Yesterday Scott celebrated his 5th birthday. He had been talking about it for weeks, counting the nights until he would turn 5. After getting a lot of presents during Christmas already we still managed to find a few new ones for him, among others a new (bigger) bicycle.

Our birthday boy could also choose what he wanted to eat. I had expected him to go for pancakes or french fries, but it turned out I was wrong: Scott insisted to go to a Robatayaki restaurant! Of all the restaurants that he goes to (on average probably about 2 restaurants per week) a Japanese grill is his favorite. I know he likes the restaurant because of the way the food is served (the cooks grill over charcoals right in front of you and hand it to you with long wooden paddles while shouting something in Japanese), but when I asked Scott he told me that their salmon fried rice is his personal favorite and that’s why he wanted to go there.

Before we left I checked again with Scott and gave him some other choices, but he insisted on robatayaki. The dinner was nice as usual although, as with many local Japanese restaurants, it was still quite empty. Right after the Diaoyu/Senkaku anti-Japanese protests the restaurant was almost deserted, at least now about 40% of the seats were taken. Local Chinese don’t seem to come here anymore and many of the Japanese businessmen that used to come here to eat and drink after work haven’t returned yet either.

A real pity, because it’s a great restaurant and the owner is very friendly. The stickers on the stores and restaurants around this robatayaki place (‘we boycot Japanese products’) certainly don’t help either. Luckily Scott is unaware of the tensions and for us the advantage is that we could easily get a table: in the past you could not just walk in without a reservation.

Restaurant name & adress: Robatayaki Ryunosuke, 2988 Hongmei Lu (near Wuzhong Lu), Chinese: 虹梅路2988号, 近吴中路