Kenting was not about food.
Within 15 minutes walk from my definition-of-touristy, choked-with-scooter-hawkers hotel, all the noise fell away – all the people must have been swallowed up by their tour buses – and a mysterious gate appeared at the entrance to something called ‘Frog Rock’. The man at the gate seemed surprised that anyone was going to Frog Rock, but he dutifully woke up from his nap to take my NT$30. I walked down the deserted street, past a bunch of sea-battered, white-walled, temple-roofed buildings, past a sign that announced I would soon be seeing a giant rock in the shape of a frog, through a natural tunnel made of pockmarked black volcanic rock, and into a landscape which, while it had nothing to do with rocks shaped like frogs, had everything to do with being seismically terrifying.
It was immediately apparent, even though my experience with geology consists solely of sleeping through a summer class in college, that this area had once – even recently – been a seething, roiling mass of lava. Porous black rocks, looking like sponges from a distance but feeling like coral on the feet, lay scattered and tumbled into the turquoise water, each pore home to a family of crabs and a starfish or two. They rose dramatically away on the cliff side and stood twisted as though they’d just been tossed there by a violent flow. And the sand made a constant clicking sound that seemed mechanical at first, but then it became clear that this was because the sand was virtually made of hermit crabs. Ranging in size from a quarter of a pinky nail to a palm and clad in every kind of shell or shell fragment, they scurried forward, backward, and sideways, fell at me from rocks and trees, and tried to become briefly motionless upon being picked up, only to forget their fear in five seconds and emerge to pinch at my fingers.
I spent hours here, listening to the sea glug at the pores on the rocks like a thousand little suction cups, emerging in time to go to the famous Kenting Night Market and purchase an overpriced, tough giant squid leg and some mushy grilled scallops with an MSG-heavy powder dusting, and ostensibly to cheer myself up after that, some dumplings that were advertised as shrimp but were made of gristly five-spiced pork and a syrupy sauce so cloying I threw the whole thing away.
The next day, I rented freedom in the form of an engine-knocking little scooter and scooted from white-sand beach to black-sand beach, watching tourists buy jet-ski rides from the locals and shriek through the layers of water color, which ranged from golden green at the shore to navy at the horizon, with some surprising stripes along the way. I waded, but didn’t swim, as the waves crashed right on the shore with a violence that sent splashes twice the height of my head. For lunch, I stopped at Houbiho Harbor, famous for its sashimi, to purchase a NT$300 plate of assorted sashimi, sliced such that the connective tissue got caught in my teeth and the skin retained a bunch of little hard nubs, and tasting essentially like fishy air. Missing Hokkaido’s seafood like crazy, I scooted up a mountain into the National Recreation Area, which was ten degrees cooler than the coast and gave me a 360 degree view of the peninsula, which was wreathed in clouds which were magically not raining, only providing shade.
So, Kenting was not about food.
Monday, August 28, 2017
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
The Milkfish Country
Hakodate may have the Squid Dance, but Tainan has the Milkfish Palace.
As I made my way downstairs from the (entirely in Chinese, but sufficiently picture-adorned to be amusing) museum display about the history, lore, and usage of the milkfish, the girls manning the milkfish-snack-sampling stands all started elbowing each other to see who was going to have to go try and speak English to the foreigner while handing her a seaweed and milkfish cookie.
The winner(/loser?) approached me with her cookie on a stick and said enthusiastically, “It’s a cookie made from milkfish!”
“I ate milkfish this morning,” I told her as I took the cookie (which was very strange – much stranger than the shrimp cookies on offer everywhere else). And I had. I ate something called ‘Milkfish Skin Soup’ from a standon a street just outside the Anping District which has been serving this soup as breakfast for years. The skin curls in the bowl like shavings from the skin of a very large vegetable, shiny like an onion but spiraled like a snail. Enough meat is left on that it retains the chew of a salmon, and the flavor of a salmon-mackerel hybrid. The broth is almost clear, but the bottom is littered with reedy ginger stalks, making the last few bites spicy.
I also had milkfish at a much fancier place on YongKang street in Taipei a little over a week ago as part of a feast that included a mysterious curly-leafed cabbage and an omelet that looked like a pot pie. This milkfish was pared to the belly, laid flat, and fried, accompanied only by lemon and white pepper. The wide stripe of fat running between the halves served as a decadent dipping sauce for the meat. Much richer than butter, it was inedible alone, kind of like a savory coconut cream.
As obsessed as Taiwan is with the milkfish – and it is, as you can’t turn around without seeing a milkfish body part on a menu – apparently it is the Philippine’s national fish, so that’s one country I can’t skip!
As I made my way downstairs from the (entirely in Chinese, but sufficiently picture-adorned to be amusing) museum display about the history, lore, and usage of the milkfish, the girls manning the milkfish-snack-sampling stands all started elbowing each other to see who was going to have to go try and speak English to the foreigner while handing her a seaweed and milkfish cookie.
The winner(/loser?) approached me with her cookie on a stick and said enthusiastically, “It’s a cookie made from milkfish!”
“I ate milkfish this morning,” I told her as I took the cookie (which was very strange – much stranger than the shrimp cookies on offer everywhere else). And I had. I ate something called ‘Milkfish Skin Soup’ from a standon a street just outside the Anping District which has been serving this soup as breakfast for years. The skin curls in the bowl like shavings from the skin of a very large vegetable, shiny like an onion but spiraled like a snail. Enough meat is left on that it retains the chew of a salmon, and the flavor of a salmon-mackerel hybrid. The broth is almost clear, but the bottom is littered with reedy ginger stalks, making the last few bites spicy.
I also had milkfish at a much fancier place on YongKang street in Taipei a little over a week ago as part of a feast that included a mysterious curly-leafed cabbage and an omelet that looked like a pot pie. This milkfish was pared to the belly, laid flat, and fried, accompanied only by lemon and white pepper. The wide stripe of fat running between the halves served as a decadent dipping sauce for the meat. Much richer than butter, it was inedible alone, kind of like a savory coconut cream.
As obsessed as Taiwan is with the milkfish – and it is, as you can’t turn around without seeing a milkfish body part on a menu – apparently it is the Philippine’s national fish, so that’s one country I can’t skip!
Monday, August 21, 2017
Custard Apples and the Capital of Food
It’s been tough, culinarily speaking, for the past week or so, being on the relatively rural East Coast of Taiwan. Non-culinarily-speaking, of course, it’s been wonderful. I spent 80 miles with my butt on a scooter, surrounded 360 degrees around with expansive ocean views, carpeted with palm trees, anchored by endless mountains. Puffy clouds stuck to the mountains like glue, never quite making it over to cover the sun that was slowly cooking me alive. To escape it, I ‘had’ to take a random side path in the general direction of the ocean, hoping to find a swimmable beach. I found a secluded cove sparsely spotted with students of a Taiwanese surfing class, with black volcanic sand and regular, rolling, body-surfable waves. Standing ankle deep in the water, spooning the insides out of a smooth-yet-gritty custard apple and spitting the seeds into the waves, I considered aborting my circumnavigation of Taiwan right there and just planting in Dulan for the remainder of my week and a half. Instead, after the custard apple had gone, we continued up the coast to Yuli and back down the East Rift Valley to search out an indigenous restaurant that first turned us away for not having reservations, and then, upon seeing how burnt and exhausted we were, squeezed us into a table with strangers and served us a set meal (that, unfortunately, was so salty my tastebuds died for a full day afterward, but the pleasure here was in the journey).
