denbushi | blog

I uploaded the pix from our 2006 trip to Myanmar. R and I went for a week (thanks to the in-laws for looking after Mia!), exploring mostly Yangon and Bagan. It was a wonderful trip and the people there were friendly, inquisitive and very hospitable. See the photos in the Picasa Gallery here.

Uoki sushi in Ark Hills (Akasaka) has long been one of my favorite kaiten sushi restaurants. Consistantly fresh, the portions are large and the quality exceptional. Not too expensive, either, when you consider the building it’s in. (You can’t swing a stick in the place without hitting a French investment banker…) I have a client nearby, and whenever I visit them I make it a point to stop by Uoki for lunch or an afternoon snack.

I noticed on a recent visit that they redid their counter-top menu, apparently going to great pains to make it accessible to the local foreign population as well. Too bad they did so without the involvement of a native English speaker. So, who’s hungry?

I’ve become a bit of a ramen maniac since coming to Japan and now always look forward to finding a new good place for steaming noodles. Recent trips to the Shinagawa/Takanawa area (trying to get some bussiness) introduced me to an interesting walk-o-ramen called 品達 (shintatsu) under the Yamanote Line tracks close to Shinagawa station. This place offers eight–count ‘em, eight–different ramen shops under one “roof”. Only the Ramen Museum has more, as far as I know. Anyway, I went the first time and had some weird “black miso” ramen that was average, and then went back with co-worker J for another shot.

This time we tried Higomonz, a place that specializes in Kumamoto-style ramen (my favorite, natch) and walked away very full and very impressed. The excellent soup was tonkotsu style–a typical ramen broth made with pork bones and other odds-and-ends, most popular down South–and the noodles just the right firmness and weight. As an added bonus there were three morsels of kakuni (thick chunks of fat-lined pork) thrown in as well to give the thing a succulent, 贅沢な richness.

Don’t even want to think of the calories in that bowl, but we sure left feeling satisifed. Lunchtime brings big crowds and long lines, so be ready to wait unless you can skirt the busy times…

We spent Golden Week this year in Kumamoto (where R is from.) and  had a swinging time. I was informed that this–unlike some of our other vacations–would NOT include me hovering over my ThinkPad tappity-tapping away in the name of work. No sir, this was going to be a PROPER vacation complete with lots and lots of Fambly Fun and entertainment for the girls. I followed the rules and we had a great  week-long break in Kyushu.  Visiting Kumamoto always means lots of good stuff like daily trips to the onsen and dining on tasty fare, but this time we also make it a point to get out and take the girls around to different places like the zoo and the mountains, which they enjoyed immensely. We also made an overnight trip to Kagoshima (my first) for a bit of outdoor fun and domestic tourism (= visiting temples and steeping in hot springs). I shot scads of photos and have put them online, have a look if you’re interested in seeing a visual summary of the trip.

Located maybe a minute from our office is Concombre, an exceptional little French bistro that serves a wickedly good lunch for around 1500 yen. The room is small and the tables packed closely enough together that you can sometimes here your neighbor chew, but what Concombre lacks in elbow room it makes up for with great dishes and artful presentation. Even the 1000 yen set lunches come on a heavy silver tray, with the main course tucked inside a covered silver dish. All of the lunches are served with soup, salad, bread, dessert and coffee, all skillfully prepared in generous portions that make you forget your dining in Tokyo. (Anyone whose enjoyed one of those 3 leaf “salads” you find in some lesser restaurants knows what I mean.) Free refills on coffee and a friendly staff make Concombre a place not to miss! Almost as good as Beacon, but without all the suits and styling gel.

Rowan Muir Duff-Rollins was born yesterday, at 6:30 PM Portland time. Weighing in at a hefty 9.5 pounds, I’m sure he was ready to move on to more spacious accommodations. We’re all very excited about welcoming him to the world, and will look forward to meeting in person for the first time later this year. Congratulations to my brother and his wife. We’re so happy for you!!!

