Tonight my co-teacher and I went out to dinner with our students.

Since we were going to a traditional Japanese restaurant, we had to take off our shoes.

For more about shoe lockers see my post: Japanese Locker

The lockers here were not as nice as the ones shown in the previous post.

Of course, what is a course dinner without food. I know that is what you want to see, so here we go.

I really like the way that Japanese food is presented. We truly eat with our eyes.

This was a really nice eggplant dish.

We also had some nice salad. I like the seaweed strips on top of the salad.

A nice plate of sashimi came out next. Do not confuse this with sushi, which includes rice. This is sashimi which is thinly sliced pieces of fresh fish.

Then we had some skewers of assorted meats. You probably don’t want to know all the different cuts of meat represented here. Most of these would not be eaten by the average American.

This was another very nice dish. It looks like we have some french fries and fried chicken pieces. Think again. The french fries is correct, but they came with fried octopus that was really nice.

The star of the meal was nabemono or Japanese hot pot. There were all kind of nice things in this post including chicken, meatballs, tofu and assorted vegetables.

Here is the pot a little later in the process as the items start to cook. Once the food is cooked we eat most of it, but leave some of the rich broth for the next step in the process.

Rice and egg is then cooked in the remaining broth. This leads to a nice rich rice dish with all the little bits left from earlier.

This also reminded me of my post A Little Seoul Food, which featured hot pot with a Korean twist.

I finished off my meal with some nice peach ice cream and some frozen berries. The plate was almost too pretty to dig into, but only long enough to take a picture.

OK, I need to stop looking at food pictures before I get hungry again.

Which of these dishes would you want to try?

Steven