Of Rice and Jen

Back in Tokyo and two final stops to make on the culinary wish list. The first was tonkatsu – breaded pork cutlet, and the place we had it was a real find (thanks to Midori once again!).

You can choose various things to go inside, and then various things to go with it. I went for an original one, with white miso soup, a soy dipping sauce, and an aubergine side dish, and it came with rice as always.

Tonkatsu

I expected it to be nice but surprisingly it was totally and utterly delicious, and even better they’re thinking of opening a branch in London – I hope they do it soon!

Next up was a day of wandering round Tokyo by myself and I had to be brave at lunch time, to go for something else on the list and not just bottle it and end up in Starbucks! So I went for Curry 77, a chain that does pretty basic Japanese curry with a handy picture menu that I could point at. I can’t even remember what I had – I think it was breaded pork with curry sauce and something pickled on the side.

Curry

It wasn’t amazing; I wasn’t really expecting it to be – I think whatever you order pretty much comes with the same curry sauce! But it filled a hole and required a bit of nerve so I was glad I did it.

A quick stop on the 52nd floor of the Roppongi Hills building to take this amazing photo:

Then it was the final couple of days – sad times. Jam and I went back to Mifune on our own which was also a bit brave as they really don’t speak any English in there! We got on alright ordering beers, and “stuff on the menu we’d had before”. It was a bit tricky trying to find new stuff to order but luckily the usual stuff was nice! We then realised we had absolutely no way of ordering sake; well, we could order sake but there’s quite a lot of choice and we ran the risk at pointing at something that cost a million Yen. When it became clear we had absolutely no idea what we were doing, they sent over the guy who spoke a little English. He asked us if we wanted dry or sweet, and then asked if his choice was ok. They really are lovely in there, and his choice was great.

Then, final final night and of course I wanted a traditional Japanese experience. We went for okonomiyaki again, and got to sit on the floor in our own little room, round the hotplate. It was fab actually; we cooked our own scallops, then a duck dish, then a few different types of okonomiyaki. This time it was proper okonomiyaki that we had to mix ourselves….

mixing the okonomiyaki

… and then cook from scratch, including a dangerous flipping moment!

flipping the okonomiyaki

So to sum up… actually I think it’s impossible to sum up Japanese cuisine. It’s so varied that I ate pretty much a different type of food for every meal and there are probably another hundred to try. I didn’t fall in love with it in the same way that I love the food from South East Asia, but it was a fascinating experience. Plus I think Aronia de Takazawa will take some beating as the best meal I’ve ever had.

So that’s it – Kampai Japan; see you again soon!

Ramen around Hokkaido

Clearly for us the focus of a trip to Hokkaido was going to be the snow and the snowboarding, rather than the food, so this is going to be something of a whistle-stop tour of the culinary offerings of Japan’s north island, where in fact we were nearer to Vladivostok than Tokyo!

One night in Sapporo and headed straight for the Sapporo beer garden (where else?), which is famous for the Hokkaido speciality of jingiskhan, or Genghis Khan lamb. To be honest, it’s not exactly what I was expecting. It was basically a DIY bbq affair involving, well, some lamb and some vegetables.

Genghis Khan lamb

Thankfully, there was (as you’d expect) a brilliant range of Sapporo beer. There was also an amusing moment when despite us being ridiculously full, Midori ordered some more stuff, and what turned up appeared to be (quote Jam) the ghost of a sausage. Apparently (quote Jam again), the Japanese are a bit weird about sausages.

The ghost of a sausage

Then came a lot of snow, and one really memorable meal in the main Niseko resort of Grand Hirafu, in a restaurant called A-bu-cha. We had a couple of local specialities; this obscenely good crispy Hokkaido chicken:

Crispy Hokkaido chicken

And another of the many types of Japanese cooking, called sukiyaki. This is a hotpot similar to shabu shabu but with more flavour (the liquid includes mirin, soy sauce and sugar) and you dip everything in a beaten raw egg before eating it. The English can be a bit funny about raw egg like this but it didn’t bother me at all, it was great.

Sukiyaki

I didn’t really get sake when I first got to Japan, but my transition to sake-lover was a very quick one. We tried so many and the flavours are so individual, and we had the most interesting one of the trip in this place. Now, it looks like the pourer has spilt sake all over the saucer, but this is a deliberate move to give the customer a little extra – sort of like a customer tip. When there’s enough room in the glass, you tip the saucer up and top yourself up.

Special sake

One more Hokkaido experience and it was some shrimp ramen, in the airport on the way home. Loved it – could eat ramen all the time, and it’s great fuel for a day on the powder slopes.

