When you visit Japan and look for some good sake to bring back to your home country (or to drink in your hotel room–we surely won’t dissuade you), choosing a single place to buy premium sake from the ridiculous number of quality options can be a daunting task. For this issue we wanted to give…
Nikkô, whose shrines and temples earned UNESCO World Heritage status in 1999, has greater name recognition than the prefecture of Tochigi which it calls home. It’s similar to how more people around the world are more familiar with, say, Chicago than Illinois, or Sydney than New South Wales. Such is the nature of iconic locales.…
Angkor pepper seeds from Cambodia. This interesting pairing combination was discovered by Villapon, a small bar in Yokohama, Japan.
This is a very simple dish with many variations that we got at Moto Stand in Shinjuku, Tokyo (featured in the Tokyo bar guide in issue #1). It is basically sashimi slathered with sesame, chopped onions and other condiments on a bed of alfalfa. The sashimi and sesame are the essentials because the oily fish…
Tofu marinated in shoyu moromi, the unpressed mash from the soy sauce making process.
Crab sake soup in the shell. Some casual restaurants in Japan (like izakaya) will cook a crab shell over a charcoal grill with the meat still in it and pour sake in as a kind of broth. The flavor is sharp; some love it, some hate it, and it is certainly considered down-and-dirty dining.
Daitokuji fermented black beans. Named after the Kyoto temple nearby which you can purchase these incredibly pungent delicacies, these dried beans generally only pair well with unfiltered or unpasteurized sake. Their powerful flavor (which some people find offensive) would probably overpower a nice, delicate ginjo.
French fries? More like Kyoto fries. A restaurant in Japan’s ancient capital city used baby potato sprouts to bread and fry. Soft but savory, they paired wonderfully with sake.
This is a kind of fishloaf (like meatloaf) with spring onions. (more detailed description coming soon, and perhaps a recipe if the chef relents!)
The foreground is just natto (fermented soybeans) and some generic potato salad. But in the background is Kamaboko carpaccio. Kamaboko is basically white fish meat that has been pureed and processed into loaves. Suzuhiro, in the beautiful hot springs resort town of Hakone, makes some all-natural Kamaboko (as well as Hakone craft beer).