I love food. I love the act of eating. I love cooking. I love thinking about food. I enjoy watching food programs. Unsurprisingly, while Ken was here I wanted him to experience a wealth of Japanese cuisine.
The one thing he wouldn’t eat: chicken sashimi, aka small chunks of raw chicken that you dip in soy sauce.
Not that I can blame him. I wouldn’t eat it either.
The stranger fare we ate:
Basashi, which is thinly sliced raw horse meat that you eat with a tiny plop of grated radish and dip in soy sauce. This is a specialty of Kumamoto, the prefecture where I lived the first time I was in Japan, so I had eaten it before, albeit in sushi form (meaning there was a finger-sized chunk of it on top of a small bit of rice).
Raw squid. This was rather hard to stomach as it smelled like fish bait and tasted really salty. I put it in my mouth and let it slide down the back of my throat. I tried to do this without any inhalation to try to mitigate as much of the tastes-like-baitness as I could (I ended up pouring half my beer down my throat afterwards to get rid of the taste).
Not all Japanese fare is the type of funk that you put on the end of a fishing hook or a kind of meat you would never eat, much less raw.
The good fare we ate:
Yakiniku. We ordered plates of thinly sliced raw beef, pork, and chicken that we grilled over a little barbeque recessed in the center of our table.
Kaiten sushi. Sushi travels on a conveyor belt around the counter. We mostly ordered directly from the chef. My faves? Seared salmon, chopped tuna with chives, and sea eel.
Indian food. I keep hoping for a good Indian joint in Reno, but every place I hit I end up comparing to the restaurant we ate at in Tokyo (near Shinagawa station if you’re interested).
Sushi breakfast. I’ve written before about Tsukiji. If you are going to eat sushi only once in your life, it should be here at Tokyo’s fish market (but, man, if you’re only having sushi once in your life…please reconsider). Generally, you would eat breakfast here after a night out on the town on your way home. Instead, Ken and I woke up relatively early and made our way in. I don’t think I can aptly describe the delight of my tongue when eating a piece of tuna that dissolves the moment I put it in my mouth.
Microbrewery. When one of our servers described their featured beer, I couldn’t quite catch what she was saying and ordered one. I should have either listened more attentively or flat out refrained from ordering one. I later placed the taste as chocolate marron (a marron is a chestnut). Sound intriguing? The taste was rather, um, not-intriguing-in-a-good-way. However, the food was nice (me-lamb, him-seared tuna) and the setting was very relaxing (on one of Tokyo’s waterways).
Udon. Udon noodles are fat and of medium length…think hand-rolled egg noodles but longer. We hiked to the top of Nabewari Peak (west of Tokyo ) with a Japanese friend of mine. He told us that even though we had spent about $20 on fixings for lunch that day, we definitely needed to have udon at the top of the peak we were hiking up. I am glad we did. We were served huge steaming bowls of broth, noodles, vegetables, and assorted other things Japanese put on top of soups (slices of pressed fish cake, unidentifiable fried things, and the like). All topped with a raw egg that was cooked a bit by the hot broth and thickened the soup nicely when mixed in. Mmm-mmm. It was hard to hike back down our bellies were so full.
Okonomiyaki. My friend Nancy calls it okonomi-yummy for good reason. Sometimes called Japanese pancakes or Japanese pizza, okonomiyaki is not easy to describe. It is pancake-like and pizza-like, but it’s neither pancakes nor pizza. The waitress dropped off a bowl with cabbage, batter, meat, veggies, and kimchee in it. I mixed up the ingredients and dumped them all out onto the griddle in the middle of our table and formed the lump into a flat oval. After three minutes of cooking I flipped it. I flipped it again after another three minutes. And after another three minutes we put sauce on it and sliced it and ate it. We ate this on two separate occasions. Okonomi-yummy!
Denny’s. In Japan, Denny’s is considered to be more upscale than its US counterpart. I like the fact that this is one of the few places I can get a bottomless cup of coffee (when coffee is $3 for each cup, I don’t want to be drinking two or three of them). I ordered fish, rice, and miso soup for breakfast, whereas Ken went for the western-style breakfast of scrambled eggs, really small pancakes, and something resembling a piece of bacon and a Vienna sausage. I wanted to go for the cultural experience. It makes me wonder if the Denny’s in Japantown in San Francisco has an American-style menu or a Japanese-style menu.
We ate out more: Hawaiian burger joint, mediocre Thai, chips and salsa on the 42nd floor of a chichi restaurant with an awesome view, an organic foods buffet, and a handful of Starbucks.
And we did eat dinner at home, twice.
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