Finally, the dinner I’d been waiting for. Good food is really the single most important thing that draws people to an onsen ryokan. If all you want is a hot spring, there are plenty near the city. The d…
Going down for the hotel’s set breakfast is always a hassle. It’s nothing special taste-wise, and I want to sleep in anyway. So the day before, I’d picked up some futomaki to go from Naniwa S…
It felt a shame to just head home after the yakiniku, so I stopped at an izakaya near the hotel for one more drink. A glass of draft beer! I couldn’t drink at the yakiniku because I was driving, so I h…
A friend came to visit me where I live, and since it’s such a rural backwater, wagyu is about the only thing I have to treat people with. So after a bit of sightseeing at Izumo Taisha, I took them to Yak…
I’m a homebody by nature who hates being in the spotlight, and I work in a field where value for money is everything, so I’ve lived most of my life without much interest in designer brands. But at …
I’d read on some blog that a French butter specialty shop called Echire had recently opened in Marunouchi, and I made up my mind to go. Their croissants, made with loads of butter, are so popular that yo…
I used last week’s three-day weekend to pop over to Tokyo. The very first place I headed after arriving was Taimeiken, a famous yoshoku (Japanese-style Western food) restaurant that anyone in the know ha…
At last, this is the final post of my Malaysia trip. Almost everything we ate in Malaysia was Chinese food. Maybe that’s because it was a group tour. The taste? About the level of an ordinary Chinese res…
Elbon the Table, 2chef, and Yountville too, which I never wrote up on the blog: lately I’ve been going to Western restaurants a lot. Not because I particularly love Western food and was dying to try them…
I finally went to Seongmin Yangkkochi, the lamb skewer place in front of Seoul National University subway station that’s so popular these days. I remember that neighbourhood having basically nothing back…
On this trip to Korea I had two wine meetups. The first was about trying some pretty geeky wines, and the second was themed around wines that anyone, wine beginners included, would agree are delicious. In Drop…
I dropped by elbon the table on Garosu-gil in Sinsa-dong over lunch, a place that’s hugely famous right now because a certain charismatic chef runs it. I’m not really into the star-chef thing ̵…