Palladion

My city is right next to Souka, and I go there fairly often. On a visit about a month ago, I noticed a small, really neat, inconspicuous statue sitting at a table at Souka Station: I'm fairly sure she's grilling a sembei. I'm not sure of the what that actually entails, so I'm not completely sure, but I can't think of anything else that it might be... I've eaten Souka sembei a few times, but I don't really eat sembei often enough to be able to tell the difference between the good ones and the regular ones. ------- Alex Parker

Found another Tokyo restaurant guide. This one seems very informative. Some of the reviews are short, but there are a good number of longer, more in-depth reviews. Frank's Dining Out in Tokyo ------- Alex Parker

I think it's traditionally yamaimo (mountain potato), which I've seen described as a starchy and sticky yam. I have no idea how changing that to a more normal yam would affect the texture and flavor. I found a short blurb on yamamimo at this page: Bob and Angie Here's the blurb: I haven't had all that much success with okonomiyaki so far, but I'll give it another shot on the 1st! ------- Alex Parker

A rather odd question, but this thread doesn't make any sense without the answer: how much does a bottle of Cointreau run in the States? I'm from America, but am currently living in Japan, and didn't start drinking until I got here. I'm planning on returning in the next year or two, and wanted to know what I have to look forward to... I know that some alcohols are cheaper here in Japan, but it seems that Cointreau in particular is repeatedly mentioned as being expensive. In Japan, it's priced fairly similar to any other standard, decent liqueur or alcohol: it typically runs around 2000 yen for a standard bottle (700mL, I think). I picked up a bottle on sale for 1700 yen. The yen is currently at around 110yen to the dollar, so that's around $16. It's really the only triple-sec availble here (Grand Marnier is available, though), so I don't have anything to compare the price to. Is it significantly more expensive in America, or are the other triple-secs just really, really cheap? ------- Alex Parker

Just remembered! Another reason to check out Kappabashi is to look inside a variety of the tableware stores along the street. Some of them have very beautiful Japanese-style plates, bowls, and other dishes. Don't go there overburdened by big bags, though. Many (most) of the stores try to pack in as much stuff as possible, and have rather small aisles. And you do not want to be accidentally knocking things over in a fancy tableware shop. Thankfully, I'm not speaking from personal experience. But it was a little annoying trying to manuever around with a full backpack. ------- Alex Parker

Kappabashi, the resraurant supply district, is located between Asakusa and Ueno. If you're using the Ginza subway line to go from Asakusa to Ueno, just get off at Tawaramachi. You might want to spend 30 or an hour looking around. The sheer variety of stuff for sale is amazing. Kappabashi is most famous for selling the plastic display food found in restaurant across Japan, but they also sell just about everything else you'd need to equip a restaurant. ------- Alex Parker

Yakiniku is grilled meat. Typically very thin slices of raw meat are brought to your table, and your table also has some kind of heating device (gas or charcoal) coverd with a wire mesh grill. You cook the meat yourself, on the grill, then dip in sauce and eat. Here's a quick link about yakiniku. From what I hear, it draws very much upon the Korean style of grilling meat. Jim would be better able to talk about this.

If you're going for one of the well known sushi places at the Tsukiji market, I've read that it can go for around ￥2500, depending on how much you eat, of course. Heehee! Shinjuku station has got to be one of the largest train stations in the world. Just googled and found something online that said that it's the busiest train station in the world, as well as the second largest. I've read before that between 2 and 3 million people use it every day. I've been there 9 or so times now, and I've gotten lost 3 of those times. Shinjuku station always boggles my mind. ------- Alex Parker

Thanks to reading this thread, I just noticed a store in Akihabara that was selling onigiri with kama-cooked rice. They had a large kama out on the counter. Taken from the Torafuku web page: Kristin (or anyone), can you shed any light on this statement? Is this how the rice in a kama is always cooked, or is it something specific to this store. In particular, I'm wondering how they both boil and steam in the kama. Can they move the kama around instead its oven, allowing them to sometimes boil, sometimes steam, sometimes bake the rice?

