Eatertainment: Inakaya

Last night we went to one of my favorite restaurants here in Tokyo, a place called "Inakaya." It's a robatayaki-style restaurant, and the customers sit around a giant U-shaped bar. You have all kinds of food laid out in front of you - beef, chicken, vegetables, fish, etc. etc. etc., and there are two guys on a raised platform in the center of the U. You tell the waiters around you what you want, and they yell it out to the two guys up front. They prepare it - cook it if necessary, and serve it up to you on a long wooden "paddle." It's a very fun, loud environment - best understood by watching the video, below (or on YouTube, here). I call it EATERTAINMENT.

By the way, in the second part of this clip, they're not beating some customer who didn't pay his bill, they're pounding rice in to submission, to turn it in to rice cakes.