MeNAMI: UDON Wanna Miss This One
By Naomi August 22, 2016 canada, culinary, friends, personal, reviews, toronto, travel
My heading is clever right?
Humor me for a moment.
So this Summer, I've been feeling very unmotivated to blog as of late, mainly because I haven't done anything really blog-worthy that I haven't already posted about before. Or rather, I've been feeling very unmotivated to drag my large camera around everywhere I go and risk everyone complaining about me "paparazzi-ing" them all meal.
Since I've been spending my entire Summer in Toronto, my routine has been a little different than what it's like during the academic year. It's a welcome change of pace, and also an opportunity to get together with friends whom I haven't had that much of a chance to see since I've left Queen's.
People are often confused at why I spend so much time in Toronto, and it's difficult to explain my situation because it's not very typical. This Summer however, I had a focused project.
For the last three months, I've been working on renovating a condo here, which has been an endless wheel of learning, coupled with the biggest headache ever.
Thankfully, it's coming to an end.
To celebrate (and also to escape the fumes of sawdust), I texted these lovely girls and basically begged them to have dinner with me. (Mainly because I missed them and because they handle my paparazzi-ing really well)
Remember them?
Let me distract you with this picture of this deep fried ika [7] while you try to figure out who these two lovely ladies are. This dish which was the perfect start to our evening. Juicy tender pieces of squid which are coated in a very delicate batter.
MeNami is a Japanese restaurant that specializes in udon, but also serves a variety of tapas. Located in a very convenient location (Finch and Yonge), it's extremely accessible, but difficult to snag a table simply because it's so popular.
One thing that I love about the menu at MeNami is how simple but thoughtful each item is. They're also not trying to do ten different things at once like some other restaurants, but have decided to focus on udon and tapas - not udon, tapas, sushi, and korean food etc.
Udon and tapas are also the perfect complement to each other.
Are you still working on figuring out who these two are?
I'll give you a few more minutes since our next dish has come. A beef tataki [12] which arrives arranged beautifully on the plate. Those of you who have never tried raw beef (yes, its raw) before are probably cringing, but trust me - it's delicious.
When the udon finally arrives (we all got the same thing), the girls were lovely enough to entertain my blogging needs. Not only were they patient enough to let me take a million pictures of the food even though they were famished, they even re-arranged everything so that it was instaworthy.
If that's not true friendship, I don't know what is.
10 minutes later, I was done and it was time to eat!
Except....
We weren't really quite sure what to do or where to begin.
The Original Kama Udon [7.95] comes chilled on a bamboo mat accompanied with a side of green onions, wasabi, grated daikon and a bowl of udon sauce.
Let's do a quick udon quiz.
Do we
A) Dump all the noodles in the sauce
B) Dump all the sauce onto the noodles
C) Just eat the noodles and forget about the sauce?!
Thankfully, our waiter, seeing our confused faces, so graciously explained the proper way which was neither A, B, nor C.
Oops.
For those of you who have never had cold tanuki udon before, the appropriate way is to first take the green onions, grated daikon and wasabi and add it to the udon sauce, to taste.
Then you're supposed to use your chopsticks to pick up a bite of udon.
Dip it into the sauce.
Gently lift it out and wait a moment to allow the excess sauce to drain away.
And then consume!
Why didn't we think of that.
As for these mystery girls who were such a good sport for me and my camera, they're my lovely housemates from way way back. You'll see them pop up in many of my posts over the years, because they're very photographable and also because they don't sit and complain about my camera the entire meal.
Very important quality when choosing dinner-mates.
____