Category Archives: restaurants

La Zona, Best Suburban Mall Ever

Posted on by
1

La Zona, Kawasaki

I recently went to watch Avatar on an IMAX screen in 3-D, but I won’t be reviewing that movie in this post. That’ll come later. Instead, I want to share some pictures I took of LaZona, the shopping center the theaters were in. It’s the second highest earning shopping mall in Japan. Only Narita Airport beats it. That’s pretty remarkable, since it’s in the suburbs, in Kawasaki city.  Although, Kawasaki is a pretty big city in its own right.

I thought that more famous shopping centers in Tokyo, like the soulless and labyrinthine Roppongi Hills or the subterranean Omotesando Hills would be up there. But it’s a suburban mall that beats them both.

La Zona, Kawasaki

I have to admit that I was impressed with the design. The central feature is an outdoor oval plaza with a stage, water features and funky mood lighting. The circulation patterns are intuitive and it was easy to view at one glance all the shops and restaurants around the three floors of the rotunda. There was a more conventional layout for the indoor part of the mall. It was family friendly and spacious.

La Zona, Kawasaki

Despite being in the suburbs, the restaurants were as stylish and hip as any in central Tokyo. We had dinner at this place called California Pizza Kitchen. The decor was very authentic, reminding me of the West Coast. Even the pizzas had the fluffy lightly crispy crust that Left Coasters love, without any of the locally adapted nonsense like the copious mayonnaise that Japanese slather on their pies. Also, I appreciated the free refills of their fruit lemonades served in big glass tumblers. Americans like to hydrate.

A movie on IMAX and some home cooking. I’m definitely going back.

Chamate

Posted on by
Reply

Chamate

When I write these restaurant and café reviews I purposely omit the places I go to regularly. But because I rarely go to Shibuya anymore I can disclose what used to be one of my regular haunts.

Chamate is a little oasis in crowded Shibuya, tucked away under the 3rd floor eaves of Loft (one of the coolest furniture and house wares emporiums in town). Though it’s a Chinese teahouse, the décor is that Scandinavian pastel look that’s popular with the leisure matron crowd. The clientele however are pensive, conservatively dressed young women. In the few times that I’ve seen men, they’ve invariably been in a suit and tie. I guess there’s something formal about the place, or about tea in general. Here’s a link to their site, demonstrating how to serve tea, Chinese style.

Even though it’s in a popular store off a densely traversed street, the only time it’s ever busy is during lunch on the weekends. And you can still get a table. Or you can sit at the counter overlooking the street.

While I hadn’t been there in over a year, T has been using it as a relaxing meeting place with her friends. So it was nice to see new dishes. The lunch set’s a bit pricier than the norm, but the food quality is quite high. T had a lush dim sum set that came with tea. I ordered something more architectural. The centerpiece was a soft-boiled egg set in a nest of crispy noodles, a fitting image for a long-awaited spring.

nest eggdim sum set

I imagine the best way to appreciate this café is to watch Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, then put on your cheongsam if you’re a woman, or your rat pack suit if you’re a man. Then meet your secret tryst and sip tea with restrained desire.  

Or, for the less dramatic,  you can peruse the beautiful lifestyle toys in Loft, then settle down with your favorite Tang Dynasty poet (Hanshan is a good one) and a pot of chrysanthemum tea.

inthemoodforlove

Happoen

Posted on by
3

gold carp

About a week before Christmas, T and I had one of our rare days off together. So we made the most of it and explored some more of Shirokane, a neighborhood near our apartment.  I recently wrote about its street of gingko trees.

La Boheme
First we went to our favorite restaurant there, La Boheme, for lunch. It’s really one of the few places we can afford in that over-priced neighborhood. Yet the decor is quite lush and luxurious. Although, there is somewhat of a gothic haunted mansion vibe about the place that’s a bit cheesy.

La Boheme

Sometimes, there’s an accordionist, and once there were a pair of violinists. It’s actually a chain, but the service is always superb, and the food is very good. I recommend the gorgonzola and honey pizza. The arabica pasta is also tasty.

Happoen
Then we decided to check out Happoen, which is a private garden that is rented out for weddings. It’s a traditional Edo style garden that used to belong to a local lord. There are a couple chapels, a restaurant, and cafe, and the huge gorgeously maintained garden. Because it’s not a public park, there were few people there. The sign at the entrance says only customers and guests are allowed, but we went in anyway. No one seemed to mind. I suspect many locals go there to chill out.

danglingwater and leaves

In Happoen there is a path lined with bonsai that are hundreds of years old, and a pond that reflected the surrounding trees in a way that created the surreal colors of an impressionistic painting. I spent a long time photographing the carp. T teased me about this because I have this fascination with them. I’m mesmerized by the way they slither placidly under the surface of the water.

persimmon bonsaimottled

Book Off!
It’d been a long time since we wandered around Shirokane. Even though it’s near our home, it’s not really our kind of place. Lots of rich matrons walking their spoiled ornamental dogs, sipping $10 coffees in pretentious cafes.

It kept us from visiting this gem of a garden. And we also never noticed that there was a bookstore with a huge inventory of used English-language books. The bookstore is called Book Off, an ubiquitous chain of bookstores specializing in used books, usually all in Japanese, and mostly manga. But apparently, they also buy used English books (and several other languages too) and they all get sent to this one branch, which is bizarre because Shirokane is definitely not known as a place where foreigners live.

Most of the books are 300 to 500 yen. So it’s cheaper than any other used English bookstore in Tokyo. Plus, it has a nice cafe, so it was the perfect way to end our date: kicking back with our stack of books, sipping coffee, watching the languid locals be walked around by their Hiltonian pooches.

