Food, glorious food!

As you all know, I love my food. I thought it would be apposite, therefore, to write a post dedicated entirely to this fantastic stuff, and in particular the weird and wonderful things we have been eating over the last month. 

With only three exceptions, we have eaten Japanese or Korean food for every lunch and dinner. The exceptions have been big ones though, so I’ll deal with those first. The first one wasn’t so bad – we found a lovely floating bar/restaurant in Shinagawa called The Waterline. The beer was Japanese and very tasty, and the food was excellent. We had pizza, chilli con carne and nachos and left feeling extremely satisfied. The next one was a bit more gaijin-tastic – we were invited to dinner by Simon’s company and went to the Outback Steak House, an Australian-themed, American chain. I embraced the menu fully by having a rack of ribs. A very pleasant evening! The third one was the whopper – last Sunday evening we both had massive cravings for a burger. Having researched burger joints in Tokyo we discovered that there’s a restaurant called the West Park Café just round the corner from our apartment building. So we trundled along to check it out and it looked very nice, but there was nobody in it. Hooters next door, on the other hand, was heaving so…you guessed it…we had our Sunday dinner of giant burgers being served by scantily-clad, very beautiful women in this all-American (with a Japanese twist) favourite. It was highly amusing and the burgers really hit the spot!

But apart from that we’ve truly been embracing the indigenous cuisine. Of lunch and dinner, lunch tends to be the bigger meal and you can often find set menus consisting of several dishes for around 800 yen (between £6 and £7), sometimes with extra stuff thrown in; I was delighted that the negi ramen I had the other day came with a free bowl of rice on the side!

Here are photos of some of the delights in which we’ve been indulging.

Negi Ramen

Negi ramen from Higomans 

This is a large noodle soup that’s got a bit of pork in it, and is served piled high with spring onions (negi). My favourite so far is from Higomans, a restaurant under the train tracks at Shinagawa. The walls are decorated with amazing posters of Japanese caricatures, advertising the sticky end to which you will come if you don’t eat Higomans’ food! They also play Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on a loop, which is surreal but brilliant. The negi ramen at Higomans also comes with a dollop of chilli sauce on top (the red bit in the photo) and on the table are pots of gherkins, garlic and more chilli, that you can add to taste.

Okonomiyaki

Homemade okonomiyaki

Okonomiyaki comes originally from Osaka and is sometimes referred to as Japanese pizza but apart from the shape, and the fact it’s got flour in it, it’s not that similar to pizza. It’s made from a base of finely chopped cabbage, ginger, garlic, onions, and whatever else happens to be lying around, mixed into a thick batter-like paste with flour, water and an egg. You can add other things like prawns, meat, fish etc. and you can also put bacon on the top while it’s cooking. Once you’ve mixed all the ingredients together well you turn it onto a hot plate to cook on both sides (the yaki bit of the word refers to the hot plate – it means ‘grilled’). Sometimes this hot plate will be in the middle of your table so you do it yourself, sometimes you can sit round it at a long bar, and sometimes it’s in the restaurant kitchen and the waiter will bring you the cooked article. Needless to say, the places where you get to do it yourself are the most fun! Once your okonomiyaki is cooked you cover the top in the most amazing mixture of okonomi sauce (kind of like plum sauce only with more of a kick), Japanese mayonnaise, katsuobashi (finely flaked, dried fish) and shredded nori (seaweed). The photo is actually of one that we made at home the other night. Impressive, huh?

Monjayaki (monja)

Monja - looks awful, tastes fantastic!

This is Tokyo’s take on Osaka’s okonomiyaki. The base is similar except there’s more liquid, which means cooking it is even more fun! First of all you make a ring on the hot plate with the solid ingredients, then you pour some of the liquid into the middle and mix in the solid stuff from the outside. You do this two or three times until all the liquid’s been added. It’s exactly like making cement! The finished monja looks like a splatty pile of sick on the grill, particularly if you manage to shape it as beautifully as we did for this photo, but it tastes very, very good. You’ll have to come over and try it for yourself to believe me!

