Posted by mamster on Sunday, August 15, 2010
People often ask me about my favorite food, and I have a favorite evasive, wordy, and unsatisfying answer, which goes like this:
Any kind of spicy noodles with vegetables and meat.
That’s actually an oversimplification. I specifically mean dry noodle dishes, not noodle soups, and they don’t have to be spicy at serving time, because I maintain an arsenal of spicy condiments. Oh, and one of my all-time favorites doesn’t actually include vegetables, unless you consider bean sprouts a vegetable.
I was thinking about this tonight as I was cooking up some yakisoba. I’d already decided to make it for dinner, and I Googled for a recipe. The first hit I got was Tara Austen Weaver’s great post on the subject, complete with recipe:
Customers entered and sat around a large communal table that was covered with a metal grill surface. The ingredients for each order were put on the grill and cooked before the customer, then pushed to where they were sitting so they could eat. I’m not sure if this early experience sealed the deal, but to this day I love yakisoba.
Me too, despite my lack of formative experiences with the stuff. Yakisoba is fast food: precooked noodles, a few common vegetables, whatever meat is on hand. The spicy, if you want any, comes from shichimi togarashi. I ate my yakisoba, read the latest Everyday Food (“Have you tried: corn tortillas?” Yes. Yes I have), and started thinking about what yakisoba is. (Reading Everyday Food always puts me in a philosophical mood, what with all of Martha’s obscure biblical references and Socratic dialogues and stuff.)
You can classify yakisoba as a Japanese noodle dish, of course. Two excellent Japanese noodle books were published last year: Takashi’s Noodles and Noodle Comfort, and it was while reading the latter book this morning that I got yakisoba lodged in my brain.
But another way of looking at yakisoba is as a member of a family of stir-fried and otherwise non-soupy noodle dishes that cuts across Asia. It includes (among many others; these are just the ones I’m most familiar with):
and, of course, chow mein, some form of which is presumably the ancestor of all fried noodles. I say this not because I have any historical evidence—it’s just that any food I like always seems to come from China if you go back far enough. It’s almost like the human race came from Africa but food came from China.
What fried noodle dishes have I forgotten? If there were a fried noodle cookbook, am I the only one who would curl up with it night after night?
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Posted by mamster on Saturday, August 7, 2010
Iris and I stayed at a popular Asakusa tourist hotel called Ryokan Shigetsu. Everyone seems to have heard of the place, and with good reason: they took very, very good care of us.
By the time we arrived at the Shigetsu, it was about 3am Seattle time and each of us was shocked that the other was still awake. We snuggled into our futons and went right to sleep…and woke up at 5am, just like everyone warned us we would. So we read our books (Neuromancer and The Pirates’ Mixed-up Voyage, respectively) until breakfast.
The Shigetsu is a little six-story hotel in the middle of Asakusa. We chose Asakusa because we’d heard it was a classic, old-school Tokyo neighborhood, which it was. Every time we went out, we walked past a new interesting window to peek in, which is not an experience unique to Asakusa, but it made going out that much more fun. We saw an old man hand-cutting soba noodles in the window of a restaurant, and a knife shop with a sharpening stone in the window that I happen to have at home. (Iris and I were, for some reason, unreasonably proud of this.) We saw people making red bean cakes using a device very similar to a sandwich press my parents had when I was a kid, used for cooking sandwiches over a campfire. The red bean cakes smelled fabulous, and we stopped to buy some on the way to dinner one night. They tasted like cake with beans in the middle. Red bean paste is a Japanese taste I haven’t acquired yet.
One nice thing about Asakusa is that the blocks are very, very short. What looks like a long walk on the map is probably a short walk. Just east of the Shigetsu is Nakamise-dori, the tourist shopping street:
That’s Nakamise-dori one morning before most of the shops opened. (We were waking up before 6am for a few days before we got onto Japan time.) It’s mostly junky souvenirs, but there are many makers of senbei, rice crackers, which are exactly like the soy sauce-flavored rice crackers you get in an assortment at the supermarket, but much fresher; the most popular kind is larger than a silver dollar and must be eaten in several hearty bites. These are addictive. Iris, of course, loved Nakamise-dori, and she took her spending money and promptly bought three different stuffed cats. Mission accomplished.
Now, back to the Shigetsu. Iris and I are still reminiscing about how comfortable the futons were. We slept fabulously, and not just because we wore ourselves out on a daily basis. The room was absolutely tiny. A real estate ad would have called it “cozy.”
In the corridor on the way to the elevator was a tiny plant that the staff changed daily. And on the sixth floor was the hot bath.
