Tokyo Food Lineup, cont.

Memory is fading a bit already, but I'll do my best.

Day 4, dinner: Restarant Engaku in Daikanyama, a kaiseki joint run by The Plum Lady. The proprietess knows everything plum, and there's even a book about her plum knowledge. Dinner starts with homemade plum wine, and continues through many beautifully arranged and tasty courses. Sad to say I can barely remember what most of them were, though there was definitely an assortment of seafood and meats, a delicious rice porridge, and traditional frothy tea at the end. The hostess even treated us to some incense listening - apparently serious incense people don't smell it, they listen to it - where tiny slivers of wood were set on a glass plate over a heat source packed in sand. Precious and very delightful-smelling. She even shared records of incense-listening sessions much like wine tastings, where guests took guesses at the sources and similarities of the incense sources. Whew.

Day 5, lunch: we stroll through the Asakusa district, admiring the Golden Turd atop Philippe Stark's Asahi building, and the temple, and the kitch stalls stretching to the horizon. We duck into a tempura restaurant and have truly mediocre tempura. A bust!

Day 5, dinner: Dinner definitely makes up for lunch. After watching a performance at the Tokyo Symphony, our gracious hosts take us up to the Ark Hills Club where we enjoy a parade of beautiful, delicious, and extraordinary sushi. Just awesome. The chef even shares a particular eggplant with us, which can be eaten raw - and tastes delicious. We're all completely stuffed, and wander about the club in a sushi high, admiring the views of Tokyo and the art by Le Corbusier.

Day 6, lunch: After discovering that the neighborhood tempura joint (recommended to us by the hotel staff) is closed, we settle for noodles in Ebisu, 99-something. It's crowded and noisy and Mom doesn't like it much, but I'm happy to have tasty noodles on a rainy day. Plus, the table is fully of funky additives.

Day 6, dinner: We return to the site of previous exploits, the yakitori joint. After a week of glorious feasting, we decide to tone it down and stick (mostly) to vegetables. Wrapped in bacon. Asparagus, tomatoes, and enoki mushrooms. Once again, delicious.

Mom heads back to Shanghai, but I stay on a for a few days of work in the Tokyo office. Sunday night I meet up with a colleague and we enjoy noodles at Ippudo. They're so big they've started a restaurant in NYC. One feature is they provide cloves of garlic and a presser at the table so you can have fresh squashed garlic in your noodles. Serious yum.

Monday night, another colleague and I go to Ninja in Akasaka. This turns out to be a theme park and a very good restaurant - we are led by a ninja through the "dangerous" path to our table, and served by various server ninjas, and entertained by a ninja magician. The food is really good in spite of the kitch factor - foams and flavors put together in an updated fusion mix. The only real miss was the dessert - one of them had a delicious flan on top of what can only be described as "snot noodles". Ew.

Tuesday before getting on the plane, I follow my colleagues to a tempura joint not far away. It's fabulous. While I wouldn't ordinarily consider paying $30 for a set tempura lunch, this is totally worth it. We have 4 different plates of piping hot tempura, plus rice and crunchy vegetables and tea. Finally! Light, melt-in-your mouth tempura that doesn't obscure the taste of the food inside!


Other notes from the trip:
On the way back from dinner one night, we sample the local hole-in-the-wall-yet-very-famous tako yaki - octopus balls. They are puffy, creamy, scorching hot dough balls with a morsel of octopus inside. I can't say I was an instant fan, but they weren't repulsive either.

The money-washing shrine in Kamakura, where you put your yen in a basket and use the shrine's stream to "wash" it. Copious incense fires nearby help you (carefully) dry your damp yen. Money so washed is supposed to return in multiple, so we're advised to spend it wisely.

Mom and D and I hit the town, and check out the Art Deco Teian Art Museum. The exhibit there features export ceramics (not so interesting), but the building itself is a beautiful Art Deco confection, with really lovely details in things like the stairway railings and radiator covers. We also tromp about the garden a bit, deserted due to the rain showers, and smelling slightly of ginko.

We tackle another neighborhood museum, the Meguro Art Museum. It's a small space and no translations are available, and we're the only ones in the Museum. We eventually figure out that the works are by Japanese artists in the style of impressionist painters and have a reasonably good time.

I bought a few pairs of Japanese split-toe socks, with the idea that I like wearing my flip-flops in the house but sometimes it's chilly. They're working out grandly, and I'm wearing them now. Yay, warm feet!

