Here we are with another weekend full of delicious food.
Since we are pretty careful about what we eat during the week, it makes sense that we tend to go a little nuts on the weekends. It started on Friday night – after work I met Kuniko in Kobe to do a little bit of last minute Christmas shopping. After our shopping we had some time to kill before our restaurant reservation, so we stopped in another restaurant a few blocks away to have a drink. The place was named memorably – La Boozy Cafe. Although we just ordered an appetizer and some drinks the menu looked pretty good – lots of nice meats to choose from. We sat at the bar in front of the chef as he cooked, and he asked us lots of questions about what brought us here. We mentioned that we had reservations at the restaurant down the street because they have some special truffle dishes, and he dug into his refrigerator to let us smell the truffles that he had in stock.
Sensing a chance to bring us back some other night for dinner, he made a simple consomme soup with grated truffles and served it to us on the house. It had a nice aroma, but I thought that the truffles were a little wasted on the soup. We also ordered small plate of ratatouille that was better than I expected. We may or may not go back, but the staff were certainly friendly and that counts for something.
Our main event was at an Italian bar/restaurant – a sister restaurant to a place we tried a few years ago but dismissed as stuffy and overpriced. This place had a much more casual atmosphere, and we sat on high stools and looked out over the back streets of the Kitano district, with lots of noise and excitement in the tiny restaurant. We ordered up a carafe of red wine, a fritatta with black truffles shaved over the top, a dish of risotto with white truffles on top, and then a roast breast of duck with black garlic sauce. For me, it was all about eating the truffles, and the restaurant did not disappoint. They weren’t shy about using lots of truffle, and the intense flavor really showed well with the comparatively mild fritatta and risotto. While eating the truffles I had the feeling similar to somebody who has tried a fine wine for the first time – this could end up being an expensive food to love. The duck was quite good, as well – they roasted it perfectly with plenty of pink still inside so that it was as dramatic on the plate as it was on our tastebuds. Great restaurant, great experience!
After dinner we walked back towards town, but in keeping with our tradition of doing things in threes we decided to make one more stop. Recently I found a restaurant review of three restaurants in the Kobe Motomachi area, and we had already tried two of them – so we thought we should complete the trifecta. The last stop was a place called The Rib Lab. I love ribs – I can’t get enough of them – and fortunately ribs have been making headway in Japan in the last few years. The Rib Lab was a pretty upscale, trendy restaurant with a stylish interior that included a giant photo of a topless woman eating ribs that dominated the dining area. This place is definitely for adults.
I know you are probably thinking, “Ribs? Topless women? This has got to be a home run, right?” Unfortunately we were disappointed with The Rib Lab. First, the cardinal sin – the ribs were tough and chewy. Slow cooked and tender pork short ribs – sliding right off the bone – these are what I wanted to eat. Instead we got tough rib meat that had been overcooked (maybe charred with a kitchen blowtorch?) One of the cool things about the restaurant is that you can get ribs with lots of different flavors – maybe 10 flavors to choose from, but it was hard to enjoy the flavor when chewing through charred meat.
The second problem with The Rib Lab was the price. Here you pay by the rib – about five dollars per short rib. For a guy that can sit down and eat twenty ribs without effort that makes The Rib Lab less than a satisfying experience. It is much better to walk down the street to our previous discovery, Bo Tambourine, and have a rack of ribs for a quarter of the price. Nice try, Rib Lab, but you’ll have to do much better to get my business.
So anyway, it was a learning experience, and we were both glad that this rib restaurant wasn’t our main event for the evening. My truffle craving was satisfied and it was “mission accomplished”.
Saturday we went over to the Fukumi’s house to celebrate the Christmas season. Last year we hosted the Christmas party, and this year the Fukumi family volunteered to host the party for the first time. Their place looked great – they had put up a big white Christmas tree, and everyone had brought some small little presents to put under the tree. As usual, dinner was excellent. We started off with champagne, and on the table was plenty of bread and a ragu style meat sauce to spread on it. We also had a big chef’s salad, a porcini mushroom risotto that had a real intensity to it, and two roasted chickens from Costco that made a big impact when they hit the table.
Everyone was enjoying lots of beer, wine, (and Scotch) with the meal, and I think that we ended up drinking into the Fukumi’s personal wine stash – a couple of Benziger wines were opened as well. During the dinner we played with Hiroka who was happy to be the center of attention. I spent a lot of time with him playing with Lego blocks, and we built some different animals together for his “zoo”.
At the end of the evening we all exchanged presents and it was fun to see what we had gotten each other. I got a scarf and some gloves to keep me warm during these cold mornings – good news! We went home around midnight after six hours of talking, eating and drinking. It was a great party, and we were really happy to spend part of our holidays with our neighbors.
But wait, there’s still one more day of eating! Sunday morning we packed up all our Christmas packages to send off – one to San Diego, one to Florida, and one to Hawaii. We drove into Kobe and stopped at the central post office to ship them out. Good luck packages! I hope all your contents make it through customs OK.
While in Kobe we wanted to hit the big 100 yen store so that Kuniko could buy some holiday decorations for her school. Before that we stopped at Luke’s Lobster to eat a lobster roll and a crab roll. This was Kuniko’s first experience to eat a lobster roll – and my first experience to eat at Luke’s. It was really, really delicious. The bread they use is the perfect texture to support the lobster meat, and it was made with a light mayo so that it didn’t overwhelm – not overly tangy like Japanese mayo can be. The size was perfect as a snack, too. We’ll be back!
For the drive back we stopped in at Horai 551. This place is a popular Chinese food shop that is known for their steamed pork buns (they are the size of baseballs) and we also got a set of six shumai to go. The shumai are twice as large as what you get on the street in Hong Kong, and chock full of meat and garlic. I am still burping garlic the next day after eating those. Wow!
Back at home we did a little shopping for dinner, because apparently we were thinking about eating again. Kuniko wanted to test a recipe for our next party with Yoshi and Mamiko, and I wanted to try an African chicken recipe. We did a little shopping, and then came home and started cooking. It was fun to work in the same kitchen on completely different recipes. We sipped white wine (Secreto Sauvignon Blanc) while cooking, and then served up some pretty intense dishes. Kuniko’s dish was spiced potato, sausage, egg and cream layered into a casserole and baked. We liked the balance of the different flavors, and we decided we’ll make some tweaks and serve it again for our guests next week.
My dish was from a book that I finished recently (David Lebovitz’s The Sweet Life in Paris) and it was chicken coated with saffron, turmeric, cinnamon, paprika, salt and pepper and then braised in the oven for about an hour. It was topped with apricots and roasted almonds, too. Definitely something new for us, but I liked the balance of the spices and trying something out of the ordinary.
So we’ve still got lots of leftovers to work on, so healthy dinners will have to wait a few days. It was totally worth it to eat well and enjoy some new foods this weekend, but I am really looking forward to that exercise bike tonight!
