Pot Belly

Rating: Not great
Meal:  Lunch
Price:  1100 yen
Payment:  Cash only
Dishes: Pork with Japanese "taste" teishoku
English Menu: Yes (not the lunch specials)

Smoking:No

Lunch specials

You just never know what a place is going to be like until you try it.  I know it's a dumb thing to say, but we forget sometimes.  I've driven by Pot Belly so many times and each time my wife and I say, "Oh that place looks so cute, I bet it's excellent, we should go sometime."  I finally went today, and it's not that great.

The proprietors are very nice, a mom and pop shop, but they have a much higher class vibe going on.  Their menu has lots of dishes and all the prices are up there, so one would expect excellence.  I went for the pork teishoku lunch special.  First to arrive was a soup.  Practically tasteless, with listless boiled to death vegetables.  I kept tasting it to see if I just had a bad first impression, but no, it was just useless.  I ended up not finishing it because...why bother?

From the main menu

The main dish arrived with a bunch of shredded cabbage smothered in a kind of thousand island dressing, nothing interesting there.  There was a small plate of rice to accompany which was inoffensive.  The pork itself was slices of some kind of pork that must have been just reheated with a sauce drizzled on top.  There was so little work or attempt at making this dish any good, and it showed.  The dessert was unexpected, but bland as well, some kind of cream filled crepe.

So uninspiring

I compare this with Marunaga that I ate at the other day in my own building.  Night and day.  Marunaga is a little scarier looking and Pot Belly looks high falutin', but you just never know til you try it.

Meh...