How did you spend your Friday Night?

This weekend I had quite an experience. A team from our restaurant went to a huge convention center event to run a food booth. This was not any event though, but an annual all night RAVE called Electroglide. So that meant we would be selling food from 9pm at night till 7am in the morning.

We did this same event two years ago, along with 9 other restaurants, but this year was quite a bit different. First off, the event itself was larger. Roughl7 20,000 people attending. And then this year, instead of 10 food stands there were only 4!

we decided on a nice menu of 3 kinds of things served on rice. Vegetable Thai Curry, Beef and veggies, and Chicken Terriyaki. So far so good.

After a week of prep in the restaurant, at the same times as preparing for service for thanksgiving dinner for 300 the day before--- we loaded up our vans, and headed to the convention center spot, Makuhari Messe, about 1 hour outside of tokyo. Arrived, set up, and were feeling really good about ourselves.

Until...

we started service, our booth was instantly popular (we were also selling vanilla brownies!) and the masses started to swarm. Suddenly, two things happend.

1. We ran out of the rice we already had cooked much faster than we thought we would.
2. the large rental rice cooker we brought BROKE! and we had only one small one left!!!

so now with hundreds of people lined up in front of our booth, we had nothing but brownies and beer!!!

My boss drove all around the area and came back with noodles, and we quickly switched to noodles, while still making rice in the small cooker and selling it as quick as we could make it.

This kind of crazy frenzy went on for about 8 hours! when exhausted and having sold any food we could come up with, we finally finished the evening. We sold thousands of beers, hundreds of waters and orange juice, thousands of brownies, and then we all collapsed. My husband and two of my friends came out to work the event with us. We had a total staff of about 20 people. We definately learned a lot from this, and hopefully there will be a next time! But it was one of the craziest nights I've had in the food business... 

a japanese blog and the return of the Madeleline

the Espresso car I wrote about and photographed before... the one in the old citron, was gone from our neighborhood for a long time. Chris and I really missed it!

The young man who owns and runs it is so nice and a pretty serious coffee guy. He told us before he was going to a new spot in Daikanyama, an neighborhood not too far from here. But we were spoiled having him so close by and we never made it over to the new spot. Then suddenly today he returned. And I found out he has his own Madeleline blog over at http://madeleine2.exblog.jp/ It is in Japanese but you can get a sense of it if you use the online translator at Babel Fish!

anyway, it is great to have him back in the neighborhood- I had a chance to enjoy a cappucino tonight. It was fun to check out his blog too.

yes, I do still eat...

it has been a sad state of affairs here at the fancy glass. I realized today it has been almost a month since I have written...!

the Restaurant I work in has been busy, as have I. and though I have been eating, I must admit food adventures that would inspire me to write have been few.

The news is good though, this week will be Thanksgiving. And once again, our restaurant Fujimamas will be making sure that americans living overseas in Tokyo will not go turkey-less. We are already sold out for two seatings in our 170 seat restaurant!

So pictures of turkey and pumpkin pie are coming soon!

*Lauren