Electrifying Eel

Today

Unagi!

A Japanese friend took my friend and I to what is ranked as the 5th best Unnagi restaurant in Tokyo.  He said that he actually thinks that it is the best!  It was in some weird place in Tokyo, and looked like it was in a house more than anything actually!

Fish ball, baby squid, and edomane beans

Steamed and then baked eel.  Eaten with soya sauce and wasabi

Eel soup

The yum yum at last.  Grilled Unagi.

The texture is so much better than any other Unnagi I have eaten.  It really melts on your mouth with each bite.  Not too oily, and cooked to perfection so that the meat comes apart easily, but is still firm enough to lift without breaking.

The experience was only heightened by the surroundings…

Then off we went to find some sweets.  Saw this angry fish on the way.

Stopped by at this famous sweet shop for yum yums.  It has been around for almost 90 years!

Sakura tea

Fried mochi with red bean.  Red bean with Mochi.  Red bean soup…

Then after this all became a bit too much we went walking around the area.  We ended up trying some Pachinko.

Even though we were with Japanese friends no one seemed to know how to play it!  It took more than 2 minutes of pressing everything in site, and trying to pull things off the machine to get it working.  We were getting some weird looks from other players (there were a lot of serious looking players around) as we tried to get it working.

The goal is to get the little balls into a hole the middle (we think) but we failed miserably.  Probably as we could not figure out if the game was random, or if there was an element of skill to it.

Anyhow, we played for a total of 5 minutes, and promptly lost 1000 yen.  Ok, maybe Pachinko is not for us.

Random wanderings in Akihabara ensured including visiting a massive electronics shops with everything you could really think of…  Now that was a very tempting place…

Walked down to Mitsukoshi to show my friends a Japanese department store where we bought a cake.

Sakura cake!  Special special

Then off to find dinner.  We spent forever trying to find a certain ramen shop only to find out that it was closed……  So we just randomly picked a busy looking one.  We soon found out why it was so busy.

These pictures do not really do justice to the size of the ramen.  They were easily triple the size of normal ramen bowls.  We almost died eating them…