Bad Luck

We're bad luck.

Kobe beef

Specifically, we're bad luck for restaurants. When we started dating seriously, Ritsuko and I often went to an Indian/Nepalese restaurant in the neighbourhood. After a year and a half or so, the restaurant closed. A great vegetarian Indian restaurant in Kobe we'd started going to disappeared soon after. Sometime later we found this great inexpensive Chinese restaurant doing a pleasantly fresh, modern, unpretentious take on the cuisine. We liked enough that we started meeting there on my way back from work on Fridays. It took less than a year for that restaurant to shut its doors. Last October we found another newly-opened Chinese restaurant with food very much in the clean, modern style we like, and with an unconventional but very relaxing budoir-purple interior (sounds strange, but it worked well). We discovered yesterday they've gone out of business, after only six months.

Of course, restaurants and bars are constantly appearing and going under. It's what restaurants do; the cooking and serving sometimes seems to just be something to occupy the time until reorganization. An only half-joking saying in Swedish is that a restaurant becomes good business once it's gone bankrupt three times. Having four of our favourite places disappear in as many years is perhaps not that unusual.

 
Or maybe it is, and our taste is just far enough from the mainstream that any place catering to it is doomed to fail. This is having us a little spooked. We're almost afraid to go too often to places we like, since we seem to invite disaster when we do. We still have a couple of places we really like, after all, and we'd hate to see any of them disappear.

And I never even got a picture of the budoir-purple interior.