Furinkazan — Restaurant in Matsumoto

Sunday night on a holiday weekend, so super crowded. I had to wait in line for about 20 minutes to get a counter seat.

I had a salad with fried noodles on top (sorry forgot the name), which was a lot bigger than I expected; shinshu salmon sashimi; and horse sashimi (ロス). Everything was excellent.

One word of warning: not sure if they have an English menu, but the Japanese menus (particularly the one with the day's recommendations) and handwritten and incredibly difficult to read (for me at least). I managed to get what I wanted, but I'm sure there were quite a few things I overlooked just because the menu was so hard to read.

Another thing, you are expected to write your order down with pencil and paper. My written Japanese is pretty sad, but after a brief conversation with a staff member, I was able to put my order in. Honestly though, a little stressful, so be prepared if your Japanese is spotty.

Recommended, I...

The people who run this place are over-the-top lying racists. We were turned away just because we don't speak Japanese. I told the waiter i can understand Japanese in written form but he still won't let us in, telling me the place is "full" after getting a cue from another staff. I had never felt so discriminated in my life. The experience was unimaginably bad, it is the kind of encounter that can make the owner liable for a discrimination lawsuit if it happened in other countries. I want to give this place zero star but it is not...

The one bad mark on our entire trip to Japan. We were shown to a seat in the lower bar right next to a guy who turned out to clearly be sick. He started sniffing as our drinks arrived and soon was coughing and snorting once we were half way through our first round of what looked like an interesting mix of sake offerings. It felt like they decided to sit the “infectious” (by definition/assumption) tourists with the sick people. Pretty bad...