Sausage #1

Name: Salsiccia Uno
Neighborhood: Hiro-o / 広尾
Style: Italian
Website: http://www.kiwa-group.co.jp/restaurant/a100457.html

For our first round of SIGGRAPH Asia Jury meetings, we were at Polygon Pictures, so we needed to arrange a reasonably-priced dinner somewhere close by. As most of the folks in the first round were Japanese, we weren't constrained to Japanese food as we are when we have out-of-town guests, so our first plan was to go to Plates, a nice Italian place in Hiro-o.

However, I noticed a few days before the event that there was a new Italian place almost across the street called Salsicca Uno, and since they were new even three days ahead of time they could accommodate a big group on a Saturday night.

As you'd guess from the name if you spoke Italian, this is a meat, and in particular sausage, oriented restaurant. We had enough people that we got a course, but since they had a decent and decently priced Italian winelist we skipped the 飲み放題／nomihoudai/all-you-can-drink and ordered bottles of wine instead.

We had a good time with a very mixed group. As I said we were mostly Japanese and so was most of the conversation, but there were a few English-only speakers and a fair number of bilinguals. I guess as I've been here longer that's becoming the norm for me...

The antipasti was yummy and the salad was generous, but the standout of the evening was definitely the sausages: lots of tezukuri (handmade) sausages of various sorts. I didn't have any (I don't eat pork) but the assembled crew pronounced them awesome. Advised that I didn't eat pork, the chef Koji Asakura 浅倉　康治 whipped up a beef plate for me on the spot which was awesome. Great improvisation on their part.

Even with wine off the winelist, the whole bill was about Y4500 per person, very reasonable for an excellent night out in Tokyo. And we got everybody back to the station in time for their last trains, even Julian. This place is in Hiro-o so gaijin are no big deal, you don't particularly need to worry about speaking Japanese.

Completely at random, Salsiccia Uno turns out to be from the Kiwa Corporation group, which runs a couple dozen restaurants in Tokyo. My friends Nick and Naoco swear by any of the restaurants in the group, although it had nothing to do with decided to try out Salsiccia Uno! Honest!