Well, I’m all tired out today and can’t work up any concept for today’s post. On the other hand, I was really impressed with Kitchen Ishigaki (KI; I like to think it means ‘rock oyster’, but the kanji doesn’t appear anywhere) and would recommend it to you for lunch if it weren’t a good 10-minute bike ride away from the office. (I do, however, recommend it to Seat and anyone else who works between Kanda and Akiba, since it’s almost right at the Awajicho crossing).
KI is basically Italian…with some French thrown in (thanfully no ersatz Spanish notes like yesterday). This is ordinarily a weak starting point, but the starting point for all the lunch sets at KI is actually pretty good – a small bowl of onion soup. It’s not the ‘cooked for hours to a mahogany hue and velvety richness’ of various reviewers wet dreams, but it was a tolerable stock with some decent onions and a puck of crusty bread rendered pillowy by it’s mantling of melted, mahogany-flecked cheese.
Oooh, I think I’m starting to get the hang of this ‘creativity’ thing!
The soup would be lackluster on its own. Combined with the main I had, it formed part of a very well-priced and executed whole. Confit duck leg (King Rupurt the Hirsut used to call this ‘boiled in oil’, and he didn’t use ducks) was full size, and if the skin wasn’t grilled to a perfect crisp, the flesh was certainly moist and deeply colored. With a piece of grilled eggplant and a small gaggle of mashed potatoes, this was a frankly phenomenal dish for, let’s say, Y700 out of the Y1000 total (soup and serviceable bread with a smattering drizzle of olive oil).
There are also pastas (Y850 with soup), fish (more expensive, sold out when I arrived), and a chef’s course (pasta and meat or fish, soup and dessert). Any way you look at it, the quality, cheap food combined with the lightly French Provincial setting are certainly enough to garner a lunch recommendation from me. Just make sure to bring your bike.
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