Kidori, Tokyo (紀どり,東京駅北町ほろよい通り)

Today I was thinking of Italian, but Zoner said ‘Fish’, and this popped into mind after I had seen it just yesterday. I may be re-calculating my remarks about the relative sadness of this 2nd-floor area of Tokyo Station, because the shops seems to be OK (if a little sad. Ooops, there I go again!)

The longer version of this place’s name says something about Tsukiji. I’m not sure where that comes from since there isn’t a fish-market head office or anything. It’s part of a group of 7 that’s mainly focused around Akasaka and looks pretty nice – this one looks like the worst of the lot, judging quickly by the web. Still, it was pretty good. The tuna was decent quality for a budget place (i.e. the akami looked like it was going to be chewy from tendons but was not, and tasted like tuna), and the assortment and size of Ponkan’s mixed-sashimi rice bowl was exemplary. I was somehow tricked into ordering the soba set, which was something like tsukimi-kakiage-soba (or ‘hot soba with a puck of tempura vegetables on top, accompanied by a raw egg that you’re supposed to break on top but don’t have to if you’re a foreigner’) with a side of tuna-don (of the aforementioned quality and taste).

And mostly we just talked about work, so I don’t have a lot to say about the food. It was that kinda place. One funny thing I noticed was these bottles of sake on the back wall. A lot of them were different labels of the same brand, and some of the labels were backwards, by which I mean the colors were weird and the characters were mirror-imaged. I hope that was because it was a different and ‘edgy’ style of sake for that brewer; I like to think they were trying to do something creative with the labeling.

Something is rotten in the kingdom of Denmark, but that’s unrelated to Kidori.
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