Zake: for zo-zo Japaneze cuizine in Houzton

there are some streets in Houston that Grace and i drive down with some regularity based on where our known haunts and habits take us.

on one of these streets there is one of those restaurants, the kind that catches your eye but that you've never been to nor do you remember to think of when the time comes for eating.

well last Saturday night, when the question for where to go eat did arise, i did remember the name.....ZAKE!! it's some japanese cuisine restaurant located in a plaza (next to a Book Stop whose lodgings is an old movie theater, kinda neat, my good friend Steve would love it).

we noticed upon entrance that Zake was one of those restaurants that is trying to cultivate a hip, trendy image but doesn't yet have the clout or success to keep out homebodies such as ourselves. the place was long and narrow and divided into two halves: on the left the dining tables and bar, on the right some kind of lounge area. The two areas were separated by one of those dividers made up of multiple hanging strings adorned with colorful beads.

Zake's owners obviously subscribed to the theory that loud, pumping techno music aids digestion as the aforementioned beaded dividers were powerless to stop the lounge's somewhat-odd soundtrack (house remixes of "More than a Feeling" and "Owner of Lonely Heart"?) from spilling over into the dinner area.

Long story short: they got our initial drink order wrong (one water, one tea, and a Budweiser became two teas and an invisible bottle of beer, apparently), the sushi was tasty enough but sloppily prepared, and the entrees paled in comparison to what we could have gotten over at Houston's for the same cost (Grace's steak might have been competitive, at best, with my last known attempt to grill meat the George Foreman way; where were the new and/or mashed potatoes that the menu promised with my roasted duck breast??)

the only real enjoyment from the place came as we were waiting for the check:

as the current techno song hit its "this is the part where the drums cut out and the generic female singer does a minute-long vocal solo" bridge, i was able to mark for Grace the buildup to the return of the industry-standard backbeat, noting the slowly-growing volume of the rapid stacatto snare drum beats that always precede the eventual re-emergence of

BOMsstBOMsstBOMsstBOMsstBOMsstBOMsstBOMsstBOMsst....