Okonomiyaki and alcohol

My second night here in Matsuyama my hosts took me out for dinner to a tiny little sushi restaurant near campus called Yamamoto 山本.

If you click through to the larger image, you can see a small container of salt on the ground in front of the door. My host told me that this is meant to ward of evil spirits. (I don't know if this custom is local or widespread.)

We had sashimi (isaki, torigai, katsuo and tairagai), tempura, and sushi (isaki, katsuo, ika and ebi). After each having a glass of beer, my hosts ordered some sake for me (dassai 獺祭 brand) and more beer for themselves. I'm used to drinking sake in those tiny little cups, so this seemed like an absolutely enormous serving. The flavor was very mild.

(In the picture above you can also see the notes I'm taking on what we're eating!)

We also had chawanmushi 茶碗蒸し, literally meaning something steamed in a teabowl. It's a steamed egg dish. I'd had it only once before in the US.

By the way, the head of that red-spoon is resting in a small head-of-red-spoon-sized indentation in the saucer.

That was on Saturday night. Last night, Monday, my host asked me to dinner for the fourth time. When I suggested that I might treat him this time, he laughed heartily at the utter ridiculousness of the suggestion.

Even though it was close enough to walk, we took the local trolley to get there. While some cars on the line are new, a few are quite old and quaint-looking. The one we rode in had a wooden floor. (I'll post pictures of the trolley in future.) Our destination was a place he'd never been to, but had a recommendation for, that serves okonomiyaki お好み焼き, a Kansai-area specialty. The restaurant is called Suzu 鈴, "bell".

The place was tiny, basically just a bar with 8 stools, the entire length of which was a grill. The restaurant was staffed by a mother and daughter. The food you order is grilled in front of your seat at the bar. We ordered two kinds of okonomiyaki, the "everything" (ミクス), pictured here:

and one topped with udon noodles:

After cooking on one side for a few minutes, the batter-egg mixture is flipped and cooked some more:

Then it is topped with condiments and a slightly sweet brown sauce.

Video:

My host was on my right, and on my left was a shlumpy-looking middle-aged guy in a blue polo shirt. As we walked out, however, I saw that the companion sitting on his left was a gorgeous young woman in heavy make-up wearing a kimono. After we walked out of the restaurant my host volunteered that this woman worked in one of the local bars. It was not uncommon for a bar patron to hire a woman in the bar as his companion for the evening and take her out to dinner before going back to the bar later in the evening. This perhaps also explained the several women in kimonos I'd seen hurrying along the sidewalks texting on their phones.

I assumed that would be the end of our evening, but my host suggested we go to a bar, and I agreed. He took me down a narrow staircase and we emerged into a bizarre medieval-Europe themed lounge, completely empty because of the early hour. You can get a sense of the aesthetics of the place, called "Le Club", by visiting its web site. The walls were decorated with paintings of medieval scenes (and, for good measure, what looked like bas-relief Roman busts in profile) and an impressive array of swords, daggers, and other weaponry. A suit of armor stood at the entrance, and there were helms set in nooks in the walls. The two bartenders were dressed in tuxedos with red bow ties. My host, a regular at this place, said that the bartenders often spoke to each other in a secret language made-up language that the patrons couldn't understand.

"When my wife and I come here", my host explained, "we generally first have gin-and-tonic, then a glass of red wine, then a bourbon". Apparently this happens pretty frequently even on weeknights.

So we started with a cocktail -- he a vodka tonic, me some sort of kiwi concoction, then we indeed moved on to that night's red wine house selection (a 2002 Bordeaux), and finally to shots of "Gentleman Jack" bourbon. We were the only ones in the whole place the entire time (because the bars don't actually get patronized until closer to 10:00, and we got there around 8:00). The two bartenders looked really bored, and spent most of the time redundantly polishing the impressive array of fancy glasses behind the bar.

My host said that he had noticed that in many American movies, there is a scene in which an angry man rushes into a room, hastily pours a shot of bourbon, and downs the entire thing in a single agitated motion. He seemed to find this both fascinating, repulsive, and hard to believe. He sipped his bourbon slowly.

When my host paid with a credit card, the slip of paper came back to him with a pen crowned with an enormous white feather -- it must have been two feet long -- to simulate the feel of signing with a quill (just like Joan of Arc would have done!).

Sadly, I have no pictures of Le Club.