French Dinner at Gaspard Tokyo Azabu Jyuban to celebrate my Dad’s 74th・ガスパール東京 麻布十番で父の誕生日を祝う

Our fam­ily cel­e­brated my dad’s 74th in Azabu Jyuban tonight. Miche­lin Guide has become my last choice for find­ing a din­ing set­ting for a spe­cial occa­sion. I have already tried a few estab­lish­ments since the 1st Issue when they first received their awards. How­ever on sec­ond vis­its, lot of them had turned into tourist traps and “must eat once before you” die joints for the masses. Food and ser­vice qual­ity had changed. My EOD5DmkII is still in repair so I used the Canon S90 ultra com­pact camera.

今日は父の誕生日を祝うためGaspardで食事をした。Gaspardへ行くのは初めてだ。2008年はミシュランを使いレストランを選んだが、2009年再度同じ店へ行くとそこは観光名所になっており、サービスも質も下がっていたみ瀬が多かった。写真はEOD5DmkII修理中なので今日はCanon S90コンパクトで撮影した。

Gas­pard is located in Azabu Jyuban next to Rop­po­ing in Tokyo

In Japan, the spread on an out­ing is huge.. Some can charge 3 times the price and some can do with 1/3 the price for a same qual­ity out­ing.  Places like Casa Vini Italia charges a meger 6400 Yen for a full and won­der­ful evening out while XXXX can charge 20,000 yen. You might actu­ally get bet­ter food at Casa Vini.

日本では同じ料理でも価格差が3倍近くあることもある。片やカサ・ヴィーニ・イタリアで6,400円の素晴らしい世界し高級の料理があるとおめば、20,000円近く出しても印象の薄い料理もある。

My Dad

So I turned to “KUCHIKOMI”, （口コミ）mean­ing “WORD OF MOUTH”. Because the nation has high pop­u­la­tion con­cen­tra­tion, and peo­ple com­mute and work in cen­tral­ized paths, the word of mouth is very impor­tant in mar­ket­ing sucess. Some prod­ucts sell so well due to word of mouth, that com­pa­nies actively pur­sue this method to increase aware­ness and post­pone tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing methods.

そこで今回はクチコミを利用している食べログの本を買った。twitterやジオタグで舌の肥えた人たちのイベントが増え。2008年より2010年はtwitterやfacebook and SNSの普及で食べ物の情報量と意見サンプルが飛躍的に増えたのだ。

With geo­t­ag­ging and word of mouth twit­ter­ing (along with face­book, blogs, estab­lish­ment review sites, blogs, foursquare etc..), peo­ple began to gather. Twit­ter and SNS events are pop­ping up every­where. Peo­ple began to meet new peo­ple online and began to gather.  Estab­lish­ments that offered WiFi with tweet­ing celebrity owner got a lot of traf­fic. Most attend­ing peo­ple in my events were also promi­nent blog­gers and tweet­ers, so they get more traf­fic and so on.  I myself did a twit­ter gath­er­ing last night with about 20 people.

So today I bought a book my TABELOG 食べログ, one of Japan’s top eatery review online and book. I pur­chased the book which had food types and user scor­ing nicely arranged into sec­tions. I found tonight’s din­ner, we decided to go to the 13th ranked GASPARD.

The guide­book was very use­ful and trust­ful, as it is ranked by hun­dreds of peo­ple who review them and are very online and trendy spot savvy.

The below is a mix of the 8,400 yen and 12,800 yen din­ner set we ordered, cho­sen from 5 choies of a 6–9 course din­ner, so that is close to 40 choices we had.. Enjoy the pic­tures below.