Shrimp ramen

After 2 weeks in Japan, we still hadn’t had any sushi, believe it or not! It’s quite normal apparently; in my brother’s experience, it’s more of a special occasion thing. There are the ubiquitous conveyor belt restaurants but they are to be avoided in Midori’s opinion (much like my opinion of English sushi conveyor belt restaurants). The other sushi complication we had was that Tsukiji (pronounced Tskiiijiiii) fish market (biggest in the world) was closed for quite a few days over New Year and that obviously directly affects the sushi restaurants.

The restaurant we went to was one Jam and Midori were pretty familiar with, and when we booked they explained that their range would be different and a little limited due to the closed market. Jam spoke to someone there once, a Westerner with lots of experience of these things, who said that he believed this place to be the perfect meeting point of price and quality. Essentially you can pay an awful lot for sushi in Tokyo, but the quality doesn’t get much better than this.

Now the Agnew family approached this place with a certain amount of trepidation. Mum isn’t good with raw fish in general, Dad can be pretty fussy when he wants to be, and while I was pretty much up for it, I do have a slight issue with the size of a sushi mouthful which I was told in no uncertain terms to “get over”.

We started out pretty easily, with this little starter of some cooked white fish.

White fish starter

Next up was one of the most spectacular plates of food of the whole trip – a beautiful sashimi selection. We were good with all of it except the raw prawns which we had to leave to Midori. The rest of it was fantastic, I can’t even remember what the types of fish were but there was a lovely one with grated ginger, the tuna was amazing, and the raw clams (bottom right) were great too.

Beautiful sashimi

Then a nice tuna skewer with some spring onion and pink radish of some kind. I think Mum appreciated this course.

Tuna skewer

Then came the sushi; plate after plate of wonderful, interesting seafood. Midori absolutely went for it on the ordering front, and while it was a bit daunting at first, once I got into it I didn’t want it to end! The highlights were horse mackerel, scallop, a curly shell thing, and squid.

Curly shell sushi

All in all, it was such a wonderful experience, and Dad did brilliantly trying absolutely everything! This was another example of how lucky we were to have Midori to show us this place – we would never have had anything like this experience if not for her.

Hard to follow Aronia de Takazawa really, so this is going to be the short version of the next few days. It was New Year, which in Japan means everything pretty much shuts for a few days, so we had to take food where we could get it. First, there was a lovely dim sum lunch on New Years Eve, at Din Tai Fung, which I’ve been to in Hong Kong as well. Xiu long bao and prawn wontons delicious as ever; still waiting for them to open one in London!

Xiu Long Bao

Spicy prawn wonton

Then came…. my nemesis. The only thing on the whole trip that I actually could not eat. Octopus balls. Not balls in the anatomical sense, but balls of sort of batter with bits of octopus tentacle inside. Big, blobby, thick, red bits of octopus tentacle. I had one and struggled through it. I could have forced myself to get through the problem by having another couple, but I honestly just couldn’t face it.

Octopus balls

The final food event of the New Year period was one of my favourites of the holiday; we were cooked for by Midori at home. We had nabe, cooked in this fantastic dish. It was absolutely, genuinely delicious. It has all sorts of things in it, which I couldn’t even begin to start listing. Here’s a game – see what you can identify from the picture:

Home cooking

One more new food experience over these couple of days, and that was katsu-don; a rice bowl with a pork katsu cutlet and egg on top. As labelled, it was kind of porky and eggy – not my favourite but it did come with some (unexpectedly) delicious pickled tofu. Interestingly it was in a restaurant right by the wonderful world heritage temple complex in Nikko, and still there was no English at all, on the menus or spoken by the staff. Yet again we relied on poor Midori to translate the menu line by line – and felt sorry for the other tourists in there trying to point at plastic models in the window to explain what they wanted!

Katsu don

I apologise to the owners of the Korean restaurant we went to for lunch, who have probably been glued to this blog in anticipation of their big moment. As it happens, I am going to skip it altogether because something very much more exciting happened in the evening – we went to Aronia de Takazawa.

It is the best restaurant I have ever been to in my life by a mile. It has unbelievable reviews from the blogs and articles that I have read, and a random newspaper article was actually how we found out about it in the first place. Some in the know consider it one of the best restaurants in the world, which seems perfectly likely to me (one not in the know), judging from our mind-blowing experience. It blows something of a hole in your wallet as well, but it is entirely worth it.

It has only two tables, and is set up like the restaurant equivalent of a Japanese tea ceremony, where the chef can attend to the individual needs of everyone in his restaurant, and ensure that each experience is personally perfect. The front of house is run by his wife, while chef Takazawa runs the food from his workstation in between the kitchen and the main room. Service is chatty and knowledgeable as you would expect but the real star is the unbelievable and astonishing food. The toilet is pretty cool too but I think the food just edges it.

1a. Pre-stuff

These were some fun things to start with. On the right are potato soup spheres with white truffle – it’s some feat of engineering to create three little pearls on a spoon that then turn into pure potato soup in your mouth – delicious (note – I am already running out of superlatives, where’s my thesaurus?). In the middle is gingko nut, another kind of potato and a bit of fish liver, and on the left are some special cured meats.

