Yesterday I went to a Japanese bar called "Danya". It is basically a bar, but you can also have dinner or lunch there. And it seems that the Road Traffic Law on drunk driving has so tightened that this kind of bars in suburban areas turned themselves into places where people can have meals mainly. I mean, you can have alcohol at a bar in a big city as you could go home by train, but you cannot in a rural area since you'd have to drive back home.
This restaurant was in a neighboring city called "Ushiku", and we came here by car. "Dan" off the name of this bar "Danya" means "warmth". You wouldn't want to feel warmth in the summer, but I think Japanese-styled bars tend to have names that sound good in the winter.
This bar had a backyard that we could see through the windows of the room we were in. Without those fences we'd have seen cars running on the road. I think it is difficult to have a tranquil atmosphere in a town.
We didn't sit on chairs but on the floor, which was the Japanese way of having meals until the early Showa period (1926-1989). And as I said before, I don't smoke at all.
As an appetizer we ordered this salad. The brown stuff you see is fried shrimps.
I don't remember the name of this set, but the main dish was sushi. From left to right: tuna, salmon, squid, a kind of shellfish, and salmon caviar. The last one is called "Ikura" in Japanese and favorited by many Japanese people but it's expensive.
You could say this is another main dish : Tempura. As you can see there are a prawn, a piece of eggplant, and a kind of green pepper called "Shishitou", which tasted bitter. And the white stuff the prawn was leaning against was fish. We have Tempuras after dipping them in "Tsuyu", which is like light taste soy sauce, and we put the ground radish in the Tsuyu that you can see on the nearside of the saucer.
As side dishes, this set had Soba, and "Chawan Mushi". I explained what the latter was in this posting. My stomach tends to be filled with a light meal, but I felt hungry even after having all those dishes. And I think that Japanese dishes wouldn't be enough for most foreign people.
