Gochisoumura ごちそう村

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It's the weekend again. With a busy Saturday and Sunday planned, we decided to take it easy on Friday by having dinner out and catching up on the Daily Show. We walked to one of our Ono favorites, Gochisoumura, a local chain. This was the first restaurant we went to when we arrived back in August, and for a while we ate at Gochisoumura (roughly translated as feast village) every Friday night. While we have since diversified our rotation of restaurants, an evening at Gochisoumura is still enjoyable, especially because they change their menu seasonally.
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We had sara-udon (udon plate, a dish of noodles, shrimp and veggies in a clear gravy, a Nagasaki specialty) and fried camembert, both pictured above.
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We moved on to have nabe, a winter hot-pot dish, and a pressed fish dish, pictured in the lower right hand corner (I can't remember the name...). This particular nabe included salmon, cabbage, tofu, winter greens, carrot, and sprouts in a light broth.
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To finish we had a few pieces of yellowtail sushi.

Some of you may be wondering about my consumption of fish. For many years I did not eat fish, as I lived in the American Midwest. While I living in Japan I have made the concession to eat fish, as it is very difficult to be a strict vegetarian here, but I try to keep it to a minimum. While I enjoy the taste of fish (unlike meat and poultry), my concern is with the environmental impact of (over-)fishing. Whenever possible I try to consult the wallet-size fish-guide card that my mom bought me (for a similar list of environmentally stable fish populations click here), and I try to cook vegetarian meals at home. The challenge here is finding good sources of protein, as we have a limited variety of beans at our local grocery, and although there is a wealth of tofu, I don't like to eat tofu everyday. Even so, there is often a communication barrier we have to face. For example, at dinner tonight I asked if there was meat in my pasta dish and told our server that we don't eat meat. She responded by saying, oh, you are vegetarians, and I replied, yes. After all that, our salad still came with bacon on it (but the pasta was clean!). While I sometimes question my language abilities, I know she understood, as she acknowledged what I said. Of course, this type of thing happens just as often in my own country, and is one of those things that I, like many vegetarians (or pescetarians) have come to accept.
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