The weekend was a little bit more interesting than usual. On Saturday night we went over to the Yamaji’s for dinner. Anna was out of the hospital and she looked very happy to be out of there. Unfortunately her husband caught a cold and couldn’t join us for dinner. The Fukumi’s also came over, and Haruka enjoyed being the star of the show. He is starting to talk now, and although most everyone else could understand his kidspeak, I was completely lost. Baby talk is quite a bit different than adult talk in Japanese, and I can barely understand the adult talk anyway. So I spoke to him in English and it went pretty well. <\/p>\n
Besides all the usual neighbor gossip that tends to go around the table at these parties we heard that there was a new Italian pizza restaurant that had opened in town. Since we didn’t have anything really urgent on Sunday night we decided to go check it out.<\/p>\n
The place is actually just a five minute walk from our house, and a little off the beaten path. I think they will have trouble getting customers to drop in, but they were certainly busy when we arrived. We had made a reservation in advance, and they were turning away customers at the door. <\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the atmosphere of the interior left something to be desired. Overly bright LED lighting in a white restaurant made me feel like I was in a hospital or an office, not a place to relax over a glass of wine and some pizza. The furniture was kind of cheap, and something about it just felt artificial and not really organic. <\/p>\n
But we don’t mind a bad atmosphere if the food is good, and so we ordered some antipasti, a pizza, and a dish of pasta. The antipasti was pretty standard, but it didn’t really match up with the vast selection of Chiro in Akashi. Not special, but not bad at all. <\/p>\n
The pizza came hot out of a big tile pizza over in the back of the restaurant. The pizza oven looked pretty cool, with the name of the restaurant, SYUMONE, written in blue tiles on a white background. The pizza itself was good – it was my favorite dish of the evening. The red sauce was a little fresh rather than rich, but no complaint here – yum. <\/p>\n
Finally the pasta came out, and it was a little disappointing. It looked like something we could have done better ourselves, and the taste was a little plain. There were a couple of chunks of meat that had been cooked along with the sauce, but they didn’t really blend in with the flavor of the dish. Disappointing!<\/p>\n
They did surprise us by having a wine list, and we could pick from three Italian red wines, two from Sicily. The wine was OK – if a bit simple – but it was helpful to get us through the pasta dish. <\/p>\n
After dinner we thanked them and left, but I doubt that we’ll go back. However, I may order some takeout pizza from them sometime and bring it home. Their location is exactly between the train station and our house, so it would be convenient to get takeout.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, last evening after the dinner I started having stomach pains and feeling nauseous. I was worried that I ate some bad food, but Kuniko ate the same stuff and had no problems at all. Maybe it was the restaurant, maybe it wasn’t, but it will make me think twice about visiting again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The weekend was a little bit more interesting than usual. On Saturday night we went over to the Yamaji’s for dinner. Anna was out of the hospital and she looked very happy to be out of there. Unfortunately her husband caught a cold and couldn’t join us for dinner. The Fukumi’s also came over, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-LO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2964\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}