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.