Taitung itself’s saving grace, as advertised, was the plentiful and cheap fruit, particularly the aforementioned custard apple. I bought exclusively from a lady who took it upon herself to crack the top off the first custard apple of my life and scooped out the first spoonful for me. (At least, I told her it was my first custard apple. I’ve had soursop, which a perfunctory Google search tells me is the same thing, but if it is, the version is Taitung is so much better as to be effectively a different species.) As for the rest of the food, I should have just stuck with whatever was pulled out of the sea that day, because my best meal there was a single, palm-sized grilled whole fish served with lemon and salt.
I’m in Tainan now, though, where I essentially fell out of my hotel’s sliding glass doors and into a famous bowl of noodles with black vinegar and shrimp broth. Served with saucy pork-topped sauteed yam leaves, both dishes were aggressively garlicky, but other than that, mild and understated enough to stand the test of a leisurely half-hour lunch. And coming out THAT door, I was bombarded with dessert shops (Hokkaido-style cheesecake, cupcakes, soft serve, gelato, milk tea ice cream…) juice bars (with ingredients from dragonfruit to osmanthus to kiwi), smoking grills full of skewers, and all manner of whole, chopped, raw, grilled, boiled, and/or souped seafood. Keep in mind too that this was 3:00pm, a time when most Taiwanese in other cities are deep into midafternoon heat-induced siesta time and all their restaurants are shuttered.
So I’m guessing Tainan will be as overwhelming to my tastebuds as the East Coast scenery was to my eyes.
Taitung itself’s saving grace, as advertised, was the plentiful and cheap fruit, particularly the aforementioned custard apple. I bought exclusively from a lady who took it upon herself to crack the top off the first custard apple of my life and scooped out the first spoonful for me. (At least, I told her it was my first custard apple. I’ve had soursop, which a perfunctory Google search tells me is the same thing, but if it is, the version is Taitung is so much better as to be effectively a different species.) As for the rest of the food, I should have just stuck with whatever was pulled out of the sea that day, because my best meal there was a single, palm-sized grilled whole fish served with lemon and salt.
I’m in Tainan now, though, where I essentially fell out of my hotel’s sliding glass doors and into a famous bowl of noodles with black vinegar and shrimp broth. Served with saucy pork-topped sauteed yam leaves, both dishes were aggressively garlicky, but other than that, mild and understated enough to stand the test of a leisurely half-hour lunch. And coming out THAT door, I was bombarded with dessert shops (Hokkaido-style cheesecake, cupcakes, soft serve, gelato, milk tea ice cream…) juice bars (with ingredients from dragonfruit to osmanthus to kiwi), smoking grills full of skewers, and all manner of whole, chopped, raw, grilled, boiled, and/or souped seafood. Keep in mind too that this was 3:00pm, a time when most Taiwanese in other cities are deep into midafternoon heat-induced siesta time and all their restaurants are shuttered.
So I’m guessing Tainan will be as overwhelming to my tastebuds as the East Coast scenery was to my eyes.
Saturday, August 19, 2017
Drawn Fruit and Real Fruit
I am passing a pineapple bun bakery at the same time as the sky opens up to let out all of its rain. This is lucky for a number of reasons: one, rain hasn’t sullied Taipei’s triple-digit temperatures all week; two, this pineapple bun bakery has had a line every time I’ve walked by it and is deserted now; and three, the bakery has an awning. Serendipity.
I order a bun with butter inside, entirely out of character as I have had less than tasty experiences with pastries in East Asia unexpectedly being full of butter, like butter is a reasonable substitute for whipped cream or custard (it isn’t). But I order it here because it is what the bakery is known for, and far be it from me to turn my back on trying something that hundreds of Shida University students buy bags and bags of every day after class. Even if pineapple buns don’t have any pineapple in them and are so named only for the design on the top of the bread. Even then.
I find upon ordering that I am actually lucky for four reasons, and the fourth is that they’re just pulling a tray of freshly baked buns out of the oven. I get mine and it’s too hot to touch, so I first dangle it by a pinky, then toss it from hand to mouth to hand as I dash the few blocks home.
Oddly, the experience of eating it is heavily atmosphere-dependent. I’m a well-documented taste hardliner, maintaining a laser focus on the objective taste of the food to the exclusion of everything else: if the dish is good, it’s good, period, whether I’m indoors or outdoors, on a plastic stool or a lavish lounge chair or standing at a counter, whether it’s dinnertime or lunchtime, whether I’m melting in the heat or shivering with my hands around a mug of tea.
In the case of this pineapple bun, though, the crunch of the topping may give a sweet contrast to the soft rest of it, but I am well aware that if the cold hard butter didn’t give relief to the soft, fiercely hot bread, exactly mirroring the way the cold, sharp rain gave relief to the fiercely hot, sunny day, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly as much.
I try hard, in Taroko National Park, to find food that is decent, but failing that, to at least find food that has some qualities that mirror the staggering, photographically uncapturable scale of the precipitous mountains, marble-walled and grotto-pocked gorges, and rushing, deafening slate river, but I can’t, so I allow the food to fade into the background, eating (I assume) like those mysterious creatures who claim they ‘eat to live, not live to eat’. Dumplings, noodle bowls, stir fried vegetables over rice, repeat.
The sole exception to this vacation from foodie-hood is fruit, particularly the peaches and plums sold at the highest bus stop in Taroko (Tienxiang). Women ply the bus stop, fruit in one hand, knife in the other. Without looking down, they cut slices from the fruit and offer them to everyone getting off the bus. The line of people exiting the bus then curves to the right as every single passenger, shocked by the explosive juiciness and flavor of this slice, joins a new line, this time to buy fruit. The fact that the price exceeds US farmers market prices matters not.
I also feast on guava and yellow watermelon slices for breakfast, free from the hostel, and while on the first day I’m savoring every juicy bite, by the third day I feel like it’s entirely normal (yet still wonderful) to wake up and fill up on abundant tropical fruit that just appears on my plate. The bar is set higher now for Taitung to wow me with its famous custard apple (and durian and starfruit and pomelo and real pineapples)!
I order a bun with butter inside, entirely out of character as I have had less than tasty experiences with pastries in East Asia unexpectedly being full of butter, like butter is a reasonable substitute for whipped cream or custard (it isn’t). But I order it here because it is what the bakery is known for, and far be it from me to turn my back on trying something that hundreds of Shida University students buy bags and bags of every day after class. Even if pineapple buns don’t have any pineapple in them and are so named only for the design on the top of the bread. Even then.
