"I was a little nervous about going into this restaurant at first," says Hawaiian Lance Kita as he leads our small group to a small windowless shop. We approach a sliding door with slotted wood, resembling a bamboo forest.

I'm surprised by his confession. As he mentioned in his soon-to-be-released TEDx talk, part of his reason for starting the Awa Mystery Dinner series five years ago was to encourage foreign residents to try out new, out of the way eateries. After all, it doesn't take much courage to go into a chain restaurant, or one that has fake food in the front window, but foreign visitors new to Tokushima might miss out on the more intimate spaces and original dishes prepared in smaller restaurants. Most menus at such places are only in Japanese, after all.

"I read about this place in a magazine," Kita tells us. "It's called Mocchan."