Random Dispatches

More Great Japanese Food

Jul 15

lindsayrgwattFood, Travel Japan, ramen Comments Off

One of the things I love about traveling is the opportunity to sample great food. We’ve been having some great experiences in Japan.

Soba

The Koru-mon Noodle House is a tiny little shack in Shinjuku. They specialize in soba noodles; try the “machine gun” for a slightly spicier dipping sauce:

Monjayaki

Monjayaki is a variation on a Japanese pancake. The ingredients are brought to you and then cooked (by your waitress or you) on a hotplate built into the table:

It’s great fun to watch. The waitress organizes all the ingredients into a pile on the hot plate. A lot of chopping ensues. The chopped ingredients are then formed into a ring around the hot plate.

The waitress then pours half the batter (it’s in the bowl, below the ingredients) into the center. Much mixing and folding occurs.

The rest of the batter is mixed in and you let it cook for a few minutes. After that, you simply scrape off the piece you want to eat:

We had our monjayaki in Tsukuda. If you go down Nishinaki Dori (the main street), you’ll find tonnes of great places. (You should also visit the nearby Sumiyoshi Shrine).

Okonomiyaki

The sister of monjayaki is okonomiyaki. If monjayaki is a pancake, okonomiyaki is a pizza. Except that it’s made of egg, not dough, fried and topped with barbecue sauce and mayonnaise.

Oyshi! (Delicious)

Ramen

A few months back I read an article in the NY Times about Tokyo’s ramen shops so we had to visit at least one of them before we left. We ended up going to Nagi in Kabuki Cho.

To get there, you walk through the chaos of Shinjuku, dodge the touts of Kabuki Cho’s red light district, walk up a cedar lined alley and then climb the steep narrow stairs into a poorly marked upstairs restaurant. Here’s Wendy trying to leave:

The place seats 8, all at a bar. The chef is on the other side and boxed in all night. If you know what you’re ordering you buy a ticket from the vending machine and place it on the counter (don’t worry, if you’re clueless like us you just need to say “pork” or “fish”).

After a couple of minutes, a heap of steaming noodles topped with a few slices of pork appear. As you wait, you can contemplate what else you would order if you spoke any Japanese:

Diner Food

If you’ve ever lived in Toronto and worked in an office tower or visited a mall, you’ve probably seen an Edo Japan restaurant offering teriyaki. New Yorkers may have been to the lonely states-side outpost of Japan’s Yoshinoya; it’s in Times Square (and the only one on the East Coast).

What I didn’t realize until visiting here, is that these are the Japanese equivalent of a diner.

We went to one in Kyoto and after ordering you sat at stools, just like in a North American diner. It felt quite like a diner, except for the ordering – you did that from a machine (a la ramen above) and then brought your ticket to a stool to get your meal made. The nice thing here is that you could see the picture of what you were buying before you purchased it:

The actual meal was delicious. Miso soup instead of chicken noodle. A variation on the garden salad. An terikyaki with an egg instead of a club sandwich.

Contemporary

In Tokyo we ate at a nice little place in Harajuku called Mother Kurkku. It was the least Japanese restaurant Japanese restaurant we’ve been to yet. The (smoke free!) second floor dining room had a double height ceiling (I think it’s a converted loft) and glass walls.

Plus, the wait and kitchen staff were all female.

The menu is very simple; there are only a few things available (pork, fish and spaghetti – there’s an Italian food fad going on right now [seriously]). I picked the pork, which was described as “pork boiled in broth”. Here’s what it looked like:

Maybe you can tell from the picture – that’s basically bacon. This is bacon boiled in stock. And it tasted great. I would never think to cook it this way; now I may have to add it to the repertoire.

Cheap

Japan is not on the backpacker circuit as it’s not known for its low prices. However, you can eat surprisingly cheaply here if you want.

Every city has a set of cafeteria-style noodle houses. You grab a tray, pick which broth you want with your udon noodle and then maybe grab a piece of tempura (friend chicken sounds so much fancier when you call it tempura).

However, these are not crappy udon noodles. For instance, the place that I ate at had it’s own noodle machine in the front. It was only a matter of minutes between when the noodles were made and when they were served to you:

Octopus Balls

The Japanese love their octopus balls. They’re served as a meal by themselves or sometimes as an amuse bouche. They’re also surprisingly tasty – and this from someone who hates most seafood; they’re a nice mix of crunchy and rubbery – great texture.

But don’t take my word for it; check out how much Wendy loves ‘em:

Tokyo – Day 1

Jul 09

lindsayrgwattTravel Japan, kabuki-cho, ramen, shinjuku View Comments

Getting on the plane to Tokyo was a clue that we were going to a wholly different world. The seats were too narrow. You could get free postcards of the plane – on the plane. The meal came with metal knives. The in-flight entertainment system had a ‘Bird View Camera’ that streamed what was below us (it was actually quite cathartic).

However, only when we touched down did it become clear just how different Japan is. What makes it so much fun, is that Japan has many similar things as the West, but due to their Galapagos Syndrome, everything is slightly – or occasionally bafflingly – different.

Take the airport.

As you go through customs, the fingerprint scanner has multi-coloured pictures of Mt Fuji on it. Having trouble reading your customs form? Why not borrow one of the free reading glasses (much older population here). In addition to signs, the airport has a mascot (more on those in a future post) that guides you through the airport.

After navigating the airport, we headed for the train to Tokyo, where the Japanese version of Dudley Do Right stopped us to inspect our passports. These police were the least intimidating cops ever (like a cartoon version of cops come to life) and sheepishly wished us “a great time in Japan” after taking our details.

Once on the train, it was an hour long ride through the rice paddies and cedar/bamboo forests outside Tokyo to Shinjuku station:

As the jet lag began to wear on us, we found our hotel and checked in. I am always amazed that you can book a trip online in a different continent and then show up weeks/months later and it just works.

If only our bed worked like that; it’s so small that we’re sleeping head-to-toe, but at least the room comes with lots of green tea and free toiletries (toothbrush! razor!).

I digress.

After a cat nap, we rushed out to soak in the Tokyo atmosphere. We immediately came face-to-face with the chaos that is Shinjuku rush hour traffic:

As we wandered the alleyways (Tokyo is a maze of streets drunkenly laid out over thousands of twisting alleys), a cacophony of signs competed for our attention:

None of it made sense. Why was the Louis Vuitton store across from a discount pharmacy? Why could we turn the corner from a major intersection and suddenly find ourselves going down a cedar-lined alley?

Rather than make sense of it, we just soaked it all in. As we hit Kabuki Cho, it almost became too much. I thought I might have a seizure and Wendy ran crazed into the night (or perhaps not).

Salarlymen were eating and drinking the night away while watching crazy Japanese television. Touts offering drinks at girlie bars (we did not oblige. And FYI, I think “Filipino bar” is a euphemism for something else). We had no choice but to leave.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped for ramen noodles at Shouhei Ra Men. The food was delicious, but we forgot that everyone smokes in Japan while they eat. Made for an interesting combination of flavours.

We also realized that we didn’t know how to end the meal. We waited for the servers to clear our table. It didn’t happen. Finally, we asked and they happily did.

Then we waited for the bill to come. If we hadn’t asked, we’d probably still be waiting.

Payment then became a concern. Do you leave cash on the table? Turned out that there was a cashier downstairs.

Japan: where you need to unlearn every cultural norm you ever adopted.

There was one more bit of the sublime on the way back to our hotel. It turned out that it’s a block away from a shrine that is lit up at night:

And thus ended a 36 hour day and our introduction to Japan.