Saturday Night Eats

When Nancy came to visit me she and another friend of hers went out for monjayaki one afternoon I was working. When I saw her later that evening, she raved and raved about how good the place was they ate at. On Saturday night, my officemate, Egg, & I hopped the train down to Tsukishima to see what all the fuss is about.

Tsukishima is the area of Tokyo to eat monjayaki. There were small specialty restaurants everywhere, but we were on a mission to find the place Nancy had been. Luckily the business card she gave me had a map on the back and, after a few walks around the block, we found ourselves sitting on either side of a table-sized teppanyaki grill.

The eats:

Szechuan monjayaki with spicy sauce, ground beef, tofu, and scallions.
Crab okonomiyaki
thinly sliced kabocha (a japanese squash)
anko shu cream

If you click on the links over to Wikipedia for okonomiyaki and monjayaki you can read a little bit more about this type of food.

But how do I describe monjayaki?

A bowl of shredded cabbage & other ingredients with "magic liquid" at the bottom is placed in front of you. To go from bowl of raw cabbage & runny liquid to magic monjayaki, do the following:

1. Spoon the cabbage out of the bowl and onto the grill (leave the liquid in the bowl).
2. Cook the cabbage.
3. When cabbage is cooked, make it into a doughnut shaped ring.
4. Pour the liquid from the bowl into the ring.
5. Mix everything together with spatulas.
6. Grill it more.
7. Eat it directly from the grill with mini spatulas.

It was tasty. However, I think I prefer okonomiyaki (gleefully dubbed okonomi-yummy for good reason!). The true highlight of dinner, though, was the ankoshu cream.

Anko is a sweet paste made from red beans and shu is the cream in cream puffs. The waitress came over and made a crepe flavored with anko for us on our grill. She then cut two frozen cream puffs in half and placed the four pieces side-by-side onto the crepe and wrapped the whole thing up and cut it into four pieces so that we were left with little pillows of melty cream puff goodness.

Mmm-mmm.