Nazar

Nazar is a good Turkish restaurant in Shinsaibashi, Osaka. We go there now and again, though not very often - we unfortunately don't have the time to go anywhere regularly. The owner opened another restaurant in Umeda some time ago so the food can vary a fair bit depending on who is working in the kitchen at the time, though I'm sure the menu will settle eventually.

They celebrated an anniversary a few weeks ago, with a buffet, drinks and belly dancing. It was fun: the food was good, the belly dancer managed to really engage the audience, and the people were interesting.

The interior is pleasant, with plenty of Turkish accents without ever falling into kitch.

The bellydancer - Japanese, by the way, not Turkish - got people up and dancing along with the music. And no, it was not a costume party.

Bellydancer, part of the buffet, and in the background Atatürk. It's not a big restaurant.

One group of regulars are military otaku, with an eclectic mix of mostly European uniform pieces - the pike helmets are Polish, apparently, and the white flowerpot thing is colonial British. One of them sported a monocle and an iron cross. We had no idea what they were about at first; Ritsuko thought they could be comedians still in stage costume, while I thought they might be right-wingers that'd lost their minds. But no, they simply dress up in uniform and meet over dinner from time to time.

As a fellow geek I certainly understand and sympathize with such an obsession in general, even while I'm firmly opposed to the tasteless idea of treating military items as something positive or worth glorifying.

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.

Chedi Luang

In our neverending quest for places to eat we've found a really good Thai restaurant just a fifteen-minute walk away. Chedi Luang (beware: annoying Flash-only website) is a pleasant restaurant in the Kitahorie district just west of Amemura. This area, like the nearby Shinmachi area west of us, is home to a fair amount of "young" businesses like designer shops, fashion, bicycle shops ("fixies" and such, not your grandma's bikes), design and acting schools, music instrument stores and so on. And along with it, a steady influx of fairly inexpensive but good modern-style restaurants.

Chedi Luang has a weekend lunch menu with a single dish for about 1000 yen, or a lunch set for about 2000. Not something you'd get everyday, but for the occasional weekend lunch it's perfect. The lunch set is delicious and more than worth the price. The starter was possibly the best Tom yam soup I've ever had, and the main menu is six or so dishes, including a curry and a main dish of your choice. Dessert is a good-sized bowl of coconut jelly and fruit. The presentation and quality leads me to think that the weekend lunch (unlike the weekday buffet) has the same dishes, prepared in the same way, as the dinner menu. Good place for a long, lazy Sunday lunch.