Not a vegetarian restaurant, but a restaurant which leans heavily on vegetables and has a lot of veggie dishes. Senraibou is in the sparkly, fancy G-Dining building, and while it's a little pricey it was worth every penny.
Finding this place, by the way - totally the result of me getting an iPhone recently. Using one of the GuruNavi apps we just threw out our restaurant gathering net into the inter-ether and this is what it came back with. I mean, a coupla hundred years ago we would've had to use real nets to eat! Ah, livin' in the future.
Senraibou is an intimate izakaya-esque restaurant that specializes in veggie dishes, tomato nabe for example.
This was so, so, so good. I really can't express properly how good this nabe thing was. It was GOOD. Perhaps italics too on that? It looked nothing like the picture on the menu amusingly enough, but it didn't need to because it was so damn good. It was a Japanese style stew meets a rich Italian tomato soup in the best way possible. After we had eaten the seafood and vegetables in it they took the rest of the soup away to make rice porridge with it, and that was incredible, but it was so hard to stop eating that soup that I was worried they wouldn't have enough soup to work with. It was incredible. Also this:
...was incredible. Baked tofu with kimchee and cheese. Oh holy crap yes. The last thing we had was sadly the worst of the three, but it was interesting in a different way at least.
Kabocha (squash) soba noodles. They didn't really taste of kabocha, but they were thick and wholemealy. They were good, but they weren't up to those other two heavenly dishes.
As I said, Senraibou isn't the cheapest place, but it isn't crazily expensive. Our meal plus drinks ran us about 5000 yen for two, and it was really, really good. I recommend the place, and of course there are tons of other fancy eateries in G-Dining too, so that's on the map now! Eating! Yes!
I wanna blog, so here's a post about random Japanese music I've been listening to.
It's getting to be a pretty hard and fast rule that I like about a third of everything Kreva puts out. When he's focussed and forceful and working with good beats (which mostly err on the glittery 'futuristic' side) he's got a good flow and I can get into it. His last single 挑め (Idome) is pretty ace:
But when he's doing the modern pop R&B thing he sucks atrociously. The B-Side to Idome for instance. Yuck.
Monobright, now including Hidaka Tooru from Beat Crusaders have put out a really decent Mini-Album and a really decent double A-side already this year. He hasn't really done much to change their sound, although the new releases are generally more consistently upbeat, which he might have something to do with. The double A-side was some insane triple tie in, whereby one song was being used by the J-League, and one song was the theme to a new movie with Yoshitaka Yuriko and was also being used in a Pocky commercial. Tie-in-a-licious yo, and it's a fun song. I got myself a Nico-Nico Douga membership so that I could post this video. It looks like the movie is about Yuriko choosing between a bunch of boys, so they went for the same thing in the video, with all the members of Monobright:
The new single from Kuriyama Chiaki (of Kill Bill and Battle Royal fame) works for me too, because it was written by Shiina Ringo, and performed by her band Tokyo Jihen. In other words, it's a Ringo-chan song sung by someone else, which, since her voice is so unique, is pretty dumb. The song still manages to be pretty good though:
I also picked up an album that came out last year: Jim O'Rourke's 'All Kinds Of People Love Burt Bacharach'. Jim O'Rourke is, of course, not Japanese, but he's working with predominantly Japanese singers and musicians on this covers record and as far as I'm aware it's only available here. I figured that with O'Rourke it could go one of two ways - restrained and perfectly performed covers or out-and-out experimentation, but I wasn't sure what to expect. It's the former for the most part, with excellent drumming from Glenn Kotche keeping the whole thing simple and light, and generally good vocal performances in variously accented English from the singers. Thurston Moore adds a faint wash of fuzz to 'Always Something There To Remind Me' and Yoshimi from the Boredoms and OOIOO puts some random percussion on her track, but other than that it's nice and straight (as you could probably expect from listening to his Bacharach-fueled Eureka album). I do really like the twist in the opening track though, where Haruomi Hosono from YMO sings an altered version of 'Close To You' which starts out "Why do birds suddenly appear every time I am near? Just like me, they long to be, close to me." It's very 'Insignificance', very, 'Halfway To A Threeway."
