tokyo food file

Sayonara to Le Dessin. Many thanks, Chef Masuda.

It's always sad to say goodbye to a favourite restaurant — even one that I never got to visit as often as I'd have liked.

But that was always one of the things about Le Dessin that made it so special: Chef Toshiaki Masuda always followed his own muse — including his choice of location, far away from the mainstream, in Ushigome-Yanagicho.

There's little to add to my review some three years ago. We had one last excellent meal there last weekend. And now Le Dessin is closed and Masuda-san is off, back to his home town of Shimada in Shizuoka-ken. Where he's going to be opening another little restaurant — not French this time, but ramen. And why not? You just know it's going to be good.

So… many thanks to Chef and Mrs. Masuda: goodbye, good luck, and all the best in the future!

The Japan Times seems to have lost all the photos that went with my column. I'll have to dig them out from the vaults, if only to remind myself of how well we ate there. Stay tuned…

Las Meninas: adios, we'll miss you

It was party time tonight in the back streets of Koenji, but the tears were flowing with the vino. After a decade as the funnest friendliest Spanish bar in town, on Saturday the legendary Las Meninas closed its doors for the very last time.

Owner-chef Johnny Miller and his wife Taeko are packing it in, taking down the shingle and heading off down to Osaka (NB they'd announced the move a long time ago, and it was nothing to do with recent seismic events). 

To call it the end of an era might be overstating the case. But for the locals who congregated there — and there were plenty — it's going to leave a gaping gap in their well-soused social lives. 

Despite working out of a ridiculously cramped kitchen, Johnny always turned out a great range of hearty and reliably good Spanish staples. It was virtually impossible to spend too much there  — even the Roda I was not a whole lot more than you'd find at retail prices. Not that I ever drank it there: Johnny always had a few bottles of good oloroso in the fridge and the house vino was basic tempranillo but quaffable anyway.

Want to know what you missed? I gave it a wee write-up a few years back in the JT here (scroll down the page). And here are a few more photos, some taken last Friday night others in previous years...