Aji Japanese Bistro

This place was one of the places suggested from my original post on Facebook asking for Happy Hour recommendations to add to our bottle, so it was a brand new experience for us. How we ended up at Aji Japanese worked a little differently than our typical Shake and Date. A friend stopped by our abode on Saturday to visit, saw the bottle on the kitchen counter and said, “I want to Shake and Date!”  Considering she’s the same friend from the “About Us” page on the website, I figured this slight breach of protocol was allowable. Anyone who knows me and my “Type A” personality well should be high-fiving me right about now for allowing this breach to happen rather than immediately putting the paper back into the bottle upon her departure and waiting until Sunday to shake.

Okay, okay… I’ll admit it. I did want to do that. Brian told me no, and that we should keep it. You may retract your high-five now.

Upon entering this establishment, I was surprised at the size of the restaurant, as looking upon it as we approached from the outside I expected it to be much smaller. It also has an outdoor area that overlooks the lake (pond?) at Town Center. The bar area itself is fairly small with seating for about 12 or so, but we were able to find a spot. The countertop on their bar fell under the type of cool (at least in my eyes) that makes me want to start a new DIY by ripping out all our current granite kitchen countertops so we can replace them with the same coolness. For my husband’s sanity, we may want to keep this revelation to ourselves. The rest of the restaurant also boasted a very cool décor. I was surprised by the choice of music that was happening which was basically top 40 pop/rock. I guess I was just expecting something way different. One thing to note, is there is not a single TV at Aji Japanese, so if you’re not particularly entertained by your companion and need that sort of distraction, you may want to frequent somewhere else. Come to think of it, Brian is the one who actually pointed out this little tidbit of information to me. Hmmmm…

Thursdays Happy Hour there is “Old Fashioned Thursdays”, so Brian went with the “Old Forester” (smoked). I decided to go with the “Orange Cosmo” from the same menu. Brian was happy with his cocktail. Mine seemed to be fairly weak with flavor, so I was not quite as happy. However…toward the bottom of my martini glass, it exploded with flavor, which lead me to believe that I probably should have given it a stir before I started consuming. I guess that’s maybe why there was a readily available glass of stir sticks within my arms reach right in front of me on the (magnificent) bar top. They had quite an array of yummy sounding appetizers on the Happy Hour menu, so narrowing down our choices to only 2 was a bit challenging. We ended up going with the “Aji Spiced Edamame” and “Crispy Lumpia”. They were both packed with flavor, albeit the edamame was very sodium rich (which probably contributed to my quick discovery of the bottom of my Cosmo having more flavor). It was Brian’s first time ever trying lumpia and he is now a fan. At least of this places lumpia. I was already a fan, but have had subpar lumpia in my past experience. This was not subpar.

As mentioned before, we had a hard time choosing between appetizers, which if you combine that with the overall pleasant atmosphere of this place, we will definitely be revisiting Aji Japanese Bistro in our future. So a big shout out to our friend for throwing my brain into a frenzy by shaking our bottle on a Saturday. You shook well my friend.

Time to Get Happy

Tuesday – Friday  2pm – 6pm and ALL DAY on Monday*

Location

4361 Town Center Blvd. Suite 111 El Dorado Hills, CA

Website

https://www.ajibistroedh.com/menus

Happy Hour Menu: https://www.ajibistroedh.com/_files/ugd/63852a_d44b38673ef9468882a81ad0b21a7de0.pdf

*Information provided on this blog was current upon the post date. Please confirm on the restaurant’s website prior to visiting as to whether times, days, menus, etc. are still accurate.

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