I’ve lived in this town for a while now ^_^ and there’s one izakaya I could call my regular spot, if you stretch it a bit. It’s no amazing destination restaurant, but it’s not bad for filling up over a few drinks. Somehow or other I’ve even become friends with the owner.
Otoshi: shrimp
The little starter that comes along when you order a beer. Nicely seasoned all the way through.
Ayu nanban
I was going to have salt-grilled ayu (sweetfish), but they said it won’t come in until July. So I ordered this instead. You can tell they use good ingredients. The taste was just so-so..
Avocado and tuna “hamburg”
It’s heavy on the calories, but it tastes better than it looks. Avocado is plant fat, so it beats animal fat, but it’s still high in calories, so I really should hold back.
Grilled dried nodoguro
Fresh nodoguro is delicious, but the dried kind is pretty ordinary. Small ones, too..
White wine from Okuizumo Winery
It had a faint apple aroma. No matter how I look at it, the value for money isn’t great, though..
Squid sashimi
Nice and fresh, but squid is just squid..
Shijimi clam cream croquettes
Maybe because I’ve been to plenty of croquette specialists, this one was ordinary too.
Roughly what the inside looks like.
Food at this level is common in Japan, but in Korea you’d struggle to find it even if you searched high and low. Even the Japanese restaurants in fancy hotels are all much the same.. just pricier.
Sea bream ara-daki
One of my favorite dishes. It’s sea bream head simmered with burdock. It was reduced in the sauce a bit more than it needed to be, but I have no complaints.
Rihaku Yamata no Orochi
Sake from a local brewery. After beer and wine, it’s on to nihonshu. With good food to go with it, the drinks go down easily ^_^
To finish, Inaniwa udon.
They had Inaniwa udon on the menu here too, so I gave it a try, but it didn’t wow me the way it did in Tokyo. It doesn’t taste bad. Probably because it’s dried noodles, you get a decent level of flavor even if it isn’t an udon specialist.
After all that I paid 10,000 yen, and for round two we moved to a wine bar called the “International Space Biology Institute.”
The wine bar’s complimentary snack
The owner here is a good cook. Of course what I make at home is a little tastier, but for eating out, this is not bad at all..
Maybe because I’ve been so busy lately, I only get to drink in this town once in a long while. I don’t have time to exercise either, so cutting down on drinking is only natural, but I do wonder if I’m living a bit too tightly these days. I should find some friends to drink with.. every time this happens, I miss my friends in Tokyo and Seoul..