No Tomatoes

When meals are followed by whisky sours, what one ate usually slips behind. I have been waiting a day or so before writing this hoping that some fervent detail and gnarled recollection might surface, but it was only last night when Peter hauled out his memory of the fat that I could piece together the other mouthfuls.

Before one eats here, one has to cook. There is a heavy black iron dome centred on the table beneath which there is fire, above which there is a lump of fat. Other food came and went, and by the end of the meal the fat had slid into the surrounding gutter. Peter and I ate the two pieces that remained once the vegetation had disappeared, leaving me as I write this to sadly muse that Mina missed out on a sublime morsel. It is normally here that I would inject a peaky metaphor, the hah-ed and brushed finger-nails of my witty repartee to evoke its ingestion, but the best I can do is compare it to pork scratchings, except tasting sweeter, not too sickly, with mirror-like depth. However, to align scratching-to-scratching does the lamb a great injustice, for the bit of bleater equates more accurately to a hundered swine patches, it really was that intense.

We were already pretty impressed by this restaurant on the canal next to Combine. Having frequented this secluded path for the past couple of years, it seemed due to eat and not always booze up with French architects and leer at the staff. And lamb is so seldom found in Tokyo, that why wouldn’t one? I think Peter is discovering that not just fish is left uncooked in Japan, the lamb that we began with a simple carpaccio with chives and soy sauce. Again, insert simile here, something along the lines of seal skin and Nivea and kittens –and beef actually; it was bloody red, if mercifully not bleeding. The rest of the meal’s meats also arrived freshly torn from a little glib bounder, but here we used our heated dome to singe the shards, allowing each to enjoy to our preferred rareness.

Back to those plants, whenever I see bean-sprouts I see a redacted idea, a superior ingredient that has been blacked-out in the menu: a sprout alone never seems worthy enough to be first choice. That still stands, despite the dribble of fat brandishing them: how wonderful it would have been had some thuggish courgettes appeared to sponge the juices instead. With that wry observation I shall leave that there and try to find the words to describe the drinks at the bar that came next. Strong might be one of them…