My g/f is mostly a vegetarian – not for health reasons so much as for ethical reasons. There are certain things she pretty much will not eat and things like beef, pork, chicken, and even some fish isn’t on the menu if you can’t show that it came from an organic farm where the animals were raised and treated well. The Japanese aren’t exactly known for their ethical treatment of animals as they consume a lot of endangered species and have pretty much fished out their oceans. Even now, they are fighting with political groups that want to ban Bluefin Tuna because it is becoming endangered to the point of extinction.
We found that the Japanese diet, at least what you could see of it, was a pretty standard fare of fish / seafood with some type of rice or noodle (or both) and usually some type of soup that is made during the cooking process. There wasn’t a lot of variance in this like there is in the U.S. You could find an Italian restaurant here and there, and there were some fast food places like McDonalds, but for the most part the food was pretty much the same everywhere we went. For my g/f this made eating a somewhat daunting in difficult process. In some cases, she ended up eating things she wouldn’t normally eat either out of politeness or to put food in her stomach. Many a day or evening we tried to make mental notes of places that looked like they had something she could eat.
Surprisingly enough, we couldn’t find a lot of meals with a bunch of veggies. In the U.S. most Japanese meals have a bunch of veggies, but there it was mostly sushi-type stuff and not many veggies. The few times we got veggies she was pretty happy because that is the mainstay of her diet.
Me? I pretty much eat anything. I always find it interesting when people call me a picky eater because I pretty much don’t like foods with a lot of saucy type crap on them and I don’t care for beans or really bitter veggies. But let’s see you eat some of the things I ate in Japan and in other parts of the world…. So eating in Japan wasn’t hard for me even if it was a lot of the same types of food.
In Tokyo we had dinner with Mitsubishi. It was our first full day in Tokyo and thus our first real Japanese dinner. Mitsubishi took us to a really nice restaurant where we had a traditional shabu-shabu dish. Again, they didn’t really ask us what we wanted and only discussed what we were about to order when we asked. For this meal they served about 6 courses. The first course was an appetizer course consisting mostly of some type of sushi. My appetizer plate had whole, uncooked smelt on it (think sardines), some other forms of sushi that I couldn’t identify and a giant snail. I thought my g/f was going to lose it when one of the Mitsubishi guys politely offered his snail to her “Here, I’ve had this before…you should try.” This wasn’t like escargot where they cook it and sauté it in garlic and butter. It wasn’t raw and slimy, but it wasn’t cooked much either. She ate it and managed to choke it down with her beer.
While we were eating our appetizers the servants put a large pot of broth on the built-in cooking surface of the table. The women serving the food were all dressed in traditional kimonos and unlike American dinning they assist you through cooking the meal at the table. Then they brought out the huge plates of raw beef to cook in the now simmering broth on our table. I thought she was going to die. The beef is sliced very thin and you basically grab a piece with your chopsticks and stick it in the boiling water for a few moments before you pull it out, dip it in your bowl of light sauce / spices and then consume it.
It was a lot of meat, and she only ate about a slice of it. Now, while this was going on, the servants were stocking the broth with veggies, rice cakes, and other goodies. Our next course was the broth and veggies along with some small ramen type noodles. After we ate all of this a large bowl of soba noodles was brought out and we consumed that. Now that we were completely stuffed they brought out the desert, which consisted of fresh fruit that was delightful.
But things didn’t get a lot better. My g/f was pretty much starving the next morning and we were trying to avoid the $30 breakfast buffet. Here are some shots of the Denny’s menu that we hit in Tokyo. Note that most of the meals include a salad. This seemed to be typical of a Japanese breakfast though we didn’t see them eating salads at any other time of the day unless it was a seaweed salad or something other than lettuce.
I tried this breakfast and it was OK, except the bean-things. I’m not sure what they were for sure, but I’m not a big of beans anyway.
While I was wandering around on my own I found a little noodle house in a back alley somewhere and had this for about $9 USD….
Sorry the photo is blurry but I was trying to take it without the flash and without drawing too much attention to myself. I have no idea what I ordered because I couldn’t read the menu:
What I can tell you is that it was very tasty. The main bowl is some type of spicy soup with noodles and baby octopus in it. There were other things in there that I couldn’t identify so who knows what I ate? It was also served with rice, dumplings, what I think was pears and peaches, and some type of dried fruit like a date.
The following day one her dad’s good friend Mr. Nisho (sp?) or Nisho-san took us to the fish market which was a real culture shock to us.
He took us to a hole in the wall sushi place off the beaten path that was serving fresh sushi from the market. This place might have been 250 sq. feet. Maybe. As Americans we were pretty big compared to everyone else and we had to squeeze in at the sushi bar. We were literally shoulder to shoulder and our host ordered the most expensive thing on the menu which was a fairly varied and eclectic combination of sushi including at least the following: tuna, yellow tail or snapper, raw eel, raw shellfish, raw sea urchin (uni), octopus, and some soup.
I might have ordered something slightly different as I know I don’t like some of those things. For my g/f I would have ordered very specific things for her, but it was too late and would have been insulting. So we ate what was placed in front of us, and in a couple of cases we traded some things – like the uni, which I can’t stand. That was acceptable.
The Japanese eat very fast and they eat sushi with their fingers. Don’t expect to see a lot of chopstick usage at the sushi house. I was about ½-way through mine and our host was done while some other groups and come in, ate, and already left.
