Tokyo Blond: Foreign Anniversary

Russell and I celebrated our 17th anniversary in Tokyo. It's not the first time we celebrated in another country. We spent our ten year anniversary in Tuscany, drinking our way through the country side and gesticulating wildly - we fit right in. But this was the first time we celebrated in a foreign county that we now live in, unless Dallas, Texas counts. That was like a whole other country. They even speak their own language. Y'all!

Somebody told me there are more restaurants in Tokyo than any other city. I believe them. Just as I believe there are more French restaurants in Tokyo than there are in Paris. No joke. Lord knows you can get a better croissant in Tokyo than you can in Paris. Come to Tokyo and I'll prove it. Last weekend we had a cocktail with a French woman and she stated the same thing without any prompting from me. I swear!

I did try to go on line and get some fun facts. I need Conrad (a very resourceful friend of mine, full of inane facts and strong opinions). I couldn't find stats comparing international cities but I did find out that Japan has 3,891 McDonalds, second only to that hamburger super power: the United States with, 13,491 as of 1/23/10.

All of this is a mildly entertaining lead in to our anniversary dinner, celebrated at, you guessed it, a French restaurant in Tokyo called L'Auberge de I'lll which I found in the 2010 Michelin guide for Tokyo. Making a reservation in Tokyo was challenging given the fact I speak very little, scratch that, almost no Japanese.

For a nano second I was thrilled to discover they have OpenTable.com in Tokyo. But the Japanese site was in Japanese (go figure) and you can't make a reservation from the U.S. site for a foreign restaurant. When I wrote the site they just replied "OpenTable Japan is not offered in English at this time. " No shit. Hello!!! Huge missed opportunity. I gotta believe, and I know there are stats on this, people who eat out a lot are more inclined to travel internationally. Geez, my head is swirling with the opportunities here.

So back to dinner. We took a cab to the restaurant. Side bar: one very odd thing about Tokyo you would not expect is, the cab drivers never know how to get to where you're going. Yes, of course, they all have the most up to date GPS but there are no addresses. It's crazy! I guess it's not their fault, most buildings don't have addresses on them so it's close to impossible to try to get somewhere. We've adopted the DAHO technique (Dial and Hand Over). We dial the place we're trying to go to and hand over the phone to the driver. This technique has proven to work 99.7% of the time. I have a chart if you're interested.

They were waiting for us at the restaurant.

No joke. See all these guys. They're not loiterers. I don't think loitering is allowed in Tokyo.
They work for the restaurant and they're waiting to greet us. I feel important.

They ushered us into the parlor.

This is a much nicer place to wait than in some bar where they try to jack up your tab

while you "wait for your table to be prepared" a la American restaurants.

View from the top of the staircase looking down into the dinging room.

Wow!

I had to descend these steps. As Russell and I were the only gaijin couple in the restaurant and I was wearing a bright blue dress - everyone was looking at us.

Why did I wear six inch stiletto heels?