Nice weather and a ready bike always make me want to venture farther away from the office. I want to stress that it has very little to do with finding new places, which is not a challenge – there are still 3 places right in my building that I haven’t been to yet! Today I went over to Yaesu and tried to find something in the south extent of the area. After being turned away from an interesting-looking Kyoto-style sushi place (if it’s full at 1:30, it must be pretty good), I settled on this old-fashioned tempura place.
The chef and staff seemed a little surprised to see me come in – maybe it was the lateness of the hour. In fact, the chef had already turned off the burners under the fryers, and as a result had to heat them up again. He also made new batter, which was nice.
The super-special (特上) tempura bowl called my name, mainly because it was late, I was hungry, and everything looked kinda cheap so I figured I’d get one of the larger items. For Y1000, this came with 2 shrimps, a big piece of eel, a small whitefish (kisu, as you’d expect), a piece of eggplant and 3 long greenbeans, all batter and fried. I felt a little guilty about eating so much meat until I realized it was all fish! In short, the fry wasn’t crisp, the sauce wasn’t flavorful, and the soup was very bland despite having quite a bit of miso. I was pretty surprised at how lackluster it was, actually. This is the price you pay for trying a different place every day. Some days are good, a lot of days not so much. But there are still plenty of very decent-looking places out there, and I’m not stopping yet (at least not for the next 8 days until I go on holiday).
秀 the salami?
Excellent review here, including pix of the outside and the exact food that I ate
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