Nouvelle Kaiseki

For our final dinner in Kyoto, we made reservations at “Giro Giro,” a restaurant that has a second branch in Paris. That tells you how incredibly COOL his place was. It reminded me of Coi in San Francisco – an unusual restaurant that gives you lots of little tastes of unusual flavors. Giro Giro provides an eight course feast, a contemporary version of the traditional Japanese feast known as kaiseki. But with an 8 pm reservation for four – including two children – we knew there was a high risk that this dinner could be disastrous. In fact, it was fabulous… for two of us…and a disastrous for the other two! Of the eight tiny courses, there was perhaps one that the kids were willing to consume (a poached salmon). And the meal lasted for nearly three hours! They were reasonably good sports about the whole thing. And Scott and I got to eat double portions of most of the feast (except the salmon, which we donated to the kids’ stomachs!).

The courses: (1) steamed squid with bamboo in a green sauce (vegetable); (2) tuna nigiri with a tiny potato salad and a slice of egg; (3) snapper soup (really good!) (4) poached salmon with pureed cauliflower, eggplant, and cherry blossom jelly; (6) bean ice cream with oranges and pepper; (7) rice with some kind of crunchy fish thing in it, with a bowl of bean broth following it; (8) some odd Japanese sweets, including “soda” jelly with oranges, some mochi, sweet tofu with sesame seeds, and other unknown items!

It helped that Scott and I shared three pitchers of delicious cold sake. We tried two kinds: Tatsuya (dry) and Desai (medium). We really loved the Desai. We need to figure out how to find this in the U.S. Tor drank a bit of sake as well… I think he had his first sensation of slight drunkness. Not sure if he liked it!