Public baths are Japanese tradition, and if the public bath is a big wooden bathtub on the top floor of a small hotel, that’s good enough. Or better. Every night, we put on our yukatas:
and went up to the hot bath, which was almost always deserted. (I took Iris into the men’s bath with me; next time she’ll be old enough to go to the women’s bath alone, so I’m glad we went when we did.) The bath was very hot, and it had a view of the temple spire and some nearby skyscrapers. When we got into the tub, water spilled over the edge and seeped through the floorboards, something I’m always warning Iris not to do at home but which is totally expected in a Japanese bath.
On the day we got lost in Uji and got back to Tokyo late and hungry, we got to the Shigetsu and Iris said, “I’m so glad we’re home.” It’s that kind of place.
Next: A day on Odaiba. Oh, and I wrote about chicken tail on Culinate.
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Posted by mamster on Thursday, June 24, 2010
One thing I wondered about Japan was whether we would get tired of Japanese food. This sort of thing has happened to me before—I’ve had pizza in Bangkok and pancakes in Paris—and I don’t see any shame in it. Here’s what happened in Tokyo.
On our third or fourth day in Japan, while we were walking back to our hotel, I said to Iris, “You know, if you’d like to have Western food for dinner one night, that’s fine with me.”
“Then I’d like to have Western food tonight,” said Iris.
“Okay, sure,” I said. “What are you thinking? Burgers? Pizza?”
“Hmm…Chinese dumplings.”
“Uh, okay. I bet we could ask the front desk to recommend a gyoza place in the neighborhood.”
“Great. Hey, that looks good.” It was a display of plastic tempura shrimp at a place right next to our hotel. “Let’s have that tonight.”
“Works for me.” When we came down for dinner, the place was closed. But they’d left a map on the door, pointing around the corner. We followed it to an old two-story house. “Tempura ga arimasu ka?” I asked tentatively. “Hai!” We left our shoes at the bottom of a ladder-like staircase that would have made an American building inspector laugh hysterically. We ascended to a tatami room, sat on the floor, and ordered off a picture menu.
Iris ordered four enormous tempura shrimp with rice; I had the combo, which consisted of three items on rice: (1) a small whole fish, (2) a shrimp, (3) and a bunch of random vegetables and seafood formed into a patty, battered, and fried. We also had tea and pickles. I didn’t get a picture of any of this, so just imagine shrimp bigger than your face.
I don’t know if this was coincidence or a known fact, but every time we ate in an upstairs tatami room, the waitstaff consisted of elderly women with the demeanor of gruff diner waitresses. This was not at all unpleasant. I especially enjoyed my fried kisu fish (a small whiting). Iris ate two of her shrimp and ate the batter off the other two, presenting me with two naked shrimp. The total price was about $40.
Later, after we survived the trip downstairs, I looked up the restaurant and found that we’d eaten at Daikokuya, which has been serving giant shrimp in that location since 1887.
You can watch a short video about the restaurant here.
Outside of breakfast, the subject of Western food never came up again.
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Posted by mamster on Monday, June 21, 2010
I have a lot more to tell you about Japan and will do so as soon as I have time. Right now I’m neck-deep in an article about how to buy insurance on your grilled chicken, or something.
-Matthew
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Posted by mamster on Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Look, I’m not the most well-traveled guy in the world. But I get around. I’ve been to four continents, a lot of top tourist destinations, and a few unusual ones. I’ve eaten gumbo in New Orleans, pad Thai in Bangkok, fish and chips in London, French onion soup in Paris, and lobster rolls in Maine.
Tokyo is very, very different from those places. I’ve struggled to figure out how to explain it, and here’s what I’ve come up with.
Throughout Tokyo there are drink machines, squat, refrigerated vending machines selling small bottles of various beverages for a dollar or two. We often bought water and other drinks: citrus soda, apple juice, iced green tea. It seems like there’s always a drink machine when you want one.
That’s not the magical part. Lots of cities have vending machines.
At a typical Japanese vending machine, you can pay in three ways: coins, transit card, or 1000-yen bill. About a dozen times during our trip, we slid a piece of paper money into the slot on the front of the vending machine, and not once did it ever spit the bill back at us.
That is Tokyo: the least annoying place I’ve ever been.
You know how at a good restaurant—the kind that is in love with making customers happy, not in love with itself—it seems like the staff knows what you need a moment before you realize it yourself? That’s Tokyo. The trains don’t stop in the tunnel without an explanation. We never had trouble finding something good to eat, usually within a few paces of where we were standing. And Tokyo is the most walkable place I’ve ever been in my life.
Tokyo has ruined me. I had a list of other places I wanted to go on future trips. I crossed them all off and just wrote Tokyo six times.
More soon, including Iris’s favorite food of the trip: grilled chicken tail.
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