Japanese pizza and recipe navigator

Recently, Mami and I have been ordering a pizza every weekend. This is a bit of a luxury and something we would never have done just a year ago, but we feel like spoiling ourselves at the moment. So when we get a craving for pizza, we turn to Aoki’s Pizza, for our fill of cheese and tomato.

I won’t fill up this post with a bunch of pizza pictures, but it’s worth checking out Aoki’s menu page on their website even if you can’t read Japanese. So let’s see, we can choose from delights such as “Squid, Shrimp and Salmon”, “Potato Curry”, “Rice Cake Pizza”, “Egg and Tuna Potato” and many others. Mami and I usually settle for a simple “Super Combo” which has all the things we’d consider ‘normal’.

The Aoki’s website is quite impressive, especially the opening page which greets you with this wonderfully appealing slogan:

I don’t know about room, freedom and a dream, but there’s plenty of fish, corn and egg!

When Christmas in Japan comes around, the fast food restaurants and convenience stores go mad promoting their chicken and sponge cakes, but Aoki’s takes it a step further by sending out their delivery boys in Santa suits! Maybe this is common overseas too, but I’d never seen it till I came to Japan. I mention this because I saw some guy from Aoki’s in the ‘coin laundry’ next to my school today washing half a dozen of them.

Still, not even a Santa suit will encourage the Japanese to pay a tip, but that’s another story.

On a related note, I saw a TV commercial today for Shaberu! DS Oryouri Navi, the latest novelty ‘game’ for the Nintendo DS. It’s actually not a game at all, but rather a talking cookbook that holds over 200 recipes and talks you through each step in the cooking process. Check out the Japanese site here.

The Nintendo DS has taken Japan by storm with, I guess, almost every household owning one. Surprisingly, games such as Brain Age, a brain training game for adults, and Eigo Zuke, an English teaching program, have made it incredibly popular with adults. Apparently the recipe navigator, Shaberu! DS Oryouri Navi, sold 120,000 copies in its first week alone!

At least I know what to get Mami for Christmas!

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