More Food
Noodles
On Monday a group of new hires had just returned from company training, and that evening we went to an udon noodle restaurant to meet an HR employee who had arrived with that group. She’s quite unusual at Mabuchi, considering she grew up in Minnesota. In college she majored in international relations while learning Japanese, and now she works at Mabuchi in the human resources department. She speaks excellent Japanese, and has been encouraging us to learn some of the language while we’re here. She even gave each of us interns a copy of this textbook for us to keep, which was very thoughtful of her. It’s useful to have her as a resource, too, since she understands the grammar points, the difficult parts of the language and what it’s like to learn it as a non-native.
So we went to this udon restaurant and and I didn’t even order udon noodles! I got some katsudon instead, which is a bowl of ton katsu with egg and rice. I absolutely love ton katsu, it’s just like the Czech breaded pork dish řízek. Next time I’ll have to get some real udon.
My actual Japanese noodle experience was last night, when I went out to eat with some coworkers. It’s nice to go eating with native Japanese folks, since they know the area, they have quick access to Japanese resources online for suggestions, and they are an accurate judge of a restaurant’s food quality. We went to a ramen restaurant, which ended up being a tiny little place with maybe 3 tables and a bar in front of the kitchen.
Ramen is a soup base with some special flavorings, egg, meat, greens, and of course noodles. In general, there are four different types of ramen soup base. There’s shio (salt), miso (soy based seasoning), shoyu (soy sauce), and ton kotsu (pork bone, not to be confused with the fried pork dish ton katsu). We all ordered shio ramen, which was absolutely delicious.
The soup was ridiclously hot. It was still boiling just minutes before it was served to us. It also had some kind of chicken broth added to it, which is apparently unusual in the ramen world. Each ramen place will have their own little variation on the recipe, and this restaurant’s signature was using a fatty chicken bone stock with their shio ramen base.
The way that the Japanese eat their noodles is by slurping. I have yet to master this skill… It’s surprisingly difficult, and I can’t quite figure out how they do it. Clearly more practice is needed.
Izakaya
After the ramen restaurant, we went to an izakaya to eat and drink. I had been to an izakaya already on my first day in Japan, but this one felt a little more upscale. As a review, an izakaya is a Japanese pub restaurant, where you order a bunch of little dishes that are shared among the table.
We ordered two types of sashimi (raw meat) – chicken and bonito. The chicken sashimi was just raw chicken that was barely seared on the edges. I wasn’t the biggest fan of it, I much prefer fully cooked chicken. Bonito is a type of fish, typically it’s cured and fermented until it’s as hard as a rock, then it’s grated into bonito flakes which are commonly used for cooking. In this case we had fresh bonito fish, which was delicious.
I also tried nihonshu for the first time after the sashimi. In Japanese, sake is just a general term for alcohol. It could be beer, or wine, or whiskey… or nihonshu (rice wine, what we call sake). Nihonshu is spelled 日本酒, where the first two characters mean Japan, and the last character means alcohol. On its own, that last character 酒 is pronounced sake, and it still means alcohol. The nihonshu came in a little clay pot with tiny drinking cups, and it tasted pretty good. Like a rice wine, I suppose.
Mochi
I’ve been binging on mochi from the supermarket recently. Mochi is a candy that’s made by pounding rice until it becomes a gooey paste. It’s readily available in the sweets section of the supermarket, so I buy some every time I go shopping.
It’s been hit or miss. The first mochi that I bought here looked green, so I thought it was green tea or matcha flavored. Instead it was a salted soybean flavoring. Not the best thing in the world, but still edible.
I got a variety pack after that, pictured below. This one also had a green mochi which also wasn’t green tea flavored. Instead it had some red bean filling, which still tasted great. I’m still on the hunt for green tea mochi.
I don’t know what the other flavors are (haven’t tried them yet) but I think the pink one is sakura mochi, or cherry blossom flavor. The leaf that it’s wrapped in is probably edible, too.
Tokyo
I went to Tokyo last weekend for a short walk around, and I’m going today as well. I’ll put all the pictures from those visits in a new blog post later this weekend.