We had walked past here a few times, but never quite managed to eat here; the queue was usually very long!
Today, we had tried to call earlier to make reservations, but alas, the staff must have been too busy to pick up calls. Nonetheless, we thought of just popping by to see the queue situation.
Thankfully, the queue was relatively short (i.e. not beyond the rice dumping shop), and more importantly, we could see that some tables were finishing up. So at 12:15pm, we decided to queue for lunch 🙂
Being a 12-seater restaurant, including 4 counter seats, and 4 tables of 2 pax each, this place is definitely not a place for big groups. If you are willing to squeeze, they have an additional 7 chairs somewhere for the queue, but able to set up tables of 3s and even 4s! Everyone was rather cooperative and willing to shift a little to make space, so we now have a 16-seater restaurant. Of course, there were also some diners who chose to play with their mobile phone after their meal, hence hogging the table and earning lots of dagger stares from the queue. Not like they cared though, haha! The staff were also nice enough not to chase them away. I guess we still have lots to learn from the Hong Kong cha chan tengs.
We went to check out the many Torii gates at 伏見稲荷大社 Fushimi Inari in the morning, and we discovered that there were now many more Torii gates compared to our previous visit in 2011, making it an even prettier sight. As we were entering the shrine close to 9am, we saw a few visitors leaving 😮 There were easily at least another 20 visitors making their way up at the same time as us, but most of them were quite quiet and orderly in their movements, so it was a rather pleasant walk. Despite the cold, we soon got warm as we slowly made our way up to the view point. Our journey to and fro the view point was about an hour. We were glad we came early; by the time we made our descent, it became really crowded!