I’ve moved off the servers at the incredibly lame Intermedia.Net and over to a different provider. Among the many sucky things about Intermedia is that they don’t make an Export function available for their WordPress installations. All I have is an SQL backup of the data, which seems not to work at all when moving from 2.0.x to 2.5.x. Please tell me I’m not going to have to re-enter all my posts manually…

Friend Rick and his new girlfriend joined us for dinner Sunday night, a four-person collaborative affair that produced an exceptional four course dinner and a good evening for all of us, kids included. The food was great, of course, but the real star of the evening was the Freeman Pinot Noir from Californian that Rick brought along. The 2004 vintage we enjoyed has ruby-brick hues and an earthy nose with notes of cherry and raspberry, followed by a hint of peppery spice. Fruity on the palate, the wine is light- to medium-bodied with a silky, balanced flavor. The finish is long and exquisite, and makes you want to go right back for more. This is a wine to pair with duck and a fruit chutney or grilled salmon with dill sauce, served perhaps with a rucola, walnut and apple salad on the side. An exceptional wine, though not cheap at 6,500 yen.

I signed up for a six-month wine course offered by the Wine & Spirits Education Trust (WSET), a UK-based educational body that provides education and training in wine and spirits. The course I joined is the Level 3 Advanced Certificate in Wines and Spirits. While most of the WSET courses here are taught in Japanese, the thought of learning the names of French chateaus and German grapes in katakana seemed a bit counter-productive, so I was glad to see that this course has a single slot taught in English. Better still, the instructor is none other than my friend and client James D., a fellow eminently suited to the job as he brings to it both an encyclopedic knowledge of wine and a wonderfully charming English accent.

We meet once a week on Mondays in Ginza for two hours. The first hour or so we cover the topics for that week (the history of wine, viticulture and vinification, etc.) and then in the second hour we taste 5-6 wines. (The second half is really the better of the two.) Much of this course involves learning how to properly taste wine using a systematic method, and later we will be required to identify wines based on our tasting experience and a basic knowledge of the wines of the world.

The course goes through to October of this year. I’m really looking forward to learning a lot more about wine and the opportunity to learn from someone as knowledgeable (and pleasant to listen to) as James. As we’ll be launching our own wine site sometime in May the timing really couldn’t be better. More details on that later…

Located next door to my alma mater Aoyama Gakuin Daigaku in Aoyama, Amour Superieur is a tiny restaurant with seating for 20 which specializes in “LOHAS French” cuisine. When we visited for the first time for lunch Chef Kumatani was the only person minding the store, and he deftly handled everything–seating, serving and preparation. We opted for simple course lunches, with me ordering the 糸より鯛 (golden threadfin bream, 1600 yen) and my companion having a shrimp and scallop salad (1200 yen).

The dishes were both exquisitely prepared to perfection. The shrimp and scallops were tender, flavorful and with just the right firmness on the outside. The bream was similarly well done, with crispy, lightly-battered skin and wonderfully succulent flesh. The portion was quite small, sadly, but the sauce and grilled vegetables somehow made up for it. Pricey, yes, but the quality and presentation is exceptional. My only regret is that we didn’t order wine. Well, there’s always next time…

I’ve decided to start writing simple reviews of the restaurants in the area here (Shibuya and Aoyama, mostly) that I frequent for lunch. Always on the lookup for simple fodder that let me take photos with the new camera (details forthcoming) and add content to my long-abandoned blog. With that…

Beacon bills itself as an “urban chop house” and is the latest venture by well-known local chef David Chiddo. He and his partner also run T.Y. Harbor Brewery and Cicada in Hiroo. I haven’t been for dinner yet but I’m told the food is excellent and very expensive.

I do go for lunch once every two or three weeks, though, because the food is fantastic and the “power dining” experience is a refreshing change from the standard 1000 yen 和食 set lunch I typically endure come lunchtime. Also, the price is right at between 1200 and 1600 yen.

Yesterday I met with some old friends who run a company here called BlueShift. On arrival I was happy to see that we managed to get one of the swanky booths that line one side of the room. However, I got stuck facing the wall instead of the room and so ended up missing out on the people watching that makes a Beacon lunch good fun.

