Location: Chatan, on the north side of the 23, across from American Family Housing and the Rabbit car dealership.
Hours: lunch 11:30-2:30, dinner unknown No English menu, limited English spoken by staff
Sora was overrun with customers, so we ended up here instead. The exterior seemed promising, with a garden surrounding the parking lot, a decent wooden patio deck, and an Open sign on a French flag. Once inside, though, we realized we had made a mistake but there was no turning back. The interior decor had all the cheesy plastic Japanese diner flourishes - blue swirls in the ceiling with constellations on them, plastic pseudo-stained glass coating on glass surfaces, cheap fake-wood tables and chairs, harsh lighting, and annoying Japanese pop playing over the sound system. You choose a main among diner standards (approx 800Y) - hamburg (ie ground meat patty covered in creamy sauce), "beef stroganoff," pasta with either meat sauce or Japanese sauce (fish egg and seaweed), or locomoko. For another 250Y you get access to the salad, soup, and drink bar. The salad bar was lettuce, cucumber, tomato, tinned beans, tinned corn, seaweed, macaroni salad, and a couple proprietary dressings. The soup bar had a bad miso soup and a bland tomato-vegetable. We had the beef stroganoff, which was fatty beef in brown sauce with a couple slices of tinned mushrooms, and the Japanese pasta, which was the worst version of this dish we've had in Japan. Even worse than at Zen. The highlight of the meal was the dessert - the waitstaff allow you to choose among approx 6 options. We had a mango layered pudding-cake and a creme caramel. Each was only acceptable, but much better than the rest of the meal. We are pained to write such a negative review of a Japanese cafe, especially one as well patronized as this, but the food was of poor quality and had the unmistakable stench of cafeteria-line mass-production. And it cost more than lunch at Sora, with its divine Japanese veggie buffet. Alas, you win some, you lose some.