I find upon ordering that I am actually lucky for four reasons, and the fourth is that they’re just pulling a tray of freshly baked buns out of the oven. I get mine and it’s too hot to touch, so I first dangle it by a pinky, then toss it from hand to mouth to hand as I dash the few blocks home.
Oddly, the experience of eating it is heavily atmosphere-dependent. I’m a well-documented taste hardliner, maintaining a laser focus on the objective taste of the food to the exclusion of everything else: if the dish is good, it’s good, period, whether I’m indoors or outdoors, on a plastic stool or a lavish lounge chair or standing at a counter, whether it’s dinnertime or lunchtime, whether I’m melting in the heat or shivering with my hands around a mug of tea.
In the case of this pineapple bun, though, the crunch of the topping may give a sweet contrast to the soft rest of it, but I am well aware that if the cold hard butter didn’t give relief to the soft, fiercely hot bread, exactly mirroring the way the cold, sharp rain gave relief to the fiercely hot, sunny day, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly as much.
I try hard, in Taroko National Park, to find food that is decent, but failing that, to at least find food that has some qualities that mirror the staggering, photographically uncapturable scale of the precipitous mountains, marble-walled and grotto-pocked gorges, and rushing, deafening slate river, but I can’t, so I allow the food to fade into the background, eating (I assume) like those mysterious creatures who claim they ‘eat to live, not live to eat’. Dumplings, noodle bowls, stir fried vegetables over rice, repeat.
The sole exception to this vacation from foodie-hood is fruit, particularly the peaches and plums sold at the highest bus stop in Taroko (Tienxiang). Women ply the bus stop, fruit in one hand, knife in the other. Without looking down, they cut slices from the fruit and offer them to everyone getting off the bus. The line of people exiting the bus then curves to the right as every single passenger, shocked by the explosive juiciness and flavor of this slice, joins a new line, this time to buy fruit. The fact that the price exceeds US farmers market prices matters not.
I also feast on guava and yellow watermelon slices for breakfast, free from the hostel, and while on the first day I’m savoring every juicy bite, by the third day I feel like it’s entirely normal (yet still wonderful) to wake up and fill up on abundant tropical fruit that just appears on my plate. The bar is set higher now for Taitung to wow me with its famous custard apple (and durian and starfruit and pomelo and real pineapples)!
Friday, August 11, 2017
Righting Night Market Wrongs
I admitted in this entry that I didn’t do Taiwan quite right the last time I was here (November 2015). I was overreliant on night markets because of how seductively simple it was to just be able to point at what I wanted, rather than use my nonexistent Mandarin. I ended the entry with a promise to return with a Chinese speaker, and here I am!
My first mission was to right a non language-related wrong, where I accidentally got full off a single cheese-stuffed whelk before getting to try a delicious-looking fried oyster dumpling at the Ningxia Night Market. The night market looked precisely the same as I remembered it, down to the exact location of the food vendors. A long line snaked around the corner from the entrance, full of people excited to get some kind of new burrito-looking thing, but other than that, I was able to find the oyster dumpling stand (and a deep fried taro/preserved egg yolk ball place that I needed to visit again) practically with my eyes closed.
The oyster dumpling was stuffed full of oysters, egg, and marinated mushrooms, then deep-fried to form a little baggie with a fried bow at the top to hold as I dug in, like XLB filled with oysters instead of soup. There definitely could have been more oysters in my dumpling, but it was savory and surprisingly, spicy! I preferred it to the famous Taiwanese oyster omelet, which in my opinion is ruined by the weird sweet tomato sauce they pour over them.
My second mission was to return to the seafood-famous Keeling Miaokou Night Market, which I visited in 2015 carsick from a long bus trip and only able to eat a small cup of deep fried tiny crabs and some squid guts over rice. This time, I arrived ravenous from hiking at Yehliou GeoPark, went to one of the incomprehensible seafood stands that had waylaid me before (it’s a stand full of a million types of seafood on ice!), and ordered (well, my companion ordered for me) stir-fried blue crab in butter sauce. Surprisingly, it came with TWO crabs, neatly chopped into pieces and pre-cracked for easy meat-digging. It was studded with thick, unapologetic garlic slices, ribboned with egg, and had a fiercely savory buttery deep fried coating on the crab shells. One crab was female, and had roe. Both had especially delicious guts. I’m really more of a crab body eater than a crab leg eater, and this dish was made for me. At NT$550 it was also the most expensive meal I’ve ever had in Taiwan. But paying the equivalent of about US$18 is absolutely worth not regretting wasting the true seafood night market experience again!
The next step is to eat in some actual restaurants that have only Chinese menus. I imagine this will become more a necessity than a desire as I start heading south and east.
My first mission was to right a non language-related wrong, where I accidentally got full off a single cheese-stuffed whelk before getting to try a delicious-looking fried oyster dumpling at the Ningxia Night Market. The night market looked precisely the same as I remembered it, down to the exact location of the food vendors. A long line snaked around the corner from the entrance, full of people excited to get some kind of new burrito-looking thing, but other than that, I was able to find the oyster dumpling stand (and a deep fried taro/preserved egg yolk ball place that I needed to visit again) practically with my eyes closed.
The oyster dumpling was stuffed full of oysters, egg, and marinated mushrooms, then deep-fried to form a little baggie with a fried bow at the top to hold as I dug in, like XLB filled with oysters instead of soup. There definitely could have been more oysters in my dumpling, but it was savory and surprisingly, spicy! I preferred it to the famous Taiwanese oyster omelet, which in my opinion is ruined by the weird sweet tomato sauce they pour over them.
My second mission was to return to the seafood-famous Keeling Miaokou Night Market, which I visited in 2015 carsick from a long bus trip and only able to eat a small cup of deep fried tiny crabs and some squid guts over rice. This time, I arrived ravenous from hiking at Yehliou GeoPark, went to one of the incomprehensible seafood stands that had waylaid me before (it’s a stand full of a million types of seafood on ice!), and ordered (well, my companion ordered for me) stir-fried blue crab in butter sauce. Surprisingly, it came with TWO crabs, neatly chopped into pieces and pre-cracked for easy meat-digging. It was studded with thick, unapologetic garlic slices, ribboned with egg, and had a fiercely savory buttery deep fried coating on the crab shells. One crab was female, and had roe. Both had especially delicious guts. I’m really more of a crab body eater than a crab leg eater, and this dish was made for me. At NT$550 it was also the most expensive meal I’ve ever had in Taiwan. But paying the equivalent of about US$18 is absolutely worth not regretting wasting the true seafood night market experience again!
The next step is to eat in some actual restaurants that have only Chinese menus. I imagine this will become more a necessity than a desire as I start heading south and east.
Wednesday, August 9, 2017
Review: Destination 1 (Hokkaido)
In transit to my next destination, Taiwan, I reflect upon my 16 days in Hokkaido.