Tonkatsu

Tonkatsu in the middle, with fried mince on the left and a prawn on the right.

This is breaded and deep-fried pork cutlet and another firm favourite with me. Probably because of the fried part. It can come served with any or all of the following: rice, miso soup, pickles, shredded cabbage, spaghetti, mustard, Japanese tartare sauce, a lump of cold tofu with spring onions on top. It is absolutely delicious! On Saturday we were in a tonkatsu restaurant in Akihabara and ordered the lunch menu, which consisted of a pork cutlet and a mince pattie, also breaded and deep-fried. Somehow we ended up with a free giant prawn each, also breaded and deep-fried! What a wonderful lunch that was.

Tempura

Tasty tempura

Tempting tendon

Think of the lightest, least greasy, most delicate batter you’ve ever had, then imagine it lighter and even more tasty. That’s the standard of tempura batter from even the smallest, most unassuming restaurants here. The best one we’ve found so far is just down the road from Simon’s office so I’ve popped down to meet him for lunch a few times. The batter is made with iced water. Sometimes it’s made with sparkling water to keep it really light. Fish, prawns or vegetables (including leaves) are quickly coated in the batter then deep fried for a few seconds until they’re a very light golden colour. The first photo is a plate of tempura with accompanying dishes (similar to those that accompany tonkatsu). The second is a bowl of tendon; tempura sitting on a bed of rice, topped with a sweet soy sauce just before serving. Delicious.

Miscellaneous

Truly it was a joyful time

I love that these nuts are called ‘With Beer!’ We did indeed have a fantastic time eating them, although we had them with G&T so perhaps were even more joyful?

Exciting selection of sauces and toppings

Freeze dried negi. Just add water.

The finished product. I was very pleased with my culinary expertise.

Pot noodles come in so many different shapes and sizes, it’s very difficult to choose between them! This one had an interesting looking array of small sachets containing things to add to the noodles, one of which was a block of freeze dried negi. Ingenious.

Not entirely sure what these are made of, or what's in the sauce

These are sweet sticky balls. I don’t know what they’re balls of, but we’ve seen lots of people selling them hot on the corner of the street. Simon bought some at the supermarket as I’d been banging on about them for days. We heated them up in the microwave and got stuck in. They’re not that sweet, although they are definitely sticky! I wasn’t a massive fan of these, but I’m yet to try the ones from a street vendor so I’ll report back when I have.

Slight food mishaps

We’ve done pretty well at deciphering menus here there and everywhere. Sometimes when we’re feeling adventurous we’ve gone for dishes written entirely in kanji, as we know we’ve got no idea what we’re asking for. Most of the time this has worked out well but we’ve ended up with tripe stew a couple of times (Simon’s not a fan – I quite like it) and I’ve had the weirdest gloopy white stuff that once came with beans and seaweed, and once came on top of rice. I’ve since learned that this may be a sort of potato…but it’s got the consistency of the stuff that surrounds the hatching pods in the Aliens movies. It’s the only thing in many, many years that even I’ve not quite been able to wade my way through. Oh and we had tongue on a BBQ the other night, but that was very tasty indeed!

Anything else

Of course we’ve been eating sushi and sashimi. Sadly I’ve got no photos of the very beautiful dishes that we ate a few times in a lovely sushi restaurant in Shinagawa. It can be pretty pricey but there are a lot of restaurants that serve it round our new place, so we’re looking forward to checking those out. On the long list of things to do is an early morning visit to Tsukiji fish market. I may even get up the courage to haggle for a whole tuna (although since they sell for between £4,000 and £10,000 per fish I’ll probably need to save up for a while first).

So that’s it for now. 99% delicious, 1% not so tasty, but definitely interesting and makes for a fun evening out!

Until the next time…