Lunch

After finishing with the real estate agent, we headed out for Japanese "pizza". I put that in quotations because this is definitely nothing like American pizza. There's not even dough. It's more like a fritter or a hash brown cake or something. We sat down at a table with an oven in the middle of it. In Japanese quick-service sit down restaurants, they don't come to see if you need anything, they bring you drinks and then wait for you to press a button to tell them that you're ready to order. I like that - if you need them, you press the button, otherwise, they don't bug you except every so often to refill your water. We sit down to peruse the menu. The choices are pork, beef, shrimp, scallops, squid, octopus, and a couple others I just don't remember. Lee and Mieko ordered the squid, I got shrimp. They bring you bowls of sliced up cabbage with some flour, green onions, red ginger, your selected filling, and an egg on top. The egg is just an egg - freshly cracked open with the yolk not even broken. You get to stir up the ingredients and cook them on the table yourself.


They have an hourglass that you flip, and it takes, I think, 6 minutes per side to cook. There's dried tuna stuff that you can put onto it to really make it fishy. I put only a little bit on. It's the brown bits on top in the next picture.


You then get to flip it over (in my case, it took a couple of attempts and then I had to repair some bits). Then you flip the hourglass again and let it cook on the other side. After that side is done, you flip it back over and turn off the table. There's a hoisin-style sauce and mayonnaise to put on the finished item, along with some seaweed based seasonings to sprinkle on. I only took a bit of the hoisin-style sauce for mine.


You have two implements to eat and cook this with, chopsticks (okay, so technically three) and a metal spatula-thingie. It has a sharp edge so you can cut the fritter into chopstick-able pieces, and it's also for flipping. This was actually really good. I like stir-fry that uses hoisin sauce, cabbage, and shrimp, so this was just that in a slightly different format. Okay, so maybe really different format, with the eggs and flour and all, but I enjoyed it. Lee liked it as well, and is quite pleased that his first meal out in Japan was squid "pizza".

Since we were there for lunch, we got our choice of dessert-type items: tea or coffee, or mango ice cream. Lee and I went for the ice cream. It was a very small scoop of ice cream with a spoon that was about as big as my index finger. Apparently the Japanese like little silverware. It matches the portion sizes here. The ice cream:


Mmmm, delicious!