Kihachi!!

Tonight a friend and I went to a Japanese restaurant that another friend recommended to me. It was awesome! I am very excited to finally have had food worth talking about! This place was in a strip mall, but once you're inside it feels like a regular restarant. There were the regular tables, the bar, and tatami rooms. Because there were two of us, and I think the tatami rooms were reserved anyway, we opted for the counter. The menu was all in Japanese with english translations, except for the teeshouku menu which was entirely in Japanese. Instead of full meals, we decided to stick to the small single dishes and got a few to share.

We started with sauteed lotus root. I have never had lotus root before, but Mameco talking about it in an earlier post made me want to try it! It was very good! Then we had BBQ eel. I was almost avoiding this one because while I love eel, it is definitely something I've had before. But Jun also told me that she loves eel, so two eel lovers together means we had to have eel! The eel was made to perfection!


Second courses, we had octopus in vinegar sauce. There were so many things in this that I couldn't identify lol. Yet I tried it all! I am not a big octopus fan, the only time I've had octopus before was on sushi. Really for sushi I like the meats to be more tender, both octopus and squid I think are too tough for sushi. However this made me like octopus, it still had some toughness to it, but since it wasn't on sushi I think it was fine. For the second dish we had fried pork tenderloin. These came on a stick and had a mixture of sea salt and grilled sesame seeds to dip it in. These were great and reminded me of when my mom makes fried pork chops at home.



Then we had dessert! I chose to try the sake-soaked persimmon, it had been soaked in sake for a week, and then cooked to remove the alcohol. My friend loves mochi and picked the colored mochi in red bean paste.





All in all it was a great food night. And the price came to much less than I had originally worried about. Mameco! We should go. Like now. Get your butt over here :P.