June 15th continued

While we've been chatting Nick has been researching dinner places. We had given brief thought to one of the fancy seventy-dollar a plate places but his diligent searching has located a restaurant within walking distance that offers a thirteen-course dinner for half that! It is called Issian and the net sort of gave us directions. We know we are close because every doorway opens into another restaurant and we continue searching in the rain until one young lady hands off her menu to her partner and actually guides us to her competitor's door! What amazing people! One reason we wander so much is that the addresses aren't like ours. The numbers don't relate to the location on the street. Number one is not next to either number three or number two. The next number might be 312! They are the order in which the building were built! Even the locals must have a map to find a new place!

Boy oh boy was it ever worth the drizzly trek to find this place! There is a hot stone in the middle of our table and all our food will be cooked there by Marc, our personal chef! He comes from New Brunswick and is studying linguistics although he tells people he is studying business because people don't think that is a strange major, like his real one! He is very fluent in Japanese and is you just observed his body language you would never know that he, too, is a gaijin.

Our incredible dinner includes shrimp, a small fish rather like a sardine but larger, tuna, four kinds of chicken - breast, neck, thigh and chicken meatballs, sausage, two different salads, beef - not Kobi but the next one down which Marc prefers, and pork which looks a bit like thick bacon. The beef and pork come from animals that are PAMPERED! They are fed alcohol to relax them because that makes the meat more tender, and they are massaged! Of course there is also a delicate rice and misu soup. Nick and I have a plum wine called Kokotu which is made with black sugar and Betsy and Ginger had beer. Dessert is included and we choose yuko sherbet which tastes a lot like calemondin and is just the right amount of tartness to polish our palettes! A short walk home in the light drizzle and up the stairs to the second floor. Oh! Did I mention that we ate the ENTIRE fish? Head, tail and all!!

Ginger and Nick are on the third floor but they have a bathroom on their floor so it all balances out! Of course, there is an elevator but we are too stubborn to use it!