Sumimasen...Om Nom Nom

This trip to Tokyo has been in the planning for something like a year now (or rather, in the discussing...planning only got serious about a month ago) with Mom and her friends. A stated goal of the trip has always been consumption of great quantities of high-quality Japanese food. So far, so good.

Day 1, dinner: We head into the neighborhood (Meguro-ku) for sashimi. As M says, "In Japan, even the worst sushi is better than almost anything you can get outside of Japan." We are each presented with an amuse bouche of a giant snail of some kind. I pass. I opt for the uni instead, which is as delicious as everyone always says it is. Essence of umami in a squishy orange blob.

Day 2, lunch: Noodles in Kamakura, suburb of temples. After a morning of slightly taxing hiking amongst the hills and temples, we duck into a noodle joint on the main drag and everyone has cold soba. Except for me. I need the protein, so opt for an oyaku-don (chicken & egg over rice) instead. Yum. On the way towards the train station after visiting the Big Buddha, we get green tea soft serve ice cream.

Day 2, dinner: An amazing feast at a place called Kamakurayama - ostensibly a "steak restaurant" in the hills above Kamakura, but somehow we manage to have the best sashimi I've ever had (this one's for you, Dad) as an appetizer - consisting mainly of shellfish I would ordinarily never eat but was fantastically, eye-openingly, fresh and delicious. The steak was a beautifully marbled slice of something divine. I'm drooling just thinking about it, and I don't eat much steak anymore.

Day 3, lunch: Roppongi Hills shopping center. We navigate our way through the slightly disorienting complex to a tempura restaurant...only to find that it's closed on Wednesdays. Doh! We navigate our way back into the main area, visually appraise the various restaurants on the food floor, and opt for sashimi. Super-bonus: weird black sweet mochi for dessert, covered in what we guess is peanut powder. Later that afternoon, between visiting the Sky View and the Mori Museum Turner Prize exhibit, we down fruit juice floats.

Day 3, dinner: We head once again into Meguro-ku for yakitori, squeeze into a local 25-seat restaurant, and pig out. We proceed to eat chicken wings, gizzards, livers, and cartilage(!); asparagus wrapped in bacon, tomato wrapped in bacon, potato, eggplant, shitake; pork rolled with shiso, ginko nuts. Yum, yum, and yum. We roll home afterwards.

Day 4, lunch: Shibuya district, Tokyu Honten (department store). We head up to their restaurant floor and once again visually appraise the options. We're planning to get tempura in Asakusa tomorrow, so we pass on the Everything Unagi place and the noodle joint and opt for more sushi. We sit at the bar and point; the chef is very friendly, and even faintly amused by our limited sushi vocabulary. "Is that ikura? Aaaaaaaa."

Tonight we're headed into Daikanyama for another local recommendation by a friend. Gonna have to work up an appetite, or at least work off some guilt at how many calories we're eating!

Sprouts!

K has been minding the garden since I took off for Asia. As part of my gardening experiment, I started a few pots of seeds - some basil, some dwarf sunflowers and, um, something else. Two weeks later, success! Sprouts! More on the veg plants soon...the pics are trapped in my camera that doesn't work on Japan's network.

Shanghai Update

Back in Shanghai for a few days before jaunting off to Tokyo. Not much new here - same old ever-present gray dust and grease, same frantic construction. Main differences: fewer knockoff vendors, more people speak English, and it was actually quite hot when I got off the plane - in the shiny NEW Terminal 2. Mmm...love that shiny new terminal smell.

K immediately went a bought himself a copy of GTA IV . His analysis: "I suck at Grand theft Auto IV. I think my problem is that I don't really want to speed, kill people, or break stuff."

Well, that's a relief.

Food and Wine

Last Saturday we went to the Kermit Lynch annual Oysters and Chablis outdoor food-fest in Berkeley. Dad was, of course, the instigator, so it only seems fair to show his happy sponsorship. From left to right: Champagne (not so great), Chablis (bought a bottle), and Aligote (very tasty). Turns out simple crisp whites go very nicely with salty things like oysters. At least, that's what I think Dad said. K stuck with sausages, and we split an strawberry-rhubarb galette and a salted chocolate cookie. Salted chocolate seems to be the New Hot Taste these days; that's the second restaurant we've been to in the last month with a salt+chocolate pairing.

