That afternoon, fresh off the eel skewers, we wandered about for a bit—we went into a Buddhist temple (where pictures weren’t allowed) and checked out a beautiful traditional Japanese garden. In the interest of brevity I’m just gonna blast out a few pics with little-to-no explanation:
At last, it’s time for dinner on our first full day in Tokyo. As usual, there’s a story to be told first: Robert and I first visited Tokyo together on the occasion of his sixteenth birthday, and we stayed at the Mandarin Oriental (’cause I’m a wimp and wanted a comfy western-style hotel). On the hotel’s recommendation, we tried a shabu-shabu place nearby which was completely amazing, so much so that we’ve been talking about it ever since!
So now here we both are again, almost exactly ten years later—where do you think we want to go to dinner?? Spoiler alert: it was every bit as good as the first time, even with our sky-high expectations from having talked it up for a full decade.
We had to ask our hotel to make us reservations; that call took forever for some reason (this seems to be a reoccurring theme in Japan). Then we dressed as nicely as we could, and went back down to the subway to figure out how to get back to our hotel of ten years ago. Our shabu-shabu place is on the forth floor of “the” Corrida building. When we arrived, we discovered there are buildings Corrida 1, 2, 3, and 4—all of which look exactly the same, just to make it interesting. But we did quickly find the correct tower (Corrida 1) and the restaurant employees seemed to be on the lookout for two confused-looking Americans (just as before :-D).
The restaurant was instantly recognizable, from the petite women seemingly in parachutes, to the stern-looking but hospitable maitre’d. They led us back to a table very close to where we’d been seated long before, and there we decided on The Battle of A4 Beef vs A5 Beef. Talk about a win-win!
With our ridiculous beef order, we got to choose four appetizers: octopus salad, tuna sashimi, deep-fried scallops, and some bean-curd deal Robert insisted upon. Throwing caution to the wind, we ordered a Japanese red wine which turned out to be fantastic.
Shabu-shabu comes with a lot of stuff: cabbage, mushrooms of different sorts, tofu, shallots, plus various mysteries of course. Dessert was the same as last time: crazy inexplicable glass noodles in molasses (maybe).
So…… disappointingly, unbelievably, I never took any pix of us actually cooking & eating all this amazing stuff!!! Hey but on the bright side, at least we put our freaking phones down for the duration and focussed on the moment, so it’s a feature not a bug.
Robert preferred the A4 (we guessed a ribeye-style cut) while I had a slight preference for the A5 (strip—again, a guess). It was dark by the time we left, all sad the meal was over but against all odds dinner totally lived up to our ridiculously inflated expectations! Next time we’re in town we’ll repeat this exact meal in a heartbeat.
We made it back for our final night at The Strings—we are actually pretty good at figuring out the local subways & trains, or at least Robert is—and we had to swing by that huge atrium bar again to try another delicious Japanese whiskey. Turned out that our gregarious bartender from last night was there again, and he had some new ideas of drinks we might enjoy. So yeah, we had a couple 😀
And just like that (readers will be thinking sarcastically, wow so soon! :-D) our first full day in Japan was already over and done with :'(
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