Our friend Fancy Nancy highly recommended that we make a stop on “Monja Street” for a dinner of monjayaki. What’s monjayaki you ask? You’ll find out soon enough!
Since it was also in the neighborhood with the rest of what we did today, we popped over to Moon Island to try it. Here’s the place we went (can you hear Nancy and Jo screaming?!?!).
Monjayaki is another Japanese style of cookery (cuisine?) that looks like sludge on a plate. It’s just not the most visually appealing dish you’ll ever eat. It starts with the grill at your table, then you select your ingredients and then they come and pour it out onto the grill and then swish it around and cook it for you and then finally you eat it. Again, looks just awful, but its sort of like a personalized Flat Top Grill.
When it’s done it just oozes around on the gill and you’re expected to cut it with a little metal spatula and then pick it up with your chopsticks. Loads of fun and ultimately delicious. Give it a try if you’re in Tokyo, we did and we lived to tell about it.
Believe it or not on the same block as the monjayaki restaurant was a pachinko parlor, which was on my list of things to do in Japan. So we stopped in and played a little pachinko!
It was confusing as hell. Jeff played half and I played half and inside of 5 minutes our ¥1000 was gone and we have no idea why. Plus it was so loud inside that you couldn’t hear anyone even scream at you (had to use hand signals!), and they still let people smoke In there so it was a pretty awful place to be for longer than that anyway.
Tomorrow we’re off to the mountains and a little leaf peeping in Nikko!
