japan food adventures part 2

Here's part two of our food experiences in Japan.

Since we will be travelling the next two months and have tight budgetary constraints, we had to get into the habit of eating fairly cheaply... So unfortunately, fugu and marbled kobe beef was off the menu... next time japan next time! Despite the limitations, we were able to sample many fine offerings from convenience stores and bakeries, and become well acquainted with the numerous delights Japanese fast food establishments had to offer!

Here we made a cheap meal out of  pickled cabbage and soba with egg strips, spring onions, wasabi, soba dipping sauce and seaweed flakes from the convenience store.

You can have a wonderful picnic for about 1000 yen with a good number convenience food delights, as we did in Nara - We had soba, tofu, noodle salad, and (not shown) a rice ball and sandwiches. Nearly all sandwiches are sold with their crust cut off - or perhaps they've found a way to make crust free bread?



First Kitchen is a ubiquitous chain serving western style pasta and burgers. I had pasta with eggplant and minestrone soup which were all quite delicious!  The pasta tasted more like udon noodles than spaghetti but I think I preferred it that way! It was also quite nice to have some tomato based dishes after two weeks of beef don and ramen.

Coco Curry House - you could get curry drizzled on almost anything here in five levels of spiciness. There's sausage curry, hamburger curry, even fried quail eggs with curry etc. This one is the very popular pork katsu curry with cheese.

More curry but this time in pastry... delicious in a way only a curry filled donut can be!

This one had an egg in it!

We had ramen a lot. The ones we had at this ramen bar in Osaka was probably the best! The funny thing was because there was no english in the ordering vending machine,  we didn't know what we actually ordered until we got it.


The noodles were served cold for dipping into hot broth which gave the noodles a firmer, chewier texture which I quite liked. My dipping sauce was a very rich pork soy broth and a fish flavoured broth. Joe had one with curry sauce.The pork broth was the best - rich, very flavoursome and salty.

We were in Osaka - apparently the birthplace of the takoyaki!

Even though I was quite full that night I just had to try some takoyaki. The octopus chunk in each ball was huge! Almost too big I think and took quite a bit of chewing to get through each chunk of tentacle.

Yakitori experience take two. Our first experience with yakitori was a bit weird - chicken butt and chiken skin on skewers wasn't really my thing. This time we tried it at the 'Yakitori alley' in Shinjuku, Tokyo - two alleyways crammed with tiny yakitori bars. this area is very atmospheric and apparently was inspiration for scenes in Bladerunner.

We stayed away from weird chicken parts this time. Here is the  vegetarian plate - skewers of capsicums, mushroom, leek and garlic. We ate a whole skewer of grilled garlic cloves (six cloves) which was pretty good, although probably made us smell pretty bad after that..

This was the meat plate - chicken and pork grilled with soy sauce. Simple and tasty.

See part 1 of our food adventures

japan food adventures

We've had so much deliciousness in Japan.. here are the highlights of our food adventures so far.

Our first meal in japan - simple ramen with cabbage and egg from a ramen restaurant where you order by purchasing tokens outside the restaurant from a vending machine. I love the efficiency of Japanese fast foods.


Takoyaki at Harajuku. Yum! There were many flavours to choose from but I couldn't figure out what any of them were, so I just picked a random one. Freshly prepared, hot, saucy, and gooey inside with big chunks of octopus. Yummmo!


This was dinner with Arief at a restaurant in Roppongi that has a bit of everything on the menu. We ordered sashimi, gyoza, yakitori combination and korean style rice with vegetable & egg. The food was quite good except the yakitori was a bit funny... Because the menu was all in japanese we didn't really knew what the "combination" yakitori was, and it turned out to be a skewers of chicken skin, butt, glizzard and i think one of the skewer was actually chicken meat (not entirely sure). It was a bit of a weird experience.. the skin might have been okay if it were cooked to crisp but it was pale and chewy. The butt was like a big chunk of fat and the glizzard had a strange bite and texture. Not my favourite dish, but an interesting experience nevertheless.