My g/f was really struggling so I gave her anything of mine that she liked and she drank the miso soup. Still it was a tough meal for her. Later she said she was tired of looking at eyeballs looking back at her and I said there weren’t any eyeballs, and she said “no, the pink thing had eyeballs.” “are you sure,” I asked. “I’m sure.”
The next day our friend Hisashi took us to an out-of-the-way restaurant in the Akihabara district of Tokyo. This is kind of the east side of Tokyo and has a ton of shopping and electronic stuff. He treated us to lunch at a 200 year old restaurant that as been run by the same family for generations. Not a 200 year old building. A 200 year old restaurant.
The only thing on the menu? Cooked eel. They serve it teriyaki style over a bed of rice with soup and pickled veggies. My g/f ate it and said it wasn’t that bad. I ate all of mine and thought it was delicious. If you have ever had cooked eel nagiri style (sushi) you have an idea of what we ate.
Everyone told us we had to try the crab once we got to Saporro as it was in season. I talked with the folks at the hotel and got a lead on some crab houses. We weren’t sure which one was the best one to go to so we asked the bar staff at the hotel bar. They didn’t speak English too well so it was a bit of a struggle to communicate with them, but they all unanimously picked the same place to eat so that is where we decided to go. It was one of the best meals we had on the trip. The crab was served sukiyaki style. This is very similar to the shabu-shabu style we had earlier.
We sat on the floor without shoes on and managed to place an order by pointing as nobody spoke any English at the restaurant. We finally got our order in and the girl asked for how many people and we said “two” holding our fingers up. “One?” she would ask with her finger up (not that one!)? No, no…”two.” “One?” “two! Two!” holding more fingers up. She finally said OK (I think) and was off. Later on we would realize why she kept asking us if it was for two.
The meal started with appetizer of crab tofu….
And then the appetizer continued with both cooked crab….
And then some raw crab. This was one of the few things I really didn’t like and only ate a little of it. My g/f couldn’t eat it at all after trying a tiny bite. I was kind and tried to warn her when I thought it was something she wouldn’t like, but she was still willing to try it.
BTW – these are single portions and we each had one…
Next was the main course of veggies, more crab, and soup….. you would simply add the veggies and crab to the soup dish and cook it for a bit before using a ladel and / or chopsticks to scoop it out and eat it.
The carnage…..(note that there was another course of stuffed crab somewhere in there).
And just when we thought we were done they whipped up a rice porridge so we then ate that..
…and then there was desert!!! I don’t think I could move after that. We finally realized why she kept asking if we wanted two instead of one.
Paying for the meal was funny because we simply had difficulty communicating with the waitress. She was trying to tell us there was only one place to pay, on the first floor, and we kept trying to give her money. We eventually figured it out. Of course, like a chip off the old block, I had my 10% off coupon and that was a good thing as the meal was roughly $70 ~ $80 / plate. Dad would be proud:
BTW – here are a couple of pics of the crabs in the atriums ponds / tanks:
And this isn’t a great pic, but if you let your eyeballs relax you can see the huge crab bastard in the corner of the tank. He had to be at least 18” or more across.
Fortunately, we also found a few Italian type places here and there and my g/f was able to find some food to eat:
In Niseko we ended up eating a lot of noodles from the quick-mart type store. We’d grab that, a bottle of cheap wine, and go back to our room to eat. It was a nice change from all the fish and stuff that we were getting everywhere else.
One of the other great meals we had was when our friend and her business associate Daisuke took us to a bar he would frequent. We had trouble finding bars. You just don’t see them there like you do in the U.S. Sure, there were plenty of places to go in and have a drink, but they were mostly restaurants. I found this odd because being in the big cities like Tokyo and Sapporo you would think bars would be everywhere, but they weren’t.
We asked Daisuke about this and he said he would take us to a bar upon our return trip to Tokyo. He picked us up at our hotel and we walked through some sketchy neighborhoods to arrive at a very tiny bar. This bar was normally closed on Sunday, but Daisuke told the bartender that we were important clients from the U.S. and that he wanted to impress us so the bartender opened the bar up just for us!! Try to find that in the U.S.!!
The bar was very tiny and packed full of stuff:
We saddled up to the bar and had introductions with the bartender who spoke no English. Daisuke translated everything for us. Here is a picture of us with Daisuke:
The bartender was a really nice guy and he was very proud to have us in his bar. He was a career bartender. None of this working his way through college crap. He had apprenticed under another guy who was noted as one of the first professional bartenders in Japan.
We discovered from talking to him that he’d been doing this a long, long, time and that Daisuke had been going there since he was 15, when his father took him. I asked if they had a lot of walk-in customers or more generally what was business like. I was told that this guy’s clientele were fairly specific and that if he didn’t know you he was likely to turn you away at the door. He said he would remember us, though, and we would always be welcome in his bar.
He made a very nice and very traditional meal for us:
Clock-wise from top-left: pickled veggies like a salad, pickled plumbs (very sweet), seaweed, chicken, egg-patty, ham, shrimp, raw scallop, raw whole squid, and an egg that had been pickled (?) in raw miso for a few days.
During the course of the meal he was vey attentive and seemed to appreciate watching us eat and asking us questions as we also asked him questions. He also made drinks non-stop for us but we never ordered them. He would just make something that inspired him from talking to us. Here is a picture of him with a painting that one of his customers did for him – he’s depicted in the painting.
Towards the end of our trip, while we were in Kyoto we found a few noodle houses that my g/f seemed to like so we hit them a couple of times:
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