Never fear! Technology to the rescue. The tables had touchscreen menus. Once we figured out we were actually supposed to order using the screens, we were on our way. Dinner would certainly be easy! Look through the items, and select what you want. Here's the front screen. As you can see, many options exist, and there are English words in addition to Japanese descriptions. We placed our order.
Well, you'd think that would make the experience go smoothly. Not quite. At first, we apparently ordered "very small" versions of what we wanted. The waitress was pretty sure we did something wrong, so she came over and told us "very small." We told her we wanted "larger" -- she pointed at the menu and said "medium" near a bowl of what looked to be the same thing we had ordered.
She assured us she would cancel our first order (and she did.) OK, so now, we go to the menu, to re-order. We clearly found a larger (medium?) size of one of the items we had ordered. And we think we found the larger size of the other. The dishes were each a type of rice bowl with pork.
When our first bowl arrived, all was good. It was pork, on rice. But it was only one bowl, so we shared it. After quite some time, another bowl was delivered. With raw fish on top of rice. Definitely NOT pork.
We began to understand what had happened. When the waitress showed us the "medium" bowls, she was showing us a special they had for three different rice bowls - pork, raw fish, and more raw fish and fish eggs. So, we had been served the pork first, and now we were going to get served the other two. But we didn't want the second dish. So we just sat there talking, and they never came by with the third bowl.
Eventually, we just asked for the check, and we paid and left.
What we had eaten was very, very good. Sadly, we wasted a nice bowl of rice with raw fish on it. But hey, at least they hadn't brought us that third bowl, too.
Adventures in dining in a foreign land!
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