Japanese tempura joint

I was one of a party of 5 at this place. You have to take your shoes off when you come in (they're stored away in what i can only think of as a shoe check), swapping them for slippers if you like, and then you're allowed into the elevator and shown to a private room. If I'd known we were going to a swanky place, I would have worn better socks. The really neat part is that when you come back down, your party's shoes are all lined up neatly, waiting for you.
The restaurant specializes in tempura, but does offer a few other selections as well. Everyone in my group ordered set menus featuring sashimi and tempura, as we'd been told they were pretty good. All of the men opted for a larger menu which included a Kobe beef dish, while the women took the next-one-down, sans-beef menu. Apart from a slight variation in the sashimi dish, the menus were otherwise the same.
Hors d'oeuvres

We started with an amuse bouche of a slice of tofu in some salty-sweet juice. I thought it was ok, but nothing I would order on its own. It didn't occur to me to photograph the meal until the amuse had been removed, but don't worry, it didn't look all that special anyway. At right, the hors d'oeuvres show off much more of the typically immaculate Japanese presentation. From left to right, they are: abalone in some kind of jelly, pickled white radish, a veggie marinated in something I couldn't discern (or didn't bother to -- I worked my way from right to left and was still thinking about the pork when I got to this one), a delicious piece of pork, and beans.
Soup

This soup was a pretty light broth featuring a slice of abalone and a piece of fish cake, topped with a small slice of lime peel. I, um, forgot to take a picture of it before I'd eaten the abalone and fish cake, so you only get to see the lime. It's my first attempt, bear with me.
Sashimi

Next up was the sashimi. Again, gotta hand it to the Japanese for presentation. The sloppy chopsticks are my doing. There were three kinds of sashimi in my shell (from bottom to top in the picture below): scallop, tuna (toro), and some kind of sea bream.

The sea bream was good, but the least interesting of the three. The toro was nice and tasty -- very meaty, and went really well with the freshly made wasabi (which I don't even usually like that much!), but it was really the scallops (surrounding the slice of lemon) that impressed me. Nice and firm, not at all chewy, and tasted sooo fresh.
Kobe beef

Mmmm, beef. One of my uncles let me try a piece of his beef, which came sizzling and still pretty rare on a small fajita-style plate. I thought the potato and carrot were an amusing nod to the Western steakhouse crowd. I let my piece sizzle a while longer, and then dipped it in the sour sauce that accompanied the dish (there was also a sweet-sauce option, which I passed on). The beef itself was pretty good; juicy and tender, and you could taste the difference in marbling from a regular steak -- but somewhat contrary to expectations, I really did like it better with the sour sauce.

Sweet sauce on the bottom, sour on top. I believe that's shredded white radish in the bowl.
Tempura

This being a tempura restaurant, the highlight of the meal is of course the tempura. The rooms are set up so that they cook the food right in front of you. We actually had not one, but two chefs (this guy and a sous-chef) performing. They did one, or occasionally two, ingredients at a time, timing them so that they weren't cooking faster than we were eating.

The raw tempura ingredients (12 pieces per person). The little balls up top are filled with red bean paste; you might also be able to make out some of: shrimp, shrimp with shiso herb, whitefish, abalone, squid, mushroom, pumpkin, onion, asparagus, and... i forget the last two, sorry (I'll get better at this, I promise). Also, my camera battery chose to poop out at this point, so you'll see a substantial drop in photo quality for the rest of the meal, as I had to resort to taking pictures on my PDA.
The shiso herb, in case you were wondering, turned out to be a seaweed-like wrapping around the shrimp. Pretty good, but as it was a little harder to eat (the herb didn't always tear so well) and mostly just contributed some saltiness, I preferred the plain shrimp.

As each set of pieces was completed, one was placed in front of each of us on the metal strainer plate, and the chef would tell us which of the accompanying condiments to use. Counterclockwise from the top right, they were: lemon juice, coarse salt, shredded white radish, and the typical tempura dipping sauce (mirin and soy sauce, I believe, but don't hold me to it). The last bowl is just a bit of lettuce and beans to accompany the fried foods you're about to indulge in.
Sometimes you got condiment combinations, such as the shrimp with lemon and salt, or a veggie that went first in radish, and then the sauce. Overall, the tempura was yummy -- a couple of pieces too hot to properly appreciate, perhaps (mushroom tends to hold heat in a little too well), but I very much liked the shrimp and squid, as well as most of the vegetables. We were told that the tempura at this place tends to be lighter than what you find in many Tokyo restaurants because they use safflower oil rather than peanut (or something else heavy). I haven't had tempura in Tokyo recently, but I'd believe it -- the batter was certainly notably light (the fact that I could get through 12 pieces should in itself attest to that!), and nothing tasted greasy. Favorite pieces, in no particular order: shrimp, asparagus, pumpkin, onion (a whole wedge, not rings), squid, and whitefish (excellently done).
Tea-soaked rice

Not too much to say about this -- after the tempura, none of us were particularly hungry for starch. You have a choice between tea rice and dry rice; we all chose the former, which I might rethink if I ever make it back to this restaurant. Cooked rice in the bowls is topped with an amalgam of tempura parts (extra pieces all cooked in together, then divvied up), and then some kind of green tea is poured on top, so that it ends up being more of a rice soup. Fine, but a little anti-climactic after all the other dishes.
Dessert

Green tea ice cream, with (clockwise from the spoon) strawberry, a block of green-tea jelly, sweet taro paste, and part of a cooked chestnut. I liked the taro paste and the strawberry, but could have done without the rest. While I'm not a huge fan of ice cream to begin with, this green tea would definitely not make my list -- not sweet at all, and not particularly smooth. The texture was interesting rather than bad, but I'm not sure I'd want it on a flavor I actually liked. Which was fine, since at that point I was ready to roll home anyway.