The Chipanese Restaurant

Last Sunday I had dinner with my girlfriend in a Japanese restaurant in Évora.

The restaurant is called Tóquio (Tokyo in Portuguese) and is, at first sight, a regular Japanese restaurant: – The waiters are Asian and wear some kind of kimono jacket; – The decoration is Japanese (simple decoration with a symmetric theme of black furniture, hiragana characters, etc); – It has the rolling lines of dishes (I’m sorry I don’t know the real name). The place used to be a Chinese restaurant before and the first time I got in it, the waiters seemed familiar and I heard them speak Chinese to each other. Later I figured that the owner was the same guy that owned the extinct Chinese restaurant so… it turns out that the owner must have realized that Chinese restaurants are all over the town and there was not a single Japanese restaurant in here, that’s when he must have had the idea of converting his place to the first Japanese restaurant of Évora. Simply genious! Therefore, I call it Chipanese restaurant!

This was the second time we had dinner in there and it was even better this time. The food is great (I am like a sashimi crazy), the waiters are kind and it is cheap! You can actually have dinner at the price of 8 € (drinks are not included) and you can eat whatever you want from the food (des-) assembly line. This time we sat at the best place there could be: the place next to the chef where the food is put in the line! Yeah, we could choose everything before anyone else! I felt like I could control their appetite… and it was cool to watch the chef preparing the sashimi.

What I really like to watch when I go there is the people on the wrong side of the line (the ones that get the food at last place) who manage to sneak and take the dishes from the other side of the line! So it’s like, some people are watching the food coming and planning on grabbing it but the Portuguese Food Ninjas from the *wrong* side of the line are smarter and get it first! I hope I never seat on the Ninjas side or I’ll have to become one myself.

If you’re a guy, let me tell you that you should take your girlfriend there because it’s fun that she will make you her “personal poison tester” – she will make you taste everything she doesn’t feel brave enough to taste and then report to her how is it like. I think mine even chose dishes she didn’t really wanted to try just to watch me eating it… women are cruel!

Anyway, it’s a place that’s worth attending for the food and the laughs.