

My dining companion had already arrived, and she was already wearing a festive lampshade. Isn't it early for that, you degenerate?

We felt a bit out of place. This could be for a multitude of reasons that distinguished us from everyone else - we weren't Japanese, we weren't dressed to show our high status, we were both male,and we were sweaty. At least I was. Suffice to say, l'Effervescence has every bit the atmosphere, elegance and service of a multi-star Michelin restaurant. I don't keep up with these things, but I would guess they'll have 2 stars next year (since they only opened in September 2010).

Lunch starts pleasantly, with a bubbly glass of raw shrimp and tropical bits and fennel sprigs, plus an orange sorbet. The mediocrity of my memory is trumped only by the mediocrity of the photo, but I do remember the shot growing on me through the three or four spoonfuls required to finish it. Just great for an unannounced starter.

The butter, too, is bubbly (the restaurant's themes are bubbles and childhood, which is a funny mix for such an upper-class place, but Namae san is doing it right and without pretension). This was good butter,

but the bread was awfully good. We only got two refills each, so we didn't find out if they stock more than the four types of bread they served us. All were good enough that I've taken up a whole paragraph telling you about them.

Personally I thought there was only one way to go among the two lunch courses (OK, three, but the other one isn't the great value of the ones we got), but the Bird differed. This is his simply-grilled ayu with watermelon balls, citrus sauce, and dabs of gray paste made from ayu innards.

And this is my New Caledonia prawns with orange paste, prawn mousse, red vinegar (the tiny cubes), plus a mound of cabbage with bacon. Stupendous prawns. You can tell how much better it was because the picture is bigger than the above.

The chef's specialty is a 4-hour-roasted turnip, served on slate with parsley sauce and brioche crumbs. It's roasted at very low temperature, so the texture of raw turnip is thankfully still there (on a day like today, you could probably accomplish the roasting by putting raw turnips out in the street in the morning, then bringing them in at lunch), and then it's cut and pan-fried to brown the surfaces. It's really good. If you're going to specialize in something, it might as well be something awesome.

I wouldn't like to call Laguiole knives a nod to Michelin,

But you could have cut this Shinshu Premium Wagyu with a spoon. The flavor was astounding. The red daikon puree and nasturtium petals and leaves did nothing to harm the overall presentation either. The contrast between the beef and the raw, spicy flavors of the vegetables was great.

Great as well was this apple pie filled with , guinea fowl ragout and raisins. heavily spiced, and more than a little in the manner of an actual pie, some would describe this as too sweet. I think they'd be wrong. We counted almost 15 vegetables in the salad, but no particular mention was made.

For desserts, the lesser course again included an interesting diversion - 'light as air' Montblanc, in which the place of the cream was taken by meringue discs filled with chestnut puree. The base of the tower also concealed a whole, cooked, sweetened chestnut. One might be excused for calling this slightly precious, but it was also tasty.

While this 'bunch 'o stuff' dessert turned out to be a flavor-packed bomb (and I mean that to have a good meaning). The first surprise was the foam - see it glistening? It's because there's a lot of oil in it, and it's got a strong, arresting, citrus flavor. The log is pineapple. The lower ball is caramel mousse (in fact, was it yogurt?). The upper ball is vanilla ice cream (vanilla in that from-Tahiti way that reminds you why vanilla got to be the most popular flavor, not just the whitest and blandest of flavors). The dark crumbs are coffee beans. What the? It's all tropical, and somehow it fits together. While eating I had the strongest impression that this would fit right in at Can Roca - reminded me in form and flavor of the Tresor by Lancome dessert I had, but continuing in that vein the surprise inclusion of coffee beans (crunch, bitterness, contrast) was almost like that Trip to Havana thing (sometimes a cigar is just a dessert).

For finishers to go with the very good coffee, we got high-quality macarons, little apples that turned out to be gently-dyed lychees in chocolate cups, and chocolate Chupa Chups with a pop-rock surprise inside, finishing off the meal with an effervescent twist.

This is just a bad picture; it was in no way dark outside or in, and we were sad as anything to leave the extremely good staff and return to the 35-degree heat, wondering what just happened.

Really good. I have nothing else to say.

03-5766-9500

Fuki, Ningyocho (地酒と趣肴風貴)

2011-07-13T21:33:00.040+09:00

Well, we didn't have that much luck at Kyowa, but it was early. Walking around left us in from of Fuki, which I had previously noticed as having some of that thar sakay stuff. Initially we were impressed by the seriousness of the master, who was sitting near the cash register working on a laptop. Subsequently we were unimpressed by his disinterest in us and his clear desire to get back to the laptop instead of cooking. I think he used to be more serious in his approach, and could be great again if it wasn't later on a weeknight like tonight, when the lack of customers gives him the opportunity to get really submerged in Angry Birds.

Because hey, the food's pretty good. The sake menu's there if you want to get into it, then some mashed soy bean meal (can't remember what I've called okara in the past), spinach, fish escabeche, fried flounder (yum), herb-roasted chicken (yum yum). The chook in particular took forever to arrive, because the master dispatched the waitress to roast or possibly even microwave it, several times, until he judged it was ready for him to put the finishing touches on. We just sat there watching it grill, but I have to say it tasted great by the time it was done, fairly 'exploding with herbal essence' or somesuch. The menu's not huge though, so let's assume you've now seen the best things on it.

