Adventuresome Eater

I remain impressed by Celeste's cosmopolitan eating habits. We set out this evening for an early dinner out: Evelin was thinking Indian food, but the place we were headed, Tiffin, wasn't open for dinner yet. (We were about 20 minutes ahead of their opening time.) We thought about circling back around to try Udupi Palace, but traffic was terrible and instead we headed toward College Park.

The Indian place we used to frequent there has since changed over to Tex-Mex, so we started rethinking things. We thought there might be another South Asian place in the same strip mall, but if there wasn't we thought we could head over to Seven Seas for some Chinese food. Instead, we ended up trying a new Japanese place, Hanami (花見), which was near where the Indian place used to be.

Overall, Evelin isn't that keen on Japanese food. I think in the 14 years or so that I've known her, we've eaten at Japanese places together twice or thrice at the most. Part of it is that she doesn't like seaweed, which pretty much rules out sushi (although not sashimi), and part is that the typical Japanese seasonings tend toward the bitter too much for her taste.

Still, she was game to try Hanami and Celeste was ready to get out of the T.R.U.C.K.

It turned out pretty good. Evelin had a shrimp hibachi dish; I had a vegetable teriyaki dish, along with a cucumber roll. Celeste, however, tried it all (except the shrimp). She was really good, having a bit of miso soup, egg from Eveln's fried rice, vegetables from both of our dishes, and bits of both of our salads. She even had two bites of cucumber roll — the nori was a bit too much for her to chew, so she ended up getting the rice and cucumber out of the roll and spat back out the seaweed.

She was also just really good in the restaurant, watching everything going on at the tables around us and just having a good time. I think the only downside for her was that since we didn't go to Tiffin, she didn't get the mango lassi I'd promised her ...

Technoarti tags: food Japanese cuisine