Following the unfortunatosity that was Tsuruya, Big Bird and I ventured over to his ‘home quadrant’ of Kachidoki, where there’s one street with a few decent-looking places. The soba looks pretty good, and so did this place. It turned out OK. Any place with the audacity to call themselves ‘Season’ must have a bit of confidence in the quality of their produce, no? The service was rather distant, but I’ll chalk that up to their activity level and not read anything into it.
A place with this much bustle on a Tuesday night is a good place, or cheap, and this isn’t cheap enough, so it must be pretty good. The whole wall over there was taken up with a big group – a work thing, judging by the ipponjime they did at the end (Big Bird, that’s like the ‘closing ceremony’ thing where people do three sets of three claps each, but just one time to avoid embarassment.) The whole time we were there, people came and went. I’d say it’s the top place on its street, for what that’s worth. We enjoyed watching the master carve up a number of whole fish while we were there – people ordering snapper head and the like. Looked great.
The drink list is shochu focused, but if you’re a hardened shochu drinker, you’ll want to go elsewhere (from this blog, I mean). The sake was limited in variety, but we were quite happy with the Kurozaemon and Fudo that we drank – second fruitier than the first, but neither excessively light. The Bakuren, on the other hand, while clearly skillful and all like dat, is not to my taste any more. When things are that dry, they seem to lack mid-palate.
Oops, I ordered fried pork again. This wasn’t deep-fried like the last place, but it was a lot fattier – ‘thick-cut bacon steak’, as it happens. I expected it to be a much simpler affair, so all the sauteed vegetable on top was a nice surprise.
And likewise…other fried food. The nuggety things are bits of Yamato potato, one of the slimy, sticky varieties like mountain or long potato, and in this case the nuggets are wrapped in seaweed, deep-fried, and heavily salted. With extra salt. The spring roll things are spring rolls filled with spicy fish eggs and cheese wrapped in seaweed. If I had access to suitable design software, I’d make a more graphic representation of the layered stratospheres present in this, but I don’t, so please imagine for me.