For all those haters who claim there's no such thing as summer sake to cover up for their non-stockage of same (this actually happened to me last week), we drank a smattering of blue-label beverages. Left is the Ishitsuchi (embarassingly, I noted that this is the cheaper of the two summer versions they're selling; it's more refined than the other, but uses in part rice from Hyogo, while the more expensive one is only Ehime rice. That's all I can figure to explain the price difference.), right is a Fumotoi from Yamagata. I usually always like Yamagata sake, but this one, not so much. It didn't taste like summer sake should, in my limited understanding - too heavy, not acidic enough.

I wouldn't say this place requires further exploration, but the fact is, it's a perfectly good place and wouldn't take you wrong if you needed something in the area.
03-3668-3545

Kyowa, Ningyocho (活魚料理京和)

2011-07-13T20:31:00.020+09:00

Marketing, my friends, is a bitch. I saw this place a bunch of times and was attracted to the modest exterior and the legend "Tai-shu Kappo", which I interpret to mean "Classy cookin' for reg'lar folks". Things were a little too regular when someone and I got in, to wit just one other table eating some tired-looking fish, and the master sitting down behind the counter. Sitting down! The nerve. We exchanged glances...actually, we had a whole conversation in English along the lines of should-we-just-leave, but nothing ventured, nothing paid.

Fortunately I've learned to tame my ordering tendencies over the years, and can start slow at sketchy places. I can't go past water eggplant; the guy at my favorite local vegetable shop told me they'll be rare and expensive this year, and so far it seems like it. This was a huge specimen, lightly pickled, and was as good as you could want. Well, maybe the pickling solution could have been better, but why quibble?

It was the fish that did it. The pickled mackerel was dry and overdone, and after the first piece of this, we quickly resolved to finish our shared bottle of beer, not order anything else, and head out to look for another place.

I guess that pretty much precludes you from getting into this place, right?
03-3664-7248

Kishidaya, Tsukishima (岸田屋)

2011-07-13T18:31:00.053+09:00

Kishidaya. I live near here. It's famous. Why did it take me 7 years to get there?

Easy. They open at 5. It's popular. I mean, get-there-before-they-open popular. Who has time to do that? Who doesn't work on weekdays?

These guys, hahahahahaha. In fact, we tried to go to another place nearby that's almost as well-reviewed except more for regular folks, not a tourist destination like Kishidaya. It opens at 4 and fills up just as fast. And was closed randomly on a Wednesday in the summer. So there we were nearby, at 4:05. We could've been first in line at K-ya, but we walked around the block once, and anyway there were two of us, so we had to be second and third by the time we got there. Or tied for second, maybe. I'd advise getting there by 4:40, latest.

By the way, dude, it looks really natural.

At 5 sharp the waitress comes outside, rustles around with the curtain - no pretension there, they've got liquor - and apologizes to everyone that they had to wait. You file in and sit down and get served in the order you were waiting.

This is an atmosphere place, no question about it. There are eating places, and there are drinking places, and there are atmosphering places. This is one of those places. If you're one of the lucky entrants - and you'd better be in the top 15, because the next 5 sit facing the wall, and after that no one gets in - you get to sit around the big u-shaped counter feeling like you belong there, chatting with the other regulars who pretend that it's no big thing to wait in line for beer at 5 PM.

I'll tell you this though - for a cheap and atmospheric place, they have half a dozen OK sakes. This Kawakame was really soft, well-rounded and inviting.

Yes, insert that joke here.

And I'll tell you this for free too, the food's pretty good for a cheap place (2 beers, bottle of sake there, all this food, Y5k. Christ, I paid that to open a bottle of wine one time.) The nuta is supposedly famous, so I'm glad I ordered it - onion and trash seafood with vinegar miso sauce, delicious. Spinach with black sesame, delicious. Hobo sashimi, a good version; hobo is a soft-but-chewy fish that you might not like, sort of like ankou. Katsuo, good. Those little fish, I can't remember what they were called...urume, I think. They were like twigs, hard as hell to bite through the spines, but the heads were nice. I smoked mine. Skate fin. Grilled golden-eye. Yum.

Hell, I'm glad we went here! I'd almost go back, on a day when I wasn't working. Unfortunately there are other atmospheric early-openers beckoning, so the triumphal return to Kishidaya, with trumpets, will have to wait.

Not forever, I hope.

03-3531-1974

Ooki, Asakusa (大木洋食店)

2011-07-12T13:58:00.006+09:00

I rolled around for hours in the heat, looking at and passing by lunch options one after another. Down a wide but empty street, Ooki stood out. Mostly by the way it retreated into the scenery, humbly nestling behind the tree.

It was already 1:30, and there was no sign of life inside except a voiced-over version of Snatch on the telly. After a few hellos, Ooki san shuffled out from the back room. He was maybe hiding, because I know he was just sitting at the table watching TV before I got there.

For some reason I didn't ask how long he's been at it. Didn't seem proper. From the thin greasiness, I would judge that it could be 50 years, every day from 11 to 9. The framed sign in the center of this picture says today's special is katsu curry. I think that was yesterday's special too, if you take my meaning. Ooki san takes pictures and hangs them around the place, plus other things he likes.

And if you're nice, he'll make you lunch. For me, it was an omrice. This is a big, big one. He fried the rice a lot, with fatty beef that made it delicious, in a pan so old it must be doing a lot for the flavor too. The omelet was completely dry, the way I like it, none of this fancy runny-egg omelet. There's more ketchup than you can shake a stick at; someone thought I must have put this on myself because there's too much for a normal person, and only a weirdo would go crazy like this. I guess Ooki san and I are crazy the same way. He gets up and rides his bike in the morning too, as I learned.

