(Omotesando and Asakusa, Japan)

This evening was special because one of my best friends, J, from Hawaii visited Tokyo to see Grant and I. He brought his new girlfriend, I’ll call her JG for this post, so we were very excited to meet her. The last time I saw J was when he visited us in Dublin a year and a half ago.

This was an evening of extremes, we met at a high-end, pricey bar that is in a trendy part of the city called Omotesando and spent a pretty penny (or 1-cent yen?) on a flight of whiskey. It was pretty good. I’m not super knowledgeable about whiskey but JG was and it was fun to try out the different flavors.

I’m definitely not a peaty whiskey fan and enjoy the more fruity flavors, more of a “Speyside” sort of girl.

Afterwards we headed on the train to the Asakusa area where we were staying. JG had made a reservation for dinner at a restaurant called Torikizoku, which literally translates to “chicken aristocracy”. Kind of funny.

This place is a new chain of restaurants from Osaka but they’ve really stream-lined the izakaya experience. Izakaya’s are informal Japanese pubs where they specialize in drinks and the food you can order is usually served in smaller portions, a la carte style. So it’s really inexpensive but fresh and good. Everything on the menu costs 280 yen (about $2.60) – all drinks, all items on the menu, etc. Some foods like cabbage salad include free refills so of course, J being the hunter for good deals that he is, kept ordering more salad refills. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so much cabbage in one setting ever!

The restaurant specializes in grilled chicken skewers and so there were many different types on the menu from teriyaki sauce smothered chicken skewers to salt-rubbed. They were all very good. A few things I couldn’t get myself to try were roasted chicken cartilage and glands. And chicken liver. It’s probably very nutrient-rich but just the image of it was hard for me to swallow (pun intended). Grant, like a trooper, tried it all and I admire him for it.

J likes to tease me (it’s ok I’ve know him for over a decade) and kept saying these spice jars looked like an urn with my pet guinea pig Tarzan’s ashes. Ok I will admit the color resembles that although it’s probably just ground up pepper.

I highly recommend this restaurant. They have everything you could order from a typical Izakaya but is very reasonably priced. To place an order, you select from a screen and depending on what you order, the food just keeps coming, steaming hot and fresh. And I think we paid for dinner what the flight of whiskey cost per person at the earlier bar we went to.

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