Tuples and Attributes

Since moving to the other side of Henderson, I have been trying out a number of new restaurants and cuisines. There is a lot of good food here without having to venture anywhere near the Strip.

One cuisine I am not very familiar with is Japanese. Just a couple of blocks away from me is a nice-looking place called “Osaka” and after looking at their website, I decided to broaden my palate and give it a try.

According to their website:

Osaka was the first Japanese restaurant in Las Vegas when it opened in 1967. Now with two locations, West Sahara and Henderson, it has become a hometown favorite and withstood the test of time. It is currently operated by the second generation of the Nakanishi family.

Osaka Japanese Bistro in Las Vegas was voted by Japan’s largest weekly magazine, the Asahi Shukan, one of the 50 best Japanese Restaurants. Of all the Japanese restaurants around the world, Osaka was the only one outside of Japan given this honor. Osaka has also been selected twenty times by the readers of the Las Vegas Review Journal newspaper to receive the “Best of Las Vegas” restaurant award.

Osaka has built its reputation in carrying only the finest in fresh fish and its ability to create a variety of rolls which satisfy even the most adventurous of tastes. The restaurant also boasts carrying the most variety of fish of any sushi bar in town. Currently, we are carrying exotics that are usually found only in Japan such as aoyagi (live surf clams), awabi (live abalone), sayori (halfbeak), katsuo (bonita), kanpachi (rudderfish), and Blue Fin Toro.

I figured if I was going to try Japanese food, this sounded like a good place to start. I first went to the restaurant a couple of weeks ago. This is the lunch menu; the dinner menu goes on for pages.

I was in the mood for noodles that first day and ordered the soba noodles with shrimp tempura. I also got the Lisa Lisa lunch rolls. The soba and shrimp were very good, but the Lisa Lisa was incredible.

For my second visit, I had the Tempura Udon noodles and the Japanese Lasagna lunch roll. Again, the noodles were very tasty, but the lunch roll was absolutely delicious.

Now, about the chopsticks:

I have never been particularly comfortable or dexterous with chopsticks. I wouldn’t starve if they were all I had to eat with, but I’ve never seen much point in pretending that I don’t find knives, forks, and spoons a lot easier to work with.

However, since the restaurant wasn’t crowded and the waitstaff wasn’t terribly busy, I decided to take whatever amount of time I needed and eat the meals with chopsticks. The first meal wasn’t too difficult: I managed the lunch rolls fairly well and the noodles also made it to my mouth without too much trouble.

The second visit, though, was another story. I seemed to be having a much worse time with the chopsticks then I had just the week before. The lunch rolls tended to fall apart before I got them to my mouth. And the chopsticks kept crossing themselves and twisting. I felt like a total klutz.

But the real difficulty was the Tempura Udon. It came with a spoon, of course, and I could easily slurp up the broth. The noodles themselves, however, were a seemingly impossible task. They were thick, they were long, and they were incredibly slippery. They wouldn’t stay on the spoon; it was all I could do to occasionally get one to stay on the chopsticks long enough to suck in the whole noodle with broth flying everywhere as the noodle flailed about.

The manager and I had been having conversations about vacations and food and other topics whenever he was free. I had told him I wasn’t very familiar with Japanese food and that I was just thinking of working my way through the menu. About halfway through my udon, I decided to demonstrate this ignorance by asking how I was supposed to eat this dish. Just as he was about to tell me, he was called off to seat some other customers, and I continued to struggle on.

When he came back, he said:

“Yes, those noodles are very thick and extremely slippery. I usually eat mine with a fork.”

!