Reviews You Can Use: Water Wheel Restaurant

This weekend we had dinner with some of Chris’ coworkers to celebrate the completion of the squadron’s NATOPS evaluation. That’s what Chris has been helping with the last couple of months, and he’s now taken on the job of NATOPS officer and instructor. Congratulations, Chris! I am impressed by skills Chris has that I completely lack, like his ability to work magic with bureaucratic paperwork and red tape. It’s really a marvel. So maybe someone else noticed those skills and is putting them to good use. Anyway, so the visiting NATOPS evaluator, outgoing and incoming NATOPS officers and their spouses had dinner at the Water Wheel Restaurant (2-22-9 Sagamidai, Minami-ku, Sagamihara-City, Kanagawa, 252-0321; Tel: 042-744-1430) this weekend. Our first course came on a small sakura dish and a long, thin plate. In the sakura: squid with bamboo and squid ear in a sauce. On the thin dish: shrimp with sweetened mashed peas; an entire four-inch fish topped with Japanese daikon radish and peppers; rice with egg and salmon roe; rice with a mushroom top; fried fiddle ferns; and, in the small bowl on the end of the plate, diced mountain potato in raw egg.The mountain potato tasted most fishy. The squid ear was almost sweet. Chris and the four-inch fish sized each other up and stared each other down. Chris won. I tried to attack it in one bite, but the little sucker was kind of big. I ended up with its little tail sticking out at first. “You don’t want to do that in multiple bites,” Dan, our host, advised. Good call. It didn’t actually taste fishy. I’m not sure what it tasted like, actually, because I was trying hard to practice Daddy’s foreign food mantra: “Smile and eat it!” Our second course was a tempura basket with fried sweet potato (my favorite!), prawns, white fish, dandelion greens, etc. For the third course, we tried our hands/chopsticks at shabu shabu. Shabu shabu literally means, “swish swish,” and refers to the sound your chopsticks make as you cook your food in the communal pot. It’s a form of nabe: any of several types of Japanese communal pot dishes especially popular in wintertime. Chris and I had this in Beijing, too. Here, we put cabbage, mushrooms, tofu, mochi, and leaks into the pot to simmer, then dunked thin-sliced Japanese beef in for about 30 seconds. Everything went from the pot into a sesame sauce or citrus-soy sauce, then into my tummy. Very yummy, and so filling! As we all slowed down, our kimono-clad waitress arrived with noodles, cooked them in the leftover water, then served us each a bowl as a finale.
After a grapefruit-gelatin dessert with tea, we contemplated the Japanese garden outside the window. Then we headed upstairs to see the owner’s personal collection of samurai armor. Some of the swords date to the 1400s. This week is Girls’ Day in Japan, so the restaurant displayed several hina dolls. Taking the displays down the day before Girls’ Day means beauty for your daughter and luck in finding a husband early, but waiting to take the dolls down until after the holiday means your daughters will be old maids. That’s kind of ironic for a culture that thinks I’m on the younger side of marriageable age at 27 (and when we tell people we’ve been married almost five years they really freak out). I told Chris I like it when someone else orders all the food, because then we get to/have to try dishes we would never order for ourselves—perfect for a business/celebration dinner. We had a lovely evening dining at the Water Wheel Restaurant (named for the water wheel by the front door), but at $100 per person, it’s not a treat we’ll indulge in very often.