Tripping Far Side

...is Japanese food. Take a look at the menu from an ordinary Japanese restaurant. Doesn't it look good? Anna and I ordered the set of the day, which happened to be deep-fried pork cutlet (tonkatsu) with udon noodles and pickles on the side. It's an ordinary kind of dish you can get in Seattle, but there's a lot more in the menu that's interesting.

Maybe it's because all their menus just look so appetizing. The nice thing about being a foreigner in a chain Japanese restaurant is that you can just point to the menu and say, this please. During the summertime, a tasty dish to order is the soba noodles, made from buckwheat. They're the brown noodles laying on top of a wooden strainer.

This menu seems to have a lot of sushi, but it doesn't seem to be the common food to eat in Japan. It's different coming from Seattle, where when you think of Japanese food, it is automatically assumed that it's sushi or teriyaki.