it's baseball, it's normal for teams to only make a couple of subs because you can't put players back into the game after they leave. even MLB teams will carry players who only play once every few games.

here in Tokyo at least there are like 10 different Starbucks-like local chains and they are all roughly the same price (i.e. expensive) so I think the point still applies, even if the stores aren't literally Starbucks branded. ordering coffee at a cafe here is fairly expensive.

even in the US it's different. places that charge gratuity for large parties generally won't let you remove it, but if you go to that same restaurant as a party of 1-2 they might default to 0% tip and you can choose what amount you want to tip (including nothing)

To be fair, I actually didn't like pho that much in the US (even when I lived in the LA area). Turns out I actually like North Vietnamese pho more, whereas most places in the US serve South Vietnamese pho. The first bowl of pho I had that I actually enjoyed a lot was in Berlin of all places...

Even when I visted Vietnam that held true, I liked the taste more in Hanoi than in Ho Chi Minh City.

Most US metro areas have a decent sized Little Saigon of some sort, it just might not be a place out of towners end up. In the Washington DC area for example it's a mall complex called Eden Center which is like a 30 minute drive away from downtown.

I wish the option in delivery sushi to exclude the soy sauce was more common. Even here in Japan, a lot of (most?) places by default include a small plastic contained of soy sauce, even though the vast majority of households probably have soy sauce at home...

I think people who watched the anime would be much more likely to remember Lickitung than people who just played the video game, because it shows up a few times prominently in episodes

TBF that sounds more like a dad joke than the dentist trying to lie to you