Other Food

So I've had a couple of people e-mail me and say that all we eat are -ahem- "weird" things. So this post is all about the good Western food you can find in Tokyo. I normally only post pictures of the more unusual things because it's more fun. But Tokyo has all kinds of great food. Above is a picture of the avocado cheeseburger from AS Diner. It's so big that they give you instructions on how to eat it.

Gen with his burger. He got the pork rib burger, which consisted of a beef burger patty topped with a BBQ pork fillet. The burgers come with fries, and you get about 6 or 7 per order. We also had a really good Caesar salad (you know, to be healthy) and I had a root beer. Mmmm! AS Diner has a dog-friendly patio, so I also got to coo over the pretty puppies.

This was one of our recent culinary triumphs. Parmesan and pea risotto with seared salmon, topped with lemon-chive vinaigrette. Gen was so pleased with us he took about 12 pictures. It was really good. You can only get the processed shelf-stable Parmesan in most regular grocery stores here, but I found an Italian market and restaurant called Eataly where we found the arborio rice, good Parmesan (on sale!) and some good wine and bread.

A few weeks ago we also stumbled across a really good Mediterranean restaurant called Cicada. It's a small plates/tapas concept, which is a favorite of ours for sharing. The menu takes a little from Spain, southern Italy, Morocco, Greece, even Turkey. We ordered four dishes. They were all good, but we were really impressed with two of them. First, the manchego cheese plate. It was served on toasted baguette slices, topped with quince paste and drizzled with olive oil and toasted pumpkin seeds. Then Gen ordered the fish tagine. It was a Moroccan style fish stew served with couscous. Very tasty!