New dishes/ingredients tried that I’d never tried before:
New dishes/ingredients tried that I’d never tried before:
Haskap berries: I couldn’t find them fresh, only partially frozen and ice-encrusted in the too-cold refrigerator section of the souvenir shop at the Otaru JR station. They were tongue-buzzingly sour and only palatable spread on a croissant.
Hairy crab: This is the food I kicked myself for nearly a year for failing to try in Hong Kong. I would have failed here in Hokkaido as well – you seem to need a deep-pocketed entourage for a hairy crab feast, and all I have is a staunch vegetarian – except that on my last day in Hakodate, I was thrilled to randomly find a giant pre-cracked hairy crab leg and half-body submerged in my miso soup, which was itself an accompaniment to:
Fresh squid sashimi: While I have had squid sashimi before, I’ve always dismissed it as flavorless rubber bands. Cut directly from a squid that was swimming around seconds before, it’s more like flavorless tacky jello strands. Oh well. I tried.
Squid ink ice cream: Sinisterly pitch black ice cream that tastes like… cream. Perhaps squid just doesn’t have any taste at all? But lest you think maybe I’m just biased against squid…
Squid liver: As you may gather from this entry, squid liver is a winner, along with every other type of liver I’ve ever eaten.
Squid crackers and sea urchin crackers: These are a mainstay on shelves in souvenir shops, and are actually delicious, and yes, do actually contain squid and sea urchin as a significant portion of the ingredients. No, I don’t know how they don’t go bad. They have the texture of slightly thicker versions of those baked potato chips that cornered the ‘healthy chip’ market back when people were still scared of fried food.
Iwashi (sardine sashimi): Sardines are amazing as sushi. So soft and silky and yielding. Why they’re pooh-poohed as lower-class fish is utterly beyond me.
Yubari melon: Furano is famous for these melons, and I ate one with the aromas of melon and lavender mingling in the air, drifting over from the farms in which they were grown.
Wasabi sorbet: This was pressed upon me by the sweetest pair of Japanese (but English-speaking) tourists from Yokohama who happened to sit next to me at a fancy traditional sushi bar and keep me from making a fool out of myself. They were shocked to find that Americans use the terms ‘wasabi’ and ‘horseradish’ more or less interchangably, and wanted me to have this sorbet to prove once and for all that they’re different. I mean, who would eat horseradish sorbet? It was mild, vegetably, and more tangy than spicy.
Japanese-style cheesecake: More of a suggestion of a cake than an actual physical cake, these airy half-palm-sized cakes evaporate into a light cream the instant they come in contact with your tongue.
Favorite meal: Ha ha, this is not a remotely answerable question. Let’s try these:
Best uni (sea urchin): Let me preface this by saying that I will probably refrain from eating uni in the U.S. from now on. After having better uni than fancy-U.S.-restaurant uni as a) a flavoring on a gift shop cracker, and b) from a grocery store deli case, I am now irreversibly spoiled and choose to wait until my next Japan trip. Anyway, I picture the taste of uni on a spectrum from iodine-y or bitter (bad) to briny and oysteresque or sweet (good). The best briny uni was either at Uni Murakami, the formerly Michelin-starred eatery at Hakodate’s Morning Market, or at Sushi Dokoro Kihara in Yunokawa, and the best sweet uni was either at the Jiyuichi Market in Hakodate or at Sakanaya no Daidokoro in Sapporo. So yes, basically I’m saying that almost every uni I tried was awesome – just awesome in different ways.
Also, my dad requested that I title a blog post “Searchin’ for the Urchin”. Since I don’t plan to do an entire post on uni, please consider that the title of my last paragraph.
Best ramen: Full disclosure: I’m not a ramen girl. But each Hokkaido city I’ve visited lays claim to mastering one of the three major types of ramen, so it’d be silly not to pit them against each other. Asahikawa owns shoyu (soy), Sapporo owns miso, and Hakodate owns shio (salt).
Keeping in mind I only sampled one restaurant in each city, the winner is pretty easy: Sapporo. Ramen Shingen’srich, salty, murky red broth, snappy noodles, and thin-sliced, fully-half-fat pork was thoroughly enjoyable all the way to the last sip, and could only have been improved with an egg, which was my fault for not adding on. I cheated a little at Mizuno in Asahikawa by ordering ginger shoyu ramen instead of plain shoyu ramen, but I really don’t like shoyu ramen and wanted to give it at least a chance to be palatable. And it was: spicy with ginger shreds and full of tender bamboo and skinny noodles. Hakodate’s Ramen Ajisai comes in a distant third with ramen that tastes like chicken broth and is topped with still-cold deli-turkey-esque ‘chashu’. Better stick to squid, Hakodate. (No doubt they serve squid ramen somewhere.)
Most Unexpectedly Amazing Meal: Toyako Onsen may have overlooked a breathtakingly beautiful misty volcanic lake, but it barely had any food options (I ate dinner at 7-11 the second night, after some nightmarish takoyaki the first one). However, when we biked around Lake Toya’s perimeter, a surprisingly difficult (but of course picturesque and worth it) 22 mile slog, we discovered that the town on the opposite end of the lake featured a visitor centre with outstanding bukkake udon made with thickly marinated mushrooms, tempura crumbles, green onions, nori, and a fresh raw egg cracked over it all. Let me repeat: a visitor centre. In a touristy town. With no obligation or impetus to have good food. This simple noodle dish was so carefully portioned and divided and every ingredient tasted like it had just been picked, laid, sliced, or fried.
Meal At Which I Was Most Out Of My Element: I accidentally chose a really fancy traditional sushi bar for lunch in Yunokawa where only about 9 patrons were let in at once to sit in a semicircle around three sushi chefs who dedicated themselves exclusively – up close and personal – to 3 patrons each. Since everything was omakase, it didn’t matter that I couldn’t order, but there was a certain amount of risk in not being able to fit nigiri into my mouth whole, dipping the nigiri wrong and the rice falling apart, getting full before the courses were finished, being served octopus, etc. Luckily, the English-speaking couple from Yokohama was there, and I copied everything they did, sighing with relief whenever they did something imperfect to mask my own imperfections. I was rewarded with excellent uni (of course – de rigeur by now), a long skinny shell-less crab leg topped by organy tasting roe, two different cuts of tuna, scallop, and crunchy herring roe with the texture of baby corn. And the wasabi sorbet, of course.
Most Un-Japanese Meal: Surprisingly, NOT the Indian thali I had after overdosing on seafood bowls. The winner of this category goes to a woodsy cabin in Furano serving curry rice that had rude, confrontational signs all along its outer walls with unfollowable rules about how to behave. They were very firm about customers finishing their plates, admonishing foreigners (and only foreigners; the signs all began ‘Dear foreigners’) to only order what they could finish. I ordered the smallest possible menu item, and it was gigantic. While this totally un-Japanese frustation annoyed me, I have to admit that their homemade sausage curry rice was the best curry I’ve ever tasted. Spicy and complex, it bore no resemblance to any chain or boxed variety.
And I got full before the plate was empty, and I left, and there was nothing they could do about it.
