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Mary & I did one of the monthly event dinners (part of the week-of-birthdays for her) at Monsoon last night and had a wonderful time. Eric did an amazing job giving us all a taste of Vietnamese new year with the fusion twists the restaurant is famous for.

We weren't expecting it to be family-style, but that only added to the collective enjoyment and we were lucky enough to meet the owners of Yama Japanese Restaurant and Red House Beer & Wine Shoope, both local eateries that we now are anxious to sample.

Here's what you missed last night:

• grilled flank steak with green scallions and vermicelli noodles
• fisherman's soup with morning glory greens
• five spice washington chicken "roti"
• braised leek and asian eggplant salad with crispy tofu paper
• braised baby back ribs with coconut juice and longevity egg
• kurabuta pork belly with pickled cucumber and banh bo
• mung bean sweet soup with tapioca

Ever since getting here I've wondered why there are *so* many teriyaki joints in and around Seattle. This Seattle Weekly article goes into great detail:

Food: How Teriyaki Became Seattle's Own Fast-Food Phenomenon (Seattle Weekly): "Nothing seems to stop the exponential growth of teriyaki shops in Seattle and its surrounding environs, including market saturation. To wit, the Washington Restaurant Association recently generated a list of all the restaurants in its master database with "teriyaki" in the name, listed by date of entry. As of 1984, the database contained 19 (that is, restaurants still in business). That number doubled by 1987. In the mid-1990s, 20 to 40 teriyaki joints appear to have been opening every year, and the database now contains 519 listings statewide (there are more than 100 teriyaki shops within Seattle's city limits alone)—which doesn't include restaurants that favor "Bento," "Wok," or "Deli" over "Teriyaki" in their titles.

And that's far from the extent of the dish's omnipresence. Pho shops pad their menus with chicken teriyaki. Asian-operated burger joints like Herfy's, Stan's and Dome Burger all feature teriyaki dishes. A Somali cafe down in Tukwila that I reviewed last month offered halal chicken teriyaki; not to mention sushi restaurants, even ultratraditional ones, which offer teriyaki chicken and beef on their menus—something (surprise) you'd never see in Japan."