My own little bubble of delusion, really. I know nothing of Japan except what I’ve picked up from Saturday afternoon kung-fu movies, late-night anime, video games. I’ve never been to Japan, and I’m afraid I will be disappointed. How could reality possibly live up to the fantasy I’ve built in my brain of a place where there are ninjas in the rafters, robots walking the streets and nightly Godzilla attacks? It can’t.

The one thing I do know for sure are Japanese restaurants -- the lure of Japanese food, the heady complexity, the Zen calm.

In this week's review, I take my obsessions out for a spin at Sushi Katsuya, the five-month-old sushi bar that opened in one of the nameless strip malls out in Aurora’s Little Whatever. The neighbors there are all alien: cafés with indecipherable names, lunch joints offering rice balls, bars existing only behind smoked-glass windows and scrawls of neon. Still, I’ve come to feel more at home in these ‘burbish ethnic cul-de-sacs than in Denver proper -- feeding among the yuppies, drinking with the hat-boys and righteous LoDo skanks. I take solace now in places where no one speaks my language unless forced, where it is obvious -- from the color of my skin, the words in my mouth—that I am there only for the food.

Also, it’s pretty cool when the restaurants themselves live up to my (admittedly high) expectations. And Katsuya did.

For those uninterested in Godzilla, sushi or where I choose to spend my down-time, there's also news from the front lines: about human trafficking in the restaurant business, about the perils of restaurant ownership and the new bloom of business on South Broadway.

And for dessert? A revisit to Osaka Sushi, winner of this year's Best of Denver award for Best Neighborhood Sushi, so that I could cram even more delicious raw fish into my already overstuffed sushi-hole. -- Jason Sheehan

Last week, while writing about the resurrection of Pizzeria Mundo (right), I mentioned that new owner Patrick Pool was trying to be nice to the planet and his fellow man by using as much local, organic produce as he could. Since he was heavily involved in Denver Urban Gardens, he was getting a bunch of his stock from his local DUG plot and, as a way of giving back, I wrote that he planned to send “his leftover sauce, dough and fresh produce to Brad and Libby Birky at SAME Café.”

Well, come to find, that’s not entirely true. I got an e-mail from Brad Birky this morning and he told me that while, yes, he and Pool had talked about sharing, there’s no deal yet.

Which is understandable, considering that at the time I spoke with Pool, Mundo had been up and running under its new, greener, more rational concept for just a week -- in other words, barely enough time to have gotten through a single order cycle, let alone knowing what extra produce Mundo might have after bulk-buying.

Timing, though, isn’t really the problem. “Several folks have come in since Thursday and asked if we serve leftover pizza,” Birkey told me. “We assured them that our pizzas and dough are still made in-house, and that we haven't received anything, leftover or otherwise, from Mundo.”

What, did you people seriously think that Pool was walking over a bunch of boxes of half-eaten double-cheese-and-pepperoni pies and leaving them on SAME’s doorstep? My apologies to anyone who was misled, but come on…that’s just ridiculous. Here’s Brad Birky one more time: “You've helped us tremendously over the past two years by mentioning the cafe in your columns, and we've managed to build a decent reputation for using fresh local ingredients making as many foods as we can from scratch. I don't want you or your readers to think we are cutting corners by using anyone's leftovers.”

So let me see if I can clear this up once and for all. Pizzeria Mundo has not been sending leftover pizzas to SAME Café. What Pool was hoping to do was share some of his large DUG orders with SAME Café. And while nothing has come of this idea yet, it’s a good one, and I hope Pool is able to pull through. -- Jason Sheehan

Here it is, just off the line and popping fresh.

New Belgium Brewing started canning Fat Tire Amber Ale today. By mid-June, the cans should be available in limited markets, including Denver stores.

“We are looking forward to introducing our old friend, Fat Tire, in a brand new package,” says Bryan Simpson, spokesman for New Belgium. “As we fire up the line for our initial runs, we are celebrating the new adventures of Fat Tire.”

We'll drink to that. -- Patricia Calhoun

Since February 2007, Alto has been serving up contemporary American cuisine and often live music. And starting today, May 20, it will be open for lunch Tuesday through Friday. Just in time, too, because the intimate patio should make this a perfect spot for a long, leisurely lunch on these unexpectedly hot days. -- Paticia Calhoun

These days, the man mostly smokes cigarillos. He’s given up the pipe, the tins of Half & Half and bags of black cherry tobacco. Things are different. But I still have a powerful connection with that smell, with the mechanics of pipe smoking.

I remember being a teenager -- sixteen, maybe seventeen, already a smoker myself -- and sitting in his chair in the living room one night when my folks were gone; taking up the tools of his habit and trying to make them work. I remember being older, traveling, and picking up a cheap cob pipe and a foil bag of Half & Half at a drugstore, sitting in a cheap motel room and trying to go through the motions myself -- the packing, tamping, lighting and drawing. I did it because I missed his quiet, stoic company. The smell of his presence. What I learned was that pipe smoking is not something that one can aspire to casually. It takes a certain skill, a certain expertise, to make it work. How to pack the tobacco, how to hold the match, how to hold the pipe itself -- what it requires is practice: a series of motions that, once performed a thousand times, simply become reflex. My dad? He’d been smoking his pipe since I was a toddler. It was as much a part of his body as the fingers that made it work.

I was reminded of this refinement, this ease of manipulation, while sitting at a sushi bar for this week’s review (I'll post a preview here later today), watching the hands of the sushi chef prepare my fish.

Some people dedicate their lives to the study of pianist’s fingers or the way a violinist draws the bow. Others could talk for hours about the way a pitcher grips the ball before delivering a slider across the plate. Me? I remember the way my father tamped his pipe and thrill to the hands of true sushi savants at work, because they are two things that I never had the discipline or the desire to learn. -- Jason Sheehan