The Breath of Fresh Air: I love seafood, of course, and I estimate I ate it every single day on this trip. But sometimes I longer for a vegetarian interlude, and Rojiura Curry Samurai in Sapporo provided the best of these rare interludes with a curry claiming to be made with 20 seasonal vegetables. When it arrived, every single one of these 20 vegetables was outlined in relief, from lotus root to cassava to carrot to chestnut. I ordered my curry cut with soy milk to balance the spicy tomato base, and accompanied by a yuzu lassi. Japanese-Indian fusion can be a little watered down, but this was anything but.
—
When my plane touches down in Taipei, Taiwan, I’ll take my vacuum-packed ika-meshi (rice-stuffed squid) that I bought at the airport, save it for a special occasion when I feel like remembering Japan, and otherwise shift gears. My culinary wish list in Taiwan includes: guancai ban, yam leaves with pork, shimu yu (milkfish soup), fried milkfish, luffa with clam, shachang fish (raw barracuda), mua gui, eel noodle soup, danzaimian, seafood congee, starfruit, durian, pomelo, custard apple, and Taitung sticky rice. Onward!
Favorite meal: Ha ha, this is not a remotely answerable question. Let’s try these:
Best uni (sea urchin): Let me preface this by saying that I will probably refrain from eating uni in the U.S. from now on. After having better uni than fancy-U.S.-restaurant uni as a) a flavoring on a gift shop cracker, and b) from a grocery store deli case, I am now irreversibly spoiled and choose to wait until my next Japan trip. Anyway, I picture the taste of uni on a spectrum from iodine-y or bitter (bad) to briny and oysteresque or sweet (good). The best briny uni was either at Uni Murakami, the formerly Michelin-starred eatery at Hakodate’s Morning Market, or at Sushi Dokoro Kihara in Yunokawa, and the best sweet uni was either at the Jiyuichi Market in Hakodate or at Sakanaya no Daidokoro in Sapporo. So yes, basically I’m saying that almost every uni I tried was awesome – just awesome in different ways.
Also, my dad requested that I title a blog post “Searchin’ for the Urchin”. Since I don’t plan to do an entire post on uni, please consider that the title of my last paragraph.
Best ramen: Full disclosure: I’m not a ramen girl. But each Hokkaido city I’ve visited lays claim to mastering one of the three major types of ramen, so it’d be silly not to pit them against each other. Asahikawa owns shoyu (soy), Sapporo owns miso, and Hakodate owns shio (salt).
Keeping in mind I only sampled one restaurant in each city, the winner is pretty easy: Sapporo. Ramen Shingen’srich, salty, murky red broth, snappy noodles, and thin-sliced, fully-half-fat pork was thoroughly enjoyable all the way to the last sip, and could only have been improved with an egg, which was my fault for not adding on. I cheated a little at Mizuno in Asahikawa by ordering ginger shoyu ramen instead of plain shoyu ramen, but I really don’t like shoyu ramen and wanted to give it at least a chance to be palatable. And it was: spicy with ginger shreds and full of tender bamboo and skinny noodles. Hakodate’s Ramen Ajisai comes in a distant third with ramen that tastes like chicken broth and is topped with still-cold deli-turkey-esque ‘chashu’. Better stick to squid, Hakodate. (No doubt they serve squid ramen somewhere.)
Most Unexpectedly Amazing Meal: Toyako Onsen may have overlooked a breathtakingly beautiful misty volcanic lake, but it barely had any food options (I ate dinner at 7-11 the second night, after some nightmarish takoyaki the first one). However, when we biked around Lake Toya’s perimeter, a surprisingly difficult (but of course picturesque and worth it) 22 mile slog, we discovered that the town on the opposite end of the lake featured a visitor centre with outstanding bukkake udon made with thickly marinated mushrooms, tempura crumbles, green onions, nori, and a fresh raw egg cracked over it all. Let me repeat: a visitor centre. In a touristy town. With no obligation or impetus to have good food. This simple noodle dish was so carefully portioned and divided and every ingredient tasted like it had just been picked, laid, sliced, or fried.
Meal At Which I Was Most Out Of My Element: I accidentally chose a really fancy traditional sushi bar for lunch in Yunokawa where only about 9 patrons were let in at once to sit in a semicircle around three sushi chefs who dedicated themselves exclusively – up close and personal – to 3 patrons each. Since everything was omakase, it didn’t matter that I couldn’t order, but there was a certain amount of risk in not being able to fit nigiri into my mouth whole, dipping the nigiri wrong and the rice falling apart, getting full before the courses were finished, being served octopus, etc. Luckily, the English-speaking couple from Yokohama was there, and I copied everything they did, sighing with relief whenever they did something imperfect to mask my own imperfections. I was rewarded with excellent uni (of course – de rigeur by now), a long skinny shell-less crab leg topped by organy tasting roe, two different cuts of tuna, scallop, and crunchy herring roe with the texture of baby corn. And the wasabi sorbet, of course.
Most Un-Japanese Meal: Surprisingly, NOT the Indian thali I had after overdosing on seafood bowls. The winner of this category goes to a woodsy cabin in Furano serving curry rice that had rude, confrontational signs all along its outer walls with unfollowable rules about how to behave. They were very firm about customers finishing their plates, admonishing foreigners (and only foreigners; the signs all began ‘Dear foreigners’) to only order what they could finish. I ordered the smallest possible menu item, and it was gigantic. While this totally un-Japanese frustation annoyed me, I have to admit that their homemade sausage curry rice was the best curry I’ve ever tasted. Spicy and complex, it bore no resemblance to any chain or boxed variety.
And I got full before the plate was empty, and I left, and there was nothing they could do about it.
The Breath of Fresh Air: I love seafood, of course, and I estimate I ate it every single day on this trip. But sometimes I longer for a vegetarian interlude, and Rojiura Curry Samurai in Sapporo provided the best of these rare interludes with a curry claiming to be made with 20 seasonal vegetables. When it arrived, every single one of these 20 vegetables was outlined in relief, from lotus root to cassava to carrot to chestnut. I ordered my curry cut with soy milk to balance the spicy tomato base, and accompanied by a yuzu lassi. Japanese-Indian fusion can be a little watered down, but this was anything but.
—
When my plane touches down in Taipei, Taiwan, I’ll take my vacuum-packed ika-meshi (rice-stuffed squid) that I bought at the airport, save it for a special occasion when I feel like remembering Japan, and otherwise shift gears. My culinary wish list in Taiwan includes: guancai ban, yam leaves with pork, shimu yu (milkfish soup), fried milkfish, luffa with clam, shachang fish (raw barracuda), mua gui, eel noodle soup, danzaimian, seafood congee, starfruit, durian, pomelo, custard apple, and Taitung sticky rice. Onward!
Sunday, August 6, 2017
The Squid City
I’m at a street festival in a city known as the Squid City, and within the hour the citizenry will be enthusiastically performing the Ika Odori (translation: Squid Dance), a lively dance dedicated entirely to squid, at nearly every street corner in the city.
