Dave Brown

Tried a new restaurant tonight

A new kushiage (deep-fried stuff-on-a-stick) restaurant opened in the summer, and I finally got around to checking it out to see if it was any good.

To save the impatient the trouble of reading further, my verdict on the place is: meh. I won’t be back there.

There’s one extremely good reason I won’t be back there, and I won’t tell anyone else to go there: it has whale on the menu. That’s an excellent way to guarantee I never do business with you.

But apart from that, instead of calling out “Irasshaimase!” (“Welcome!”) when I entered the place, all the staff called out “Otsukaresama deshita!” (“Good work!”). And I thought that the Starbucks-enforced “Konnichiwa!” (“Hi there!”) was excessively-chummy.

But it didn’t stop there. When I received my beer, the waiter grabbed a tankard full of plastic beer (literally—a plastic model of beer) and insisted on doing the whole “KAMPAI!” thing with me.

For all that, the food was okay, but the general trying-too-hard atmosphere of the place, with all the forced jocularity, just put me off it. It was too artificial—kind of like those American-style restaurants where the waitresses all have to be pretty 18-year-old girls who look good in shorts.