Hey El D, yeah it was really good value.

I think if you don't have huge appetites and schedule allows for it, lunch tends to be a lot better deal at many top restaurants. You usually get 2/3 the food you get at dinner for 1/3 the price.

My thoughts exactly!

It was probably the best value of the trip with the Tempura Endo meal being a close second and the Shoraian meal being a close third.

Notice they were all during lunch. Granted, Shoraian is only open for lunch.

I think for next trip to Japan, I will do most fine dining during lunch and stick to Izakayas for dinner.

Dinner fine dining in Japan tends to be fairly gutbusting in my amittedly limited experience.

Out of the dinners, Maeda was the best value and taste. Every dish was well balanced and had such depth of flavor. The only flaw was arguably the uni could have been a bit better. Every other ingredient was pristine.

damn, wish you grabbed a video of that

enjoying the blog, I'm bummed I didn't know about it in real time

Do you have any advice for people visiting Japan who speak no Japanese?

We'll have the Google Translate Pack I'm sure, but I'm a bit worried about how we'll fare in more fine dining places if they don't speak much English.

Going to try to get a reservation at Harutaka tonight. I'm heading there in two months so fingers crossed they can get us in!

Zimmer, i only know a few words like please, thank you, etc... I think in general you will do fine. Most fine dining places will be ok, you will have a bit more issue at non chain casual places.

I liked Harutaka but it wasn't my first choice. Out of thr places bookable by ordinary people, I really wanted to book Yoshi take but schedules didnt line up. I also hear lots of good things about Arai.

Anyways, the rice at Harutaka is noticably more salty and vinegared than elsewhere and whereas me and my wife like this, it might not be favored by everyone.

So, thats kind of the end of the trip. I am not sure what you guys want to read about. I can reccount other past trips or I could turn this in to an actual real time blog.

That was great tr. Im going to read regardless but whatever you are more excited about writing about is what you should write about.

A post in the cook everything thread reminded me of something from my childhood.



I grew up in the Xuhui district of Shanghai in what was formerly the French Concession.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shan...nch_Concession

Me, my mom and dad, and grandparents on my mom's side all lived in a 500 sq foot apartment in an old shikumen alleyway.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikumen

My grandfather was a tall polyglot history teacher who had a fondness for greasy food and exotic meats such as horse, reptile, and dog. My slight of stature grandmother is and was a fine home cook who preferred the light and refined cuisine of her hometown of Hangzhou. She would occasionally indulge my grandfather by letting him pick the menu for what she would make that day.

This particular day would be one of these days.

In Chinese cities in those days you didnt need alarm clocks as the songlike yells of the recycle man asking people to bring out their old used items for resale rang loud and clear through the illfitting single pane window.

My grandfather asked me to go to the outdoor market. Even though I had already developed a hearty appetite and love of food as a five year old, the market held no appeal. There was always a lot of trash and water on the ground and the smell was not helped by the swelteringly humid Shanghai summer. Nevertheless, I could hear from the tone in my grandpa's voice that it was half request and half command. "In any case, we would pass the toy store and I can check to see if that new constructor bot Transformers made it in to the window display" I reasoned to myself.

Before entering the market, grandpa bought each of us a youtiao fried bread crueller. I was not to speak of this to grandma.

We passed through the stalls selling veggies, pork, and fish. We passed through the stall selling eel. The eel man used what can only be described as a glass shiv to slice thin length wise juliennes of eel flesh off the eel bone. He worked blazingly fast, maybe 20 seconds per small eel. We walked by the frog stall where the basket of live frogs were near to the ground and were almost eye to eye with my 5 year old self.

Finally we arrived at the stall that carried what my grandpa hankered for. A scene unfolded much like the pyramid scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. A mound of snakes coiled and hissed in a shallow pit, thankfully no cobras.

While I later found out that I have a stronger fear of snakes than normal, as a child, I thought everyone was as deathly afraid of snakes as I was.

Grampa picked out a particular 2 foot long specimen that the snake man promptly picked out from the pit. He moved it over to the chopping block where a sizable cleaver fell guillotine like behind the snake's head, where the heart resides. While the snake is technically dead, the body still goes through muscle contractions. He coils and stuffs the still writhing body in to a plastic bag, ties a knot around the bag handles, and hands it to grandpa, who then hands it to me. Apparently, I was to be the warden of snake on the way back home.

The serpentine body still writhed occasionally in the bag below where I held it by the handle. I reasoned to myself "the snake is headless, it can't bite you. Its going to stop moving soon," but it didnt really help. A deathly thousand mile stare came over me the whole way back. I didnt remember to look for the new Transformers as we passed the display window.

We reach home and I hand the bag, now no longer moving, to grandma. I then went off to play whatever five year olds played.

I am not sure if my childhood mind was resilliently forgetful but before long I had forgotten the trauma of the morning. After about 3 hours, grandma called down from the 3rd floor to the alleyway where I played that it was time for lunch.

An array of dishes was put out. Jinhua ham steamed with dried mussels, winter melon soup with dried shrimp, sauteed spinach with garlic, and what looked to be braised beef.

I picked up a piece of beef and bit in. "This beef is really tough and chewy, grandma" "thats not beef....."

The horrors of the morning come rushing back in 4K clarity. I drop my chopsticks and refuse to eat another bite of anything. After getting the whole story, grandma softly but sternly admonished my grandpa who meekly protested with "I thought it would be good for him".

