Every year, R. and I go to a nice dinner for Christmas. I really look forward to that every year. This year, I wanted to try a Michel Star rated French place in Tokyo. Well, the Tokyo part is because I live here, and the Michelin Star part is because I’ve never eaten at one of those places before, and I found Joseph Mallozzi’s blog, who is a producer on Stargate Universe (which I like) and coincidentally did a great write-up of amazing food in Tokyo. I was jealous. So for my revenge, I decided to go eat some nice food of my own. If only I had the budget to do this every night for a week or so. But I don’t.

So, R. and I went out to Tateru Yoshino at the Shiba Park Hotel. It was probably my favorite of all the Christmas dinners that we’ve done for the past three years. For comparison, the other two were at the New York Grill, and the COUCAGNO in the Cerulean Tower. They were both very good, but I remember feeling like I would explode after both of those meals. This time, the portions were smaller or I’ve gotten fatter because I didn’t feel like I would explode. We also drank less this time (only one glass of champagne and one bottle of wine) so I wasn’t nearly as drunk as the other two times. We had a wine tasting menu at COUCAGNO which was great, but too much to drink.

Of the places that we have eaten, this one was at the lowest elevation, at only the first floor. The other two were forty or fifty floors up. The food was great though. The evening was full of truffes, but I have had so few of them that I can’t really evaluate whether they were good or not. The stand-out dish to me was the fish (the Amadai, I don’t know what it is in English or French.) It had a great crispy shell and was just marvelously delicious. I also really liked the cabbage dish, and R.’s deer with chocolate. I would have preferred that to my bird, which was also quite nice, but I’m glad we tried a bit of each. The cheese wasn’t so great for me, since I am not a big cheese fan, but R. really enjoyed it. The dessert (the real one, with the ice cream and cake-like crunchy object) was also great. Overall it was a really nice dinner. We also split a nice bottle of white wine, which of course I have now forgotten.

I’m not sure what we will do next year – I want to try to get reservations at the Molecular Bar but who knows?