Fast Food or Slow Food - Take Your Pick

Food in Japan is bright, colorful,  eye-catching and mystifying. So many choices. So much small writing on the outside of the packaging. Such prices.

Everything seems to be available via vending mating - giving even more choices. Even the local truck drivers (wearing western ball caps) seemed baffled by what to choose.

And you don't need to be inside to get vending machine choices, they are everywhere in parking lots, along sidewalks, and in the most unlikely places.

Because we have been on the move we have eaten relatively fast food. One night it was a do-it-yourself barbecue - at the table. They bring the raw food.

This is what we left behind after an hour and about 6 extra plates of meat were brought to us.

One day we were free to choose our own restaurant, so we went to the sushi-on-a-conveyor-belt place. The ultimate fast food. A spigot dispenses hot tea into your cup. Choose and grab, eat and stack the plate, choose again -- they total up the number and color of plates and you pay, then dash off.

We haven't fallen for American food chain meals (yet).

HOWEVER nice all this fast food is, it's not really our favorite way to eat. But last night we had an exceptional treat.

We went to dinner with Ken and Casey, two guys who also work for a watch website. Casey is an American photographer who moved to Japan 28 years ago. Ken is a Japanese banker who lived in New York for 20 years and recently returned to Japan. They know each other because they both collect Seiko watches (like me). I had met Ken before in LA, and we arranged this dinner visit to meet up to talk watches and EAT.

Ken chose the Takewaka Ikebukuro restaurant and a special autumn tasting menu for us. The starter included prosciutto, peeled green grapes, some mackerel, okra and a few other items I can't recall or identify. Casey told us about his first visit to Japan - he went home to the US, quit his job and moved immediately to Tokyo. He's been there ever since.

The second course was Dumpling in broth with sea food inside and seasonal mushroom (like truffle) in the broth.

Special autumn box with colored leaves, egg yolk dressed as a tiny pumpkin, bean cakes, crabmeat in a citrus fruit, steamed oyster with sauce, fish roe and special beans threaded onto pine needles.

Fingers are okay for many small round things...

Now the seafood platter arrives! Fish, shellfish, lobster, seaweed.

Ken is a thinker. A thinking gambler of sorts. He invests a small percentage (but huge amounts) of the Japanese public employees pension fund in hedge funds and "alternative investments". Also "cross-border business advice, globalization, financing, asset management, insurance/reinsurance".

Here he is trying to make a huge decision - the best sake to go with the meal. I am trying to decide how to tackle that lobster head with chopsticks.

We watch collectors are a very cheery sort, and we had the waitress in stitches the whole evening.

Next course was a large piece of eggplant underneath a whole bunch of vegetables and some shredded fish. In broth. Very tasty and I don't like eggplant but ate it anyway.

Then a kicked up version of BBQ with all the fixings on a large leaf placed over a burner. The leaf insulates the food from the direct flame and keeps the sauce out of the fire. But you have to be watching it every second.

Either our waitress felt Casey couldn't cook his own, or there was some flirting going on. Anyway, she came over to demonstrate the technique.

After the BBQ was cleared away we had tempura - 3 pieces plus the leaf - with citrus juice and pink rock salt.

More sake! we cried.

Ken said "When the rice comes, the meal is over." Mike said "That's a lot of rice!" It was covered in fish roe (aka salmon eggs).

Casey convinced our waitress to demonstrate on his bowl of rice. This is the first of three ways we ate the fish/rice. First, own its own, second with a broth, third with special herbs and spices.

Notice the bowl is the size of a salad bowl.

Oh, and under the cover is miso soup. And some pickled veg in the bowl behind it. Dinner is over??

Finally the deserts came, along with cups of tea. This is a chestnut on chestnut custard, slices of apple, pear and peach between slices of mozzarella, with a fig, drizzled with caramel sauce. And a mint leaf.

What a meal! And it only took 2.5 hours to consume, eating non-stop with 3 people serving us. My kind of "fast" food.

To work it off we had to walk home a mile underground, and a half-mile on the typhoon sidewalks.

We were glad to see the sign for our hotel, and gratefully staggered up to bed.