I ordered the Grilled half chicken “frango style” with veggies (ポルトガル風ハーフグリルチキンと温野菜). At 1600 yen this was the most expensive item on the menu but every bit worth the price. The chicken was grilled to perfection, with crispy, oil-free skin and tender juicy meat. The vegetables that accompanied it were also perfectly done, and the whole thing lay in a shallow, thin sauce with just the right level of spicy zest. Add to that complimentary bread and herb tea and you’ve got yourself a fantastic lunch experience. For power lunches and entertaining clients in Shibuya it can’t be beat.

Met up with old friends Donald and Jason and a couple of other folks last night at Andy’s fantastic izakaya under the Yamanote Line tracks in Yuraku-cho (有楽町). British ex-footballer Andy has run Shin Hinomoto (新日の基) for as long as I’ve lived here in Tokyo (much longer, actually) and serves up some of the best home style izakaya fare around. The portions are massive and the prices cheap. What could be finer? I hadn’t been in maybe a year or more this time, and it was great to see that the food and raucous atmosphere are still as enjoyable as I remember. We samples some of out standard dishes–sauteed enringi mushrooms, grilled asparagus spears, sashimi moriawase–and also ventured into new ground, enjoying lightly-battered John Dory (マトウダイ) and steamed black cod (ギンダラ). Everything was great, and we washed it all down with chilled mugs of beer and imojochu (芋焼酎). Gotta remember to get over there more often!

Being here in Japan and disconnected from the US media (due to a lack of CNN or television access to other US news sources) I have seen little video of any of the candidates for President and instead mostly ingest news from print and online sources. So while I often read about Obama’s exceptional oratorical ability, aside from the occasional brief snippet, I’ve not actually watched him speak. Until today.

Popurls tipped me to the buzz surrounding his recent speech on race, and so I tracked down a complete online version on Obama’s YouTube page. I watched it and was floored. Now I understand my so many writers use the word presidential when referring to him. Everything about the speech was fantastic–the delivery, content, message, timing, everything. A cogent speech delivering a powerful message, in well-crafted prose spoken with exquisite finesse. What’s more is that he apparently wrote the thing himself. How refreshing after years of watching the speech-impaired, semi-literate Bush clumsily try to string more than a few words together without looking at his notes.

Obama is the first presidential candidate in 40 years to match the authoritative presence and oratorical power of John F. Kennedy, and the similarities don’t end there. His populist message of unity and an unflinching willingness to take the issue of race head-on has earned him the respect of pundits and politicos on both sides of the political divide. For once it seems as though we might have someone who can actually redraw the lines of our cultural debate, and take us from the endlessly divisive left-right debate to a more meaningful and important discussion of class, economic division, and income inequality.

In other words, Obama just might be the one who can train the spotlight on the issues that really matter to most Americans: jobs, health care, education, fairness and equality for all, and a bright future for our children. He might be the one that can return the focus to those things we all share, instead of those which divide us. He might just be the one who can restore the the dignity of the United States and our respect abroad after two terms of Dubya and the catastrophic damage the current administration has done to both. He might just be the one after all. After listening to him speak today, I think he might.

Obama, you’ve got my vote. Godspeed.

I attended my first wine tasting dinner by The Vine (one of our clients) last night at Legato in Shibuya. Legato’s parent company Global Dining is also a customer of ours, so you could say it was a familiar setting even though the event was my first.The Vine’s owner James conducted the proceedings and did a fine job of discussing the wines, answering questions and generally keeping things interesting.

All of the wines featured that night were all of the appellation Châteauneuf-du-Pape, one of my recent favorites from the Soutnhern Rhone valley. These are rustic, strapping wines of often dazzling complexity, and are seen as some of the best value-for-money wines coming out of France these days (mostly thanks to vigorous promotion by Robert Parker).