This was a somewhat better meat-on-stick experience - this was street food at the Senso-ji temple in Asakusa - big chunks of grilled steak and octopus.


More street food in Asakusa - okonomiyaki smothered in sauces, pickled ginger and seaweed flakes.


More street food - rice balls dipped in sweet and salty soy sauce and lightly grilled in Kamakura. Pleasant but unexciting.


After a big day hiking at Kamakura, we were glad to end up at this lovely little restaurant serving rice bowl dishes - Joe had salmon and salmon roe on rice which was very good.


Mine was tuna with avacado and egg. Nice flavours although some bits of the tuna was a bit chewy.


For dinner that night, Haeyoung and Takeshi took us to Kimukatsu in Ebitsu, which serves the most delicious pork katsu I've ever tasted! Kimukatsu pretty much only does pork katsu (fried prawns was their only other main dish) but in a variety flavours - garlic, cheese, plum, original etc. Their katsu is a bit different from the normal variety - The meat consists of many layers of thin slices of pork - giving it a much more light and airy texture. The cheese katsu was melt-in-your-mouth, so moist and delicious. I was quite surprised how well cheese goes with many japanese food! The simple sides of shredded cabbage, miso soup and pickles complemented the katsu quite nicely.


This is the original flavour katsu.


Next day we had sushi breakfast at the famous Tsukiji market in Tokyo. We got up at 4:30am to get there bright and early but didn't end up seeing the famed tuna auctions (visitors are now banned at the auction since the earthquake) but we did have some very fresh, tender sushi.  It was delicious but Joe's stomach didn't quite agree with it :\ and he was ill for the rest of the day.  I think we had too much raw food in those few days and Joe's stomach revolted.


After that, I got some "gentle stomach food" in the form of cup noodles to calm Joe's stomach down. How pretty is this instant noodle! Whole prawns and colourful bits! There's actually a whole slice of pork in the other instant noodle I got - dried, embalmed looking chunk of bbq pork... didn't really taste too much like pork though.


The next night Haeyoung and Takeshi took us out for mutton at Yukidaruma in Shibuya. This style of BBQ is called "Genghis Kahn" because the BBQ is shaped like Genghis Kahn's helmet. This is mutton at its most glorious! The meat was tender and beautifully marinated. Went very well with beer and edamamme.


This was lunch at a diner in Kyoto. I don't know what this dish is called but its basically a shallow pan hotpot with sukiyaki broth. Lots of tasty bits in there. Joe had a tempura set meal.


My favourite Japanese fast food so far has got to be beef don. There's quite a few chains like Yoshinoya that do only one thing - very cheap (280 yen for a standard) and fast beef don in a few variations. This one is beef don with kimchi.


This is another good Japanese fast food - ramen with mountain vegetables at the Kyoto train station.


We went to a nice restaurant in central Kyoto called Apollo tonight. The food was great and they had an english menu which was helpful. Although unfortunately none of the staff could speak any english so it was a bit hard to communicate and impossible to ask for any recommendations. This was also probably the first restaurant we've been to where they took orders down with old fashioned PEN AND PAPER! (Instead of the more common electronic tablet or touch screen menu) The ambience of the place was quite nice and they had very beautiful crockery!


Kushi Katsu at Apollo - crumbed beef skewers, fried and drizzed with sauce - very tasty and we gobbled these up fast!


Rice with plum, seaweed in broth. A pretty dish; taste like how it sounds really.


Extremely good tempura - zucchini, asparagus, cauliflower, broccoli, beans, fish and prawn. The batter was so light and crispy and not at all oily.


Joe and I also shared a very good dessert taste plate - cheesecakes, fruit, cream brulee and sorbet- all very tasty and a delightful end to our meal.

I'm looking forward to more tasty foods in Japan.. stay tuned!