In the evening a friend took me to a café that’s supposedly one of the places in Osaka with a good-looking crowd. I remember it being somewhere near Umeda, but, well, I doubt I’ll ever go back. The crowd really wasn’t bad, but the food… hmm… it’s hard to even say how to describe it.
This is the place.
Its official Japanese name is Kiriston Cafe, and they’d decorated it pretty nicely. Apparently it gets featured in magazines a lot.
The table…
The interior has a Christian theme, and the serving staff were young and fairly handsome. Maybe that’s why there were so many young women customers. It’s on two floors and quite big, yet at peak time you apparently need a reservation to get in…
This one… a shot of the inside…
Looking at just this photo the crowd doesn’t seem all that great, but I’m a bit shy, you see…
And this is the interior.
The atmosphere is pretty nice. It seems to take catacombs and a cathedral as its motif. I’ve never even seen a place with a concept like this back in Korea; I guess it only works in Japan.
The beer I ordered, called the Duchess of Burgundy: Duchesse de Bourgogne.
I ordered it because they said it was a beer aged in wine oak barrels. The world really is a big place… there’s even a beer like this…
Starter
So-so. It’s not terrible. For a place this size, with this interior, at this price, I’d have to call it pretty decent. That’s probably why people queue to get in. But it wasn’t enough to satisfy a gourmet like me. When I say I go around looking for good restaurants, now and then someone introduces me to a place like this. Sorry, but could I just gratefully accept the thought… that’s what I mean…
I believe this was a pizza.
Well… it’s a lump of carbs and fat. Like most food of this style, if you eat it while it’s warm, it goes down in no time before you even notice the calories. Even so, it’s a notch below what I’d call tasty…
A nicely poured beer
Hmm… the beer tasted of wine… and smelled of wine too… a completely unexpected flavor. This is the biggest problem with B-grade stuff like this: beer on its own and wine on its own are both very tasty drinks, so there’s no need at all to mix the two. Every so often someone tries it, and you end up being served something absurd like this. Anyway, thinking of it as an unusual experience, it wasn’t bad. These things happen sometimes.
Aglio e olio pasta
Way too much oil floating on it, and the noodles felt carelessly boiled… In a word: I shouldn’t have ordered it. At a place like this, the safe pasta to order is surely the meat sauce… the rest I’m too scared to order at all… Still, aglio e olio doesn’t have any special ingredients, so even when it fails it’s no big loss, which is nice.
A gratin, I think…
I really don’t like dishes where they throw together something unremarkable and plop an egg on top. In most cases you’re lucky there’s at least the egg. This one wasn’t much different. It’s the standard Japanese izakaya style of cooking.