I’d helped someone I know with some computer stuff and got a meal out of it, but since it wasn’t anything major, we went somewhere reasonable: Jasmin, a cafe-cum-restaurant. It’s run by the s…
On the last weekend of August, right in the thick of the heat, I took a trip out to the Osaka area. The theme of this trip was to enjoy what was left of the summer. Honestly, this summer was so brutally hot th…
I really love outlet shopping, so whenever there’s an outlet near wherever I’m travelling, I end up dropping by. This time, when I went to Kobe to burn through the last of the summer, there was a s…
Someone I got to know somehow through work was hosting a Calera wine dinner, so I went along. Calera is the pricey wine people call the Romanée-Conti of California -_-. Apparently the winery’s owner trai…
I could only get one day off, so I had to be at work in the morning and got up early. After last night’s feast there was a hearty breakfast waiting too, so I couldn’t just rush off because I was bu…
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…
For a friend who came all the way to visit, I booked a room at Kasuien Minami, the most popular onsen ryokan around here. With the wagyu course it came to a little over 20,000 yen per person, which is actually…
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…
My trips always have a clear purpose, and the main purpose of this Tokyo trip was shopping. On past Tokyo trips I was so busy meeting people that I never had much time to shop properly. This time it was a thre…
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…