Err, hold on. Was the cake called satsuma, or was the restraunt called satsuma? Either could make sense, as satsumaimo is the name of the Japanese sweet potato (imo is defines it as potoato, regular yellow potatoes are called jyagaimo). Or it could just be a Japanese word used for the name of the restraunt. As it's a smooth filling, you want something called koshi-an. The other major type of red bean filling is tsubu-an, which isn't smooth, and still has chunks of the azuki beans in it. Never made it myself, but from what I've read you soak the beans, then simmer them until soft, then combine them with sugar. Pretty much what you'd expect. For smooth paste you also need to pass them through a sieve of some kind at some point in the preparation, I think, to remove the shells. I remember a thread a while back where people discussed using about half as much sugar called for in recipes for the red been paste, in order to get a final product that wasn't overly sweet, one that had a more pronounced bean flavor, so the proportion of sugar to bean is something that you're going to want to play with. ------- Alex Parker

You know, it's times like this I wish eGullet had an option to view a thread without pictures. I've seen the pictures I took about 500 times at this point, and I still have to load every single one of them when I want to read the latest reply to the thread. ------- Alex

Pretty much... I took three shots of it while hearing other people breath such phrases as "this is fantastic" and "this alone is worth the price of the meal." I had a feeling that my pictures were blurry, but at that point, I just wanted to eat. ------- Alex

Actually, I chose to walk back. There were still some taxis running, but it was a nice night, I wasn't really tired yet, and, after the cost of the meal, I wanted to save a little bit of money. Thankfully, it didn't start raining, but it did lightly drizzle for a minute or two at one point. Now, if I had missed that last train at the transfer point... that would have been bad. It's funny how you never think of such practicalities when the meal is set to start at 6:30. ------ Alex Parker