There's more but I've sated the blogging urge so let's leave it there. I'm digging the new Polysics album title - "Oh No! It's Heavy Polysick!" so I really hope I can afford to pick that up soon.
Cheese Cheese, located on the ground floor of the somewhat unbalanced Norbesa Building in Odori, does not (luckily or unluckily) serve only cheese. It is instead a good Italian restaurant. I suppose that cheese is an integral part of Italian cuisine, and is pretty alien to Japanese cooking so emphasizing the presence of cheese in the name of the store is probably justified. Still, it's not that cheesy.
I've been to Cheese Cheese a few times now, and I really like it. Not just because it does Italian food that's a sight more satisfying that most Italian restaurants in Japan, but because they seem to have a nicely showy approach to serving some of their dishes that makes things look all the more delicious. The salad we ordered was mixed and spun in a massive bowl-within-a-bowl thing, and then we were given a choice of cheeses and told to say when. We left that girl grating for a pre-tty long time.
They mix some of their cheese-based dishes inside a massive, hollowed out cheese for maximum cheesiness, and when the dude ground our pepper, he did so in a somewhat scatter-shot way. Plus they give you coloured pencils and a big white paper place mat that you're encouraged to draw on (hints of our work can be spotted throughout these pictures). That's just plain fun.
That pasta was delicious, and I can't resist ordering a pizza when I go there because decent pizzas are a thing to be cherished in Japan. I think the chef won some international pizza competition - anyway, good pizza. Of course with a somewhat Japanese bent, but then... this is Japan.
So I like the place and I recommend it. It's in Norbesa, which has a bloody great ferris wheel on top so you can't miss it, and I've marked it on my map too. Speaking of pizza though, just a quick shout to say a while back I finally thoroughly enjoyed a delivery pizza in Japan. It was from Pizza-La, and after unsatisfactory orders from every other chain I can think of, I'm gonna stick with them from now on.
EDIT! UPDATE AND EDIT! Grabstri closed down. Then they demolished the building too, which is a little extreme but, well, it wasn't that great really. Don't worry about the Meer Lounge people though, they opened a new place in Susukino called PEACE with really uncomfortable stools. I'll leave this post up for posterity but kill the tags. Is that ok?
Oh boy, pretty soon every trendy, somewhat bohemian bar and restaurant in Sapporo is going to be owned by the Meer Lounge dude. I wonder if he could be described as 'shadowy'? That would be cool. Hot on the heels of World Japanese Foodin' EN, that I blogged about last year, January saw the interestingly monikered Grabstri open in Kita 24 Jyo.
I'm really not trying to plug this little chain of bars too much, honestly. I was in Kita 24 Jyo and picked up a flyer for the place, then didn't know it had anything to do with Meer Lounge or EN until we went there and saw the menu. The flyer, by the way, features their slogan - "Let's Tacos", which I would hope a lot of people will find grating (the common "Let's [NOUN]" construction of Japanese ad copy tends to grate on most native English speakers) but for me just shows how inured I've become, in that it didn't bug me that much. Also I kinda fancied Tacos, which really aren't common in Japan.
Well, turns out that much like EN, Grabstri offers a contemporary Japanese take on the dish. All the food we had was great, and I'd certainly recommend the place, but I don't think their tacos are all that taco-like in anything other than basic construction. Then, I'm English! What the hell do I know about Mexican food? Only Americans know about Mexican food. Eh, Mexicans too probably.
Grabstri is a smaller, more humble looking place than EN (though it shares a few quirks of decor), less of a restaurant, more of a bar with food, but they had a pretty big menu to choose from. The tacos (soft or deep fried) are the centre-piece, but we also had these deep fried shrimp cakes that were just incredible.
