TARO and HANAKO

A Truly Odd Experience

This restaurant is a bit old and run by a guy who is equally old. Its regular customer base also seems to be a bit aged, although you would never see it from the outside. Recently, age has caught up to the man running the restaurant as the hours of operation seem to be shorter and the days of operation are becoming more random. I feel a bit mean for saying this, but that might be a good thing. Menu items are relatively cheap, coming at 800 yen on average for a plate of something. Drinks are on the more expensive side at around 500 yen for a cup of coffee. I supposed the drink prices make sense considering the restaurant has a machine that grinds and siphons the beans (I think, I have no idea what the giant machine sitting on the countertop does, but it makes a lot of noise and the guy running the restaurant got coffee out of it). I got a Neapolitan pasta with a cup of black coffee and it far exceeded my expectations considering the ambience. There was a slightly more expensive paella that my girlfriend ordered too, and that also exceeded expectations. And the ambience is the reason I can only give it 3 stars. When I visited, a wall of cigarette smoke hit me the moment I opened the door. There were quite a few people inside, but they were mostly elderly and kind of zombified by the horse race playing on the TV. Don’t get me wrong, they were nice people, but it felt like the restaurant was simply a place where these people could get away from their homes. Seating was objectively spacious, but there seemed to be so much clutter on the counters that the restaurant felt a lot smaller than it was.