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Thursday, November 14, 2013

Using the "Meet up" system to enjoy restaurants and make friends

I would like to recommend a good system that's in place for helping people to meet up and enjoy their common interests together. You may use it to find a good restaurant to go to for the restaurant review you have to do in our seminar. The system is called "Meetup" and it involves using this website to create a group around a particular topic (e.g., eating at Indian restaurants in Tokyo) that people can join and later participate in events related to that topic that are organized by the members.
For example, last night I participated in a side event of the Tokyo Vegan Meet-up Group, which was a Cuban vegan buffet, held at a restaurant/ bar/ art space in Roppongi called the Pink Cow. It was really enjoyable and the buffet offered a good variety, quality, and quantity of food for a really reasonable price. I especially liked the Spanish rice and beans, various dips--from avocado to hummus and miso--and banana (or was it plantain?) morsels. There was also a nice variety of salads, including pumpkin, potato, green, and tofu salads. As it was a buffet, we could go back as many times as we liked to re-fill our plates. While eating, we could enjoy a slide show of photos taken by a Korean amateur photographer who made many trips to Cuba and seemed to love it there.

I hope you can make use of the Meet-up system when you're searching for restaurants to review. Click here to see a wide range of Tokyo meet-ups, many of which concern food in one way or another.

Use these restaurant review criteria when you and a classmate go out to work on the two restaurant reviews that were assigned to you. Along with your review, you will need to submit the criteria you used for judgement and show the ratings that you gave. Especially be sure to create a "Sequence of Service: Time, Event and Comment Log" (refer to page 4 in the PDF).

Friday, October 18, 2013

Starting a New Blog

This is the inaugural posting of a new blog I'm starting about how to eat in a healthy way in Japan. For the last three years, I've kept a blog called "Wailing for Whaling." I still post to that blog occasionally, but I have long thought that it is most consistent and least hypocritical to consider it immoral not only to eat those large, beautiful, and intelligent masters of the sea, but also to consume the four-legged grass chompers and our two-legged nearly-flightless friends, not to mention the non-mammalian sea dwellers. Fortunately, what is morally right is also environmentally sound, and nutritionally superior. Is it right to be against whaling but indifferent to the fates of the billions of animals that are brought into the word just for the exploitation of their flesh, mammary secretions, and "packages" intended to nourish a developing embryo (i.e., eggs)? Therefore, this blog will focus on how to eat both healthily and cruelty-free, hungrily and enjoyably...bon appétit!