OLD FAVORITES IN SOMERVILLE

We were starving the other night. After a little party at ES, we needed to escape early to feed our tummies. And i needed to pick up inventory in Somerville. So what better place for a quick dinner than the Porter Exchange? I looked foward to some chicken tatsu-age at my favorite place, Cafe Mami, but found that they were closed when we arrived. (kinda strange since it was a Tuesday and all the other cafes were open). So we chose to go to Ittyo, which I hadn't been to before. (I went to the ramen place recently, I even took pics, but I never posted about it. But suffice it to say, it seems to have slipped in quality and is just not that great. It's best avoided).

But back to Ittyo. So we ordered pretty quickly. Leah and I both got chicken cutlets with curry (so I could fill my fried chicken craving) while Tom ordered a chicken teriyaki don. Leah and my dinner came with a little side salad while Tom's came with the obligatory bowl of miso soup, which in the world of miso soups, was pretty average. But I'm not gonna be super picky here. Or did we get the soup and he got the salad? I don't remember now.

At any rate, here's the chicken cutlet curry. You can see that's it's a very generous portion and I totally enjoyed the crunchiness of the chicken mixed with the curry and rice. Plus their curry was a little spicer than the average Japanese curry, and I really liked that, too.Here's Tom's chicken teriyaki don. Which looks really nice. But i don't think he loved it. There was too much sauce which made the entire dish too sweet.We didn't get any dessert, but we did drop by Kotobukiya, the Japanese market, to pick up random snacks. Leah got bottles of marble soda (this cool glass bottle that has a marble in it. I loved them as kid.) While i bought some random snacks like chocolate mushrooms and koalas.

After picking up inventory, Leah suggested ice cream at Christina's in Inman Square. For the uninitiated, Christina's is a pretty famous local ice cream joint that always has a huge menu of homemade ice cream. Here's a look at it below. So we zipped over there and picked up a few scoops. It was a hot night, and I felt that ice cream would be a bit too heavy, so i got this scoop of guava sorbet. I found it very smooth and intensely flavored. I liked it a lot. The other good thing about Christina's is that these big scoops you see below were less than $3/piece.

Here are leah's and tom's. Leah got a burnt sugar. She said it was different from toscanini's burnt caramel and she liked it. And tom got the green tea ice cream. I considered getting this myself, but after trying Tom's, I remembered I don't really like the green tea ice cream at Christina's. It's a bit to heavy on the tea flavoring, i like it more subtle. We sat on benches outside to enjoy our ice cream, so all in all, a great casual summer night in Somerville.