Monday, December 25, 2006

Christmas Eve Dinner @ Casablanca


MERRY CHRISTMAS!

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Christmas is not a holiday here so I was hoping to spend Christmas in a quiet sort of way. On Christmas eve, Xinyi and I didn't do much but lounged in our hotel rooms until it was dinner time. (Check out the things that we did since we got to Casablanca).

Our Christmas eve dinner was Japanese food. Turkey and stuffed meat, foods that are traditionally associated with Christmas, are pretty usual fare in the Maghrebian diet anyway. Moreover, I had a craving for Japanese food.

Kiyotori, one of the two Japanese restaurants in Casablanca, not far from our hotel was our choice. Other than sounding Japanese, Kiyotori does not have any meaning in Japanese. It was also not easy to find the restaurant because it was located in the middle of a inconspicuous and deserted alley. Ridiculous name and location aside, Kiyotori is really a popular restaurant with the hip and up-market crowd because of its pricey exotic fare and lush interior design.

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The menu items @ Kiyotori are the usual culprits on a typical Japanese restaurant menu like teppanyaki, sushi, tenpura, kushiyaki (skewered meat) and sashimi. The missing items are donburi (rice bowls), udon and ramen because perhaps they don't cater to the local tastes. For novelty, the restaurant does have specialty sushi rolls with rather interesting names like dragon roll and anaconda roll.

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To be able to satisfy my craving for sushi while being thousands of miles away from Asia, I think I cannot complain much. Actually, I consider the food @ Kiyotori quite tasty in its own right, especially the dragon roll, which nicely blended the tastes of unagi (eel) and avocado.To compare, I would position the taste of the Kiyotori above Sakae Sushi to somewhere on par with Sushi Tei. Kiyotori gets a small plus over Sushi Tei for the freshness of its seafood, while losing out a little to Sushi Tei for authenticity.

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