Food & Shopping or "How I Spent My Weekend"

I love good food. There is nothing quiet like wrapping your mouth around a tasty morsel of food. We paid a visit to Canoviano Tokyo on Sunday for dinner. We being my girl & her Sis...forever known as S.B. It was S.B.'s birthday in Jan, so we decided to take her out to a fancy dinner.


This was one fancy Italian restuant. We were pampered and taken care of from start to finish. I am usually pretty cavolier about taking pictures. But this was not a place I felt comfortable doing that. Therefore most of the pics have low light and some are downright out of focus. I tried to clean up the pics and remember what each course was. Let's get to the first appetizer.


This was fresh salmon with basil sauce on a pie crust stick. It was delicious. A really nice mix of flavours and textures.


Worst.Pic.Ever. I know, but at the same time....this might have been my favorite thing of the entire night. Before we got any food, the head waiter came over to inquire if there was any food we were allergic to or didn't care for. The first anit-pasta was supposed to have octapus, squid, and scallops. I was eager to eat the scallops but could do without the other two. So the chef whipped up this amazing number for me and my girl. S.B. had the seafood thing, ours looked better. It is layers with fancy corn chips, parmesian cheese, with white fish paste and raw shrimp. It was so good. Some of the best bites of food I have ever tasted!


This was my least favorite. But both of the ladies loved it. I think most people would have liked it...it is just my taste is not very rareified. It was sea urchin pudding topped with nanohana with fritter of soba flour batter with fish egg paste inside. This was all covered with a fish and consome soup broth.


This one made me pretty nervous at first. But, I was sold after the first bite. It was 4 cocoa ravioli stuffed with marscapone cheese and quail meat. They were topped with fried quail eggs and a Kyoto carrot paste sauce. Damn tasty!


Then we got to the main course. It was a worthy end to all of those dishes. It was wild boar cheek meat with a red wine sauce and raddish sorbet. To be clear, the raddish was fresh but frozen. It was melted by the heat of the meat and grilled mixed vegetables. So tender and delicious. Loved it!


Now let's hit some desserts. I was full by this point, but ready to try to squeeze in some sweet stuff. This one was mine. It is a white chocolate crème brûlée with rasberry sorbet. Of course I picked the best one...but I will show you what my dinner partners ordered.


My girl choose this one. It was good too. It was a chocolate soufflé with ginger flavored orange sorbet and chocolate icecream. My girl really liked it. So much so that I only got one bite. Oh well...I wasn't about to share all that much of mine either.


S.B. got this marvoulous looking thing. It was a banana tatin tower with bay leaf icecream. Me and bananas don't like each other so I have can't say if this was good or not. She said it was good, if that means anything to you.

A very enjoyable evening for sure. The chef came out at the end to have a chat. Nice guy, if a bit nervous for a chef. Relax! Anyways, we plan to go again sometime and try the a la carte menu. If you come to Tokyo and you got cash to throw around and you want Italian food, you should check them out.


Today was a train heavy day. I was going all over the place. First I went out to Chiba to visit the outlets. It is stressfull out there for me. I want to...scratch that...I'm desperate to find something when I go out there. There is a lot of pressure becuase it takes so long and the train aint free! I usually find something I like at either Nike, Adidas, or New Balance. Today I was only feeling Nike. My first consideration were these.


[source]

I have almost bought these Air Max Ones's before and I almost did again. Almost being the key word. The price was more than right: ¥5600 ($46) But what stopped me was the leather toebox. I like everything else about the shoe, but that. The same thing happened with these...


[source]

I love the orange. I love the Safari print on these Oasis Mids. I love that they are Asia exclusives. I love the price: ¥9800 ($8200) But I can't get past that huge expanse of leather out there in the front. Yuck!

Then I ran into the shoe that made me go on a search for an ATM.


[source]

Love them! They are a beautiful combination of art and technology. I have been looking to buy them for a while. I have been waiting for the price to drop. And it did...a little. But there were two problems: the price didn't drop enough. Still a steep ¥17,990 ($150) The other problem being that since I already have one third of this "Air U Breathe" pack, if I got another pair...then I would be forced to finish the pack with these beautiful shoes.


[source]

And someday I intend to. But right now I can't get wrapped up in that mini project. I will keep waiting for the prices to drop. So I bought two t-shirts and left Chiba. I was sad that I could't find a pair of kix to sink my teeth into today so I decided to head to Ueno to see what was boppin' there.

When I got there, I tried these on.


[source]

Love these a lot. I like the ripstop toebox in blue and the orange accents. Nice price too: ¥11,900 ($100) And the best part...


[source]

Nice skull. I was almost convinced I had found my Moby Dick of the day. Two problems: my jeans covered the skull making it useless. The other problem being they had some samples of what was coming out next week...and boy does it look the business in person. The online pics don't do it justice.

Hold tight.