Right, now I remember, it was the asparagus that we had really wanted to try with the flavored oils. If you look in the top-right corner of my pictures of the asapragus, chicken with yuzu-koshou, or the grilled chicken wings, you can see Kristin's trio of oils and soy sauce. Next we had another pair of items, grilled chicken wings and ginkan (gingko nuts): The grilled chicken wings were meaty, and their skins were tougher than normal, I thought, a bit chewier. I really liked the gingko nuts. Here they were simply lightly salted and grilled, very tender and flavorful. Next was the star of the evening, the foie gras. Unfotunately, evening though I took three pictures of it, they all came out horribly blurry. Grrr. Maybe prasantrin managed to take a decent picture. Anyway, here's one of the pictures that I took: You can see the most important element, the light surface char. Like Kristin said, the charred bits had a wonderful smokey flavor and texture, but it wasn't burnt or overwhelming, it was just right. It provided a perfect bit of rough texture that complemented the insides, which seemed to melt away in my mouth. Also in the picture you can see the combination of fat and slightly sweet sauce that accompanied the dish. Excellent. Next served was a grilled boneless chicken breast. I think there were two of these to be shared between the five of us. I'm not a big fan of the chicken breast, and I thought that this was only ok. To me, it didn't seem different from a brined and broiled chicken breast that I could do at home. Lots of others in the group seemed to like it though. Next up was what someone (I think Jim) described as "giant tsukune" (balls of ground chicken meat skewered and grilled yakitori style. typically they're much smaller and served three or so to a skewer): Served with more of that tasty tare sauce, this time with an egg yolk to mix into the sauce, to give it more flavor and richness. It looked great and tasted wonderful. This next dish was a plate of vegetables and that mostly raw chicken. It came with a pair of extra-thick, dowel-like chopsticks that you can see in the picture, for serving. The chicken was, again, sublime, and at this point, I think, everyone was thinking that they'd be forever tempted to undercook chicken when making it at home, however bad an idea that might be. Our final savory course was a combination of different elements. It was served somewhat late, probably about half an hour after the previous course. It was held together by rice (the only time rice was part of the meal) that had been steamed in a pot called a kamma (I have no idea what is different about a kamma. Perhaps some kind soul could inform us all...). This slow steaming process was, apparently, what had delayed the dish. The rice was purposefully undercooked, still just a touch hard in the middle. Prasantrin remarked that it was rice "al dente." The rice came with an egg in a dish. You broke the egg into the dish, added soy sauce, stirred that together, and then mixed it into your rice. I thought the rice was delicious, both with the egg and soy sauce mixture and plain (I had a bit of the rice afterwards, by itself). The al dente rice held up very well even when covered in the rich egg and soy mixture. Plain, the rice still had lots of flavor and a wonderful smell and texture, and made me want to get rid of the bag of super-cheap rice that I bought when I first arrived in Japan and didn't know any better (literally the cheapest rice that was in the store) and trade up to something better. You can see an identification sticker on the egg. The egg yolks provided in the previous dishes had all been top notch, and this whole egg was no exception. The small item on the on the far left side is an umeboshi, a salted and pickled plum. I typically don't care for these, and while this one was definitely better than the standard, I still left mine at least halfway uneaten. In the top right you can see a bowl of miso soup. Accompanying the rice were a variety of small dishes of food. Unpictured are mentaiko (spicy fish eggs) and salted squid in sauce. There was also a plate of assorted pickled vegetables: And there was a bowl of kimchi (good kimchi, but no chicken hidden underneath this time) and the bowl of nattou that's being discussed in the nattou thread (again with the oddly thick chopsticks). I can't really identify the other items in the picture. I just really liked the rice, egg, and soy sauce combination. I ate the other items separately, for the most part. The exception was the nattou, of which I added a little to my rice. It was much better than nattous that I've tried in the past, but it was still a bit strong, and I was really enjoying the rice mixture by itself. A testament to Imaiya's wonderful ingredients. Lastly we had a small piece of melon for dessert. I forgot to take a picture of this, but it wasn't particularly unique or exciting anyway, just a slice of good, juicy melon. This was also the only course of the meal that had no fowl at all. I guess trying to work chicken into a dessert was a bit too much, even for the ultimate chicken restaurant. Looking back at all the pictures now, it sure doesn't seem like all that much food, particularly spread out over five hours, but it was indeed filling, and I think we were all fairly well stuffed by the end of the meal. It was a wonderful way to sample a whole host of different chicken preparations. Between the food and the company, the five hours seemed to fly by, and we could hardly believe that it was 11:20 when we were getting prepared to leave. I ended up walking home from the train station, which took about an hour and a half. This was while carrying 22 pounds of stuff in a backpack. I finally reached my apartment around 2:00 in the morning. And you know what? The meal was worth it. ------- Alex Parker

