Saturday, February 21, 2009

Bad Luck

We're bad luck.

Kobe Beef
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.

3 comments:

  1. Tough for you - this seems to happen to me a lot too.

    But I notice that you always mention that the place had a favorable price - maybe that's the reason they all go belly up? The only restaurants you really like are ones that are selling their food at a loss :-)

    Greetings from snowy Stockholm

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  2. Yes, that occurred to us too. ^_^ But no, none of the restaurants have been unusually cheap, compared to other places at the same level. It's not the price level that was different, but the style of food.

    What I mean by "inexpensive" is in an absolute sense, where you don't feel like you're making a sacrifice going out to eat. The kind of place that's clearly above the cheap diner place (which I also love, BTW), but still inexpensive enough that you don't feel pressured to have a good time or feel robbed if everything doesn't match your expectations. For us that level is perhaps 3-5000 yen per person for a dinner, drink excluded.

    You have snow? I envy you...

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  3. Plenty of snow (tons!) up here in Dalarna as well. Which I suppose is good for the various upcoming ski competitions.

    (Just checking if comment posting works. Please don't let it work only in IE...)

    ReplyDelete

Comment away. Be nice. I no longer allow anonymous posts to reduce the spam.