Monday, September 6, 2010

First Ramen in Czech Republic!

As you may know, I miss Japanese food A LOT. Here in Brno, there are some sushi restaurants, but they are very expensive even by US standards. There are no restaurants where I can eat Ramen, Katsudon, Udon, or anything else!

Last Friday, I went to Prague along with my hubby who needed to apply for a Chinese visa (apparently as a US citizen, he could not have someone else to go for him). I also had to go to the Japanese embassy to get a certificate for my Japanese driver's license which I will need in order to exchange my Japanese driver's license for a Czech driver's license (will write about it later). So, off we went. It was a quick day trip to Prague.

We left Brno around 7am, and ran some errands and hit the highway a little before 8am. We were in Prague by 10am. It was already past noon when we finished all the things we had to do. We decided to look for a Japanese restaurant for lunch. I know there are a whole bunch of nice restanrants that we could have gone to in Prague, but I really needed to have anything Japanese.

We found one called "Katsura" near the Chinese embassy. Although it was in a nice hotel called Diplomat, the ambience of the restaurant was not too wonderul, but the lunch dishes they had were great! My hubby ordered Katsudon, and I ordered their daily special, Ramen! I haven't eaten Ramen in a restaurant for more than 4 months, and was so happy to see it as a daily special.

The katsudon came with a bowl of miso soup and three side dishes; Hiyayakko (tofu), Japanese-style macaroni salad, and Tsukemono (Japanese pickles). My Ramen was just satisfactory. It had a chunk of ox tail in it. The soup was a simple soy sauce based one and it was not too greasy and certainly didn't smell like a bad Ramen soup (you know, the soup is the key as you see in the movie called "Tampopo"; video below). It also came with a huge bowl of fried rice and two of the same side dishes: Hiyayakko and Japanese-style macaroni salad. There was no way that I could finish everything and I ended up taking some of the fried rice back home, but all in all I was so happy that I finally got a taste of Ramen in the Czech Republic!

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