This post was written in 2004. Shop details and prices may have changed since then.
I made a whirlwind budget trip to Tokyo over my summer vacation in August.
I went with a friend who, sadly, doesn’t like fish,
so we had to pick only places that served dishes without fish… well… but…
summer isn’t really the season for great fish anyway, so I think it turned out to be a blessing
in disguise.
Our first lunch was at La Bettola (LA BETTOLA) in Ginza.
The photo below is La Bettola just before opening. There were far more people waiting
than the photo shows, and even that was a quiet day because it was a weekday.
If you go about an hour early to book a table and wander around Ginza before coming back, the timing works out just about right.
The photo below is a caricature of the chef, Mr. Ochiai. It was so cute I had to take one ^^
The bread and house wine that came out as a starter. The bread was so-so; the wine was decent for 400 yen.
The bread I had at Aglio Olio was better, but hey, I didn’t come to an Italian restaurant to eat bread ^_^;
Today’s assorted appetizers… a miss. The ratio of tasty to not-so-tasty items was about 20:80.
Tomato and mozzarella. A dreamlike taste. The menu said the cheese was made at some famous farm,
and I’d honestly never had cheese this fresh. I was so impressed that lately I’ve been ordering this dish
at every Italian place I go to back in Korea, but not one of them comes even close to this taste.
Today’s best dish. I think it was called beef braised in wine pasta. It was the first time in my life
a plate of pasta made me cry. Everything I thought I knew about pasta just crumbled… Pasta
isn’t even otoro, and yet it can taste like this… What on earth was all the pasta I’d eaten until now…
Highly, highly recommended. Be sure to order it.
Gorgonzola pasta. It’s made with a generous amount of top-quality gorgonzola, so the smell is a bit
strong, but with red wine it was a fantastic match. This too was beyond imagination,
but it fell just a little short of the beef braised in wine pasta above…
Today’s main dish. I really can’t remember its name, but I think it was something like pork
steak. This was a miss too… but in a different sense from the first one. The first
was a miss because it really didn’t taste good, but this time the previous dish was so delicious that it couldn’t live up
to my raised expectations. If I’d eaten this first, I don’t think I’d have been that disappointed.
This is supposedly the most popular dessert at La Bettola, but it was just meh. Next time I’ll try
something else.
