Iron Chef French's restaurant

Woo hoo! Finally able to go to Iron Chef French, Sakai's restaurant in Shibuya! :)

We bummed around most of the morning to catch up with sleep and had a late start of 10:30am. After walking around the local town, Akasaka, we realised that there were a number of shops that we didnt visit here. We had the task of looking for breakfast - but the challenge is not to over eat because our lunch was at La Rochelle, Iron Chef French's restaurant.

We found some Taki-something balls (cuttlefish, grilled with flour/pastries) and was really good in comparison to the extremely floury ones in Australia and Hong Kong. We quickly then rushed off to Shibuya for a quick round of shopping before trying to locate the restaurant.

A note to remember: Before coming to Japan, please learn how the address system works here. If you dont, you are screwed trying to locate nearly anything. The first is the suburb that you are trying to locate (matches back mostly with the train stations). from here on, the rest are just numbers that does indicate something (and they hardly have road names given there are a lot of small lanes everywhere). The 3 numbers are usually written as 2-40-2 for example. In this expression, 2 is the Cho-me (sub district) as larger suburbs are cut down into smaller components. The middle number is the block number of the Cho-me. Which block is what? Dont know.. but you should check the maps that the government provides at every major intersection. The last number means the unit within the block. Sometimes there is a fourth number that corresponds to the level etc.

After locating the restaurant, we went up the lifts to the top floor overlooking the entire city. It is quite amazing and they made wait at some lounges overlooking the western part of the city until it was time take us to the table. We booked for 3 people, but they gave us a BIG table (usually for 6 people). Service was top notch everywhere throughout.

Meals are selected as set courses. There were two main sets of 3800 yen and 6800 yen per person ($45 and $80 AUD) of 3 and 8 courses respectively. We decided the 8 course since we that was the original target and by god, all the dishes was not only very tasty, but also pieces of art. A special offer was also available to customers who pick the 8 course meal was a wine deal, whereby you pay another 2500 yen, and they will serve half a glass of different wines along the way to match the meals. Kalin and Tom both took this and they could not be happier to go through the 7 different wines from the bubblies to the rieslings and chardonnays. Since our main meal was the steak with Foie Gras and Truffle sauce, the main wine was a red.

Anyhow, I have posted some pics of the various dishes that we went through. It was really beautiful - most expensive meal that we have had here, but worth every cent given we were fully serviced for nearly 3 hours all up.

Oh.. as you have noticed.. my blog is very infrequent and there can be a dump of news all in one go.. I have tried to write as much as I can on my Dell Netbook and where possible, dump it all back into the blog like last night. I do apologise for this, but as I suspected, Internet access is crap in Japan for tourists. However, when you find, it is extremely fast. :)

Tonight is a J-League soccer game to ease off on the spending too.. :)

Tomorrow is a day at the Onsen in the japanese Alps so I dont expect any updates until I get into Osaka the following day. There will be plenty of pics of the Onsen (Hotsprings) - no, not of naked people but I will probably do the forest explorations to get some good nature shots!

Have a good one and hope to check back soon.