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!
