It turned out to be a very handy stroke of lunch. The pasta was freshly made on the premises, the accompaniments were quite acceptable, and there were a couple of Italian wines on the wine list, so I managed a rather good Montepulciano over lunch. When we found ourselves with another hour to kill the options were to order something else and stay where we were or head off in search of somewhere we could sit and talk.
If the dessert menu had included cassata I'd have ordered one, but it did 't, so I had settle for a rather moreish Nebbiolo. Fortunately I took my time over it, and was able to resist the siren song. With lunch out of the way it wash case of back to the station, so we took the lift down to the basement and made our way back through the underground redevelopment that proved very interesting indeed.
There wasn't that much, surprisingly, until we'd flashed the Rail Passes and passed through the barrier into the Station proper, where we found a veritable rabbit warren of retail outlets, including a liquor operation that was offering a little wine tasting.
I tried two versions of an indigenous red grape variety, something that mightn't sound too promising, but the early drinking style was good, and the other, given the benefit of a little bottle age was quite acceptable. I've tasted worse wines made by far better known operations from much more established varieties.
We'd dawdled a bit along the way, and when we spotted a clock showing 2:44 when we were due for a 2:56 departure it was a case of a couple of quick photographs and a scramble to find the seats and, more importantly, claim a bit the all important space behind the seats in the rear of the carriage to stow the Black Monster.
That space was almost all gone, but I managed to claim the final remaining bit, something that may come in handy when we make the mad scramble off the train in Sendai. We're headed to Kitakami, which isn't one of the stopping points for the faster services and had deliberately veered away from the stop everywhere all the way from Tokyo option which would have meant a substantial reduction in the time allocated for lunch.
Tapping out the preceding update took us out of greater Tokyo, through the stop at Umiya and on towards the tsunami zone. We'd been over this section before, around the same time of day four and a half years previously, and we were on the right hand side of the northbound train again. The countryside is fairly flat, and while there isn't a whole lot of actual visual interest along the way the patchwork is easy on the eye, and the more urban stretches have plenty of green scattered among the buildings.
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