And then we just sat and watched the movie, neither of us understanding it, each for his own reason.

03-3872-0610

Chibakiya ramen, Kasai ()

2011-07-11T13:08:00.000+09:00

Aaaaaah, relaxing bike rides to the countryside for ramen. You know what really puts the icing on that cake? Making sure the store is open first. I arrived in North Kasai to find that the 'closed on Tuesdays' policy at my target shop doesn't apply on the occasional Monday in summer. After a brief interlude at a really good sake store nearby, I ended up at mama's recommended shop, the somewhat famous Chibakiya. The have about 5 branches aside from this head store, but all far-flung - the nearest is Yokohama, and there's even one in Sendai (where the founder hails from, I surmise, because they have a beef tongue topping option).

Nothing happening inside, just 4 guys standing around, watching the streets shimmer from the heat (Tokyo hit 97 yesterday; paved suburbs like Kasai maybe more) and waiting for the odd customer to take out their excess energy.

Strangely, their welcomes were muted; they spend the most energy on saying "Please take your time!" which everyone says loudly and almost in unison.

But they work fast and serve a very nice bowl of shina soba, basically old-fashioned Tokyo ramen but with a bit better noodle and maybe a more refined soup (which was worth drinking - clean and simple, no floating fat, just onions). Very thick and meat pork. You can see the egg was a touch overcooked, but that's no crime when you're boiling them by hand and not in no fancy circulator gadget.

Hate them things, I do.

03-3675-3300

TGI Friday's, Shinagawa

2011-07-10T20:58:00.004+09:00

I've been accused of a willingness to blog anything. That's pretty true, although I've never stooped to the level implied by the original comment by writing about a convenience store. This is close...

So we were hanging out with Todd and his family, and after we got tired of eating whipped cream-jalapeno chips and drinking Gassanryu and the sun went down, we went out.

Where all the beautiful people hang out in Shinagawa.

I've been unfair to Shinagawa, I suppose. In particular, this shotengai near Kita Shinagawa seems very good - even on on shuttered Sunday night, it was pretty clear there plenty of interesting shops. I can console myself that that's a whole station away, and the near districts of Shinagawa are still pretty dull, but there's also a nice ramen street under the tracks on the west side south of the station. They have branches of Tetsu, Setagaya, Kibi, and then a bunch of good-looking alternates.

But the cool people are definitely hanging out at TGIF. Especially the foreigners in tank tops. Which was NOT me and Todd, I hasten to add.

Having already had lots of whipped cream and jalapenos, no one was particularly hungry, but we got some Moscow Muletts and desserts. This is the famous 'Cheerio Ice Cream', sort of like huge ice-cream-filled Oreos. Come to think of it, why don't they call them Oreo Ice Cream?

And this is a big, junky, unsatisfying brownie sundae. In America, you can get much better than this - the brownies can be moist, and the sauce can be hot and fudgy. We'll do it up.

Todd and Chiquita were already doing it up. Hell, there's nothing wrong with TGIF. You know what, you can sit outside, you can get junk food, the view is pretty cool, it's not expensive. If you want warm and dignified treatment, community involvement and home teaching, go to Leatherby's. I'll be over with the normal folks.

Going to hell.
03-5798-2755

Ohara et CIE

2011-07-09T20:54:00.001+09:00

Many years ago I visited the confusingly Irish/Japanese-named Ohara (and who knows what the CIA means either?) as one of the very last lunches I ever ate as a Roppongi-based worker. Reading that review gives me more confidence in my much-derided one-visit policy - it was mainly the same when we went for dinner, although of course much more involved. It's a nice place. However, there is no reason in the world for it to get the same Tabelog scores as Merveille.

The stairs down are directly across from quality Italian purveyor Oggi Dal Matto, and of course these blocks of Nishiaz are quietly packed with other great restaurants.

Ohara seems to be doing a good business in events. The web shows how you can trick out the stairs and open atrium at the bottom to be perfect for intimate weddings, while the large doors and glass wall into the restaurant would make it perfect for a reception.

Our only special event was of course "Saturday Night Dinner", and thus I had asked for a reasonable course. It seems like a la carte isn't an option on the weekend, but you can choose how much you'd like to pay for your chefs omakase. The 8 courses over there sound like a lot, but it was a very well-judged volume of food. Extra points for the named menu.

And extra extra points for serving some interesting stuff - this is an onion pot de creme (or something) with karasumi and daikon. I didn't remember any Japanese influence before, and it was quite arresting to have these (store-made) dried fish eggs right up front. Fortunately they were much better than the imported Australian ones I had grated onto our lunch pasta.

Next was a salad...

But the salad has a secret, and the secret is pork-foot terrine, beautifully pan-fried. Years ago, the gelatinous bits of foot remaining in here would have put me off. Now, I can focus on the browning and the crunch, and it's a nice plate. Great salad dressing too. How do they do that?

As if there wasn't enough wa in the karasumi, we also received an amusing egg custard royale. In fact a chawanmushi made from local clams, topped with soup and fresh nori. This was really delicious, and if you're going to make chawan mushi, it might as well be like this.

In keeping with the tendency for things to look much worse in pictures..

This is a nice piece of sea bass, topped with a highly-seasoned scallop mousse. And the bok choy in the back conceals a delightfully-seared scallop too. The best thing about this plate, however, was easily the champagne-tomato-cream sauce, which made us wish the bread was served a bit more regularly so we would have had something to finish the sauce with.

Moving on, it's a nice melon granite to clear the tongue for...

