Category: Everyday Life

We don’t eat out very often.

We don’t eat out very often.
We don’t even go out for lunch, and eating out at night is rarer still.
However, a friend of ours suddenly came back to town for a few days, so we had an opportunity. We could eat out at night, for the first time in a while. (Even we sometimes visit a friend’s house for eating or drinking. Anyway, when was the last time we went to a restaurant? Maybe it was our neighbourhood yakitori restaurant?)

Our friend, who moved to the Kantô (Tokyo) area, wanted to eat something she finds she doesn’t get a chance to eat these days, and that was motsunabe. (I heard she still tries to cook it over there, too.) It was our first time to eat out at a motsunabe restaurant in five or six years. Soy sauce soup base motsunabe with draft beer. They are the best match! Especially, the cooked cabbage and garlic chives in the soup are impressively good. The last motsunabe dish we ate was champon noodles in the soup! Chris happily dumped more red hot chilli peppers and garlic in his bowl.

And the restaurant manager recommended their skewered stuff, such as daikon, konnyaku, gyusuji (beef tendon), and meatballs. We didn’t know before, but she said their kebabs were introduced in some magazines or broadcast on national TV. I grew up in a family that didn’t have a passion for cooking oden, so I didn’t notice how tasty it was until I started working and paying for my own food. Actually, I hadn’t eaten gyusuji, which a popular oden ingredient, so I felt it was best among the skewered stuff we ate that night. Of course we put yuzugosho on it!

Kyushu-style ramen, noodles in a not-black soup, motsunabe. These are the foods that our friend who moved to Kantô missed most. It’s really understandable. I grew up in Kyushu, so I feel ramen must be Kyushu-style. I really missed it when I was living overseas. (However, I saw and tasted many strange Asian-style instant noodles; but I never saw Kyushu-style over there.)

–YS, 16 June 2006

16 June 2006