The Canal Cafe
The Canal Café offers two possible dining options: the restaurant side café, which promises pizza and pasta in a traditional restaurant setting, and the deck-side café, which allows you to purchase food cafeteria style and bring your pet to dine by the canal with you. Visiting the deck side is a great idea for hanging out alone or with friends on a warm day. Soaking up the sun while watching children out in rowboats with their fathers is a pleasant backdrop for a long conversation.
On a recent winter afternoon, I visited the restaurant side for the first time. Sitting outside by the water, the view and ambience were equally as pleasant as the deck side, however, I wrongly expected the food there to be of a higher caliber than it’s take-out-style counterpart. Settling into a menu featuring a full page of pizza options, I was disappointed to find out that there were no pizzas being served that day. My friend and I ended up ordering a panini set and a curry set, and I ended up being disappointed by both. The Panini was not in fact a grilled Italian sandwich, rather it was a cold sandwich served on toasted French baguette. Not bad, but hardly remarkable. The Thai green curry was mediocre, and I became immediately suspicious that it had come out of one of those instant curry aluminum bags.
Once finished with our quickly cooling tea, my friend and I tried to get closer to a heat lamp that may or may not have been on (we couldn’t quite tell). Looking out onto the canal, people had started to rent out boats for the afternoon, and I watched a pig-tailed child lean out over the edge of a rowboat to feed some carp. The sun came out, and I started to think that maybe it isn’t always about the food after all.
http://www.canalcafe.jp/cafe/
Tokyo Foodie.com 