People did some funny things during the bubble economy. An insurance firm paid $80 million for an incredibly ugly painting by van Gogh; other companies paid equally stupid sums for New York's Rockefeller Center and California's Pebble Beach golf course; Louis Vuitton's vastly overpriced handbags became de rigueur among young Japanese women with more money than taste; and Verdy Kawasaki paid a useless soccer player named Tsuyoshi Kitazawa 70 million yen a year.

At a time when Japanese people were willing to pay funny money to eat badFrench food, Jane Best-Cooke and her husband, Steve, opened an English restaurant called 1066 in Tokyo. It seemed to make sense to no one except a few strange Englishmen such as myself.

No one ridiculed the restaurant once they had been there, though. Best-Cooke was no amateur caterer, and she armed herself with a vast repertoire of dishes, some well-known, some not, that enticed people down to NakaMeguro and even convinced some to come back for more.