Japan - The Food

Starter - Japanese Style

I had worried a bit about the food before going to Japan. I’m not a big sushi fan and nor am I too fond of noodles in soup.

When I arrived, I was a bit baffled by the restaurants. There were loads and they all showed pictures of the food they offered. However, I still couldn’t really work out what the pictures were (the food was mostly fairly unfamiliar) and everything was in Japanese. Every now and then I’d spot a restaurant with an English name – there was a lovely place advertising organic food, but then there were no pictures and the entire menu was in Japanese. I ended up going for an Indian curry in a place where everything was in English.

I had to get used to the currency as well – I’m just not used to dealing with money where the denominations are in the 1000s and it all seems quite scary (even though work was paying!).

Breakfast – with the obligatory hand towel as with every meal – was very Japanese. There were boiled vegetables, fish, miso soup or something similar… fortunately, they also offered bread rolls and jam, plus warm croissant, so I just kept to that and the coffee and orange juice!

After that, I was pretty much looked after. On my first day at work, we had sandwiches for lunch, so that was safe; subsequently we went to the work canteen each day. There were forks available, but mostly people ate with chopsticks. I played safe with a curry again on the first day (fortunately they had a curry on the menu each day, so there was always a fail-safe!); after that I was more adventurous, although I can’t really say what I ate.

I had tempura and noodles in a soup (this has a special name); I think another day I ate something that looked like spaghetti, but it was actually noodles, and then there was a bowl with liquid (miso soup?). I struggled with the chopsticks for the noodles (I was trying to twist the noodles round the chopsticks, but I’m not sure that was the right technique). In the end, my colleagues brought me a fork and watched with fascination as I twirled the noodles on the fork and laughed that I was treating it like spaghetti.

At the weekend I ended up in an Italian restaurant and ordered Japanese beef (yes, weird, I know). In my head this was going to be how I imagine Teriaki beef to be – little slithers of beef in a sauce. However, it turned out to be an almost-raw steak. To my surprise, since I normally eat my steak medium-well done, it was actually delicious and very tender. The starter salad was exquisitely presented (see photo).

One night Sayako took me out to a chicken place (I’d told her that I love chicken). It only sits around 20 people and you all sit round the counter by the kitchen and you are served directly from the kitchen. It’s not anywhere I could possibly have gone on my own. To my befuddlement, I was handed a picture of a chicken with about 20 different cuts shown on it (eg, the bit just above the tail was the option that drew my attention as I wondered if we [Westerners] ever even ate this part) and you were supposed to choose which bit of the chicken you would like to eat. This was totally beyond me! I asked for skin-on and moist meat in the end and was served with something a bit weird that was verging on gristly. It’s probably best that I don’t know!

My welcome meal was at a lovely restaurant where we had our own section of the restaurant and they brought in meats for us to cook directly at the grill in front of us. There was as much to drink as you liked (introducing me to the concept that the Japanese like to drink). Again, the meat wasn’t quite what I was expecting – not sure what some of it was, but the first serving was tongue. Although I don’t eat tongue (in the UK, it’s a common filling for sandwiches; not sure we really eat it as a main course meat much), it was actually delicious.

Weirdly, the restaurants don’t really do Diet Coke (or Cola Light, depending on which country you come from!); only full-sugar Coke. I thought I’d try a Japanese alcoholic drink (they all drink beer, so I wasn’t actually being very Japanese!) which I thought would be saki. Instead it turned out to be more like a schnapps or grappa (you can get them in different flavours apparently), but instead of being served in a small schnapps glass, it was served like a glass of orange juice. It took me the whole evening to get through it.

I had been scared of starving while I was away, but actually I did pretty well – in fact, I ate way too much in the end!