Saturday night we left the kids behind and went to dinner at Kyoto, a Japanese restaurant in Scottsdale.
Irene takes James and meets with friends there for lunch on a fairly regular basis – principally because their lunch specials are cheap. (Lunch deals are somewhere in the range of $4.) Personally, $4 is more than I’d pay for all the (authentic) Japanese food in the world, but Irene likes it.
I can’t help but remember the words of one of my Japanese language teachers.
“Whenever I return from Japanâ€, she said, “The first thing I do is go out to eat Mexican food, to have some food with flavor.â€
That notwithstanding, I can tolerate teppanyaki steak, which is hardly authentic Japanese food and, in fact, I’ve had some very good teppanyaki.
I was a little concerned about the crowds heading into downtown Scottsdale on a Saturday night and, although we got there early enough, I was right to be concerned – but for the wrong reasons. It would seem that, while catering to a sedate lunch crowd on weekdays, the Friday and Saturday night crowd is somewhat different. According to several online places, Kyoto is experiencing a bit of an upturn because young club-goers like to go there, do Saki bombers and get good and drunk before they hit the nearby nightclubs.
We should have known something was up when, as we were being seated at the table with five twenty-somethings that they warned us that, “…if (we) aren’t liberal, (we’d) better ask for a different table, because (we’ll) be offended pretty fast.â€
The disadvantage, to me anyway, of teppanyaki is that you get stuck eating at a crowded table with people you don’t know. That’s not my strong suit. Stoic indifference to strangers, that’s my strong suit.
On the other hand, sometimes you get a floor show.
I was never offended by the other people’s politics. In fact, they never came up, but as they tried to make conversation with us (at first, anyway) we got such fascinating tidbits as how long some of them had been dating before having sex (and in what type of car it happened), who had slept with whom and one even pointing out which one (her fiance, as it happens) she’d lost her virginity with.
Since they started with a saki bomber on empty stomachs, they progressed to drunk quite quickly, and their happy personal relationships were literally deteriorating before our very eyes. I felt sorry for the two couples that were engaged, it was clear they stand no long term chance whatsoever.
Still, it was all I could do not to try to screw with their heads. It would have been so easy – they were completely defenseless, but they didn’t seem like bad kids.
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