The delicately curry-flavored quail. I tell you, as I always do, that it's damn rare for the main meat dish to be the highlight of the evening, but this was it, no question. I remembered the quail very fondly from my first visit ('best ever' seems to stick in my memory), and while this was grilled instead of boned and stuffed with liver dressing, it was extraordinary. And not at all curry-flavored. Oddly, the potato gratin was also exemplary, and the vegetables were notable (sorta like the above-mentioned Oggi) for being very, very flavorful. Nice one, O'Hara.

One can't expect much after that, and our expectations were met with a dull blanc manger with mango sauce. The coconut ice was really good though - grainy like they had just frozen up some coconut milk, and quickly melting, but still delicious.

Of the petit fours, the fresh chocolates deserve mention for their awesomeness. The others, not so much.

You'll pay a 10% service charge here (which still doesn't make the whole assemblage overpriced). The head waiter is excellent if a bit formal, and justifies the charge; the other staff are a bit young and feel unsure of themselves and the food, like you wouldn't want to ask them any questions in case they flustered beyond all recognition. Also, I wonder why the kitchen can't maintain a good flow with 14 customers who are all on omakase courses.

That waiter took a picture of almost every other table with this instant camera. We were hideously snubbed and wondering what was up with that. Turns out there's a special-event course option that includes embossed cakes, champagne and photos, and this is the popular Saturday-night thing to do. I wonder why O'hara feels like he needs to market the place as a date-night, wedding, special-occasion venue. It's plenty good without gimmicks.

Aside from the food, my favorite moment of the night came when the waiter was seeing us off outside and I presented my card. (Yeah, I had cards made up for the blog. They just say 'Jon' and have the address and email. Now that I got them, I don't really like giving them out because it feels like "Haha, you've been inspected!" but I'm just trying to be friendly.) As soon as he saw it, his face droppedand his mouth turned slightly with a distinct look of "Shit, we've been inspected. Did anything go wrong for this table?"

Nope, not really.
03-5785-3485

Yoshiki Sushi, Nihonbashi

2011-07-08T14:37:00.057+09:00

Yoooooosh (iki). As of today, I no longer lunch in Greater Otemachi. I trust that the 453 entries for Otemachi, Marunouchi, Nihonbashi, Tokyo, and Kanda will tide you over if you need ideas for lunch or dinner.

But for now, let's party! Several weeks ago, Shaft and I entered into a long process of negotiation that ended up with us having lunch today. She finished her pre-lunch meeting and off we went - I had booked Yoshiki, and a good job of it, because it's the highest-rated non-ridiculous sushi 'joint' in the area that's open for lunch. It never ceases to amuse me how foreign writers love to say 'sushi joint', even when paying $100+ for their sushi. It also never ceases to amuse me to make vague and unamusing jokes about foreign writers, like my writing is somehow better. You know what this picture shows? Yes. The sign and stairs. It's right across from the Mandarin, and would actually be a good option if you were staying there.

Nice interior - you can tell it's a cut above a lot of places. There was no particular abuse or anything going on between the two chefs, but the waitress was notably unable to keep up with business. We think she must be related to the owners. While we're on it, let me mention that they have quite a decent list of sake for a sushi place. We went crazy and had a go of Ugonotsuki, but could equally have gone for a special-class Shimehari Tsuru jungin, or even Juyondai Honmaru (theoretically).

They did a nice job of pacing, not rushing us to eat (the Y3.2k tokujou nigiri set). This is a snapper, then squid, then golden-eye, and all three pieces were notably delicious as well as a bit thicker and warmer than usual. This lets you taste them more, and they were really worth tasting.

Next 'course' was a whole akagai (see the 'skirt' pieces hanging off?), incredible chutoro, and excellent vehicle shrimp. You can see by my use of adjectives that I enjoyed these; they really were a level up from the usual sushi lunch that you have, even (for example) the similarly-priced one that I was embarassed to take Victorious to in Asakusa.

Mmmmmmmmm.

Obvious points here - salmon eggs (nothing special), crab that made us both go "Wow" because it tasted strongly and deliciously of crab (admit it, this is not common in crab sushi) and otoro (meh. I prefer chu; it's more cohesive and integrated.).

A piece of eel. Very interesting style, extremely soft and with a distinctive sauce not like other places. Rollz, meh. Expecially too bad that the akami wasn't nearly as good as the other tunaz.

I was sitting there looking at the rolls of fish liver in the case (which was all ice-cooled, by the way, old school) and Shaft admitted as to how she likes them, so I ordered two pieces, tan-pin, as we say in New Jersey. They were good, but the first batch I made at home (Christmas) was better.

Throwaway dessert after the very good miso soup (which, again, they didn't try to foist on us during our meal) - peach jelly with whipped cream. Still, it's in the course, so not bad.

I know it's crazy, but right now I'm thinking that Y3.2k for sushi of this caliber at lunch is in fact of the Highest Cool.

Yo-ho-ho-hoooooosh. Iki.
03-3274-6800

Coulis, Shintomi

2011-07-07T14:10:00.000+09:00

There are a few places in Tokyo that I believe in enough to go back to, and a very few that I feel compelled to post more than once about. Coulis is one of them. Y1800 for these four courses? Seriously? How do they stay in business? Feeding off the souls of the dead restaurants that come and go in their basement?

Gyoro-Gyoro, Nihonbashi (魚櫓魚櫓)

2011-07-06T22:49:00.023+09:00

Yooooooshta. It's official. I have now been to all of the good sake places in Tokyo. Think you know another? Nope. Not good. This is the last one. Boo-yah! Good, I'm glad we could all agree on that.

