Mark Cooke’s G-Mixer

OK… imagine the scene, I just got back home and experienced this. It’s Monday night. 10:45 PM or so, just finished eating dinner with a friend. We’re in East Shinjuku. I’m in a kind of upscale 100 yen place called “Don Quijote” or as it is typically called ドンキ (donki). Think of it like a dollar shop and you’ll get the idea. And it is absolutely SLAMMING. Tons of people in there, many that look like the young socialite type. This simply just does not exist in all of my experience in the United States.

You can see their insane website here: http://www.donki.com/index.php

On the ground floor there are plush stuffed female breasts (clearly the first thing I noticed), maid outfits, entirely head covering penguin hats, underwear, soap, etc. There is death metal blasting out of speakers all over the place, quite loudly. This place is like 5 or 6 stories. It also carries plenty of normal household goods – I was there to buy hangars, which were located in the basement.

The place is like a hellish haunted house – each aisle is just barely wider than the width of my shoulders and there is absolutely no obvious segregation of items. Even the aisles themselves are not evenly separated like in a super market or something in the US… it’s a complete maze.

Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures but I thought some of you might find it interesting.

The place I went to dinner tonight was something I had never had before. Unfortunately again I suck and forgot the name but basically it’s a restaurant where you pay about 3,000 yen for 1.5 or 2 hours of all you can eat. The food is all kinds of different skewered foodstuffs, kind of like a shishkabob, but only one item per stick. There were things like: salmon, sausage, broccoli, cheese, octopus wrapped around cheese, octopus balls (takoyaki, no not those kind of balls), raddish, onion, chicken, beef, etc. You pick up as many as you want then bring them back to the table.

They are all uncooked so what are you gonna do about it? Oh yeah, that’s right, we gonna deep fry those MFers. First you dip them in the “glue” mojo and then roll them around in Japanese style bread crumbs. There is a vat of oil in the middle of the table – drop them in, wait a bit, then enjoy with a variety of sauces. It isn’t fine dining but it is certainly tasty.

I know a couple of you guys out there who would want to eat them straight out of business (*cough* Eddy, Dan W.). Even better, for another 2,000 yen or so you can add all you can drink beer. Good times.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 9:00 am and is filed under food, japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.