I had dinner the first night in Japan at Restaurant Ninja. I wish I could have filmed the whole experience, it was amazing!! We were greeted in the tiniest little room by a guide in full Ninja garb and told that we would begin our Ninja training momentarily. Ah! How exciting!! I’m a big ol dork so I love this shit. We have to duck to enter a teeeeeeny secret door in the wall, balancing on craggy soggy terrain in a very narrow tunnel with waterfalls audible in close proximity, we slowly make our way through the path which is faintly lit by flickering “torches” on the floor. After this first trek we spill into a maze of “jail cells” and dead ends and more secret tunnels….then a draw bridge, which was awesome because I mean it’s a draw bridge inside the basement of a building in Japan!
These “jail cells” were neat, some looked just like jails to where you can see through the bars from the hallway to the inner rooms which were actually little private dining rooms. Some of the cells didn’t have bars, just heavy looking doors to mimic dungeon rooms that you can’t see into from the hallway. Appropriately we were placed in a dungeon!!!!!!! The room was small and dark and we had to remove our shoes in the hallway and sit on mats on the floor, but thankfully the table was sunken in so we had room to dangle our feet. I loved our little dungeon dining room!
The food presentation was awe inspiring. I didn’t want to be that colossal goob who takes photos of everything, so I let a few of the presentations skip my lens. One of which was a foie gras dish that was over a foot high and had food in the shapes of throwing stars and whatnot. They had this nummy “Ninja Fakeout” dish with tofu and lobster meant to look and taste like a custard tarte and I swear that was neat! I snuck in a couple of food photos, like this unfortunately blurry pic of a meat cupcake (which is probably only hilarious to Mess and Janice) and a pretty display of sushi that was lit from the bottom with rainbow LED rights.
Meat meet Cupcake. Cupcake, meet Meat. MeatCupcake!!!! Mashed potato top with edible gold garnish, over a “cup” of some manner of minced marinated pork-of-awesome rolled in a flat biscuity thinger.
What a cute way to display sushi!! It’s a bed of shaved ice, but in the bottom of the dish there are LED lights that alternate colors; sadly my camera flash washed out the effect but it was really pretty. I like my food all high tech yeah!!
The dinner was only part of our “training” we had some fine entertainment with Ninja Magic!! I’ve seen some amazing slight of hand card tricks in my day by some amazing artists at the Magic Castle…but I was stunned at the Ninja skills on display right there at our dungeon table. First of all, it was a very small room, only the few of us in my group were able to fit, so there was no stage or distance between us and the Ninja…all the tricks were done right under our noses in front of our eyes and not one of use could see what or how the hell this guy was doing this stuff.
At the end of the night I was happy to get checked into my international hotel, where I was greeted by comfy beds instead of tatami mats on the floor and also along with the customary Holy Bible I am used to seeing in hotels, there beside was The Teaching of Buddha which tickled me 🙂
Holy Bible and Teaching of Buddha in my hotel
View of Tokyo from my hotel room
As an aside, dig on the streets here…that’s three layers of street going on there. I think that’s neat. I also think it’s neat that they read up-to-down rather than left-to-right like on the street sign I posted below.
Their streets go up
Their words go down
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The Adventures of Nikki Nefarious 
