Menya Mappen Madness and a Spanish Cat

Idea: Grab a quick Japanese meal before running off to a Spanish lesson

In case you're confused about what's going on, there's instructions. Cute, Japanese pictures to guide you through your eating experience. Make sure you return your tray like a well behaved diner. There's some old school Japanese movie posters as decoration, but apart from that it's all about the food. Menya Mappen is a self serve style bar. Choose your dish, which they prepare right in front of you, grab a tray, slide it along and pick up your extras along the way. Included in the ridiculously cheap meal is a scoop of chopped green onions and tempura crumbles if you so desire them. We decide to top up our dish with everything and choose far too many sides. It's quite easy to get carried away.

We both order the Keke - udon with kadadeshi soup ($3.90 regular size). Now, I'm a big eater, but even the small size is big enough for me and could be a meal in itself without any toppings. We grab extras like the sweet potato tempura (60c), massive chunks of tempura onion, fried bean curd, seaweed, menma (fermented bamboo shoots), prawn tempura and other pickled vegetable toppings.

fried bean curd, sweet potato tempura sides

prawn tempura, onion tempura sides

We only had a few minutes to eat before our Spanish lesson began (our first one, so we didn't want to be too late)! We scoffed our food extremely fast. It was salty and delicious. The tempura batter wasn't the nicest I've had but overall it was very satisfying. Such a simple, cheap and healthy (well, except for the tempura) meal. Miss C and I waddled to our Spanish class at the Spanish Cat. Sooo full! Buenos noches! Como se dice "more Japanese food" en Espanol?