Japanese Food is Good!

A few nights ago we ate at a lively restaurant called Kaikaya where the chef enthusiastically posed for me when I asked if I could take his picture. The restaurant is on the not so crazy busy side of Shibuya on a little winding side street filled with other nice looking restaurants. Andrew read some good reviews about Kaikaya online, so we thought we'd give it a try. We sat at the counter and were thoroughly entertained while we ate a delicious meal. The service was a little slow, especially when we were ready to leave, but we still liked the food a lot and had a great time. We're not sure just how Japanese this food is, if at all really, because there were more westerners eating there than any other Japanese restaurant we've been to. In any case, it was very good.

Andrew's sake. They let it overflow into the little square cup. So you get a big sake!


Andrew's sashimi. I didn't have any of it (or the sake), but Andrew said is was amazing. The baby isn't allowed to have any sashimi or sake.


Our fish in the broiler. Poor fishies.


Our fish before.


Our fish after. This was delicious! The butter, lemon, garlic sauce part was the best. We had a few other small plates--a salad and a prawn appetizer--but I didn't get pictures of those.

Cooking away. It was fun to sit at the counter and watch.

One nice thing is they have an English version of the menu. Not every place does, which can be fun if you're up for a surprise. But in my preggers condition, I'm not up for any raw meat surprises. Well, I'm not up for raw meat surprises in any condition. (We've found raw chicken and raw beef dishes on menus at a number of places we've been to.) Oh, and heads up to non-smokers--you're out of luck here. People can smoke in restaurants in Tokyo, and there seem to be a whole lot of smokers. Every place we've been to allows smoking in the restaurant, and a lot of places don't have a non-smoking section, which makes me fussy, but I'm trying to get over it. (I hate cigarettes, even though I used to puff away on those nasty cancer sticks myself.)