James prepared a selecton of reds and whites from the 2005 and 2006 vintages, with the former generally thought of as being the better year of the two due to perfectly timed rains a month before the harvest that year. These rains, which spelt disaster for some of the other wine producing regions, arrived at just the right time in the Rhone to plump up the grapes, infusing them with a rich and vibrant succulence. The extra juice lends a fruitiness to the smoke and pepper undertones of these great wines.

The wines served that evening were:

1. Bois de Boursan Blanc 2006.
2. Clos du Caillou Blanc 2006.
3. Pierre Usseglio 2005.
4. Bois de Boursan 2005.
5. Charvin 2005.
6. Clos du Caillou 2005.
7. Bois de Boursan Felix 2005.
8. Clos du Caillou Quartz 2005.

My favorites of the evening were all of the Clos du Caillou and the Charvin, while I found the offerings from Bois de Boursan to be a bit too pungent and leathery. James attributed my ranking of them this way to a simple lack of appreciation of Châteauneuf-du-Pape’s intrinsic rustic nature, which the Bois de Boursan wines apparently typify. For me, I just found them to be a bit too, well, stinky, and stuck by my guns (and the Clos du Caillou!).

The food was great (if a bit spare), with each of the four courses matching the wines perfectly. All in all a great tour of some recents offerings from the “New Castle of the Pope,” but I have to say the premium attendance price means I’ll probably not be joining all of the Vine events that come along. My budget for such things is closer to the 5500 yen or so charged by ORCA International for their wine parties, unpretentious one-glass affairs which involve less “tasting” and more drinking of their fine Pacific Northwest wines.

I found a little park near our place equipped with basic necessities: slides and swings. It was Shione’s first time there, and she made a beeline for the really long slide built into the high slope at the edge of the park. In seconds she clambered up the few steps to the platform, dropped into position, and shot down the chute without a moment’s hesitation. This kid, she knows no fear! Mia was happy to have a playmate, and they must have gone down the slide together 20 times before running off for the swings. Glad to have a decent park nearby, and with Spring on the way we’re going to lots of opportunities to go back.

Denentoshi Line, 12:11 AM. You can’t tell from the photo, but the train was otherwise crowded. People give catatonic folks like this a wide berth for fear of getting puked on. I was thinking I might try this move next time I don’t feel like standing.

I’ve uploaded pix from our end-of-year foray to Guam, find them at my Picasa site.

We spent the afternoon today driving around the sounthern part of the island, exploring different beaches and coves, hoping to find a good place we might return to later in the week for some good wave action. It was a relaxing change of pace after yesterday’s marathon day at the beach, and we are heading downstairs now to check out the New Year’s fireworks display from our in-laws’ ocean-facing hotel room window. Happy new year to to you all!!!!

About this time last year we sat huddled under the warmth of the family kotatsu in Kumamoto and talked about how nice it would be to be sitting on a beach somewhere instead of freezing here in Japan. By June we had firm plans and hotel reservations, and now here we are in tropical Guam, enjoying the sun, surf and a refreshing break from Tokyo’s Winter chill.

We spent a full day at the beach on Tumon Bay, swimming, snorkeling, and kayaking around the wide expanse of shallow water that forms this popular tourist area not far from our hotel.

We’re off today to explore the other side of the island by car and see if we can find a beach with good body-boarding potential. The girls have been a handful and I can’t say Rie and I have “relaxed” much at all in the three days we’ve been here, but we’re making the best of it with the help of the in-laws and looking forward to another week in paradise…

The free (?) WiFi here in the Mumbai (Bombay) airport waiting lounge seems to work well if a bit sluggishly. To get access I had to enter my keitai number into a form and then they sent the login details by SMS email. I’m on my way down to Trivandrum in Kerala to meet with a development company from whom I am thinking of renting some developers. First time to India and looking forward to the coming week very much. The trip is taking much longer than I expected (mostly due to skimming the itinerary) and I’ve still got a three hour wait and a two hour flight ahead of me. Its been about 17 hours just getting from my door to here. Blech. I think I’m gonna go find a beer and a stratolounger…