Out with the old and in with the new. That's the prevailing state of the game in Tokyo's restless, ever-changing restaurant scene. Sometimes this can be exhilarating, as with the brilliant refurbishment of the top floors of the My City building in Shinjuku. Sometimes, though, the process can feel downright disorienting.
At least, that was our initial reaction when one of our trusty haunts, Il Caminetto, was swept away earlier this year. It was never a top favorite of ours, but we kept going back anyway -- for its highly convenient location above Gaienmae Station (the ground-floor cafe always made a great meeting spot) and the honest sincerity of the Florentine cucina. Granted, it was getting a bit fusty, but the food was good -- plus they boasted an improbably massive cellar of top Italian wines.
Anyway, so disgruntled were we when the ground floor reopened as a hip-looking, deli-style, self-service cafeteria (now simply called Sign), that until recently we never bothered to check out what had happened to the restaurant upstairs. Our mistake. The old place has had a total face-lift, emerging like a chic, modern butterfly from that dowdy, old-world chrysalis.