Today was another nice day. Slightly cooler than yesterday but still pretty nice. We started off at the “old coffee shop” and it was packed with old dudes reading their racing forms. I’m guessing horse racing is a weekend thing? I got the croquette monsieur which started out a little bland but tasted better as I ate more. I think there’s egg salad in there and the first piece didn’t have much of it. But maybe the weekend chef is a little more sparing with the salt.

We walked around Sannomiya and the only crazy crowds we saw were in Chinatown. I wanted to confirm that Kobe’s is much larger than Nagasaki’s (which is only a city block) and it is much larger. The long line for the famous pork buns looked 100 people deep and didn’t seem to move very fast so I punted. We walked down to the end of Motomachi and back to the Daimaru department store where we ate at the Kyoto restaurant that wasn’t on the restaurant floor. The restaurant floor was pretty spendy but the single restaurants on other floors were reasonable. I had the chicken and mochi soba because I didn’t think it was going to be this large.

Mariko had the yamakake soba.

After that we went looking for the coffee counter we last went to about 15 years ago? It was still great. I had an incredibly strong cup of coffee in a beautiful cup. It’s in Sanchika, on the slope above the Misudo.

We also went and checked out the restaurant area because I think that’s where the Japan Eat guy tries all the restaurants. It looks nothing like what I thought it would look like. It’s old and dingy like the southern end of Umeda and the Daiichi through Daisan buildings.

Then it was back to Umeda.

We walked around a bit trying to decide where to go for dinner and ended up on the restaurant floor of the Hankyu department store. I was in search of chicken nanban and started off with a cream soda. It wasn’t quite as radioactive green as I’ve seen in the past.

There was a lot of chicken in my chicken nanban. It wasn’t my favorite because it didn’t have the sweet sauce and the tartar sauce had a slightly bitter taste. It was good, just now what I was expecting.

Mariko had the tempura udon and the tempura was very good. Not too oily.

We both got the set with a little soft ice cream at the end. Probably more like ice milk but it was a nice way to end dinner.

And that’s about it for the day. I did stop by Kinokuniya to get a couple of calendars. I can’t count on the free ones from my insurance guy any more (he retired and the new guy doesn’t seem to send them out) and some of the other ones quit coming. As my dad would say, that’s progress.