1. Ratatouille

This is Takazawa’s signature dish – 15 different vegetables prepared individually and combined into one stunning mouthful. This dish takes something like 9 hours to put together, as each vegetable is treated to bring out its best. The result is so interesting – it takes about 15 bites to eat and it feels like each bite gives you the essence of a different one of the vegetables. This dish is stimulating in so many ways – visually incredible, fascinating to think about and a challenge to eat in one mouthful!

2a. Bread

Freshly baked (in front of us) bread with homemade pate in a cute little jar with an Aronia de Takazawa label. Nice touch.

2. Buri Daikon

Quite possibly the most beautiful plate of food I have ever been served. It’s a clever one if you’re Japanese, as buri daikon is a traditional stew dish of buri (yellowtail) simmered with daikon (radish). This is obviously completely different – a fresh salad of raw buri, and some different types and colours of daikon. The magic touch for me was the yuzu powder that chef Takazawa sprinkled on himself at the table; it gave a lovely, theatrical, citrussy edge to an incredible dish.

3. Ankimo Marble

Yet another absolute stunner. As an aside, at some point around here I think I went into a speechless wonder spell, where I just gawped around the room at the crazy brilliance of the whole thing. Ankimo is monkfish liver, which is quite rich, paired with some porcini mushrooms for balance, plus some marinated leeks, Japanese balsamic vinegar and pine nuts. This was one of my favourites actually – a totally new ingredient for me given the magic treatment, and served, of course, on a slab of marble – why not?

4. Candleholder

This is the one we’ve talked about the most – clever clever. So, the candleholder is glass, and we were asked to lift the top off…

The lid of the candleholder turned out to be filled with a foie gras creme brulee, and the tea light was pear jam with a little “wick” of a herb. Now I don’t always like foie gras too much – the taste never seems to outweigh the guilt, but this time it certainly did. Awesome.

5. Breakfast with White Diamond

There may have been a Lost in Translation moment here, but I’m not totally sure what the White Diamond reference was. Breakfast was clear enough – we had little potato flakes which came to the party as a bowl of cornflakes. In the bowl was guinea fowl soup (?) with truffle, and the instruction was to tip the cornflakes into the bowl and enjoy it like cereal. This course was fun.

6a. More bread

Mental note – when Mr or Mrs Takazawa offer you something, you take it. I was on the verge of declining more bread but changed my mind at the last minute, and this is what turned up! I don’t even know what it was but it was very cool, with its little Takazawa logo on and some sort of coal dust (that can’t be right) ingredient.

6. Early Spring

Less of the cleverness, more of the food philosophy on this one. It was something like sea bass served with vegetables sourced from warmer parts of Japan that were beginning to produce the spring crops. Takazawa is all about the local sourcing and using clever and seasonal ingredients so this was a nice representation of that. A hilarious and unexpected chopstick crisis ensued towards the end – picking up a flat bean in a soupy bowl turned out to be a massive challenge.

7. EZO-Venison with tree

So that there on the top right is a Christmas Tree. How festive! The green smear (there must be a better word than that) was green vegetable, the red one was beetroot, the venison was totally wonderful and came with loads of tasty fat (apparently the chef’s favourite bit). This was a wonderful plate of food – although I did hit a momentary “too much food” wall half way through which stepped on my enjoyment of it ever so slightly. Oh yeah – and the snowball was a little bit of horseradish!

8. Takazawa’s Special Blue Cheese

Ha ha – it’s not blue cheese at all! It’s white chocolate and pistachio cheesecake. But how much does it look like blue cheese?! Another signature move – I think he varies the style and content but it looks like there’s always a cheese = cheesecake event on his menu.

9. Strawberry Short Cake

This was a spectacular liquid nitrogen-fest, with the box lined with strawberries filled with the gas, plus some icecream and frozen whipped cream.

The theatre and presentation of this dish was ridiculous(ly cool) but it was a slight anticlimax taste-wise. The effect of the strawberries, ice cream and frozen cream was supposed to be like having a mouthful of strawberry shortcake… meh, it was nice but not my favourite.

10. And finally…

Somehow we had room to have these lovely extra bits – they were a coconut meringue, melty salty dark chocolate, green tea cakes, and marshmallow. And I also had one of the nicest cups of tea I’ve ever had; we got to choose from the selection and I chose Happy Tea – must have been a reflection of the complexities of my mood at the time.

How lucky we felt, to have been treated to such an extraordinary evening by a young (he’s 35) genius. On top of masterminding all this, he also cleared our plates when he was the nearest, and when it was time to leave he walked us downstairs and out of the building, bowing to us until we reached the end of the road and turned out of sight.