Robataya Oton is a Japanese restaurant that is the sister restaurant to Wa Okan Dining, a restaurant I’ve blogged about several times. I’ve been wanting to check it out since it opened last year, but after reading just so-so reviews, I ended up not visiting.
Not too long ago, Dennis of A Radiused Corner wrote a blog post documenting the lunch specials, which are available during the weekdays. Each one looked simple, tasty, and reasonably priced.
I don’t often get to venture to this area for lunch during the week, so when I have a chance, I take advantage. The Future Husband (“FH”) and I got a chance this past week to go check out the lunch menu.
Inside, there are several little private rooms, where you take off your shoes before sitting down at the tables. We were seated in one of these private booths. On the table was a stove top which I believe is used for hot pot.
I had a hard time choosing my lunch entree, as there were several I wanted to try. In the end, I chose the sea urchin and salmon roe bowl. Each entree comes with miso soup and a side dish. Sorry the pictures are overexposed. I was inspired to play around with my camera more after a recent post by Dennis about his new camera, but obviously I was not very successful.
Here is the side dish which consisted of tofu, potatoes and konnyaku jelly.
FH chose the spicy beef skirt bowl. The beef was tender and was marinated. It wasn’t really spicy though. However, he was provided with a little thing of pepper if he wanted to spice it up. The yellow glaring thing in the bowl is tamago, a sweet egg. We both got it in our bowls.
We enjoyed both bowls. Hopefully we’ll get another chance to come back to try some more.
5447 Kearny Villa Rd
San Diego, CA 92123
(858) 277-3989
thanks Kirbie – i just want to make sure about the cash thing.hopefully it won’t be crowded when my daughter and i go for lunch. we want to be there when it opens!
I hope you and your daughter like eating there! I guess you can always make a reservation if you want to make sure there is space for you.
hi kirbie – a few q’s – is it cash only here? do you think reservations are needed for lunch?
It’s cash if under $20. Over $20 and you can use credit card. At least that is what the menu says; I didn’t actually test it because ours ended up being just under $20 so I paid cash. I don’t think you should need reservations. We went at about 12:45 and it was empty. There were only a couple customers that came after us.
hi kirbie
i totally want to try this place! my daughter would love it – we both loved wa dining okan….thanks goodness for vacation and lots of free time! this is on my ‘go to’ list!
i like the color of that konnyaku in the bowl!
You should definitely check it out! It’s a different menu but definitely a similar feel. Vacation is always great for hitting up weekday special. I like the konnyaku when it is that color too. Hehee. I was just thinking I need to buy some like that. Usually I get the clear white one.
The overexposed look is pretty cool I think. I like some of the photos on Violet’s The Hunger blog up in Seattle. Anyway for me documenting is first priority and if I can do something different to make it fun and relevant it’s a bonus. You can always take the photos in RAW format where you’ll have the option to process it the way you want later. But with the number of photos I up I can’t be bothered. I still really like my old SD1000 when there’s good light. Wasn’t great for dinner or even dim food courts though.
I basically ditched by old sd1100 after I got this one. I don’t like shooting in raw because that requires me to do photoshop which is so time consuming. My brother has the same camera as Kirk, the Canon s90. I was thinking about getting that because the picture quality is more crisp and it takes decent photos in low light settings. I’ll have to keep playing around with this one some more.
Hi Kirbie, thanks for the mention. The one I enjoyed the most was actually the cheapest, the soboro-don, ~$6. Your photos look nice! 🙂
Interesting, I’ll have to try that one next time. The other one I really wanted to try was the Yakitori-don. You know I spent most of the lunch obsessing over the target button on my camera. After you mentioned it to me, I remember I did learn how to use that for focus but then I forgot about it. And so I spent lunch trying to figure it out. I don’t know how my photos got so overexposed. I feel like the playback doesn’t really represent how the photos come out.