This is a boring post. Watch out.
Quick lunch with Zoner to catch up after vacation; in a slightly compulsive way, I just steered toward Kanda and picked out a new place. It’s getting a bit thin up there other than the mass of shops under the tracks; we looked at the place that has famous Miazaki chicken, but their lunch menu has no chicken on it. What the?
Ended up with another of Kanda’s finest mediocre Chinese joints. I think I should spend a week on these just to see if they’re any good! Zoner had a tantanmen which was distinguished by being quite unspicy and unsesame in appearance. I thought those were the defining characteristics, but perhaps this is a rare Chinese species of tantan and not a normal Sichuan one?
A guy at another table had a good-looking bowl of noodles. The waitress said they weren’t on the menu, so I ordered them – sort of an ankake gomoku yakisoba. Those Chinese whole-wheat noodles, thin style, mixed with a bunch of meats (pork, shrimp, fish cake, crab stick) and vegetables and covered with thick, translucent sauce. Not bad.
If I was going to come up with any one interesting thing from the lunch, it would be that the small bowl of fried rice on the side was very good. I often avoid getting fried rice – I like it a certain way, and it’s rare. Thing is, I think that way is the right way – I like it to have that whisper of burnt taste that comes from a really hot wok. I read one time that it’s called the ‘breath of the wok’, and this had it.
There’s always something good, eh?
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