But none of the food stands at this street festival are serving squid.
They’re serving fried chicken. They’re serving okonomiyaki. They’re serving a staggering array of greyish-looking meats on sticks. And of course, they’re serving bananas coated in chocolate and decorated with candy to look like cute cartoon characters. But not squid. No squid anywhere.
This has been my experience all day. Okay, there’s squid at the Asaichi Morning Market, but much of it is served as a ‘dancing’ dish (confoundingly ALSO named Ika Odori) where the squid’s head is chopped off and its muscles contract in a morbid ‘dance’ as soy sauce is poured over it, usually accompanied by wide-eyed, madly Instagramming tourists, and I’m super not into that.
And, okay, there’s squid in most seafood restaurants, but as sashimi it’s too chewy for me. I certainly don’t want a repeat of that sashimi restaurant in Asahikawa where I lost all the face in the world by unsuccessfully covering up my unchewable octopus with an insufficient pile of daikon radish.
I just want some casual, cooked squid. Straight-up grilled. As tempura. Legs akimbo in a pile of soba noodles. Even on a stick, spiced so aggressively I choke on it (this happened in Hunan, China).
It takes me all day to finally find it, after many false starts, including being refused seating at an outdoor restaurant for not wanting to order alcohol. It’s in an alley paralleling the festival called Daimon Yokocho, and has no recognizable name, but on its window is taped a picture of a grilled, sauced squid sliced into perfect strips like a big fat squid-shaped piano.
I order the version with liver and organs intact, and wait. It comes out bigger than expected, perhaps three-quarters the length of a forearm. Its triangle-shaped head’s angles are curled and crispy from the grill, and it lies in a pool of liver-tinged sauce. It’s cut into rings, as in the picture, but since I ordered it with organs, it looks like it’s stuffed with paté. Ankimo (monkfish liver) is one of my favorite dishes to order in sushi restaurants, and this is like ordering two plates of it served inside a squid.
Some of its other organs taste and feel to-the-note like miniature mussels. Maybe they are. Maybe Hakodate stuffs their grilled squid with mini mussels. Maybe they FEED their squid de-shelled mussels. I don’t know how Japan works, or how squid works, or how any of this works, but I know I like this squid and I like its organs. I wish some of my paté-loving relatives could try this, in the same way I wish they would try balut, which also tastes a bit like paté. A liver is a liver is a liver, even if it’s a squid liver, a monkfish liver, or a fetal duck liver.
Full, pondering squids and livers, I wander back to the street festival, where a crowd has gathered around a Hakodate-Singapore Friendship Float, all ready to dance the Ika Odori. We’re all dancing the Squid Dance, but I might be the only one dancing the Squid Dance literally full of squid.
But none of the food stands at this street festival are serving squid.
They’re serving fried chicken. They’re serving okonomiyaki. They’re serving a staggering array of greyish-looking meats on sticks. And of course, they’re serving bananas coated in chocolate and decorated with candy to look like cute cartoon characters. But not squid. No squid anywhere.
This has been my experience all day. Okay, there’s squid at the Asaichi Morning Market, but much of it is served as a ‘dancing’ dish (confoundingly ALSO named Ika Odori) where the squid’s head is chopped off and its muscles contract in a morbid ‘dance’ as soy sauce is poured over it, usually accompanied by wide-eyed, madly Instagramming tourists, and I’m super not into that.
And, okay, there’s squid in most seafood restaurants, but as sashimi it’s too chewy for me. I certainly don’t want a repeat of that sashimi restaurant in Asahikawa where I lost all the face in the world by unsuccessfully covering up my unchewable octopus with an insufficient pile of daikon radish.
I just want some casual, cooked squid. Straight-up grilled. As tempura. Legs akimbo in a pile of soba noodles. Even on a stick, spiced so aggressively I choke on it (this happened in Hunan, China).
It takes me all day to finally find it, after many false starts, including being refused seating at an outdoor restaurant for not wanting to order alcohol. It’s in an alley paralleling the festival called Daimon Yokocho, and has no recognizable name, but on its window is taped a picture of a grilled, sauced squid sliced into perfect strips like a big fat squid-shaped piano.
I order the version with liver and organs intact, and wait. It comes out bigger than expected, perhaps three-quarters the length of a forearm. Its triangle-shaped head’s angles are curled and crispy from the grill, and it lies in a pool of liver-tinged sauce. It’s cut into rings, as in the picture, but since I ordered it with organs, it looks like it’s stuffed with paté. Ankimo (monkfish liver) is one of my favorite dishes to order in sushi restaurants, and this is like ordering two plates of it served inside a squid.
Some of its other organs taste and feel to-the-note like miniature mussels. Maybe they are. Maybe Hakodate stuffs their grilled squid with mini mussels. Maybe they FEED their squid de-shelled mussels. I don’t know how Japan works, or how squid works, or how any of this works, but I know I like this squid and I like its organs. I wish some of my paté-loving relatives could try this, in the same way I wish they would try balut, which also tastes a bit like paté. A liver is a liver is a liver, even if it’s a squid liver, a monkfish liver, or a fetal duck liver.
Full, pondering squids and livers, I wander back to the street festival, where a crowd has gathered around a Hakodate-Singapore Friendship Float, all ready to dance the Ika Odori. We’re all dancing the Squid Dance, but I might be the only one dancing the Squid Dance literally full of squid.
Saturday, August 5, 2017
Easily Found Food
In foreign countries, there are lots of ways to fail at finding and eating the food you have so carefully researched ahead of time.
Vietnam specializes in the unauthorized duplication of famous stalls, presenting you with the quandary, for example, of three seemingly identical banh xeo stands facing each other across an alley. Korea likes to write its menus in a loopy, highly stylized script on wooden planks deep inside the dining room, where it would be exceedingly awkward to stand for minutes with face buried in Google Translate. China likes to run out of whatever the restaurant specializes in right as you arrive, even if you arrive at 6am. Malaysia goes a simpler route and just makes it impossible to walk anywhere.
Hokkaido, however, has taken all my memories of frustrated, fruitless city-wandering and shoves them aside. All restaurants are where they say they are, and if they don’t have lacquered replicas of their dishes in display cases outside, they have colorful posters, and if they don’t have colorful posters, they have a waiter willing to parse my halting hiragana-reading.
Unagi Kamogawa is wallpapered around the outer door with shiny but simple images of eel. Eel in round bowls and eel in square bowls – that’s it. I step into a den thick with eelsmoke, take off my shoes, and practically trip down into the space beneath the squatting table. A customer with one protruding bottom tooth and slow but confident English tells me he only eats eel once a month because it’s so expensive. It is – my round bowl is ¥2200 – but the two thick fillets are more smoky and tender than sweet and cloying, have only tiny flexible little bones that yield easily to my swallowing, and come with pickled vegetables and a clear soup featuring a mystery spring-onion-looking thing that tastes a little like a fish cake.
