As with other cuisines, there are destination Japanese restaurants, where you can make an evening out of it, and there are those like the highly successful Fuji that offer a mass-market interpretation of one of the world’s greatest cuisines, with a consistent product, experience and atmosphere at a reasonable price. Shinanoya, a simple little eatery with modest pretensions and some of the least appetizing menu pictures we’ve ever seen, is in the latter category. The interior is nothing special, clean but cafeteria-like, an L-shaped room with 15-20 tables including four plastic booths and a short sushi “bar” that is too low, in comparison to the kitchen, to see much of what the cooks are doing. A fish tank, thankfully not a TV, is the most prominent feature, and J-Pop music provides an air of aural authenticity. Call them signs of desperation (you cynic!) or simply smart promotion: There are brightly colored banners on the sidewalk out front touting lunch specials; the place offers 12 low-priced set dinners (practically unheard of for a Japanese restaurant); and on the first page of the comprehensive menu (from sushi to tempura to curry to noodles to grilled meats), there is a list of “3 Frees”: one, free green tea with refills; two, a free plate of tempura or sashimi (on the spot) as soon as the value of your order exceeds B500; and three, for every B1,000 you spend, you get a B100 voucher for your next visit. All of the servers are extremely sweet and eager to please; ours, for example, returned breathless 30 seconds after taking our order (this is apparently how long it took her to do the math) to inform us that we were now eligible for free sashimi or tempura. We opted for tempura, which was not the greatest but free, after all. The first dish to arrive, with a large bottle of locally brewed Asahi, was a medium-sized boat of sashimi (five kinds). We’ve definitely had better, but we’ve also had worse; the cuts were hardly deft and some of the fish wasn’t really sashimi quality, but the fatty salmon and octopus, in particular, were almost worth crossing chopsticks over. Similarly, the gyoza (four) were a bit chewy and could have benefited from a more generous amount of filling, but they were large and served with a tasty homestyle salad. We also sampled two of the half-dozen or so “fusion” maki (rolled) items on the menu, which were recommended by our server: spider roll (with soft-shell crab) and Philadelphia roll (with salmon and—you guessed it—cream cheese). Both were decent value, the spider roll a respectable version of this increasingly popular dish, and the cheese fan in our group went nuts over the Philadelphia maki—the combination works great on a bagel, so why not rice? To end, we chose, from the “Chef’s recommends” (sic) section, beef grilled with “house special sauce”, which was a bit chewy but not so much we --couldn’t enjoy it with the shoyu-based sauce. On the Saturday night we visited, the place was pretty dead, but we imagine Shinanoya must do good business during lunch, with office workers digging into lunch sets, and midweek evenings, with residents of the many local apartments and condos grabbing a quick meal on the way home.
