Month: March 2004

And shabu-shabu for dinner

This evening, I visited a IBM friend who’s here on assignment. His office is at IBM Asia Pacific HQ, very near the Roppongi-Itchome subway station. After a brief stop there, we walked over to Shabuzen for dinner. Sha-buzen in Boston advertises itself as “inexpensive, healthy, delicious, and fun”; Shabuzen in Roppogni hits three out of those four adjectives.

The food was delicious, especially the Kobe beef, which we had as part of our second order. It was absolutely wonderful, and made the premium domestic beef (the next-to-the-top option) seem like McDonald’s in comparison — and I’d thought the premium domestic beef was awfully good when I first tasted it.

And it was probably healthy — at least we cooked up (and ate) many vegetables. And it was certainly fun.

But inexpensive? No. The base meal would have been &165;4800 each, but when you add a couple of beers at &165;500, and the extra orders…well, let’s just say I’ve never dined in five figures before (even if in yen). On the other hand, the all-you-can-eat Kobe beef dinner was over &165;15,000 per person, so I guess what we had was comparatively inexpensive.

I’d go back cheerfully.

Breakfast at Starbucks

This morning, I overslept a bit (so I guess I’m mostly over any residual jet lag, though I haven’t suffered from it very much on any trip since I started following the melatonin regimen Jane Brody wrote about in the New York Times), but still got downstairs in time to go out to breakfast at 7am, enjoying the glorious early spring weather (the rain vanished overnight).

Our plan was to go back to Jonathan’s for breakfast — they have a set breakfast including broiled salmon and rice for about (¥600), which is a pretty good deal, especially when compared to the ¥2800 breakfast buffet at the hotel. But when we approached the shop, there was a sign on the door (in Japanese, of course) — all I could read on it was numbers: “03/31/2004” and “00:00-09:00”. I had a bad feeling about the sign, but the door was open, so we went in. And quickly discovered that my bad feeling was right, because all of the chairs and tables were stacked at the edges of the room; I guess they were doing periodic maintenance.

So we headed onward. We tried a couple of coffee shops, but couldn’t communicate well enough to figure out whether they’d have anything I’d eat. Finally, we decided to check out the nearby Starbucks, where I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had balsamic chicken sandwiches available. So that’s what I had for breakfast — coffee and chicken at Starbucks. And then a scone for dessert. And then some delicious fruit from the am-pm market on the ground floor of the IBM Hakozaki building. Total expense, about ¥1000, and it was healthier than what I would have had at the hotel (well, maybe the scone wasn’t the healthiest choice I could have made, but I did pick the blueberry scone instead of the chocolate chunk variety).

Now I’m in the meeting room for the rest of the day (unless there’s enough time for an escape during lunch or breaks). Oh, well…that is why I’m here, after all.