haha, if you have to mess something up, do it right! Depending on your definitions, I may have eaten today at a place that I went to before – when it was in a different building and had a different menu and decor entirely. Well, I’ll chalk that up to experience.
The basement-dwellers of the grubby old JA building packed up and moved en masse a few months ago to the spanking-and-sparkling clean, snappily-designed new JA building two blocks away. This blog has some neat pre-move-in pictures of the building and food corridor, and I can tell you from experience that the office areas and building in general are very modern and soothing. Scrap-and-build has its advantages.
For some reason I was without direction today (the pounding rain all morning from Typhoon 9 washed away the motivation?), and it came to mind that I would eat yoshoku if I could find it. Well, if you try to find something in Tokyo, it will come to you…eventually…in one form or another, and the JA Building basement had a yoshoku place. It turns out that Asaji, the tile-floored, brightly-lit, vaguely Tuscan establishment offering pastas and cutlets, is the same Asaji that used to be dim and dingy, with brown-framed windows and lace curtains facing the smoke-stained JA basement hallway. Who woulda thought? I didn’t recognize the chicken cutlet from before either, but the canned peas and carrots shoulda been a clue. To complete the yoshoku irony, I had my chicken cutlet with toast, 1-inch thick Japanese white toast lathered with margarine. Mmmmm, I love Western food!
We’ve established in the past that branches of the same restaurant are OK and don’t count as repeats, so I guess the relevant question is whether it counts as a repeat when the old restaurant moved to the new location. Come to think of it, I don’t even know if the old place is gone, and if I don’t go back, I can pretend that today was just a branch encounter.
if it was in a different building and had a different menu it wasn't the same place, huh?