Tharros, Shibuya (タロス 渋谷・中目黒)

The original of this post was lost in The Great Blogger Crash of Last Week, wherein they rolled back a day-and-a-half of edits. It wasn’t that good in the first place, so little harm done.

Years ago, I used to read Tokyo Calendar all the time. It’s a dangerous habit – the restaurants are mostly quite expensive, and the photographers are undeniably talented. After some mediocre experiences, I realized that if a place didn’t look like the best thing ever in the pictures, then it was a sign that even TC’s amazing photography couldn’t raise the bar to good-looking, and that was a sign to avoid the place.

Needless to say, Tharros looked really good when I saw it in an Italian feature a year ago. Turned out Mrs. Swannie had recently been for lunch and was happy to try it again, and there we were.

Everyone else was there too. The only reason there are empty seats in this shot is that we were early (still light outside, see?). It filled in pretty quickly, upping the approximation of Greek ‘taverna’ atmosphere. In fact it’s Sardinian, but who’s going to quibble?

I could quibble – the original plan tonight was to eat Turkish, because it was the closest I could find to Greek (near where we were supposed to go for the live music, which was cancelled, and this is getting long and boring, isn’t it.). Instead we ended up with Sardinian, and this mixed starter plate for 4 – grilled tuna, scallops, shrimp, roasted vegetables, pickles. The picture’s dark, but the food was definitely ‘bright’ tasting, or ‘zingy’, or ‘spiked with citrus’ as some would have it. The starters lean toward this shared-plate concept, which is great.

The mains are not specifically shareable, but we did anyway. Left side is some kind of grilled fish, and below that a pan-roasted hobo. Again the cooking was very good, ‘letting the natural flavors of the top-quality ingredients shine through.’ On the right side was a sausage, which almost made me cry because it was so properly tasted and textured like I think a sausage oughta be (sausage makers of Japan: more coarse, more herbs). The stuff on top isn’t noodles; it was likely shredded zucchini, with a heavy dosing of mint. Below that a steak, where the best things were the onion sauce on top and the asparagus beside.

The wine list is sorta fun – they’ve got a goodly number of pages focused on different regions…of Sardinia. While this is confusing, and almost certainly no one is going to come in and love the ability to explore the northwest corner of the island in their wine choices, it at least keeps the prices quite manageable. This in turn left the whole evening fun, reasonably priced, and ‘quite manageable’ overall.

Maybe that’s a new slogan for them.
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