I had some return contact from some of my favorite potential suppliers today, so that was gratifying. I also sent some inquiries out to some freight and web hosting companies since I’ll need to have some solution for transporting products and I need a better solution than I have now for the web retail presence I’ll be establishing. I have one meeting scheduled for tomorrow with a company that mostly deals in Korean beverage products (yuzu tea, ginger tea, date tea and so on); the representative is someone I encountered at FoodEx.
This weekend I want to go to Osaka and Wakayama, so today I finally bought plane tickets and hotel vouchers. I haven’t dealt with making my own domestic travel reservations without the assistance of Japanese friends before, so I realized how little I remember from the trip reservation conversation drills I had in Japanese classes in 1995. I guess I have to learn sometime…
In Machida, we were lucky enough to get seats at Ume no Hana, a tofu restaurant at the top of the Lumine department store there. They had told us there would be a 30 minute wait, but we were offered seats before we could finish calling another restaurant to find out if we had a prayer of getting in there.
The food was pretty nice… freshly made yuba and tofu nabe, various small nibbles, and all the elegance you’d expect… nice clean, refreshing flavors, very fresh foods, nothing overwhelming, nothing under-seasoned, beautiful presentation. They also made vegetarian substitutions for me where possible (dashijiru and a single piece of shrimp being minor exceptions). Restaurants that make substitutions are somewhat unusual in Japan, unlike the hyper-accommodating US world which will sometimes over-accommodate to the point of disastrous culinary results. So I was pretty happy when I got mostly what I asked for with good food quality. Some of the drinks that they do there are interesting, though some are a little sweet; we tried a few different things and shared tastes.
Tomorrow I need to call Yamato Transport in Seattle and try to set up a meeting or two in Osaka so I feel like I’m getting some business value out of that side trip.