And I'm back. I should tell everyone that I'm certainly the least qualified person from the get together to discuss the food that we ate. I only became interested in food as of about 4 months ago. I was actually in the middle of a very heavy diet that I had been on since arriving in Japan last August. So my experience with fine foods and flavors is very limited. I hope to be a quick study. As I mentioned during dinner, I'm going to Thailand for three weeks this summer. In between bouts of feasting on Thai food, I hope to hit a few other types of cuisines. I've heard off-hand that there is decent French, Italian, and other types of foods available in Bangkok, though I haven't seen any specific reccomendations. I have, however, made a lot of detailed notes about where to eat Thai food from the archives of the elsewhere in asia forum. I know a few of you have had lots of experience with living in Thailand; do you think it would be worthwhile for me to pose the question of where to eat non-Thai food in Bangkok? Anyway, enough with the introduction, back to the food. At some point while we were waiting for our food (after we had ordered) we started playing with the little dishes and knicknacks that were on the table. That was when we discovered the black shichimi. We also found that they had fancy toothpicks. Those would come in handy later. Well, it's later. We ordered the chicken brains as a separate dish, as it didn't come with the set meal. We made one order, and were going to split it 5 ways. It was the first thing to arrive: The accompanying items and sauces were, starting from the top-right and going clockwise: ponzu and green onion, wasabi and shoyu, egg and shoyu(?), and something that I don't remember. Yes, each little (tiny!) serving of brain was to be divided into 5 seperate. Kristin went first and divided two of them into servings with two of those fancy toothpicks. I divided the other two. Someone (I forget who) remarked that the work was so delicate that it was akin to "brain surgery." Ha! Thankfully the brains separated easily into little lobes, and so the 5 of us who wanted some all got some chicken brain with each of the different sauces. My opinion? It was intesting, a quite subtle flavor, and a bit gritty maybe. I liked the ponzu sauce, which set off the subtle tastes from the brains. This was our first encounter with the restaurant's fresh wasabi, and though the wasabi itself was excellent, it was overpowering when paired with the tiny piece of chicken brain. This would perhaps not been so bad if I had been eating a full piece of brain, as opposed to one fifth of a piece. Next up came the sashimi platter that Kristin already posted a picture of. Again, this was to be divided up between 5 of us. This dish came with three sauces, served individually to each person. One was soy sauce, one was a garlic oil of some sort, and the third was a terrific salted sesame oil. The waitress made some sugestions for which sauce to use for which type of cut, but I can only remember one of them: plain salt with the gizzard. I didn't care for the gizzard though; I thought it was quite tough and tasteless. You can tell more easily from Kristin's picture that the surface of the chicken was cooked. The cooked layed ran maybe a millimeter deep, and everything past that was raw. My favorite was the liver, but I liked the breast meat and the sasami too. Next up came the chicken salad: I guess this is where my cullinary inexperience begins to shine through. My prior experience with salads has been the disgusting kind, literally oozing with commercial dressing. So up until this year I've avoided dressing on salads. Recently I've been experimenting with making oil dressings (oil, lemon juice, and herbs) and vinagrietes. So, what can I say, this was easily the best salad I've ever eaten. It was some varieties of mixed greens along with red cabbage. There was a bit of oil or vinagriette and the salad was lightly drizzled with a sweetened mayonaise. Add in some slivered almonds and corn (yes, corn). Chicken again, very lightly cooked, as you can see in the picture. And finally there were some little red things which I didn't end up getting a chance to eat, and I don't remember what the others called them. The next dish was individually plated, and it was the first actual yakitori served: This was chicken skin and gobo (burdock). The chicken skin was exemplary, crispy and charred on the outside. The burdock, something I didn't think I would like on a yakitori skewer, but its texture and dryness worked well with the fatty chicken skin. At first I thought that they needed a bit of salt or extra flavor. That was when we discovered something that would prove a small annoyance throughout the evening: the server had taken all of the flavored oils. I wanted to try dipping it in the salted sesame oil. Others were using salt (I used a little to, on some of the pieces). Sadly, the waitress had also removed the wasabi, which a few of us wanted to try on it as well. But I continued eating it plain, and found that the tare (the yakitori sauce) really shone through. It wasn't overly salty, like my sauces turn out to be, and was slightly sweet. It was really good. In fact, I wish I knew how to make sauces that light. All of the recipes that I've seen for yakitori sauce have been something like half to a third soy sauce, and then concentrated by simmering. That is, obviously, going to put a lot of salt into the sauce. Next up was asaparagus: This was good. This was served with a watery chicken soup. I didn't think that the soup had much flavor, but it was warm, which was nice, because the air conditioning in the room was set too aggressively. Later in the meal we asked the waitress to turn the aircon down, as it was just too cold in part of the room. Next was sasami with yuzu-koshou: Though you can't tell from the picture, the chicken here was only cooked on the outside. The insides were raw. Because everyone got an entire skewer, this was probably the best oppurtunity to get a good taste of the raw chicken. The chicken here (and all of the other mostly raw chicken) was incredibly tender and meaty. Gads this is taking a while. The meal took a while too. At this point we were probably 2 and half hours into the meal itself, which isn't counting the hour or so before we ordered. The meal was spread out very well, and we had plenty of time to sit and chat in-between the courses. In fact, the meal was probably a little too long. I left around 11:30 or so, after the meal had ended, but before we had entirely figured out the bill (I hope it worked out correctly!) because I had to catch the subway home. I ended up catching the second-to-last train when I transferred at 12:20am. The bus that I have to take from the train station had stopped running long before -- but the meal was worth it!. Anyway, I'll post pictures and comments of the rest of the meal tomorrow. ------- Alex Parker

