Posted by Jess
25 August 2010

Tonight we had dinner with my boss from my last job in Minneapolis.  He's in meetings in our offices this week and was so kind to take us (all 4 of us!) out.  He lived here for 6 years with Medtronic so he's definitely a good resource for all things Tokyo.  He took us to a place not far from our house where we had some salad appetizers - cabbage and cucumbers (pretty common here I've found) and then we had some steamed and fried chicken and vegetable dumplings.  The place was great and really reasonably priced - definitely somewhere we could go back to.  It's called Harajuku Gyoza Rou.  I didn't take pictures of our food but I took some from another website (sorry they are small and a little fuzzy!).

we sat at some booths to the right of the counter area

steamed dumplings

fried dumplings

cucumber salad appetizer

cabbage appetizer

Abby loved the cabbage, cucumbers and dumplings.  Ella, however, only ate Abby's puffs and wouldn't try anything we ordered.  She's just not in to new foods right now, but we're hoping she'll warm up to it soon.  She's fine when the other kids are eating new things but of course when Mom and Dad tell her to try something there's no way!  I have a feeling I'll be singing that song for 14 more years at least :)

After dinner we went in search of ice cream.  I thought I knew of a place that was close by and was completely wrong.  Which is strange because I usually have a really great memory for that sort of thing and I can see the place in my head - it just wasn't on the corner I thought it was.  It's going to bug me now until I figure out where that was. 

So we started walking back to our place and ended up getting ice cream at McDonald's.  After treats we parted ways with our host.  So great to try something a bit more Asian and to have a wonderful host. 

And I just did some blog searching for the ice cream place...here it is:

Jonathan's on the right hand side of this photo - across the intersection - I think I may have been 1 intersection short         thank you to http://japan.fjordaan.net for helping me find it!

And now I can get some sleep tonight.  thank goodness!

Kanpai!
Jess