Some more vacation tidbits:

Fresh housemade ricotta and buffalo mozzzarella in Campania. We had just finished visiting the temples at Paestum in the middle of buffalo mozzarela country. Serious five-star yum. On a slightly worrisome note, in addition to the garbage scandals in Campania (Napoli's "state"), there are concerns that illegal dumping is causing toxic chemicals like dioxin to get into groundwater and soil. Apparently some buffalo mozzarela has tested positive for dioxin, and the DOCG buffalo mozzarella consortium has of course been working to disprove/discredit these rumors. Their sales would plummet! Sadly, corruption is alive and thriving in southern Italy...or do they just hear about it more than we do in the US?

The fish market at Siracusa - much cheaper than Taormina, where we stayed. But we didn't have any way to bring pounds and pounds of shrimp home and cook them, which I'm sure Mom would have done given the chance. One vendor had a bucket of still-alive octopi, somewhat squeam-inducing.

Whoops, there went March. And most of April.

We're back! All the news that we make time to print. Or something.

K's had some excitement at work, where his studio was/wasn't closed, he did/didn't have a job or a project. He is, at this moment, still employed in Foster City and he even has a new project...but we can't talk about that. Officially. My work remains oddly the same yet ever-changing. I'm looking forward to a short break in early May, when I head to Asia for a week+ to hang out with Mom. I'll sneak in a few days in our Tokyo office while I'm there. The weather in the Bay Area is starting to change, showing signs of warmth (but not too much), and the trees on our street are sprouting happy green leaves. Except for the one in front of our house, which is literally retarded - it blooms later and sheds its leaves later than all the other trees on the street.

Here's a vignette from our January vacation: we were stopped in Amalfi on the way to Ravello for lunch and a stroll. The next bus wasn't due for an hour, so mom asked the local entrepreneurial taxi drivers what it would cost to get up to Ravello. We met: Elvis.

On the windy road up to Ravello, his stories of bad drivers on the narrow streets were accompanied by the sounds of "Heartbreak Hotel". He eventually had to turn it off because the road quality was so bad it caused the CD player to skip.

Groovy.

Dear lord, it's almost March!!!

Where has 2008 gone? Yikes!

Last weekend was awesome. Dad hosted his annual Burgundy tasting dinner, and actually invited us to attend! W00t! First time ev4r. There were 18 bottles of wine for 18 people, some 9 different wines (2 champagnes, 2 whites, 5 reds), and a delicious dinner. And great company! Many of the attendees hadn't seen us since our wedding, so it was great to catch up with them and witness their surprise and delight at K's "new" hair- and beardstyles. We arrived at 6:30 and didn't leave until 12:30. Decadence!

Then Sunday was another foodstravaganza: my Aunt E.'s Chinese New Year Party. Gong Shi Fah Zay! (Note that's the Shanghainese version of Gung Hay Fat Choy) She cooked up a storm, and Aunt J. and Mom brought even more to eat. The cousins and mini-cousins were there, and it was a great family gathering. Chinese New Year is the time to eat symbolic foods pertaining to luck, properity, and fertility. So there were lots of eggs, round things, things whose Chinese characters look or sound like money...between the fat and the family, I felt very rich! Super-bonus: my cousin Bob (who, like me, was born in the Year of the Rat - this year!) brought a bag of plush rats to hand out the the mini-cousins. Five fat, furry, buck-toothed, thick-tailed rats from IKEA. It was awesome.

This weekend we had dinner with one of K's colleagues: J and his family. We spent most of the dinner taking about games. Classic video games, new video games, board games. It was a complete geek-out. Lots of fun. K also saved the universe (playing Mass Effect), and I pulled a bazillion weeds out of our front yard. My back and legs muscles are really paying for it, but it makes me happy to have a neat(er) front yard. It was great weather, so there was also a lot of cat-like basking in the sun. With the not so cat-like New Yorker.


A quick Brussels restaurant redux:

Brasserie de la Gare - not too far from work and yummy Belgian food. Great interior decor.

Belga Queen - very chic and with very Belgian food. The bathrooms were unisex with transparent doors...until you turned the lock. I ate foie gras and woodpecker. Yum!

Kokob - the Ethiopian place. Tasty, but not as tasty as Cafe Colucci here in Berkeley. They did have a nice hibiscus, ginger, and something-else aperitif though.

The flight home was delayed at JFK (shock! dismay!) and the nice Delta folks comped us the movies and games. I spent most of the flight riveted by a Popcap game, something to do with flipping links to eliminate them. Damn those electronic crack dealers!

Next trip? Probably back to Brussels in April. Mom's muttering about going to Japan in May but the planning might be complicated.