It's located really centrally to Kita 24 Jyo, about a minute from the North exit of the subway, and I've marked it on the map too! Good food, perfectly good beer and a nice feel to the place, so go check it out.
This is what you miss out on, not having Tower Records in the rest of the world any more, suckers! I went to Tower Records in Sapporo, I forget what I went for, but I was wandering around listening to pretty much everything that looked interesting and there was a pretty big display for the two new albums from Shinsei Kamatte-chan. I had no idea who that was (despite them getting an assload of press last year, I don't keep up with everything, though I've been working on feeds and readers to make keeping up with anything easier recently) but they had albums by Midori on the same display, who were great but split up recently, so I gave them a listen. And then I bought both of their new albums
I cannot remember the last time I've been sold, so completely after the first few tracks of an album. It turned out I was listening to Tsumanne ("Boring"), their major label debut, but that they'd also released an album on their original indie label on the same day at the end of 2010. TWO ALBUMS ON THE SAME DAY? It's been done many times before, but let me tell you I cannot help but eat that shit right up. It hits my 'artistic follies' sweet spot just 'so'. Also it brings their total for 2010 to three albums and a separate single, which is a more than respectable output.
Another awesome, ridiculous thing they do is hidden tracks. Their debut has an unlisted track, their single (which is two tracks, one being an instrumental of the other) has more music stuck on the end of the second track after a silent gap. Best of all 'Tsumanne' has an unlisted track that's actually THREE more songs put into one twelve-minute track. It's so stupid, but it's so great.
A lot of people seem to like to flail around trying to describe Shinsei Kamatte-chan's music, and if that's good enough for everyone else, well... anyway. They're a noisy, messy, arty, avante-ish punk pop band, with good tunes and a chaotic approach to... pretty much everything it seems. They've got a massive youth following from live-streaming, uploading shitloads of videos and generally working the internet for all they're worth. And the videos often seem to be entirely different mixes of the songs to the ones they end up releasing (like the one at the top there). The frontman doesn't give interviews, and a lot of their songs pitch-shift his vocals so much that I really did assume that they had a female singer too at first.
Wow, this sounds like an utter puff-piece so far. But, I mean, they're not the best thing ever in the world. Just calling their albums 'Tsumanne' ("Boring") and 'Minna Shine' ("Everyone Fuck Off And Die" as jrawk.com wonderfully translated it) makes me want to not like them, even though it's almost important to have somebody taking that approach to things. I can see why their first album, 'Tomodachi Koroshite Made' was so popular: it's catchy and aggressive and crazy and fun. But when they lean on the piano for songs it makes me think of Midori - but less-so (the single is probably the worst offender for that I suppose). I think it's a good album, so's their other indie record 'Minna Shine', but I don't love either of those records.
I fucking LOVE 'Tsumanne'. For me, musically it's like a quantum leap forwards. It sounds like nothing else, despite bringing to mind a load of music I like. There's still shreds of that simple, snotty punk sound, bits of Midori, but it's drunk, woozy, smothered with deranged, over-chorused vocals and stranger melodies than before. Oh, ok, when I first put it on and was blown away I thought - Holy shit, it's the punk-rock Yapoos I've been waiting for. And now, jrawk says (in the review linked above) that they've been hanging around with Togawa Jun of Yapoos? Makes perfect fucking sense. Then, the best thing is that in the end after living with it - it doesn't sound like Yapoos. It's entirely its own thing, but it has that same, weirdly other-worldy vibe to it. Maybe it ate a bunch of Yapoos vinyl before it turned up to the party, I don't know, but I do love it.
And for all I know whatever they do next will be completely different and that will be awesome too. They're a great fucking band and I think I've been paying too much attention to pop music recently. Time to pick up another free zine and check out every band in it again I guess. Also, check out all the albums on jrawk's best of 2010.
