Plum Blossom

I probably said this before already, but Tokyo is, apparently, the city with the most restaurants per capita in the world. It's almost as if eating at home is a strange experience to be savoured occasionally. On every street, every corner, there is a restaurant or ten. The sheer choice makes it hard to pick. There's a cuisine for every palate, and also cuisine for every wallet.

It is hard to say whether I am blessed or cursed to have a good friend who is a gourmet, because it increases the number of times I go to the restaurants for people endowed with thicker wallets than mine. However, today was not one of those days. Today it was my fault.

Last year, as my faithful followers surely remember, when I was visiting Nikko with some friends, I was talked into going to a yuba restaurant, and it was a fateful day. It was love at first taste, even if I still have trouble with the name. But I had to wait for almost a year before I would have an opportunity to have shoujin ryouri ("devotion food") again.

I had a vegetarian phase, long ago, but in the end I went back to meat. There's something deeply delicious in, for instance, yakitori or hirekatsu, and it would be very difficult to give it up again. But let me tell you, those monks knew their food: even without meat (okay, maybe with an occasional rabbit scam), they led a full culinary life.

Anyway, the point is, the food was great. Superduperamazing. I loved every bit of it, even though some people would say it had no meat. It had meat: crab, scallop and fish. To those people who don't think that is meat... Why haven't you failed biology?

I wanted the course with more yuba, which was incidentally discounted this month. Yay! However, they would only make it for at least two people, so J sacrificed himself at my altar of yuba. Em went for a bit less extravagant and more tofu-oriented course.

The restaurant itself was very strange. You know how in some izakaya each party gets their own room? Well, you probably don't. But it is so. Those rooms are often quite small, just big enough so that the allotted number of people can squeeze around the table. There's hardly a place to put a bag; or rather, there wouldn't be, if they didn't have boxes under the seats in which you can pack your things. This one was similar, in a way that Zastava 750 (or for you international visitors, Mini Morris) is similar to a Cadillac stretch limo. It was three metres by four, at least, with a definite tang of hotelicity and a strong suggestion of apartmenthood. Even the corridor between the rooms was un-Japanese in its spaciousness. I felt a bit lost at first, until the food started coming, and then nothing mattered any more.

There are some pictures at the usual place. I'm very near my quota, and if I want to upload anything else, I will have to take something down.

Fortunately for me, I rarely want to upload photos. Today, you were lucky.