Yet another place to tick off the list, and in this case it’s really a ‘place’, not a restaurant by another name. In front of the Sankei building, which is just diagonal to my office, there’s a series of lunch trucks parked every day along with tables for eating their takeout. The number varies by day; when I went today, there were 6 spanning a variety of curries, meats, ethnicities and healthfulities.
Why didn’t I have the Hawaiian, the roast meat, or the curry? I dunno, but I went to N’s Fuu, the ‘healthy Japanese deli’ selection. This line is about what you’ll find at most of the trucks. It takes a while.
And the deal with N’s (fuu in this case is ‘style’ or ‘flavor’) is that you get salted, sesamed rice with 2 meats and 2 veg. Starting top right, there’s some pickle, then a miso-glazed chicken, sesame paste broccoli, scrambled eggs with chicken, and dashi-boiled eggplant. Japanese readers of a certain persuasion will be thinking this looks homey and comforting. And it was all pretty good, especially the eggplant, which they only gave me one of. Boo.
We took our lunches and went to eat somewhere else; it was easily 30 degrees and sunny and humid all at the same time, so I was thinking it would be nice to eat in a garden or by water. The palace garden is closed Mondays and Fridays, so after reminding ourselves of that the hard way we wandered to this water feature-filled park across the street. It’s called Wadagura Fountain Park, and there’s actually a tiny bit of seating, rare for Japan. Of course, it’s not comfortable seating, because the benches are huge cylinders of polished marble – OK for a short sit, but then you’ll want to be moving on. And I imagine part of the purpose of these is indeed ‘moving on’, as in ‘not providing a place for homeless people to sleep’, which you can do on the side of a cylinder.
Well, tell me if that’s too cynical, but I’ve gotten accustomed to reading architectural / design ‘features’ that way in Japanese public parks.
Let’s look at another picture to make ourselves feel better, shall we? The interesting building at the back of the park is a restaurant and cafe. And actually the park is bordered n three sides by the palace moat, so there’s not much of a better trees ‘n’ water destination around Otemachi.
Stay cool, OK?