A day of eating. Wait, let me change that. A trip of eating. Delish! No shame in my game, I had to make sure I ate it up during this trip. I sure did. Well, since we spent all day in Tokyo Solamachi, all our meals were from there too! Let’s get started shall we? First was our brunch meal in the Food Court. You order your food and get a buzzer that goes off when your food is ready to be picked up. Actually these were beepers/buzzers so the food court was abuzz with beeping the whole meal through. When you are done with your meal, you take it back to your establishment’s tray return window. Great system!

Kristian got a tonkatsu curry. He liked it a lot and let me have a taste. The curry had a nice mild flavor, I liked it! The Japanese are serious about their shredded cabbage. They love it there.

I got a Chinese set. It was a chicken and gravy over noodles dish that came with two siu mai and this mochi rice thing. The mochi rice thing was great, it was a mushroom sticky rice thing and it hardly stuck to the leaf/wrapper. The siu mai was okay, not great. Tastes like it looks, plain and bland. I was also a bit disappointed because I am pretty sure there was MSG in my food, I was thirsty all day! Not recommended. After a full day of shopping, we headed to the restaurant levels for dinner!

My salad! I love how they put in all these herbs in the butter and cheese. This was a good salad. The bread had some kind of pate on it so it was a bit hard to eat. I used my fork and knife.

French Onion Soup that came with my meal. Pretty good! It came in a mini Le Creuset pot, love it.

Kristian had two steak dishes during this trip that included an herb butter on top, I got super jelly for both! Looks awesome. Made me crave steak…gotta get my fill when I come home.

My dish! Omurice with Hamburg Steak WITH Foie Gras. You can hardly tell there is foie gras but it’s sitting there behind the hamburg steak! The burger was delicious and juicy as was the foie gras, the rice was alright. I’m not a huge fan of the rice but liked the egg.

As we walked through the mall, we walked through a bakery called Cheese Garden and they were sampling their Imperial Villa Cheese Cake, oh my god it was amazing. Somehow, the cheesecake is super rich and dense yet light at the same time. The cheesecake had an intense cream cheese taste. Kristian bought the cheesecake and we brought it back to the apartment, it took a few days to finish it but finish we did.

We got a bit lost looking for our apartment initially but once we found it and dropped our bags, we laid around a bit playing with our devices since we had wifi. I really learned how much I depend on the internet through this trip. Forreal. Anyway, after a while we decided to head out and get ourselves some dinner. We were tired and weren’t in the mood to have confused conversations with restaurants. We finally ended up in a ramen restaurant. The waiter was very nice but didn’t know English. We figured we could point at things in the menu. Soon the waiter disappeared and he actually got help…his colleague spoke English! Really good English! That was super cool.

And guess what? I realized that we were eating at Santouka Ramen! Yes! The sister restaurant of our very own Hokkaido Ramen Santouka! I was really happy to realize that and noticed this restaurant had the same exactly bowls that we have in Hawaii. How nice and comforting that was. Our waiter told us a story about going to Seattle to teach people about Japanese culture but getting arrested at the airport and being sent back to Japan. That was quite the interesting story to hear, didn’t know how to follow that! I’ll just follow that with food.

Tan Tan version of their Ramen – of course I had to get it!

Very open kitchen. This whole restaurant is just a bar against the kitchen. I watched as the soup was boiling away on the side.

My friend’s ramen, yummm

Tan Tan Ramen! This was mine. It was delicious. I enjoyed it a lot. I thought the brown stuff on top was meat from the picture but it wasn’t. It was like preserved chinese cabbage, I like that though. Very good!

Free egg! We initially ordered gyoza but they had run out. The waiter was very nice and told us that to make up for it, my friend and I would get free egg! He talked it up. He didn’t have to, I know Japan eggs are awesome! Very nice gesture, very delicious gesture. This dinner was nice and warm for a cold night. It was a nice end for a crazy travel day. Day 2 coming soon!