New! Favorite! Kind of Restaurant! 卯夢

Name: Umu / 卯夢
Style: Chicken
Neighborhood: Ebisu / 恵比寿
Website: http://r.gnavi.co.jp/g752305/

So, right near work there's a restaurant that doesn't serve lunch. Instead, a nice woman (usually with her son) sells really good bentos (Japanese box lunch) out of the front door. In the evening, I see people in there though, and when I asked people what it was, they said, "Oh, it's a chicken restaurant."

I've been wanting to find out what a chicken restaurant is for awhile, so on Friday night Yoichi, Atsushi and I decided to go. We walked over and... we couldn't get in. I did, however, get to watch a group of young women in heels energetically flattening a dozen or so cardboard packing boxes while dolled up in their Friday evening finery (Tokyo moment). While the women strutted triumphantly away holding their vanquished boxes, we debated the next step.

Yoichi said there were plenty of such places up in Ebisu, and a typical Tokyo logistics comedy ensued. I was on my bike, Atsushi on his scooter which was parked near Azabu-Juban, and Yoichi was moving via taxi. It took about 35 min. for the three of us to reassemble in front of the Wendy's in Ebisu (a common meeting point), by which time Yoichi had already scouted out some likely candidates.

The first restaurant we went to was playing jazz classics painfully loud (standards and smoky grilled meat restaurants aren't an obvious combination). We decided to abort, and that was just as well because next door Atsushi spotted Umu (卯夢, which roughly translates as "Dream of the Rabbit", the rabbit being the fourth sign in the Chinese zodiac).

So, when we order I got to learn more about what a "Chicken Restaurant" is. As you'd guess it's basically a lot of different ways to prepare chicken meat. They had the obvious Japanese items: Karaage (Japanese fried chicken), which came with a really thick breading but like all good Japanese fried food was actually not particularly greasy; Yakitori (you frequently order, as we did, a big assortment of chicken yakitori); a dish that's a lot like the Chinese "Salt-fried Chicken"; Tamago; a Katsuo salad.

They also had a couple particularly notable dishes. Chicken Sashimi (now there's a dish I wouldn't order at a street vendor in China). It was, to be more exact, chicken tataki: raw chicken seared on the outside but still raw inside. You could eat it either with the traditional shoyu & wasabi or with an amazingly tart plum sauce. And, there was some sort of special, small squid served whole. It had an interesting texture but as I put it afterwards, "daisuki ja nai".

And, they had some nice sakes (日本酒). Although I started with an Otokoyama (男山, literally "Man Mountain"), which is a dry sake of the type I usually like, after a bit of discussion with the waiter I tried an Akitora (安芸虎) from Kouchiken on Shikoku. It was great, not as dry as Otokoyama but with a lot more interesting flavors underneath. Yoichi tried a couple of sweeter sakes (and told an amusing story about how his dad, like myself, likes only super-dry sakes, so his rebellion is to always drink sweet ones), and Atsushi indulged in his preferred beverage, umeshu (梅酒), plum wine, which they also had a selection of.

The atmosphere at Umu was really nice, you enter on a stone path and sit in black-wood booths, usually separated from the booth on the other side by a light gridded curtain (we could hear the two couples in the other booth practicing their English). The rakuna kimochi (easy feeling) meant that we lingered there until about 2:30. Atsushi and I just walked our respective pieces of two-wheeled transportation back to the apartment here in Nakmeguro; unfortunately, Yoichi hadn't intended to stay out past last train, since he had to use a fairly expensive cab ride home at that point.

New favorite restaurant! KAN

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.