Adventures in Japan

Tokyo a Gastro AKA Tokyo the Second part 2: the Second Course

We had two big days of shopping and snooping about and each day ended in a big meal.

The first day, we ended up in the Lock Up. A prison themed restaurant. Kinda. It was more like a cross between a prison and a mad scientist's lab.

It was an enjoyable experience. Even though they didn't have any English menus. We found that odd. Not that all restaurants always have English menus, but most do. Especially such large places. Oh well, we figured most of it out. We ordered things that were on fire and such. And all of it was good. We ordered seconds. And none of it was as expensive as we were expecting.


The drinks were the best part. Some came in syringes, some with dry ice, but Ben's was by far the best. It was a series of test tubes filled with various coloured liquids and a beaker to mix them in. So awesome.

Indeed, the whole dining experience was awesome, but it was not crabtacular.

For you see, the Lock Up was in the same area, mayhap the same building even, as an all-you-can-eat crab place. All you can eat crab for 20 bucks! Sweet deal. So that is what we did the very next night.

The night of the crab did not get off to the best start. It seems the 20 buck per head advertised price was not quite true. There was also a table charge, and a seating charge and some other kind of charge. An extra ten per, all told. We were kinda cut about that. And the service at the start was a bit slow, which worried us because there was a time limit to the deal.


But things got better once the crab arrived. The dude, as he set down our first platter of crab, pointed at his watch and said, "Start now!" In Japanese. So we did.

So notes on the crab: they were whole, guts n' all. They were cold. They were wet. There was no garlic butter, but there was some kind of dipping sauce.

We set about destroying the crabs with the various crab destroying implements supplied to us. We were not so good at it. Most of the crab stayed in the shell. Most of the juice didn't. When a stream of juice shot over my shoulder I began to understand the extra charges. This isn't the kind of joint where you can just wipe off the table and seat the next customers. I did not envy whoever had to clean up after us.

A kindly waiter saw our crap crab scramblings and took pity on us. He showed us how to get the most meat in the least time. It took us a while, but we eventually got the hang of it and then we were feasting on mountains of crab. We got a little too good, actually. We felt full before the time was up.

Being stupid, we all basically bullied each other into another plate of crab. A bit of a mistake, that. I reckon we filled our crab quotient for the next few months with that one meal. Between the five of us, we ate around 30 crabs. We all smelled of crab at the end of it.