This is going to come out in installments, as I'm running around with a few other things right now. As you can see in the picture of the table, the place settings were fancier Japanese style. Here's a closeup of my settings In the back right, you can see a little tray with little bowls of salt, shichimi, soy sauce, and something that someone (I forget who) described as black shichimi. I think most of us tried the black shichimi straight. It was fairly spicy and peppery. Also at the table when I first got there were two little bowls of food for each person: The one on the right is a shaped cylinder of grated daikon. It was ok, but nothing spectacular. It's just daikon. But on the left was a very garlicky kimchi, with a suprise hidden beneath. After eating a few bits of the kimchi, we found small small pieces of chicken, which was very littly cooked on the outside, and completely raw in the middle. We also snacked on that plate of young ginger, cucumber, and miso paste. It was a good thing that we were given a few things to snack on while we were deciding on what to order, because it took us about an hour to order. It was a combination of us not really being able to decide exactly what to order and the fact that we seemed to have scared the waitress away. After waiting for a while, we started looking around for a button to push (lots of Japanese family-style restaurants have buttons at the table that activate a remote buzzer and alert the server that you want something). No tacky button at this upscale restaurant; instead there was a little bell. After we rang it the waitress came back, and we proceeded to order. 5 of us ordered the 8400 yen set, and one person ordered a variety of ala carte items. A few minutes later the waitress came back and informed us of a special: we had the option to replace the chicken liver course with foie gras! The 5 of us getting the set meal jumped at the oppurtunity. More later. ------- Alex Parker

Yeah, that wasabi was great. A couple times, I grated off a tiny dolop of it and ate it straight. ------- Alex Parker

I'll add in a lot more pictures and comments later, but for now, here's this. We had a private room on the third floor of the Ebisu Su-honten restaurant. They call this floor "Kagetu, A Hiding House in Edo." From the pictures that I've seen on their website, we were placed in the "Shogun" room. The table was above a recessed well, so that you could sit either Japanese or Western style. Ebisu Su-honten kagetsu webpage There was a foot-massage-style plastic bar in the recessed well area. It wasn't the vibrating type, but it was covered with little rounded plastic nibs, and it was nice to rub my feet against, particularly after a day of walking around Tokyo with 10 kilograms of assorted food purchases in my backpack. A very nice touch that I've not seen anywhere else. I arrived at the restaurant first, and took this picture of the table setup in our little room:

I'm with you on missing the sandwiches. I just can't find the variety of good breads here in Japan, and forget about nice deli meats. Super fresh, sweet corn. Corn so mouth-wateringly good you can eat it without butter, salt, or pepper. That you can buy it (when it's in season, obviously, but that's the only time you should be eating it anyway) at something like 8 ears of corn for $1 is just a bonus; I'd miss it even if it weren't so cheap. Pizza. Cheese. I can buy it, but it's too expensive for me to keep a couple blocks on hand all the time for snacking, like I liked to do back home.

Wow, I haven't read through that whole thread yet, but this just reminds me how much I really should at some point soon. You've put a ton of great information in there. Interesting. All of the American sources that I've read talk say that the Fuji is a cross between a Ralls Janet and a Red Delicious. I wonder if the Kokkkou is just the Japanese name for the Ralls Janet. I found a links with more information (in English or Japanese) and pictures about Japanese apples: http://www.anc-tv.ne.jp/~apple/ The link is from a Nagano orchard. I noticed this snippet as particularly interesting:

No, I almost always say お水（を）ください. I just forgot the honorific when I typed it in. Though the rest of my spoken Japanese will occasionally come out in a bizzare mixture of polite and casual. Which can be rather embarassing, depending on who I'm talking to. ------- Alex

In a similar vein to Pat's question, I was once dining with a Japanese elementary school teacher and he told me to ask for water by saying 「お冷ください」 (ohiyakudasai), rather than whatever I was going to say (probably something like 「水ください」. He said that the ohiya version was cooler or something. Know anything about it?

