Menchi katsu day with fam
[written August 17, 2025]
This August Sunday was a gastronomically pleasant one spent with my mom and dad. My sister’s out of the city with her friends, my brother’s out of the country teaching English to Spanish children, and my aunt’s with my other aunt and her family in the bucolically colder side of the country. So today, it was just me, Mama, and Papa.
We dined at our favorite Japanese restaurant, Yabu, which is renowned for its katsu and unlimited miso soup and salad refills. The miso soup was hearty, loaded with sea kelp and silken tofu. The salad also remained generously good, freshly and thinly sliced, always perfect when seasoned with their pink, savory sauce.
I ordered my good old favorite, the Authentic Menchi Katsu, which flavor and quality remained the same despite its palpably trimmed-down proportions — a diminishment that happened slowly and incrementally in the previous years of economic downturn.
That being said, I love Japanese food so much. But it doesn’t love me back. My allergies to fish and chicken are killing me inside every single day as a food lover 🥲