Daily Doings at the Line of Death Bar & Grill

It's cold, dark, and rainy out there. Bleah. In other words....this is soup weather.

There are three Japanese restaurants within a 5-mile drive of our home, and my wife and I usually go to each of them st least once a month, rotating between them. One week we go to Sushi Cafe Kai, the next week we go to Shiro, and the next week we go to Sake.

Last Friday, we went to Sushi Cafe Kai. Like tonight, it was cold and rainy. My wife had the sushi and sashimi platter, and I ordered futo maki (large rolled sushi with crab and daikon radish) and nabeyaki udon (soup broth with mushrooms, thick udon noodles, and an egg, with tempura shrimp served on the side). I also had the pieces of sushi my wife couldn't eat due to food allergies.

A steaming hot bowl of nabeyaki udon is a great meal to have on a cold, rainy night. It evokes an image of me being in a forest cottage or chalet in either the fall or winter, with a fire going in the fireplace, and enjoying a bowl. No, there's no connection between the food and any locale I'm imagining. It must be the mushrooms they add to the broth -- it gives the soup a nice woodsy/fungusy/smoky flavor and aroma.

I still have one question about udon: is there a proper way to eat the noodles? I end up twirling them around my chopsticks. It's certainly an entertaining way to eat them, and it gets the job done, but it's probably not the proper way.

So how did I first get hooked on sushi?

Pull up a chair and I'll tell you.

My first taste of sushi was in 1991, when one of my co-workers at the time took me out to lunch at Mito, a Japanese restraunt near Wright-Patterson AFB. I didn't get hooked on it until 1997, until the person I worked for took me back to the same sushi bar I went to 6 years earlier, but the name (and ownership) had changed to Yanase. I remember the waitress making a comment to Bob-san (my friend and client) that only old men mixed their soy sauce and wasabi. He said that he learned it from old men while he was stationed in Japan.

Sadly, the sushi chef and his young son died in a house fire a few years later, and the restaurant changed hands again, and is now called Akashi. Meanwhile, the original owners of Mito started another restaurant, called I-Zu. I've yet to go there.

Last year, for my birthday, I asked my wife to take me to a sushi bar for my birthday dinner. She tried some of the tuna, and liked it. We've been going out for sushi on nearly a weekly basis ever since. We stopped going during my wife's pregnancy, since she heard it wasn't healthy for her to be eating raw fish while pregnant.

We've also gone to places (like Benihana and Shogun iin Amherst NY) that have teppanyaki tables -- the tabletop grills and chefs that put on quite a show -- but those are most enjoyable if we go as part of a group. So far, we haven't found enough people who were brave enough to try it with us.


Sushi humor: I laughed pretty hard when I was watching the Friends episode were Ross referred to some mental power he had as "Unagi". He'd say the word while pointing at his head with two fingers, and twist his wrist. ("Unagi" is the Japnese word for "eel".) I laughed even harder when Rachel outsmarted him, and told him of her secret power: "Ah...salmon skin roll".

Tomorrow: Victoria's dirty little Secret....and Idiot of the Week!