My Old Man's 30th Birthday Dinner

On November 25, 2012,

Jon turned 3-0.

He's officially my old man.

We knew each other back when we were seventeen.

Now that he's thirty, it's just crazy.

Where did the time go?

How did we get so old and fat and gray?

WHY???!

We went to Kyo-ya

for his birthday dinner.

Well, his official on-his-actual-birthday dinner.

We've been celebrating this birthday with dinners

all over the place all year long.

There were eleven courses,

and tons of delicious food.

We were the only ones at the bar for a while,

but once the other Japanese couples at the bar settled in and started taking photos

and the service started slowing down a bit with the influx of the dinner crowd,

I whipped out my camera phone to kill some time

while Jon thought about how old he was getting.

Jon's menu got splattered with fat oils from cooking

his meat on a grilled stone.

Yum!

My old man.

The best part about this meal is the huge bucket of rice

with other stuff.

They serve you as much as you can eat,

then they wrap up the rest in bamboo leaves for a meal another time.

The beauty of kaiseki and other Asian banquet meals,

besides it just being beautiful and tasty,

is that if you didn't fill up on all the more expensive ingredients

you get a huge thing of rice (and noodles in Chinese banquets) to help you feel full.

Oh those pickles were a miracle.

I want to eat so many of them until I feel sick.

It was such a great meal!

We think the sorbet was definitely kyoho,

but the grapes on top look like finger grapes.

It was so good.

Definitely something to think about making at home.