Sapporo’s Nijo market solves my ever-present problem at seafood markets: seeing all this delicious seafood but being unable to do anything with a giant horsehair crab or tank of abalone in my hostel/Airbnb. Next to the tanks of waving tentacles and claws and bubbling shells, there are restaurants, and the restaurants will put any combination of the market’s wares in a rice bowl for you. Again, it’s pricey, but ¥3800 gets me a sea urchin/salmon/salmon roe kaisen-don accompanied by a bowl of miso soup with, no exaggeration, half a crab tilted out of the side as if to mount a too-late escape attempt. The urchin is so soft and indistinct that it looks like scrambled eggs, usually bad news for a creature that gets runnier the longer it’s out of its shell, but it’s so mild and sweet that perhaps even avowed uni-haters would reconsider. It stains the rice under it sun-yellow, a welcome leftover after disappearing so quickly.
Oddly, the urchin here is better than in Otaru, the port where they actually capture them. Otaru’s kaisen-donlets me sample two different species of urchin, the northern variety and the short-spined variety, and while both are firm-edged, their flavor is tinged with iodine, and one’s color is somewhat greenish. Both would be laudable in a US sushi bar, but compared to Sapporo’s scrambled-eggy urchin, they pale. The winner in the Otaru bowl is the giant mound of crab meat next to it, taking up fully half the bowl and remaining sweet and stringily flavorful to the last mouthful. I always feel weirdly decadent eating chopstickfuls of crab meat, knowing the work it takes to extract just one strand from a shell, and as if to underline my uneasiness, they place a crab claw across the bowl with half the shell cleanly removed to reveal a perfect, untouched, still-claw-shaped wall of meat, ripe for the taking.
But one can’t always spend $30 on unagi or kaisen-don, and this is where Japan’s unsung heroes step in: train station restaurants. They always have English-speaking workers, and JR Sapporo Station is so much more than a train station, so it may be unfair to call its food train station food, but still: it’s a mall – actually three malls – two subway stations, and an underground tunnel to ensure continued commerce even during Hokkaido’s long winters. And it provides me with:
– legitimately excellent soba (studded with melt-in-your-mouth shrimp tempura and a tidy pile of tamago)
– airily-breaded tonkatsu surrounded by stuffed eggplant and shrimp, accompanied by mustard greens and silky chawanmushi
– a bowl filled with big chunks of soft tuna, bright green avocado, and that slimy white mass known as mountain yam that I usually hate, but that somehow ends up blended with rice to make a sticky-rice-like concoction, accompanied by gorgeously silky black sesame ice cream splashed with matcha ice.
Asahikawa Station, for its part, though only attached to a mere one mall, has a version of takoyaki that is perfectly cooked, incorporates greens into its batter and comes with a sour, zingy yuzu sauce. I pair it with a sugar-dusted green tea custard-filled taiyaki from a few stalls down.
While Japan may be lacking in the thrill of the chase, and therefore in providing me with the satisfaction that comes after having successfully chased a food item down, it’s kind of nice sometimes to just be able to decide what I want to eat, set off on an organized, efficient public transit system, and eat it!
Vietnam specializes in the unauthorized duplication of famous stalls, presenting you with the quandary, for example, of three seemingly identical banh xeo stands facing each other across an alley. Korea likes to write its menus in a loopy, highly stylized script on wooden planks deep inside the dining room, where it would be exceedingly awkward to stand for minutes with face buried in Google Translate. China likes to run out of whatever the restaurant specializes in right as you arrive, even if you arrive at 6am. Malaysia goes a simpler route and just makes it impossible to walk anywhere.
Hokkaido, however, has taken all my memories of frustrated, fruitless city-wandering and shoves them aside. All restaurants are where they say they are, and if they don’t have lacquered replicas of their dishes in display cases outside, they have colorful posters, and if they don’t have colorful posters, they have a waiter willing to parse my halting hiragana-reading.
Unagi Kamogawa is wallpapered around the outer door with shiny but simple images of eel. Eel in round bowls and eel in square bowls – that’s it. I step into a den thick with eelsmoke, take off my shoes, and practically trip down into the space beneath the squatting table. A customer with one protruding bottom tooth and slow but confident English tells me he only eats eel once a month because it’s so expensive. It is – my round bowl is ¥2200 – but the two thick fillets are more smoky and tender than sweet and cloying, have only tiny flexible little bones that yield easily to my swallowing, and come with pickled vegetables and a clear soup featuring a mystery spring-onion-looking thing that tastes a little like a fish cake.
Sapporo’s Nijo market solves my ever-present problem at seafood markets: seeing all this delicious seafood but being unable to do anything with a giant horsehair crab or tank of abalone in my hostel/Airbnb. Next to the tanks of waving tentacles and claws and bubbling shells, there are restaurants, and the restaurants will put any combination of the market’s wares in a rice bowl for you. Again, it’s pricey, but ¥3800 gets me a sea urchin/salmon/salmon roe kaisen-don accompanied by a bowl of miso soup with, no exaggeration, half a crab tilted out of the side as if to mount a too-late escape attempt. The urchin is so soft and indistinct that it looks like scrambled eggs, usually bad news for a creature that gets runnier the longer it’s out of its shell, but it’s so mild and sweet that perhaps even avowed uni-haters would reconsider. It stains the rice under it sun-yellow, a welcome leftover after disappearing so quickly.
Oddly, the urchin here is better than in Otaru, the port where they actually capture them. Otaru’s kaisen-donlets me sample two different species of urchin, the northern variety and the short-spined variety, and while both are firm-edged, their flavor is tinged with iodine, and one’s color is somewhat greenish. Both would be laudable in a US sushi bar, but compared to Sapporo’s scrambled-eggy urchin, they pale. The winner in the Otaru bowl is the giant mound of crab meat next to it, taking up fully half the bowl and remaining sweet and stringily flavorful to the last mouthful. I always feel weirdly decadent eating chopstickfuls of crab meat, knowing the work it takes to extract just one strand from a shell, and as if to underline my uneasiness, they place a crab claw across the bowl with half the shell cleanly removed to reveal a perfect, untouched, still-claw-shaped wall of meat, ripe for the taking.
But one can’t always spend $30 on unagi or kaisen-don, and this is where Japan’s unsung heroes step in: train station restaurants. They always have English-speaking workers, and JR Sapporo Station is so much more than a train station, so it may be unfair to call its food train station food, but still: it’s a mall – actually three malls – two subway stations, and an underground tunnel to ensure continued commerce even during Hokkaido’s long winters. And it provides me with:
– legitimately excellent soba (studded with melt-in-your-mouth shrimp tempura and a tidy pile of tamago)
– airily-breaded tonkatsu surrounded by stuffed eggplant and shrimp, accompanied by mustard greens and silky chawanmushi
– a bowl filled with big chunks of soft tuna, bright green avocado, and that slimy white mass known as mountain yam that I usually hate, but that somehow ends up blended with rice to make a sticky-rice-like concoction, accompanied by gorgeously silky black sesame ice cream splashed with matcha ice.
