One of the enjoyable things about being in Japan is discovering restaurants. The fun part is the variety. We have: an "Italian" restaurant we like. It's part of a chain: quite modern where we can order a crisp chef's salad, a nice little one-person pizza, paella, au gratin, and/or of course, spaghetti.
We have a wonderful little hole-in-the-wall noodle and rice bowl ma-and-pa restaurant we eat at where the cook and his wife know us and serve us our favorite things along with whatever meal we order. Mary and I can both order the tempura meal and the cook will put an extra bit of pumpkin tempura on Mary's tray and a special pickle on mine. (more story and pictures after the jump)
There's a restaurant where they bring a charcoal brazier and put it between us in a hole in the table. Then come little trays of exquisite slices and chunks of heavily marbled meat that we can grill for ourselves on the brazier.There's a Chinese restaurant (another chain) with an endless variety of cheap dishes. We have several favorites here: fried mixed vegetables, egg foo yung, gyoza, and tofu in hot sauce on rice.
We found an exquisite (but expensive) establishment in a Buddhist temple that serves a meal of 12 courses of Buddhist vegetarian food all in various sizes of bowls modeled after a Buddhist monk's begging bowl. When the meal is over, all the bowls nest perfectly inside each other!
On and on it goes, and all of these within an easy walk of the house.
Our latest find is a coin machine noodle and rice-bowl restaurant. When you walk in you find a coin machine about the size of a pop machine with buttons all across the front of it. (As usual you can click on the pictures here to get a larger view.)Put in your coins or bills and then start pressing buttons: plain rice, rice bowls with meat toppings, hot noodles in various kinds of soup with various toppings, cold noodles with dipping sauce, curry rice, miso soup, salad, pickles, a raw or soft-boiled egg to put on your rice, even "pudding" -- actually more like what we would call "flan".
For each button you push you get a ticket. Armed with our little stack of tickets we found a table and handed the tickets over to the friendly waitress. It was a hot day so Mary ordered one of her favorites: cold buckwheat noodles with dipping sauce. I got a rice bowl with savory thin-sliced beef on top, a salad, pickles, and miso soup.
What a treat. Service was fast so before long we were enjoying two very satisfying meals. Then we went on our way to the further adventures of the day: a walk in the woods near the nationally-renowned Kamigamo Shrine. You can click here to read that story.