I mean, it's pretty obvious that they've got something going on; with a head store elsewhere (Shibooya, I think), and another branch in this little block of Muromachi, they get a little buying power and can indulge the sort of sake purchases that let them post a bunch of used labels around the door. Never a bad sign.

Today I explained me theory of life and izakayas to Shoe (making his one-and-only appearance in these pages, but of course still rating a nickname). He tried to order deep-fried food in the first round and I said hey, man, howzabout we hold off on the heat until later? Once I went through the whole "Kaiseki has a sequence for a reason, and there's nothing stopping you from imitating that sequence with an izakaya menu" thing, he agreed. Out of politeness, one imagines. It was good conversation; funny how even after many years people can still say things that remind you to challenge your thinking.

And challenge to eat rare fish! Again we foreswore to order the standard 3 or 5-variety set, striking out boldly by ordering only the three varieties we wanted (two of which weren't included in the sets). The snapper was probably the highlight here, but the huge slices of bonito were pretty good too. This was on the upper end of mid-priced.

This is a pretty good sake menu, isn't it? 14 varieties, two of which were out of stock already (at least two, I suppose), and two off-menu additions (including 14-day Honmaru). I was especially struck by the inclusion of both Azakura and Senkin, thinking as usual that they're nipping across the bridge to Kiyosumi to shop at Tokyo's best sake store, Echizenya. We started with the same Taka sparkling nigori that You and I had last Friday, then moved on to nibble a few more. I especially liked the Genbu, top middle, which is made by Kawanakashima (I say again, one of the oldest brewers, since 1540, as well as referring by name to the famous battle where (if I have this right) Takeda Shingen gave food to the enemy's army so they could have a more glorious battle. Nice one.). The Senkin was terrific, notably different than the others, more refined...just better. Oh, I drank some Azuma Ichi and now find it lacking compared to some of the other famous Saga brewers (Amabuki, Nabeshima), it tastes old-fashioned and clumsy, although that could be the heat influencing my view.

Water eggplant and cucumber, a bit heavy on the vinegar and other saucy appointments, but so early in the season it's great to get these; cold boiled pork salad, another favorite in summer; octopus satsuma-age; scallop grilled in the shell; fried shrimp with spicy mayo - so nice we ordered it twice; grilled chicken with yuzukosho, not the best version ever, but that's kinda true of all the food here.

You're disbelieving the first paragraph, right? Too bad. I'm enjoying it.
03-3272-1212

Salutare, Yushima (リストランテサルターレ) 51683

2011-07-06T14:00:00.036+09:00

I'll not soon forget this afternoon - for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to get here, one of the most popular restaurants in Yushima, the one where even I can read the comments saying "It's full every day," at exactly 12 PM. Oopsie. The waitress was nice about it, not treating me like an idiot, and actually said "You'd be fourth on the waiting list. We can call you when a table's free, OK?" Indeed. Thus I ended up doing a slow, cautious tour of Yushima by bike - so as not to get lost, which I still did, twice. But I found Yushima Shrine, and saw that it was good.

Again, I forgot to take a picture of the exterior of the restaurant. I was genuinely addled by the heat; by the end of the 45 minutes that I waited, I was thinking "Get me a beer. Get me a soda. Anything." but not stopping, just rolling on. And getting sunburned. Once I got into the cool green darkness of Salutare, I just sat and stared for a while, de-compressing and de-heating. The icepack in my boxers helped too.

You can have three courses for Y1.7k, which sounds pretty cool. One would wonder how they can afford to do that, and the answer is this: The portions are small enough. This terrine is nice, but it's also bite-sized. It wasn't memorable.I think it's more calculated to impress the ladies - the ones next to me said, respectively and in rapid succession, "Kirei" and "Kirei."

The primo course, the pasta, was better. I was sucked in by the sausage (errrr), which turned out to be mediocre and not the type of Italian sausage I dream about.The pasta was made fresh, and the sauce was excellent. The gnocchi with fresh peas at the next table would have won in a streetfight though, I'd bet on that.

The Tabelog pictures are headed by a really nice looking steak, so I sprang the extra dinero to get this. It's smaller than it looks, and wasn't cooked as perfectly as the web one. They must save the good stuff for dinner, fair enough. The blackberry is not edible (and in fact this is the next-to-last picture it will be in).

Weeellllll, there you go - neighborhood favorite that's not quite up to city-wide leadership levels. At least for lunch.
03-5818-0665

Cafe Rosemary, (カフェローズマリー)

2011-07-04T14:57:00.030+09:00

Oh hell, it's the fourth of July. Well, happy fourth to everyone who's in a place where they give a damn. Here, it's a normal day at the office, albeit one on which I could spend almost 75 minutes at lunch. Then again, I did ride to Akiba, buy a disk drive, find this place, and eat three courses before waddling back to the office. No exterior picture today. They're always meaningless, aren't they? Actually the interior shots aren't so great either. This one kinda points up the fact that they've got plasticized tablecloths and a bit of clutter, all in a French way. Categorize this under 'affordable Japanese bistro, not bad'.

It's only been a few days, but I've forgotten if the options for the first course. I religiously avoid things like 'cold potage' because I'm not that old yet and still have my teeth (although I admit that when it's 90+ degrees out and you've been riding your bike 15 minutes to get to a restaurant, a bowl of chilled potato cream sounds pretty good...as a facial). This salad was quite forgettable, with the mediocre salmon, processed ham and cheese.

