Hundred Acre Woods

Our first night in Tokyo we went to a tempura bar on the 53rd floor of the Tokyo Opera House. We had a bit of difficulty finding the place–We couldn’t read any of the signs and couldn’t locate an elevator. Finally through trial and error we went from the first floor to the fourth floor and found the elevators to take to the top were on the second floor. Of course, once we got the right floor there were 5 different restaurants all of the names were in Katakana–the Japanese symbol system. We had only the Romanji name–the English spelling of the word. We went to every place and carefully scoured the menu–no luck, all in Katakana. Finally we randomly picked one and showed the hostess our reservation slip from our hotel concierge. She spoke to us in Japanese and graciously led us to another restaurant. Once there we were seated at the “bar” near the tempura sensei (master). Luckily they had an English menu–well, sort of. Many of the dishes had names like “Special plate little.” Ahhhhh, my favorite. Finally we just picked two fix priced menus and decided to go with that. We watched the sensei as he prepared various foods. I would say 3 out 5 things we could figure out. He was very nice–spoke very little English–we did find out he had been a tempura sensei for 20 years! WOW! That’s a long time to be on the restaurant biz!
For a fact I know we ate: prawn–Steve ate the little tempura crunchy head…that was a bit much for me. Sashimi–raw fish -different from sushi which is served with rice and wrapped in seaweed. This was just plain old sliced raw fish-tuna and some kind of white fish. Tempera yam, green bean, asparagus and some white root like vegetable. I ate all that. As we watched the sensei we noticed he was tying a knot with what looked like a long thin white slimy fibrous thing and dipping it in the batter and making tempura from it. I thought it was a root vegetable cut the long way. Steve thought it was a squid arm. We were both wrong. It was the spine of the eel we had eaten earlier. Bone? You betcha! The sensei then fried a couple up for us free of charge. Steve ate his first and said it good–crunchy. I needed a few more minutes to mentally remove the thought of eating an eel’s backbone deep fried, but I did it! It was crunchy and delicate and a little like shoe string potatoes, but tied-in a knot. I was immensely proud of myself. Not every Minnesotan can say they have eaten deep fried spine and thought it was pretty good!