More delicious food, and some booze too!

There’s just so much fantastic food here, I felt that it warranted another blog post. I also realised that I haven’t yet mentioned much about the delightful booze we’ve been consuming – an uncharacteristic oversight on my part!

Weekday lunches for me are often spent with my classmates and we’re busy sampling all the local restaurants round Iidabashi, where our school is. We’ve tried a couple of the ramen joints, a tonkatsu place, a burger bar, and on Friday we went to a great place where I got a whole grilled fish, head, tail, bones, insides and all, which I had to eat with chopsticks. It was messy and delicious!

In my last post about food I said that we’d been eating some amazing sushi but hadn’t had the camera with us…that’s now been rectified and here are a couple of photos of the wonderful selections we’ve had.

Lunch set in a restaurant underneath Tokyo Station

Dinner in one of our local sushi restaurants. We sat at the bar so the chef
was making each piece about two feet away from us.

Izakaya

An izakaya is a kind of Japanese pub that serves small dishes of food with which to accompany your booze. Think tapas-sized portions of anything and everything that you just keep ordering until you’re full. It’s pretty heavenly really. Here are some beauties from the last couple of weekends.

My friend Yuko took me out for dinner a couple of weeks ago and we
went to a local izakaya. This was the starter we got on the house. The
skewer has fish cakes on it, and the orange square thing is three
different types of roe set in jelly. Looks gorgeous, tastes great.

Beautifully presented sashimi (I think it was trout here) served under a pile of
ginger, spring onions, radishes, garlic, seaweed and chrysanthemum petals.

Last weekend's izakaya spread including fried chicken, chips, edamame beans
and tako-wasabi (see below).

Close up of tako-wasabi (octopus with horseradish).
Looks like a bowl of snot, tastes fantastic!

Round 2 - once we'd finished the spread above we ordered some more.
This time it was garlic octopus (on the right) and deep fried cheese
balls (on the left). Tasty tasty tasty.

After all the octopus and fried stuff we each had a large glass of sake.
It's poured so it fills the glass completely and spills over into the box.
When you've finished what's in your glass you pour what's in the box
into the glass and drink that. That way you know you've not been
cheated with a small measure. Genius.

At 200 yen for a drink you
can't go wrong really!
Happy times at the Regent Manor

This is how we knew that the Asahi
in Hiroz was cold...

Many izakayas offer a course menu at dinner. This is a pre-set selection of anything from four or five courses to tens of plates depending on what your budget is. On Saturday night we decided to have a bit of a blowout and find a tasty-sounding course menu in one of our local Akasaka izakayas. We started off by trying out a few bars nearby. These ranged from the hugely cheesy (it was Halloween weekend after all) but wonderfully-cold-Asahi-serving Hiroz, to the very quiet but amazingly-cheap-Saturday-Happy-‘Hour’ (3pm-8pm) Regent Manor, to the über-classy, cover-charge-tastic Mixology.

Having warmed up suitably, we wandered downstairs to a restaurant that looked rather pretty on its street-level advertising. It’s called Kawano-ne, which means ‘sound of the river’, and that’s because it has a river running through the middle of it. Yup, an underground restaurant with a river in the middle of it. It was pretty special really – here are some of their beautiful publicity shots that give you an idea of what it looks like.

The waterfall that greets you as you walk into the restaurant.

Amazing decor inside. We need to go back in a different season to see
whether they change the foliage. I'm hoping for cherry blossoms in spring!

The tables are set along the river with lots of space around them.

And here are some photos of the food. We went for the eight course menu, a couple of beers and some shochu (Japanese spirit a bit like vodka). The menu was as follows: tofu with seaweed, soy sauce and two types of salt; radish, roe and sweet potato; sashimi; radish and fish soup; vegetable tempura; chicken with mushrooms; rice with salmon and potatoes; and milk dessert with kiwi sauce. All in all it came to around £40 each which, considering the quality of the food, the amazing setting and the brilliant service, seems rather bargainous! Enjoy vicariously…

Tofu with soy. In the box on the left are two types of salt, and dried seaweed.

From left to right; sweet potato; radish and something orange that we
couldn't identify but enjoyed; block of roe.

Sashimi with grated radish, shredded spring onions and soy sauce.
This was my favourite course.

Radish soup with a large prawn and some fishcakes. There was another taste
that I couldn't work out. I've never had anything quite like this and
I enjoyed it a lot.

Rice with salmon and potatoes, with miso soup on the side.
This was Simon's favourite part of the meal.

Milk pudding with kiwi sauce. Very refreshing at the end
of the meal. We also had a glass of shochu each. Delicious!

またね!