Now that I think of it, perhaps my fear of snakes developed from this episode. Not quite as traumatic as River Fenix in the circus train.

I enjoyed the way you told (or are maybe still telling) that story, broken down Into easily digestible post-chapters that I was following along with in real time as it unfolded, rather than having it all together in a single post.

I agree with this. Also snakes are most definitely to be feared! Zero wrong with that.

Zimmer - if you've got two months until you'll be there, may I suggest spending 7-10 minutes a day from now until then learning some basic Japanese? If you learn as little as 2-3 new words each day, by the time you arrive you'll be able to hold very basic conversations and it will go a long way toward showing respect. You'll find that your effort is much appreciated and I guarantee things will go far better for you than if you hadn't bothered.

Being able to have short conversations such as:

Hello, how are you?
I'm fine, how are you?
Good, thank you.
My name is (name). What is your name?
My name is (name). Where are you from?
I am from (place). Where are you from?
I am from (place).
It was nice to meet you.
It was nice to meet you as well. Goodbye.
Goodbye.

and similar will reap enormous dividends. The same with being able to politely ask for directions or recommendations.

The above may seem daunting right now with no knowledge of the language, but I promise you that you can master it in just a few days with a little effort, and in a couple of weeks with almost zero effort.



I'm happy reading anything you feel like writing about due to the quality of your writing. Stories like going with your grandfather to the market are wonderful.


Haven't been able to view the more recent images until today. That wagyu katsu sandwich looked unreal. Same for the beet mousse. Also wouldn't blame you for making your wife order another Monet's Garden while you ate hers.

Thanks for the ideas Amoeba.

Was looking at doing the beef restaurant in Tokyo that you went to, but ultimately it's prob a bit too expensive and we will get Waygu both nights at our Ryokan in Hakone.

Made a lunch reservation for Sushi Arai, will have a full trip report back.

Currently looking at doing one French Restaurant while we're there. Chez Olivier looks like the current leader in that category. That's probably it for fancy meals in Tokyo, eat Ramen/Yakitori/other delicious stuff the rest of the time there.

Awesome! I think you will have a fantastic trip. Its really hard to go wrong in Japan and everything always tastes better on vacation.

Rachmaninoff

I walked down from the stage after performing one of the easier Beethoven piano sonatas. My teacher of three years, a slight woman from Moscow, looks pleased in her oversized glasses and red sweater.

I was slated to be the penultimate performer in this recital, the order having been decided on experience of the player and difficulty of the piece.

As I walked off stage, a girl a few years older than me who had taken lessons for longer walked on stage from the other side. As she hit the first tolling chords of Rachmaninoff's prelude in C# Minor, a storm of emotions gathered in my 13 year old body.

She made technical mistakes but it didnt matter, the amount of passion and power that she expended from her lithe 16 year old frame was impressive. I did not know music could sound like this. It was only later that I learned that Rachmaninoff wrote this most simple for a Rachmaninoff piece at the young age of 18.

About 7 years back, some youngsters introduced me to the concept of beat drops. Rachmaninoff had some of the most epic beat drops. His calling card being an emotional buildup in to dizzying heights before a cathartic release.

Listen to the Zimmerman rendition of the Piano Concerto #2 from minute 5 to minute 7. It builds and builds until you can't take anymore, then climaxes and denouments in the most Russian of melodies.

Whereas the 2nd concerto is an excercise in harmony between the soloist and the orchestra, the 3rd concerto is largely a showcase for the soloist.

Made more famous by the Geoffery Rush acted movie Shine, where the Australian pianist David Helfgott mentally breaks down while attempting the 3rd concerto.

The most interesting part of the 3rd concerto is the cadenza, the solo portion of the concerto where there is no orchestra. Rachmaninoff considered his original cadenza to be too difficult to be played and thus rewrote it and published the work with the rewritten cadenza. The original is called the Ossia Cadenza whereas the rewritten version the Toccata Cadenza.

I tend to prefer the great Marta Argerich for the Toccata Cadenza version and Yefim Bronfman for the Ossia Cadenza.



Cadenza starts at 10:18



Ossia Cadenza only

I am a big fan of 19th C piano music but other than that Prelude and the opening to the first two Piano Concertos I don't really know much Rachmaninoff. I'm sure I'd recognize some, but I'm not familiar with it the way I am with a lot of the other 19th C repertoire.

I first fell in love with one of my girlfriends when I was working at a music store that sold electronic pianos that had the Chopin Fantaisie Impromptu as a demo song. I heard it playing once as I was leaving my teaching room, but instead of the demo, it was the new 16-yr old teacher just standing there knocking it out like it was nothing. We started dating a couple of years later.

Hey Greg, thanks for commenting.

Other Rach fan favorites include the prelude in G minor. Gilels was supposed to have played this for the boys on the front during WWII.



The prelude op 32 no 10 is great but depressing as hell.



The vocalise was originally written for voice but I prefer the violin version.

Its funny that you mentioned the Fantasie Impromptu. I also played that piece at 15 or 16. I like that its almost like Chopin's remix of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.

Its also interesting that it was an unpublished commissioned work held in private hands like a 19th century version of Martin Shrekli and Wu Tang Clan.

She assured me the Fantasie Impromptu wasn't as difficult as it sounds because it fits under your fingers so well (and the black key etude was even easier), but for someone like me whose Chopin is limited to the E minor Prelude, it's still impressive as hell.