Fuji Mountain

Chris and I went to a Japanese restaurant in Philly last Friday for our one-year anniversary (!). The weather was gorgeous and warm, and the streets and trains were filled with semi-inebriated people celebrating the Phillie's win.

The funny thing about Fuji is that Chris and I have previously passed it before, and I dubbed it as "generic looking." And I booked a reservation a week ago not knowing that it was the same restaurant. When we got there, it was TOTALLY empty. I was really worried that it really was going to be a bad restaurant. But then we realized that it was 6:30 on a Friday night, and we were being total old people getting in on the early bird special, so we took our chances and went in. Luckily, my intuition was totally wrong and it ended up being a sweet little restaurant.

I ordered the Nabeyaki soba, which is a huge bowl of buckwheat noodles in clear broth with fish cake, eggs, and some veggies. One of my main worries about soba is that it will turn out hard and chewy, but theirs was perfect -- tender but not soggy. Definitely a solid dish. Chris, on the other hand, got a yaki udon, essentially thick white noodles in a "special sauce." It turned out a bit too saucy and the meat was a bit funky. He ended up giving the dish a grade of 90%, although I think there was some grade inflation involved here. Other than that, their sushi was good, but tempura was oily and not excellent. Get the mochi ice cream for dessert. It's worth it. And the service was pretty decent.

From Edacious Eatings

From Edacious Eatings

The real kicker from the night was our adventure back to Swat. Because of the parade, SEPTA was completely backed up. Silly Septa thought that they could handle the number of people in the streets that day. But the fact that our train was 85 minutes late definitely told otherwise. We ended up taking the sketchy subway to 69th street and taking another sketchy bus, finally arriving back on campus at 11pm at night (we got to 30th street at 8:30). Oh man. By that time, I was just glad that I wasn't alone.