Tokyo Food

A snack package of what appears to be hazelnuts in a Tokyo mini-mart.

The Passengers ate all sorts of goodness in Tokyo.  The Japanese take their food seriously in the same manner as do the French with serious refinement of standardized age-old recipes.  We didn't suffer a bad meal once during our travels. Here are some highlights, though they exclude our early morning sushi adventure.  That will be a separate post.

Ramen noodles with all the fixings.

We had ramen one evening at a small restaurant not far from our ryokan.  Diners are supposed to choose their dishes from a vending machine outside the front door.  After the customer pays money in, the machine spits out a ticket for his order, and he brings it inside the restaurant.  We tried our very best to match the Japanese labels on the selection buttons with the pictures in the window.  Finally we gave up, and we were kindly greeted inside with an English menu.  This bowl of ramen was as big as my head.  I could barely get through half of it.  Passenger H unwisely had her own bowl, too, which by the time she quit looked like she only managed to pick out the seaweed, the half-boild egg, and two pieces of scrumptious fatty pork.  The yummy noodles are underneath a big pile of extras that also includes corn, bamboo shoots, and bean sprouts.  I think we paid JPY 950 per bowl (USD 11.25/GBP 7.10).  More dishes after the jump.  Click below left to keep reading.

Takoyaki beside the Kannon temple in Tokyo.

A great number of food sellers cluster around the Kannon temple in Asakusa.  Our experience of living in Singapore has made the Passengers real suckers for street food.  We decided to try out the takoyaki stall.  Takoyaki is a famous streetside dish from Osaka: savory, grilled beignets with chunks of octopus inside.  The batter usually includes tempura flakes, green onions, and a bit of ginger.  The lady who served us immediately slathered our order in Japanese mayonnaise (a cult food in its own right), something like barbecue sauce, and fish shavings that almost melt on the tongue and really complement the barbecue sauce. JPY 500 for six (about USD 6/GBP 3.75).

A sweet Japanese confection oozing with sugary glaze.

Passenger H had to try one of the sweeties sold near the takoyaki stall.  This stand sold various candied fruits made by repeated dips into an unbelievably viscous sugary syrup.  We chose a marinated sour plum because it looked like the furtherest cry from our native food traditions.  Who wants to travel to Japan to eat a candied strawberry?  The plum was a deliciously salty contrast to the candy exterior, but that goop was stickier than any taffy.  I had gobs of it pasted to the back of my front teeth for half an hour. JPY 200.

We tore through plenty of yakitori before we remembered to take a photo.

On the advice of one of our well-traveled, omnivorous Singaporean friends we opted for yakitori underneath the train tracks.  He advised us to keep an eye out for drunken salarymen.  Eat where they eat, and drink whatever they are drinking.  We found this place tucked underneath the rails leading into Ueno station after a walk in peaceful Ueno Park. It was a Sunday afternoon so we were short on salarymen, drunk or sober.  Yakitori refers specifically to charcoal grilled chicken, but it embraces a larger genre of grilled items, usually prepared on wooden skewers.  The photo above shows our messy sampling: fish, marinated beef, blackened leeks, mild peppers, plus the standard chicken and some edamame to nibble. It was all freshly prepared and incredible.  I especially recommend the fish.  At least two small herds of salarymen did pass by towards the end of our lunch.  We spent about JPY 3,000 for food and two beers (USD 35.60/GBP 22.50).