Last night I was so hungry I could have eaten a horse….so I did…

Raw Horse Sushi / Sashimi, you take a slice of horse and wrap it around some of the onions and ginger (both dipped in the sauce), well nice! (sorry Shergar!)

One of my colleagues knows a famous Korean chef (based in Shanghai) and she asked him where is the best Japanese food in Shanghai, this was one of his top suggestions, so off we went last night to try it out and by the end of the meal I was tending to agree with him. The horse was quite nice actually, kind of like a light, fatty beef, if someone had told me it was beef I’d probably have believed them

As well as the food being delicious the presentation was just about the best I’ve seen in any restaurant, have a look at these:

The appetiser, everyone got this, I think it was free, note the cherry blossom (tis the season!, just about every dish was garnished with a sprig), my favourite was the blue one, the shell thing was surprisingly tasty too, the one at the back minged (turned out it was tofu and hemp).

The sashimi set, on a mountain of ice, unusual in that every item had it’s own little basket/pot, it reminded me a bit of the bottom of a fish bowl, I kept expecting to see a stream of bubbles coming out of a treasure chest. Everything was extremely fresh, I even tried the tentacles (and I don’t eat octopus), BOB ON!!!!

Grilled fish, very tasty (do I have to keep saying this, I think you’ve got the message by now, I’ll just concentrate on the decoration), served on a bed of twigs (I’m not sure what kind but I bet they’re posh) and a stick of bamboo sliced and selectively coloured red to look like a space rocket/dog’s lipstick. I ate most of this dish, everyone else barely got a look in.

Preggo fish, this is a popular dish in Japan and I don’t know why, these fish are proper knocked up, look at the state of them! Anyway, they’re jam packed full of eggs and were probably just about to offload the lot of them before some guy with a net scoops them off the top of the water (surely they can’t swim when they’re like this, they just float?), bangs them into a frying pan and sticks them on our table, DINGLE SAYS NO!!!!! Anyway, my colleagues said they were really nice. Note the lack of the cherry blossom, this probably means something very significant, I have no idea what, I was on my fourth beer at this point.

Errr actually there were another few courses after that but I stopped taking photos (although for some reason I have a picture of the urinal), anyway, pretty much the best Japanese food I’ve had in Shanghai, get yourselves down there!

Dingle top tip – take a bird there, guaranteed leg opener!!

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention, I did a bit of research while I was there and I can confirm that Chinese waitresses in Japanese restaurants ALWAYS answer in Japanese, regardless of which language you speak to them in, I tried English, Japanese, Chinese and Korean.