It’s kind of like being a TV-starved kid on an airplane and watching ten movies in a row just because you can, or maybe it’s like the first week at the college cafeteria after you realize that you’re allowed sevenths of everything and before you calculate what percentage of your private liberal arts college tuition is being funneled into that chocolate chip-oreo-marshmallow-maraschino-crème de menthe shake.Ĭlearly facing such a wilderness of choices involves some sense of responsibility (right, Spiderman?) e.g. Or even, you know, getting ripped off by Starbucks.Īnd you’re allowed to have them all! Or if you prefer, to have twenty cups of the same thing, or again, play bartender and see what a collagen grape juice mocha tastes like, the way you always wanted. Which is a luxury that strikes me as less counterintuitive than paying triple for a thimbleful of 100% organic Ethiopian blend-something-about-hemp at a coffeshop that asks you to make reservations and clear out within half an hour. These restaurants are ubiquitous, invariably clean, spacious, and, unless you hit the service button on your table, leave you to your own devices. “Famiresu”, or family-style restaurants to the uninitiated, are worth but a passing mention for their menus–Japanese-style hamburg, curry, and ramen sets steaming bowls of gratin and pasta deep-fried sides or bowlets of salads and soups comfort foods that are palatable and fairly reasonable and ultimately neither here nor there–but their real attraction as I see it is the mere 231yen that buys you an all-access pass to the drink bar. The establishment that offers too much is treated with the same suspicion as the one that’s lacking, and so much that is both 24-hours and all-you-can-whatever it may be emanates the distinct aroma of the disreputable (think truck stop, love hotel).
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