Happy Birthday, J!

Sometimes I feel that I'm a terrible mother. A week ago, we asked J what kind of restaurant he'd like to go to for his birthday. We gave him the choices of pizza, American, Chinese, Italian, etc. Imagine our surprise, when he picked sushi. Yes, my California rolls are always a hit with the kids. But we've only gone out for sushi couple of times. Anyways, that's that. So I did a little research on yelp, and decided to try out Tokyo Japanese Restaurant in Loehmann's Plaza in Factoria. I then put it out of my mind. It didn't occur to me until couple of hours before dinner that I didn't make a cake. Can you conceive the sheer horror and panic? Not being a talented pastry chef like Aran from Cannelle et Vanille. I resorted to the unthinkable - a strawberry flavored cake mix. I then made a cream cheese frosting with some strawberry extract and 2 drops of red food coloring. Sometimes it's a blessing that my kids don't have sophisticated taste in food, in this case desserts, yet. My kids even got a kick out of wearing aprons and holding the hand mixer "helping" me with the cake mix and the frosting. =) So cute.

We got to Tokyo Japanese Restaurant shortly after 6. When it comes to Asian food, I never know whether I could trust yelp reviews or not. So I had no expectations. It was a pleasant surprise to find that almost everyone who worked there was Japanese, and most of the patrons were Asian. The place seemed fairly popular and got a flux of people around 6:30.

Hubby didn't want sushi and went with a combo of tempura and tonkatsu. I got chirashi, so that everyone could have some fish to their liking. J got little Tokyo which included gyoza, vegetable and prawn tempura, and California rolls. The kids loved miso soup with all the tofu and wakame seaweed. Hubby and I also had green salad, not much to write about. The tempura was very fluffy, the tonkatsu very tender. Hubby liked everything he got. But I think $18 is a bit steep. My chirashi was very good, very fresh. Don't quote me, but I think it came with 2 pieces of tamago (egg), some ikura (salmon roe), and 14 pieces of fish which included unagi(eel), ebi(shrimp), saba(mackerel), maguro(tuna), sake(salmon), bincho(albacore tuna), tai(red snapper), hamachi(yellow tail) and probably some that I forgot. $23 isn't cheap for chirashi, but both the quality and quantity were very good. I think it was a better value than hubby's meal. Everyone left completely stuffed, and J was quite happy with his choice. I think he felt very grown up being the one "making" the decisions. ;)

Tokyo Japanese Restaurant
3500 Factoria Blvd SE, Bellevue, WA 98006
(425)641-5691