旬彩料理 結縁（ゆえ） — Restaurant in Matsue

I have dined in this restaurant three times during my week-long stay in Matsue so far. Their food is amazing. No, the word amazing does not do their food justice. I simply have to go into more detail.

To start with, they use very high quality food material for all their dishes I have tried so far. On top of that, their artful combination of those food material brings extra joy to my taste buds. I will use two steak dishes as an example. Normal Wagyu steak and Wagyu steak with foie gras. When ordering normal wagyu steak, they use the type of well marbled beef that melts in your mouth, served with spiced mash potato, sweet tomato and some simple vegetables. The relatively muted sides bring out the juiciness and flavor of the Wagyu steak. But for Wagyu steak with foie gras, due to the already fatty nature of the fois gras, they chose a relatively lean cut of the beef to accompany it, so that the fattiness of the dish does not get overwhelming. As another example, when ordering Wagyu curry rice, they chose the cut of meat with well cooked tendons in it, so that the springiness of the tendon compliments the well blended, flavorful curry, giving the dish extra texture to enjoy.

For each meal, they serve small dishes as starters. Each day's starter is different, but they all bring happy surprises for me. My wife does not eat raw food, so unfortunately we haven't tried their sashimi so far. But if their sashimi mixed starter today is of any indication, they probably won't disappoint too.

Their service is also very good. I... do not speak Japanese. Thanks to Google Translate, we can more or less get the message through, though the process is still quite frustrating, involving a lot of repetitions and fidgeting on the phone interface. They put up with my clumsiness with extra grace, though. The entire time they were friendly and polite.

I have two more days to stay in this city, I can't wait to try something different again...

A local restaurant that happens to be open even when the many restaurants close for the night on a Monday evening. They spoke only Japanese but there is an employee who worked really hard to communicate with us. The sashimi is fresh and the food is delicious. Our favourites were the soup rice and...

Great food. They speak only Japanese. A bilingual neighbor saved us, and I'm sure our clumsy eating provided untold entertainment for the locals. Very local and authentic. Had soba, sashimi,...