Becky Goes Out to Dinner

February 26, 2007

For practically all of February, I have spent weekends at home. This was due in part to my cold, due in part to a lack of a social calendar.

The only thing I’ve done socially has involved dinners. Two weeks ago, on Friday, I went out with the English-speaking staff at Nogyou for a Shinnen Enkai—a New Year’s Drinking Party. Granted, it mid-February, really too late for anything but Chinese New Year—but better late than never.

I don’t know how much I’ve mentioned Drinking Parties, but they happen quite often at my schools. The name actually makes it sound wilder than it is. Basically, the staff of a school (this can be the whole staff or just a part of the staff) goes out to a really nice restaurant, which serves all-you-can-drink alcohol for two hours. Rest assured, the alcohol flows quite freely, but it’s no college binge and no one gets really out of hand. The party usually begins around 6:30 and ends at 9:00. It’s a good chance to socialize and get to know people you normally wouldn’t talk to very much.

I’ve been to 6 of these since the school year began (two for Nogyou, two for Kushira Shogyo, and two for the office—none for Kogyou). I look forward to them because I like to socialize with new people. But I also like that there’s a time limit. I can leave after 2 and a half hours—I don’t have to stay forever and all night. As far as drinking goes, it honestly depends on what alcohol they serve. If they’re serving nothing but beer, sake, and shochu straight, I drink juice or tea, because I don’t like straight alcohol. If they have mixed drinks, such as chuhais (shochu and fruit juice), I have two drinks. Usually two drinks won’t do anything more than get me slightly hyper.

Anyway, back to the very late New Year’s Party. Now, I like Nogyou’s parties, because they’re smaller and more intimate—six people as opposed to, say, 50 in Kushira Shogyou’s parties. As such, I also have more say in what we have to eat. I had mentioned that I’d never had shabu shabu, and so they arranged to have the party at a shabu shabu restaurant.

Shabu shabu is cook-your-own-food restaurant where you boil pieces of meat and vegetables. These kinds of restaurants are tremendously fun (and expensive). If you’ve seen Lost in Translation, I’m pretty sure the characters got into a fight at a shabu shabu restaurant.

When I went in, there were already two giant pots of water and two platters filled with vegetables, tofu, and udon (thick white Japanese noodles). The stove was built into the table and the fire was on. I fiddled with the range until the fire was hot. When everyone gathered, we ordered our drinks. They had chuhai in this restaurant and I ordered a peach one. It was very good. I couldn’t taste the alcohol at all.

After our toast, the waitress brought in platters of meat: raw pork and beef, cut into thin strips. The water was already boiling nicely, so we stuck the meat in. We moved the meat back and forth underneath the water, swish, swish—or, as the Japanese say, shabu, shabu—and soon the meat changed colors. We dipped them in a tangy sauce and they were delicious.

We ate the meat and vegetables and kimchi appetizer. I had my second chuhai, grape-flavored this time, good but not nearly as nice as the peach one. After we had eaten all the meat and most of the vegetables, we added udon and ate that too. The waitress then took our cooking water and made a rice and egg porridge out of it. For dessert we had mochi ice cream, pieces of persimmon sliced up, and coffee and tea.

All of this added up to a heavy price tag: 4200 yen each. (About $42.00.) That is, of course, the downside to Enkais—they’re expensive. But I had fun and enjoyed myself.

This weekend, on Saturday, Rachelle and I went out to Nero for dinner, since neither of us felt like cooking. Nero is a very nice local restaurant that I’ve been to—let’s see, this was my third time. The very first time I went was my first night in Kanoya.

At the end of the restaurant, the walls are glass and there are a few trees or vines on the outside of the building. At night, when the trees are in shadow and Christmas lights sparkle, it feels a little like eating inside an enchanted forest. For 1200 yen you get a main dish, an all-you-can-eat soup/salad/appetizer/desert bar, and an all-you-can-drink (non-alcoholic) drink bar.

First we got our drinks. I always get apple vinegar. Always, always. Apple vinegar is either a very light vinegar or else vinegar and apple juice mixed together. In the case of Nero, I think it’s the former, because it was very pale, almost white. To me, it tastes like apple juice with a bit of a kicker: a little sour, a little sweet, a little zingy.

At the appetizer end, Nero has some of the best fresh tofu in Kanoya. It’s very soft and on Saturday it was served with an ume plum sauce that was mildly sour. I also had edamame, a slice of pizza (too late I realized that it had tuna on it), bread, cheese and bacon fries, and two cups of soup. This may sound like a lot, but you have to think in Japanese proportions. The pizza, for instance, was no bigger than a personal pan pizza, was thin as paper, and had been cut into at least 20 different slices. My portion was only slightly bigger than a splinter. The bread, too, were the size of croutons. I’m not exaggerating.

The main dish was bigger. Rachelle ordered eggplant spaghetti with meat sauce (one of the more normal Italian dishes—no I’m not kidding either), and I had bibimba. Bibimba is a Korean dish. They serve it in a stone bowl that’s sizzling hot. Inside was rice, meat, bean sprouts, kimchi (spicy pickled Korean vegetables), dried seaweed, and the raw yolk of an egg. I mixed the ingredients together, letting the stone cook the egg, and ate it. It was actually pretty good and a lot less strange than it sounds. Rachelle didn’t find her pasta quite so appealing. Let me tell you, finding good Italian in Japan is hard.

There was a small desert bar with coffee Jell-O and whipped cream (a modern Japanese staple in buffets), tiny, tiny cream puffs (slightly bigger than the head of a Q-tip), and vanilla wafers.

You know, to me, Japan is not an exotic place anymore. It’s real, normal, and boring at times. But the food never ceases to remind me that I’m not at home. Even things that are normal are slightly off. It’s an endless source of fun and amusement.