Tonkatsu!

What better way to spend lunch when you've eaten all the sushi and tofu and noodles? Of course, there is ritual involved, which I learned by way of side glances at the neighboring table.

Now, we've got a lot of this back home; it's a cheap and easy go-to lunch, but never really goes beyond a breaded and fried pork cutlet, rice, and a few packets of soy sauce.

This started out with pickled daikon, black and white sesame, and a pestle being dropped off. Mimicking their technique, I ground the sesame and added the sweet and salty Japanese BBQ sauce from the table pot. This was meant for the pork, but I'd ordered more.

Shredded lettuce turned up next and got drizzled with the salad dressing flavor not available in the US. I ate about half before the miso soup, rice, and light vinegar showed up, followed directly by the combo plate.

Item #1 was a ten-inch prawn, coated in panko and fried (as was everything else). It came with Japanese tarter, so now we've got five sauces going on. It's all about the dip. Next up was the pork mille-fuille of lunch: imagine very thinly sliced pork, like cheesesteak style, wrapped around a pickled plum, and breaded and fried like before. The vinegar sauce is for this one. The third was closest to the tonkatsu we get, but so much better. There's your sesame BBQ.

This is where the lettuce comes back into play. Between bites, rest your morsel on it to catch all the crispy fried bits that fall off. Instant croutons.

$12. The mille-fuille pork alone is worth it.