My friend Onny from LA was in town this weekend, just finishing off a two-month (!) vacation in Thailand, China, and Indonesia after wrapping on Surf's Up. Onny loves Japan and Japanese food so he stopped by for a few days of hangin' out on the way back.
Last night, on the recommendations of my friends Makino-san and Kondo-san, we went to Kan, a Japanese restaurant in the area between Nakameguro and Shibuya. Specifically, it's in the neighborhood called Higashiyama, although what's better is that the building called the "Oriental Higashiyama."
Since we didn't have much notice, I took advantage of Kondo-san's assistance to get a conditional reservation. At about 9:10pm they called and said we could have a table at 9:30. Since Onny was nowhere near Nakameguro at the time, it was touch and go, but we got there almost on time... right.
It's a very sparse, modern-Japanese interior, and all seats are counter seats. As suggested, we ordered the chef's course, which turned out to be about nine AWESOME courses of various assorted Japanese food. I remember several: the sashimi course was excellent and included horsemeat sashimi (no, I don't object to it). There was a separate course which was beef tataki (tenderloin seared on the outside but raw on the inside), a vegatable course, a soup course. Surprisingly, there was an entire course that was just Edamame. Tomatoes are totally in season here now, so tomato was the "magic ingredient" for the night; about five of the courses had tomato in them, including (I kid thee not) lovely tomato sherbert for dessert. Just prior to desert was the rice course; I had an awesome onigiri with mixed barley and rice; Onny had the namatamagodon, raw egg mixed into rice.
Other than the organic-foods restaurant I've been to with Shuzo, this is the best place I've been to in Tokyo! And the price is merely expensive, rather than heinously expensive: including a fair amount of alcohol, dinner was Y7000 per person, which is about U$60.
Also, we were chitchatting with the manager all night (he was our chef -- that all-seats-are-counter-seats thing), Hayashi Kohtaro (林 高太郎). And best of all, since Kan is on Makino-san and Kondo-san's way home, they stopped by at the end of the meal, and we got to earn them kudo points with Hayashi-san for sending us his way!
Kan doesn't have a website, but this blog post gives you a good idea what our meal was like, including a blurry picture of the restuarant itself at the bottom.
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