Things turned right around with the fish, a pan-seared sea bass with crispy fried onions and a mound of soft cabbage. If the balsamic saucing was a bit heavy, it went fine with the bread. This was cooked excellently and tasted great, and if dinner was like this across the board, Rosemary would be a real find. I shan't find out, unfortunately.

Dessert offered a flash of excellence; the bits in the nougat glace were very tasty, but it was too soft (and too small, boo) and the coffee poured over didn't taste like anything. I coulda swore I heard the next table receive a description about this dish that involved caramel sauce, and that's what had me so confused until I realized it was coffee. If it was caramel sauce, we have bigger problems.

None of your sauciness, wench.
03-3837-1455

Onodera, Kagurazaka (おの寺)

2011-07-02T18:56:00.019+09:00

There are a few places in Tokyo that I believe in enough to go back to, and a very few that I feel compelled to post more than once about. Obviously Onodera is one of them.

The cooking is, if anything, better than I remembered. Onodera himself is a great guy. I offered him a glass of champagne, assuming he would say "Nooo, I'm working, impossible." Instead he said, roughly, "What, me?! Awesome!" Bottle charge is Y2k. His nihonshu list has somehow swelled to about 15 names, good choices all.

Bunzou, Otemachi (鍛冶屋文蔵)

2011-07-01T23:40:00.066+09:00

Did I mention that we went to Honoka? I think we went to Honoka. Did we? Certainly we took the train after. Or something that looks like a train.

With all our friends. They love us, just sitting there giggling, speaking broken Japanese, maybe taking the odd picture.

Maybe, hell. It's OK, we're foreign. Well, I'm foreign, and he's country. (That's good!)

I can't believe we went from Musashi Koyama back to Otemachi just to meet Takeashita and have one last drink. Ugh.

Ugh. Deathtrap ho. Let me keep my shoelaces out of this one.

Tried to go someplace decent, that cup sake place in the basement. It was closed. We ended up at Bunzou, which I knew wouldn't be very good.

Funny how a place can telegraph its intentions. Maybe even without meaning to. They're doing the country-style thing here, but it's obvious that it's going to be lame.

[The fact that the Danke Brothers Group has 29 restaurants under this brand alone is also a tipoff, but I haven't felt sufficiently troubled during my time in Otemachi to look that up.]

Lots of semi-private rooms for after-work conferences. 'Semi-private' is no barrier for my Lumix.

No privacy at all when you're just at the next table.

We ordered some butts and some breasts. And some onions. As men do. And a drink. Or two.

But those guys had to get the train, and I had to ride my bike home, so we didn't last long.

It's nice at night, out on the bridge. Always a great feeling to ride home, especially when you've already changed into shorts and t-shirt. Especially when you remember that the police sub-station is on the left side of the bridge, so you take the right side to avoid questions about why your light isn't on and what you've been doing and whether your bike is in fact stolen.

Harder to take a clear picture when you're riding in the middle of the street. With oncoming traffic.

Home again. Monnaka.
03-3548-8095

Honoka, Musashi Koyama (穂のか)

2011-07-01T21:50:00.025+09:00

There are a few places in Tokyo that I like believe in enough to go back to, and a very few that I feel compelled to post more than once about. Obviously Honoka is one of them.

I don't think they remember me despite the nice welcome card, because I was there quite some time ago, and only once. It made an impression on me, but I'm sure they're used to that. It's really great.

OMG, 2 hours of all-you-can-drink for Y2.7k? Seriously? Actually, I think this is meant to encourage turnover, because the master made it clear that we couldn't order more after 2 hours, and we would have to leave at 2.5 hours sharp. Sure enough, the bill came right on schedule.

I had a bizarro-world experience earlier in the week where a master lectured me about how sake is made, so it's impossible that there's new sake released in summer. Honoka's master didn't bullshit like that - he said "Come around here behind the counter and I'll pull out what we've got. That turned out to be 5 types, including the Yamamoto with the pretty blue label. Actually the Taka on the extreme left is also summery, and the Nabeshima sparkling nigori was aaaaaawesome. That Kameizumi with the handwritten label was probably my favorite, but the others (Raifuku, new-to-me Ippaku Suisei, Kaiun, Juyondai Honmaru, Kokken) were of course never less than very good.

The food is also good to excellent, and I only include 'good' because the horse, top middle, was strangely lame. Not pictured is the selection of 5 flavored misos (omakase from their ~25 options), some of which were astounding (preserved fish guts and miso, who knew?). The assortment of raw wheat gluten (bottom middle) is also good, and if you were going to make a ham-katsu, you'd be well-served to make it from smoky bacon layered with vegetables before frying.

All too soon (and I mean that; we could've stayed, although like the first time I would soon have been in danger of passing out), we were manhandled to the street. You got busy with the map of their sakes, pointing to his home just to say "I'm a total fool from the middle of nowhere!" It's good he doesn't know about this blog.

Fortunately you do. And you owe it to yourself to go to Honoka at least once.

Ganko ramen, Akihabara (宗家一条流がんこラーメン八代目秋葉)

2011-07-01T13:36:00.068+09:00

As usual, I've been enjoying the hell out of Tokyo this month. Every morning I leave home a little early so that I'll have time to cruise on the bike through Tsukiji, Ginza or other neighborhoods, maybe pick up a cold Roots Aroma Revolut (after 7 years, I remain a sucker for Engrish product names)...

and dodge traffic on Sotoboro Doro outside Tokyo Station, or Tokyo Eki as we natives like to say.

Those big buses, they got no game. Straight up.

Straight up, to tha bone.