Sipping Coffee on LeCorbusier

Posted on by
5

img05.jpg

Cassina IXC

There’s a furniture store on the first floor of the building where I work out. They have designer furniture from the greats like LeCorbusier and Mackintosh. It’s like a museum actually. The cool thing about this store is that it has a café inside. So you can sit on $11,000 chairs and eat Vietnamese noodles and sip very strong iced coffee, served by silent black-clad waiters. I never entered before because it looks expensive and well, pretentious. But actually 1,000 yen will get you a very tidy meal, al dente. For directions click here.

There’s the usual pampered young Shibuya housewives with their ignored kids dressed in designer garb. And there are always groups of what looks to me like designers of some sort. They are dressed in dark clothes, wear ironically chunky glasses, and their haircuts are sculpted into well-placed disarray. And they always have at least one open laptop and some very important papers scattered about their tables.

Still, it’s a totally chill atmosphere. It’s never crowded, never noisy. There’s not even any piped-in music. The only sounds are the sounds of self-important chatter and the street noise outside. But it’s all absorbed nicely by the furniture.

I sat on the long counter, soaking in the first pleasant day of autumn. Scribbling in my notebook and then spacing out at the minimalist flower arrangement in front of me.

Recommended Company: your friends in ‘design’ and architecture to smirk at the latest fads.

Suggested Reading: biographies of mid-century modernists.

Likely Activities: sketching perfect curves and concocting self-referential parodies.

Photo from the Cassina website, until I can take a decent picture of the place. Click on the picture for the source.

Blown Back to Ashland: the Windiad no. 4

Posted on by
Reply

praise

The Wind Bag
Aeolus is the wind god, or he controlled the winds anyway. In exchange for stories from Odysseus, Aeolus gave a bag of winds that would help Odysseus find his way back home. Odysseus told mostly stories from the Trojan War, with other tales of fishing trips and crazy relatives in between to pad the mostly uneventful decade of half-heartedly laying siege to Troy. Aeolus wasn’t really into the stories, but he liked to listen to people talk while he cracked open a beer.

The bag of winds was really big, made of blue silk and lined with the feathers of doves and peacocks. Odysseus’s men thought it was treasure that he didn’t want to share, so they opened the bag to see what was inside. The winds were released and the ships got blown back to where they started.

One place I find myself blown back to often is Ashland.

Shakespeareville
Ashland and I go back a long way. Back when I was in high school I first visited my buddy Kevin who had just moved here. For a Southern California boy, my image of Oregon was of log cabins, rednecks, bears and forests. They all certainly exist here, but I also found a town full of artists, musicians, dancers, hippies, America’s largest Shakespeare festival, fresh air, rivers, and a sky full of stars I’d never seen through the haze of Los Angeles.

It was a revelatory vacation. I got to see an alternative to the materialistic, status-loving, car culture of Hollywood. And I questioned everything about the superficial life that I felt I’d been living. Once I returned to LA, I went through more than a decade of navel-gazing, studying religions and philosophies, to try to break through the veil of the illusory, physical world. I read a lot. And pondered over Sartre, Nietzsche, Chuang Tzu, Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, bell hooks and many others.

That was a heavy time. Since them I’ve discovered the meaning of life and I’d like to share it with you. Just send $49.99 to: Universal Secrets, P.O. Box 13, Lagos, Nigeria.

lithia fountain detail

Ramana
If you really want answers to the big questions you want to consult with my long-time friend, Ramana.

We met with her and her husband, Stacy, at a Japanese restaurant called Kobe. Surprisingly the sushi was outstanding, but very California. The delicious rolls had stereotypical names like, Red Dragon and Kamikaze, with sushi ingredients never seen in Japan like avocado and sun-dried tomatoes. When we asked for more shoyu, the waitress had a perplexed look on her face until we said, soy sauce.

Ramana is a dedicated Soto Zen practitioner. She’s the seer in my life story. She’s a combination of spacey mystic and grounded explorer. At various times in her life, she went to a prestigious art school to study film, wandered in the desert as an apprentice shaman, collected lovers in Europe like Starbuck’s city mugs, lived in Buddhist monasteries, wrote erotica.

During one of the many times I’ve crashed at her place, she kept parakeets and lived in a charming house with a sloping floor. Another time she lived in an even cuter house behind the bakery where she worked. Now as a mother and wife, she still has a priestly vibe to her, and her house is like a redwood cathedral.

In short, she’s led a fascinating life. And she’s filled my bag of winds many times over.

Bloomsbury Café
Cafes are the best places to find meaning. One café I get blown back to often, and so I guess is my favorite Ashland café, is Bloomsbury Café. It’s upstairs from the Bloomsbury bookstore. They have a large shady outdoor seating area, a cozy interior with lots of stuffed chairs. Here, I suggest reading children’s books with dark themes, after meeting a friend you haven’t seen since you were a teenager.

sycamore bark

Lithia Park
Nature is also a good place to seek answers. One of my favorite parks in the world is Lithia Park. It’s enormous, stretching for miles it seems, along Lithia Creek, which has natural lithium. Lithium water tastes like rotten eggs and the element is used to treat schizophrenia. So it’s an excellent place to stop hearing the voices in your head. The park has a pond with a pair of swans (though I didn’t see them this time around), a sycamore tree grove, a crumbling white fountain, an amphitheatre, tennis courts, roses, deer, and at one time had monkeys.

Yup, I love Ashland.