When I first arrived in Japan, I was ovejoyed to find that fuji apples were readily available here. They were my favorite apple in the USA, they possess a wonderful balance of sweet and tart, are almost always perfectly crunchy, and they keep very well in a refrigerator (important for a college student). But the fuji apples in Japan seemed to fall far short of this mark. First warning sign was their weight. They didn't weigh nearly enough for their size. This worried me a lot, but after craving a good apple for a long time, I ended up buying some. They weren't nearly dense enough and their tartness seemed mysteriously missing. But what mostly bothered me was that the crispness was gone, replaced by a soft, light, and open (almost mealy) texture more reminscent of bad red delicious apples I've eaten in the US. Some of the ones that I bought had rotten cores as well. That put me off apples here for a while, and I ate other fruits. Recently though, a roadside fruit and vegetable seller in my city had some bruised apples on sale for 20 yen each. But they smelled excellent and felt nice and heavy for their size, so I picked up 5 fuji and 5 ourin apples. Once I scraped past the bruised bits just under the skin, I revealed good, crisp, tasty apple flesh. I don't know if it has to do with the season (I thought I had tried the Fuji apples while they were in season, when they were plentiful and cheap at the local stores). I was impressed with the Ourin apples. I was hoping for something similiar to a Granny Smith apple, for variety, but found them somewhere in between a fuji apple and a golden delicious. I have a Japanese cookbook that says that they are a cross between a golden delicious and a "delicious". (I thought there were only red and golden delicious? Argh, I don't know nearly enough about apples.) Since then, I've been buying bags of these apples from the local supermarket, and they've all been good. Tomorrow I'm probably going to take a look at the Fuji apples at the local store and buy one or two if they are the right density. I want to see how the current ones fare. I also just recently tried a Mutsu apple. I've only eaten one so far, so I really shouldn't judge them yet, as I've found produce quality to vary very widely in Japan, even from day-to-day, same produce at the same store. Anyway, it was somewhat soft, but had a nice dense texture; it wasn't mealy. Mostly I was struck by an interesting fruity overtone, something that I've not encountered with the regular American varieties. It came in more as a smell than a taste. I'll need to pick up some more of these to do some more experimentation. (I bought it from a little open-air market-ish-style fruit and vegetable shop I found over the weekend. I was also excited because they had small bags of sweet red onions for 100 yen, a lot cheaper than buying them at the local supermarkets). So, anyone else care to share their experiences with apples in Japan? I'm only slowly learning about foods here (and, heck, foods in general). -Alex

That doesn't sound too bad, actually. On paper, at least. I wonder how similar it tastes to apple butter. I've seen quite a good selection of regular jams and jellies in Japan, even a bunch of only fruit/fruit juice and organic ones. Some imported, some domestic Japanese products. But I don't think I've seen apple butter (or other apple based spread). On the other hand, I really don't care for peanut soft, Japan's regular peanut butter spread.

In college, I had a friend from New Mexico, and he was passionate about his southwestern cooking. He brought something like 30 pounds of frozen green chiles that his family had roasted with him to school (in the midwest) each year. When he made enchiladas, he made them in a manner somewhat similar to your Sonoran-style stacked enchiladas. Made a gravy from the green chiles, tomatoes, onions, water, and other flavorings. Then we deep the fried corn tortillas, not till they were crispy, but enough so that they became moderately stiff. Then we layered the tortillas in a baking pan, added chicken, a little bit of the chile gravy, and cheese, and then repeated the layers. Topped it off with a final layer of tortillas, then sauce and cheese. Then they were baked. I have no idea as to its authenticity, but it was definitely tasty. I helped him make this dish for our fraternity a couple of times. It always took forever to fry enough corn tortillas to make several layers in 4 or 5 really large pans.