Really, the bone. A black front and two cow femurs hanging from a chain can mean only one thing - a Ganko ramen shop.

Ganko means 'stubborn', and refers, I suppose, to the insistence on making their ramen in an odd way. With beef bones.

You'd think it also refers to the strictness of the shop rules, like at that ridiculous 69 'n' Roll place. Certainly they don't want you to use cell phones.

I mean, they really don't want you using cell phones, because there's one of these at every place. Curiously, the other things this paragon of scricture says are "Let's take off our hats!" and "You can get a boiled egg for Y100!" It's a good deal more cheerful, somehow.

As is the master, who was a really nice guy. I mean it. I thought he was strict and ganko, but he started talking to me.

Emboldened, I mentioned that I had been to the Ganko in BaBa, and then asked about my beloved Fukumen. I had heard that the old master there was, in fact, THE old master, the one who invented Ganko ramen.

The master here directed my attention to the wall behind me, wherein resides the Ganko family tree (at least to-date, one imagines). It turns out that Ichijo san, the founder, left Fukumen, took 6 months off, and is now working his own new shop in Arakicho. I'll be there soon (and present this information purely as public service; I think you've gotta follow your favorite masters, right?).

It's a mark of respect, I think, that the master here puts on his cards "8th Generation of Ichijo's Style". If you're struggling to put the math together, I surmise that a new generation starts when one finishes apprenticing with Ichijo san. He's only been making Ganko for 20 years or so, according to this guy.

There's something strangely right about Ganko ramen. It doesn't look like much, but the taste is always good. It stays with you. Their style of chashu is also neat - big, round, fatty slices that are so thin they almost dissolve in the soup. It's not my style, but I love it here.

Even when the egg is a little runny, and you make the mistake of ordering 'kotteri' so you get those snow-white gems of pure fat ladled on top.

Hmmm...Ganko project?
03-3253-1766

Ant & Bee, Roppongi (アントンビー)

2011-06-30T21:35:00.077+09:00

Years of my life, I spent here, years. Seeing Mori Tower gives me a peculiar feeling; not like the dread I used to get when I would catch a glimpse of Chifley Tower across Sydney Harbor on a Sunday, but a little twinge. Fortunately it's been years in arrears since I felt the certain intensity of working up there.

Roppongi has perhaps changed in that time. Or perhaps not. Certainly there are some new stores, but they look much like the old ones. The faces must have changed, but I never saw them before, and they must look the same too.

One thing that hasn't changed is the freakshow nature of Roppongi at dusk - do those people really think they're stylin', they're lookin' good? Are there people that think they do? Do they think I look that bad?

I just sat here outside Ant and Bee waiting for Big Bird, watching the river flow. For a while I talked to my new friend Cherry. She was here from China, for work, and said her broken English was less broken than her Japanese. I still don't know exactly what kind of work she was doing, but she gradually got the point that I was just killing time and didn't need any work done, and she drifted off to meet her friend.

The newish A+B forms the keystone in the triumvirate of Tokyo's Best Beer Bars, they being Popeye, Ushitora, and Craftheads. Alert readers, the ones that don't go to A+B every night, will note that that's four establishments. They'll also note the excellent geographic dispersion of those places along the axis from Ryogoku through Roppongi and Shibuya and on to Shimo Kita.

You now have no excuse for not drinking the world's best beers, unless you're put off by the extraordinary prices that get charged for them in Tokyo. Or don't like beer. Whatever.

You may be less impressed to see 'only' 12 Japanese micro-brews on here. It may help if you know that this is just Side 1 of the menu. Would it also help if I mentioned that I had barely heard of any of the brewers therein? Or the small keg sizes they order, which produces daily turnover? Or the convenient small and medium glass sizes at Y700 and Y900?

If all that doesn't help, then god help you, because I can't.

The last thing I can maybe offer to get you over the hump is that the food is pretty good. Better than it needs to be, considering how great the beer is. You can tell by the way the chef sprinkles his salt that he's a chef, not just a guy making sausages in a beer bar.

Hell, I'm not complaining about sausages in a beer bar. That would be un-American as well as untrue to my German heritage. The great thing about the menu here is that I actually wanted to order stuff from it. This puts it way above the menus at Tokyo's other three best bars. Let's just go through what we ate (over 3 hours): meat-stuffed, polenta-coated, fried olives; pickled sausages; corned beef; blue-cheese sauce eggplant; whole chicken that we didn't order, but it looked nice, pan-frying on the stove before roasting; fried octopus; fish and chips; (in fish shape). We over-ordered fried food, didn't we? I say 'we' like anyone other than me was involved in the ordering.

There must be a healthier menu there. After the third beer it was tough to look at it. Fortunately those glasses really are small enough to let you try a fair few things before calling it a night.

Also keep in mind they're open, for real, until 7 AM. Perfect for those blisteringly-hot, already-headachey Saturday mornings in Roppongi.
03-3478-1250

Mitakaya Sakaba, Morishita (みたかや酒場)

2011-06-29T21:36:00.062+09:00

I almost feel bad writing about Mitakaya. Let me count the ways. Just two, actually.
1. It's on my street, and I like to support local business, but it took me approximately 2,500 nights to go for the first time.
2. The Mitakas, and their customers, are the nicest people, and I would hate for anyone to get the idea that I mean anything other than sincere appreciation here.

How does the entrance look to you? Usually I see it early in the morning while jogging. At night there's nothing around it, so it's a bit like a beacon of hospitality. They open early, and earlier on Sundays.

You can stop by any time. I'm sure the charge is cheap.

