Restaurant Review - Japanese restaurant in Yutenji (name unknown)

cross-posted, originally written: Friday, September 10, 2004

Japanese food is so good here compared to what we get in Australia. Even the humble ramen is an order of magnitude more delicious, taste and texture-wise. A Japanese meal consists of a series of entrée sized plates that are shared so we started with cold snails.

These looked like large periwinkles and came with a wooden toothpick to prise out the curled bit of muscle inside. I wasn’t very adept at this and ended up breaking my toothpick after the second snail disembowelling.

Then we had some deep-fried mini spring rolls, as always these were perfectly crisp and tasty.

We were seated in a private room upstairs, so Lynn then pressed the buzzer for the waiter to come. She placed an order for grilled mackeral, fish head, deep fried chicken pieces (kara-age) and some agedashi-doufu. In the meanwhile, a plate of Californian roll sushi had arrived as well as a verdant dish of cold cooked salty soybeans. We snacked on these while we waited for our more substantial fish dishes.

The mackeral was so tasty, a little bit on the dry side but still redolent with aromatic fish oils and char-grill. The fish head was juicy and succulent with salty crisp fish skin pieces.

All of this was accompanied with a bowl of rice and pickles.

We had the choice of dessert after this and Lynn chose some green-tea ice-cream. I chose the rai-chi burooberi dezeruto. This turned out to be a dish of six frozen lychees and about ten frozen blueberries. I guess this is appropriate for a hot summer's day, but I have never eaten frozen fruit for dessert before. These were very sweet, but the texture was…frozen-like. I found that a bit odd.