How do people decide they’ve had enough – learned enough, pushed enough, grown enough – and it’s time to settle in?Moreover, is it wrong to do this? Especially if you’re doing your thing better than most people could?And is it indicative of a deeper pathology that I read restaurant reviews while eating lunch? (This has […]
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Delizioso Firenze, Marunouchi
The happy days are over, folks. As of this week, technology issues have removed my ability to post at will. I’ll continue to post relentlessly on indiscriminately-selected dining venues, but the updates may not make it live in the afternoons. And they may be shorter and even more typo-ridden.Today’s venue is anything but indiscriminately selected. […]
Ikada, Monzen Nakacho (いかだ)
After the minor debacle of the grumpy grandma, I felt a little burned, but also a little hungry. Ever the glutton for punishment (see prior comments about needing to search to find those hidden diamonds), another sign piqued my interest. Ikada was equally a bit scary – a very normal izakaya on a very small […]
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Tobu Sakana, Shimo Kitazawa
Wow, the main course. This is close to the station, and one of the first places we saw when we started walking around. Stayed on my mind all day, and I wanted to go back. This being Japan, the good-looking places get packed, as was this one when we got back (at 6:30). Fortunately the […]
Bibinba, Marunouchi
We all have to make sacrifices. At the grave risk of minimizing those of others, one of my recent sacrifices has been to eat lunch at a bunch of mediocre-looking places under the rail tracks in Marunouchi just so I could say I’ve been to all of them. Bibinba is one of those places, or […]
Beer Chimney, Marunouchi
Go ahead, keep on-a hatin’. We’re going to continue going to the dodgy places under the railroad tracks until they’re exhausted (even if we’re exhausted first). And once in a while, they’re going to turn out to be pretty good! EOITwJ will never fully understand some things about Japan. Or possibly Japanese corporations will never […]
Vinchou, Marunouchi
Gaaarrrrh! Just when I thought it was safe to re-visit a place, circumstances conspire to extend the new-lunch-venue streak through yet another week! OK, that’s not really so frustrating. It’s a dorky point of pride. The good ship Wolf is soon bound for sunnier pastures and more mixilated metaphors after nearly 3 years in Japan. […]
Nucci’s Italian Ice, Sewell
We wanted to track down the store associated with the tiny ‘Italian Ice’ sign we had seen on the road to Terra Nova. Rolling across the street we saw another, and followed this and some others, like a trail of breadcrumbs to the witch’s house, to a small strip mall around the corner. Not an […]
Ciconte’s, Glassboro
Ahhh, the Final Countdown. Not only some cheezy 80’s hair metal, but the enumeration of South Jersey meibutsu that we ticked off over the course of recent days. This is the biggest of them, and we’ve saved the best until somewhere around last…Cheesesteaks. If you’ve ever had a Philly Steak…then forget whatever you ate, because […]
Water Ice Station, Pitman
No doubt you’ll remember the Water Ice Station from the 15 or so years they spent in their Pitman Ave location, just across the little alley from the Itaska Building and across the street from Rosebud Florists. There was a lot of sadness in some minds, at least mine, when they closed that store – […]