Food

Dessert Forest

Today has been a bit of a nothing day: we travelled from Kanazawa to Tokyo on a weekend preceding a series of public holidays, so the whole country is travelling and we had to have a couple of tries before we could find a train with seats available (thanks to Sim who managed to figure out how to tell on the Japanese website whether the trains were booked out or not). Most of the day was spent on trains, so we haven’t really done much at either end. Accordingly, I thought that instead of describing the day, I’d take the opportunity to discuss a subject very close to my heart.

It is food. We’ve learned many lessons since coming to these fair shores, but I think number one would be that you have to go pretty far out of your way to eat a bad meal here. (Sim may disagree, but that’s mostly down to poor choices on his part. That, however, is another post for another time, and I’m sure Sim will have much more to say about it.)

Allow me to give some examples.

Tonight, after arriving tired, annoyed (many more children than normal on the Shinkansen) and in dire need of a shower, we ventured out in search of food, and entirely by accident ate the best beef of my life. I know I’m prone to hyperbole, but this really isn’t one of those occasions. Honest.

I’d been noticing a number of restaurants that appeared to be a Japanese version of Korean barbecue, where the meat is cooked at your table on a central fire pit. Tonight we tried it for the first time, and ordered a mixed beef plate (though in saying so I’ve summarised what was a very complicated ordering process transcending language barriers. We know, for instance, that one of the items on the plate was tongue, but once again we owe that knowledge entirely to the art of mime). The plate of raw meat came out, and it’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve never in my life seen such beautiful beef, at least in its raw form. Sliced about half a centimetre thick, it was so intricately marbled that it appeared pale pink rather than red, and dissolved away to nothing in the mouth with just a hint of charcoal from the fire, simply served with lemon and soy. It was face-melting stuff.

Yet we ate this best beef of my young life not at a fine dining establishment, but at a random family-run restaurant down by the train tracks in Otemachi, across the road from a strip club, with pictures of meat sticky-taped to the walls and waitresses who sat down at a nearby table and ate their dinner halfway through service. Although not cheap, it wasn’t expensive, either, and I shudder to imagine what the raw meat alone would have cost me if I’d tried to buy it in Australia.

Another example. Last night in Kanazawa, feeling not so much hungry as obliged to eat through habit, we thought we’d grab a late snack at the food court sushi train in the shopping centre across the road from our hotel. We sat down, didn’t see anything we wanted on the train, and turned to the menu, which most of our fellow diners seemed to be ordering from.

We already knew from the Lonely Planet that Kanazawa took pride in its seafood, but the message was certainly driven home when we saw that the sushi menu had eight or ten different options for tuna alone, and allowed you to choose your favourite cut of meat. I tried a few and was, in my Westerner ignorance, pleasantly surprised at how different they all were. I didn’t even have the most expensive toro (belly cut), but the second- or third- most expensive has, predictably, ruined all other sushi for me for all time.

While we’re on the subject, I should say a few words about food courts. As with many other things, the Japanese experience varies quite substantially from the Australian. While Australian food courts are generally a series of takeaway bars with communal tables at which people can eat between legs of a shopping spree or in their work lunch break, food courts here are more likely to be a level of a shopping centre containing a number of self-contained restaurants, each of which is entirely walled off from the surrounding area. They vary in quality from your budget noodle bar to proper restaurants where you can spend a couple of hundred bucks on a meal for two and have a bottle of wine and a dozen oysters. The only thing we haven’t come across is fine dining restaurants, but everything else seems to be fair game.

In addition to life-changing sushi, the food court in Kanazawa was also home to the Best Gyoza in the World (soft on top, crispy on the bottom, tangy in between, great for a snack at 400 yen a plate, $5.05 according to xe.com), as well as something called the “Dessert Forest”, a fake forest in true over the top Japanese style housing a number of dessert bars, pictured above.

We’ve also noticed, in a lot of places we’ve been, that the chefs have been watching us very closely from the kitchen while we eat, and have often come out to say good bye to us when we leave. I guess we’re a bit of a novelty, or they want to make sure that while in their hands we’ve had a good experience of Japanese cuisine. Either that or they’ve done something horrible to our food and are wondering whether we’ll notice (I’m sure everyone’s too polite for that).

If there’s one thing left to say, it’s this. To all the service staff who have put up with us being jerks, expecting to have menus explained to us just because we’re too lazy to learn your language but want you to know ours: we’re very sorry, and we had a lovely meal.

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