Asahikawa Station, for its part, though only attached to a mere one mall, has a version of takoyaki that is perfectly cooked, incorporates greens into its batter and comes with a sour, zingy yuzu sauce. I pair it with a sugar-dusted green tea custard-filled taiyaki from a few stalls down.
While Japan may be lacking in the thrill of the chase, and therefore in providing me with the satisfaction that comes after having successfully chased a food item down, it’s kind of nice sometimes to just be able to decide what I want to eat, set off on an organized, efficient public transit system, and eat it!
Thursday, August 3, 2017
The Octopus Dilemma
She comes out carrying a long, square, boat-shaped platter piled high with six different types of sashimi. This is exactly what I meant to order, which is a miracle considering I had to try to explain in Japanese that I wanted sashimi from Hokkaido only.
With the aid of a bilingual fish info sheet she procured from some hidden closet, we confirm that what is in front of me is, from left to right: hirame (flatfish), tako (octopus), hokkigai (surf clam), hotate (scallop), amaebi (raw shrimp), and iwashi (sardine). With a bow, she withdraws, though I can see her hovering in the corner in an area she might think is just out of my sightline. She is extremely anxious to please, which I find heartwarming considering I entered her establishment alone with terrible Japanese skills in a tank top and wide-leg pajama-esque pants to take up the only non-tatami four-top in the restaurant.
At first, there’s no problem with being attentively spied upon, since the iwashi are tiny maroon-striped fatty oily wonders coupled with ginger and green onions that make me wonder why we ever bother to cook, pickle, or jar them, and the amaebi, tiny tender little pink fingers, make me forget every negative word I’ve ever said about raw shrimp having the texture of dried glue.
I get nervous as I get closer to the octopus, though. Octopus served as sashimi is almost always inedible for me, and not because I don’t like it the taste. In fact, the soft white rubber banded fat around the tentacles of this version is plump, oceany, and delicious. What I mean is that I literally cannot eat it, because my front teeth are incapable of tearing off a piece, and my molars are incapable of crushing it.
Sadly, this turns out to be the case here. The only way I’m going to be able to eat this octopus, I know, is if I tear at it with my paws like a bear at salmon, suck the fatty tentacled area off with a big slurp and leave the rest, or choke to death trying to fit a whole piece in my mouth at once. So I know I’ve got to find some other way of getting rid of it.
I’ve been faced with this dilemma at sushi bars before. I have a vivid memory, for example, of sliding a piece of slimy, rank uni (sea urchin) nigiri slowly off the bar and into a napkin-lined jacket pocket, permanently imbuing the pocket with the smell of iodine, just so the chef wouldn’t know I didn’t eat it.
But there are no pockets in my pajama-like pants to slide the octopus into, and even if there were, I’m being watched closely enough that this isn’t an option. So I eat the rest of the platter with obvious appreciative gestures, which isn’t difficult given that everything else is excellent, and as I chopstick up various pieces of fish flesh, I nudge the pile of shredded daikon and onions ever closer to the pile of octopus. With each bite that travels to my mouth, the pile of vegetables overtakes the pile of octopus, until, at last, my tastebuds are vibrating with the last rich sardine (please make it a point to try sardine sashimi, everyone, really), and the octopus is very superficially covered.
I linger for awhile with my green tea, but realize that I’d better get up and pay at the counter so she doesn’t come over and look at my platter while asking how everything is, so I do that, and after I pay (a bit of a shock at ¥3200), she delivers a mouthful, a couple sentences maybe, of utterly incomprehensible Japanese, looks at me expectantly, and when it becomes clear I have no idea what she’s talking about, abruptly leans around me to gaze directly and at length upon the contents of my vacated table.
No ‘oiishi-des’s in the world can hide my abandoned tako now.
Is this a grave expression I see coming over her face as she places her hands on her thighs, bows more deeply than she yet has, and sends me on my way? Or is it just me projecting my shame?
With the aid of a bilingual fish info sheet she procured from some hidden closet, we confirm that what is in front of me is, from left to right: hirame (flatfish), tako (octopus), hokkigai (surf clam), hotate (scallop), amaebi (raw shrimp), and iwashi (sardine). With a bow, she withdraws, though I can see her hovering in the corner in an area she might think is just out of my sightline. She is extremely anxious to please, which I find heartwarming considering I entered her establishment alone with terrible Japanese skills in a tank top and wide-leg pajama-esque pants to take up the only non-tatami four-top in the restaurant.
At first, there’s no problem with being attentively spied upon, since the iwashi are tiny maroon-striped fatty oily wonders coupled with ginger and green onions that make me wonder why we ever bother to cook, pickle, or jar them, and the amaebi, tiny tender little pink fingers, make me forget every negative word I’ve ever said about raw shrimp having the texture of dried glue.
I get nervous as I get closer to the octopus, though. Octopus served as sashimi is almost always inedible for me, and not because I don’t like it the taste. In fact, the soft white rubber banded fat around the tentacles of this version is plump, oceany, and delicious. What I mean is that I literally cannot eat it, because my front teeth are incapable of tearing off a piece, and my molars are incapable of crushing it.
Sadly, this turns out to be the case here. The only way I’m going to be able to eat this octopus, I know, is if I tear at it with my paws like a bear at salmon, suck the fatty tentacled area off with a big slurp and leave the rest, or choke to death trying to fit a whole piece in my mouth at once. So I know I’ve got to find some other way of getting rid of it.
I’ve been faced with this dilemma at sushi bars before. I have a vivid memory, for example, of sliding a piece of slimy, rank uni (sea urchin) nigiri slowly off the bar and into a napkin-lined jacket pocket, permanently imbuing the pocket with the smell of iodine, just so the chef wouldn’t know I didn’t eat it.
But there are no pockets in my pajama-like pants to slide the octopus into, and even if there were, I’m being watched closely enough that this isn’t an option. So I eat the rest of the platter with obvious appreciative gestures, which isn’t difficult given that everything else is excellent, and as I chopstick up various pieces of fish flesh, I nudge the pile of shredded daikon and onions ever closer to the pile of octopus. With each bite that travels to my mouth, the pile of vegetables overtakes the pile of octopus, until, at last, my tastebuds are vibrating with the last rich sardine (please make it a point to try sardine sashimi, everyone, really), and the octopus is very superficially covered.
I linger for awhile with my green tea, but realize that I’d better get up and pay at the counter so she doesn’t come over and look at my platter while asking how everything is, so I do that, and after I pay (a bit of a shock at ¥3200), she delivers a mouthful, a couple sentences maybe, of utterly incomprehensible Japanese, looks at me expectantly, and when it becomes clear I have no idea what she’s talking about, abruptly leans around me to gaze directly and at length upon the contents of my vacated table.
No ‘oiishi-des’s in the world can hide my abandoned tako now.
Is this a grave expression I see coming over her face as she places her hands on her thighs, bows more deeply than she yet has, and sends me on my way? Or is it just me projecting my shame?
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