Actually you can't stop by any time - it gets crowded, and full, pretty much every night. There seems to be a good turnover of people coming in for dinner and leaving though.

You could probably say it's a bastion of the neighborhood. Mitaka san (I'm assuming that's his name) putters around placidly in the kitchen. I don't think he ever gets upset. However regular customers know that if it takes too long to get their food, a reminder is in order. He forgot someone's potatoes in the microwave.

Drinks are cooling in the fridge behind him. And cucumbers. What should we have?

Yessss, a delightful glass of automatic-hangover 'white liquor' and a cheerful bottle of Hoppy Dark to mix with it. This really does taste a bit like dark beer. It's not a bad thing.

There's also beer. And chu-hai. And some sake, but it was Takashimizu, and Mitaka san laughed, unoffended, when I ordered Hoppy after seeing the bottle.

And the tuna, the 'signature item' here, the one that's mentioned in the increasingly-frequent magazine articles, is extremely good for Y600. I know it looks a little funny, and it certainly has its fair share of tendon, but it's a tasty piece of tuna. Or this one was.

I rounded out my dinner with a dish of cooked spinach, in dashi, topped with fish flakes. And I liked it.

This is where the magic happens.

No, I just like saying that. It's been a while since the kitchen was tidied up. But hey, I hope I look as good when I'm this age.

Actually I AM this age. They opened in January 1975, which means that Mitakaya Sakaba and I are the same age (though I get the edge by a few months).

Mrs. Mitaka is certainly the energy of the operation, but between them they have the balance just right. Of course, with her sitting at the counter and entertaining customers, relaying their orders to him without standing up, some might question the balance. I confess I ordered a drink from her just to watch as she immediately called it out to him. I smiled, and the other customers laughed because they saw what was up.

We were all friends anyway.
03-3632-4744

Kajima Liquors, Ningyocho (加島酒店)

2011-06-29T18:25:00.035+09:00

As foreigners, and especially as foreigners with an interest in 'deep' Japanese culture, we get cut a lotta slack. We get to go to some of the weirdest, localest little places you can imagine, and people are by and large nice. Or better. Now that I mention it, they're usually welcoming, interested, and friendly. It's sometimes hard to shut them up and get out the door.

That makes it all the more surprising and painful when they're not. Kajima is a liquor shop that slaps boards on top of beer crates and converts to a standing bar at 6 PM. I've wanted to go here for months, but you have to arrive in a slippery 10-minute window. Otherwise it's still closed or already full.

I was stoked (dude) that I hit the sweet spot tonight. Then the little master there looked at me like an alien and stammered..."Uhhhh, drink?" Why yes, bartender. "Hmmm, it's a little full...[other than these 4 tables]."

But I assumed people would warm up and say hi. They look like folks. So I just stood there while he pottered around and set up a new table, away from the big boys who get their own can-chuhai from the fridge on the way in.

They didn't warm up. One guy looked at me for a second, once.

I got to stand by myself and look out the window until I finished my beer and left without looking at anyone.

Needless to say, I'll be back.
03-3666-5848

Shun-poo ramen, Akihabara (麺旬風)

2011-06-29T15:09:00.000+09:00

Another day, another ramen. I was braving the heat again to ride about on my bike, this time up by Akiba. On the east side of the highway, in that weird strip of tall buildings under and next to the tracks, I popped out of a random alley and faced this happy site. I try to listen to the quiet rumblings of destiny, or "the universe's farts", and thus would never say no to this circumstance.

That was even before I realized this place was called 'Syunpoo', or 'seasonal crap'. I love a place that keeps up with the seasons, and it's terrific that they're so simple and humble about the quality of their food. False modesty, though, because it's quite good.

There was another customer at the same time as me (2 PM), so I don't know why they seemed so depressed. Those papers above the counter list the merits of their product; I always think having signs in the store that say how good everything is smacks of desperation.

Especially confusing because I'd be pleased as a parakeet if I could turn out ramen like this - two types of pork; an almost-perfect egg; wheaty, tough noodles handmade in the shop; and a really good pork-bone soup. It's a mystery. This place should be a regular stop on the ramen tour of the central north.

The ramen tour of the northeast is on indefinite hold.
03-5820-0141

Juhachiban, Kanda (十八番)

2011-06-28T14:16:00.032+09:00

Have you seen this picture before? I have a feeling I've taken it before, like the taxi driver with the red hair who squats and smokes (that picture is Nihonbashi, but I saw him outside my house one time).

The lion seems to be saying "Suckazzzz! I've got it made in the shade!" but the sun will soon catch him crying.

Getting a random thought: It's so hot, only hiyashi chuka will do. Left me walking for ages. I would have been crying too, but that's like, you know, giving water to the dead. Instead I just held out for block after block until I saw a place advertising cold Chinese noodles.

They didn't advertise the delightfully downtown ambience; not quite Taishoken-caliber (if you don't have shop-kids scampering about without shoes, it's a 5-point deduction), but very suitable.

Ohhh, excellent. Very droll. Very suitable. What you have here is your basic ramen noodle, cooked and chilled, sauced with a sweet-soy-vinegar sorta broth, and smothered with these traditional toppings. Actually I lie, because they've embellished it with the pure-white shirataki tangle on the left - which is nice because it's an interesting texture and has zero calories.

Speaking of texture, why are these noodles always slimy when I make them at home? You can buy fresh ramen in the stores, but they don't come out store-style even when I wash and chill them real good.

Ahhh, the mysteries of the universe.
03-5294-1818