This weekend Kathy and I went over to F's to see his newborn baby girl. Such a little sweetie. Sleeps like 22 hours a day according to F's wife, which was a huge difference from their first one. Anyways, after being there for a bit, we ended up going out for dinner.
I felt like something seafood, maybe at a Red Lobster or something, but having only thought of it in the car, we didn't check to see where the closest locations were - we decided to check out the Marlowe or the Alice Fazooli's in a restaurant area around Hwy 7 and 404. Turns out that the Marlowe was a bit more upscale than we felt like, and the Alice Fazooli's didn't have much of a seafood menu. (didn't Alice used to be a Italian seafood place?) Anyway, after hmming and hawing a while, we ended up at the Chako Restaurant Izakaya that was in the same area, the others looked like they wanted to try it out, and I figured I could get my seafood fix from grilling some salmon or something.
Chako is a Korean BBQ. Looked pretty nice and we'd passed by it a few times before and wondered if it was any good. We arrived pretty early, just shy of 6pm like a bunch of senior citizens, and were seated immediately. It was a nice table with 2 grills on it, which was nice cause there were 4 of us. We looked at the menus and there was quite a bit of stuff to look at. The waiter asked us what we wanted and had a little notepad out, but being sort of hungry and since it was all-you-can-eat, we just asked him to bring some of everything. Also we ordered some Sapporo beer. In the amount we wanted, it was being sold in 2, 3, or 4 litre sizes, and we figured 3L would be plenty to get us happy. He bowed and left, and someone came to light the grills.
A few minutes later, he came back with some of those Korean appetizer plates - some tofu, some kelp, kimchee etc. Then another waiter showed up with a plate of sushi and maki roll on it. Miso Soup too. Then somehow, everything appeared at once in a hubbub of serving staff and trays - little stackable black-and-red trays of meats and veggies. (well I guess we did say some of everything) So we set to grilling. It was pretty good stuff! The meats were well marinated and the vegetables nice and fresh. Course F and E didn't really want to have anything to do with the veggies so it fell to Kathy and I to finish off most of it. We were good with all of the dishes except for maybe this whitefish that seemed to have been defrosted from a frozen package and not fresh like the salmon.
They brought the beer over at some point too, I dont recall if it was before or after the food stampede. It came with these little juice glasses from Ikea. The beer came in a little wooden barrel - that was kind of cool. It had a tap on the front and the top was removable so we could see how much beer we had left... though after a few glasses, F kept telling us there were 3 glasses left, even though we must have gotten at least 12 more out of it.
We stared ordering more of some of the dishes as we grilled - there was an especially good lamb, and the bulgogi beef was nice and marblized. I think we ordered like 4 sets of short ribs as well. By the end of it we had eaten quite a bit. Not half as much as we did when we were in our teens, but we put in a pretty good show I thought. I know that on the last two little trays of beef, they started doing the usual Korean BBQ thing where they hint that you shouldn't eat any more by serving you semi-frozen unseasoned meat. It was a bit funny too, when we were at the end we figured we could do 1 tray of short rib and 1 tray of bulgogi - we stressed to the waiter that we just wanted these last 2... and he misinterpreted it as we wanted 2 of each, so we got double the portion we wanted. So we went from the 100% full we thought we'd end up at, to a solid 120% of food induced discomfort. I think E went way past that, he somehow managed to fit in 2 bowls of rice on top of everything else.
We ended up sticking around a bit longer cause we thought maybe some ice cream might help smooth things out. They also appeared to have some oriental style mango pudding, and we had a bit of a discussion on how "mango" flavour is never mango-like, sort of how "grape" flavour is not the same thing as grape. So we got some of one and some of the other - some mango ice cream, some mango pudding, and some green tea ice cream. The two mango desserts tasted completely different from each other and neither one tasted like mango. E said that the pudding was more of a lychee flavour, and the ice cream was more of the usual artifical mango flavor. I has some of the green tea ice cream which was pretty normal.
Oh if you are in their washrooms (a bunch of nice little individual rooms) make sure you don't turn on the faucet all the way - it's a fancy looking affair but designed in such a way that water will bounce right out of the sink and into your lap if you turn it too high.
So anyways we did have a good time, the food was of pretty good quality, and the service was REALLY good compared the the standard service at a chinese-korean restaurant. It was really good enough that I'm actually spending time writing about how I like it instead of how I don't like it. :D I would definitely consider eating there again. Btw, it looks like it's owned by the people who run the Destiny tea shop. (link)
We rounded off the night with a bit of Rock Band, which none of us had played for a while, so we were pretty rusty. I think I sang like 4 songs before my throat started giving out. Okay, maybe about 1/2 way through the 2nd song, I had a coughing fit and had to go down an octave, which was a bit on the low side. Dammit why are so many songs either too high or too low for me? Oh well, it was still fun. Before one of the songs I was playing guitar on, Kathy was poking a drum stick into my ear to bug me, so I played badly on on purpose. I meant to keep it near the fail mark of the 3rd life, but I sucked enough that I actually died, doh! Sorry E who was trying to sing Oasis.
Allen.
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