Tokyo Icheban

I was having a craving for sushi, so I took Shannon to Tokyo Icheban, my town's premiere sushi restaurant. Ironically I didn't order sushi at all, even though it was the original lure of this place. The service here is generally excellent as soon as you walk in the door and starts to wane the longer you're there. They seem to have a policy of sending 3 people to each new table and then just getting around to other people later. It's because of this that we didn't order dessert, which was a chocolate hazelnut ice cream in the shape of a pear. Every time we go there we've wanted to order this dessert but it's always out of stock. I guess we'll never know if they actually had it or not now.

We shared a pot of green tea, which was particularly strong. I drank only 2 cups and I was literally buzzing about the table. We shared an order of yam tempura. Shannon had the California Rolls (which were much better than mine) as her entree. There are over 200 menu items to choose from, so I was having a hard time deciding. I was going to go with another eel dish because I know it's something I'm not going to prepare at home for this project, but instead I went with yakisoba. It was steaming so viciously that it was challenging to take a picture. It was actually quite tasty once it cooled off enough to put in my mouth. Luckily my chopsticks skills are horrid and there was plenty of cooling time between trying to scoop and the actual delivery of food.

I was quite surprised that I ate an entire skillet of noodles and am still feeling the burn. It's like I've got a big ball of dough resting in my stomach. It certainly doesn't help that we went for ice cream afterwards either. I was feeling generous and left a decent tip, about 40% of our bill. I guess I'd like to support one of the only worthwhile restaurants we have here.