Ninja Part 2: The Ninja

As we sat in our little mountain village hut, giddily anticipating a violent ambush from all sides, a slender, pretty girl swaddled in ninja gear (basically black sweatpants that have been put through a Cuisinart and then reapplied to the body by Mary and Joseph) appeared with arms full of scrolls.

(All ninja literature comes in Torah format)

"My name is Kikio, and I'll be your server tonight," she said. She clearly hailed from a ninja mountain village somewhere in Long Island, or possibly Burbank, California. "You guys ordered drinks already, right?" She was distinctly sunny. I did not get the impression that she would be physically harming any of us, although she had been, as we learned, through rigorous ninja boot camp and fire safety training. The necessity of the latter became apparent when she opened a notepad to take our orders and it burst into flames. She shook the flames off of her shockingly flame-retardant notebook, apologized coyly and pencilled in the orders she had coaches us through: we all chose tasting menus, to maximize the presence of Ninja's signature "performace" dishes. Surely these would be the key to a broken clavicle, we hoped.

Not quite. The first real "performance piece" consisted of Stephanie-- I mean Kikio-- dropping an 800-degree stone in a pot full of mizuna leaves and broth. The stew heated up quickly, with Kikio applying quite athletic effort to mashing the stone up against the caulron walls. The next performance involved fire again. Kikio presented a plate of two conch shells sitting on mounds of salt. A fairly innocent-looking thread of powder extended from each shell, which Kikio, after delivering a husky chant, lit on fire. Like ACME TNT in a Looney Toons bit, the flame crept up the powder filament as we looked on, inquisitive Wile E. Coyote's about to get our faces blown off.

As you can see from the photo, it kinda looks like whatever that thin thread on fire is, that mound is made of the same stuff. Look how tickled Jon is at his impending immolation!

What actually happened, was that the fire hit a bump, flashed, and was gone, purely ornamentally, while the conch inside the conch probably had no idea of the pyrotechnics at its doorstep.

But Stephanie was a dream, from start to finish. Although her ninja charms and chants coulnd't do much about the mind-boggling, totally unparalleled in my dining experience, nastiness of the elaborate menu she would usher to us. Beginning with a gelatinized egg filled with embryotic sea things...