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EATING AND DRINKING |
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One of the great pleasures of a trip to Japan is exploring the full
and exotic range of Japanese food. Whilst dishes such as sushi and
tempura are well-known the world over these days, there are hundreds of
other types of local cuisine that will be new discoveries to all but the
most sophisticated of Western palates. Many Japanese recipes embody a
subtlety of flavour and mixture of texture rarely found in Western
cuisine, and the presentation is often so exquisite that it feels an
insult to the chef to eat what has been so beautifully crafted.
Throughout the text of this Guide, language boxes give the English,
romaji (for pronunciation) and Japanese characters for the names of
restaurants and bars, unless they are clearly signed in English or
romaji .
Picking at delicate morsels with chopsticks is only one small part of
the dining experience, though. Robust and cheap dishes such as hearty
bowls of ramen noodles or the comforting concoction kare raisu (curry
rice) are staples of the Japanese diet, along with burgers and fried
chicken from ubiquitous Western-style fast-food outlets. All the major
cities have an extensive range of restaurants serving Western and other
Asian dishes, with Tokyo and Osaka in particular being major-league
destinations for foodies.
With a little planning, eating out need not be too expensive. Lunch is
always the best-value meal of the day, seldom costing more than ¥2000.
If you fuel up earlier in the day, a cheap bowl of noodles for dinner
could carry you through the night, especially if you're planning on
drinking, which is never a cheap affair
Meals
Breakfast is generally served early (from around 7am to 9am) at most
hotels, ryokan and minshuku, with a traditional meal consisting of a gut-busting
combination of miso soup, fish, pickles and rice. Western-style
breakfasts, when available, seldom resemble what you might eat at home,
and usually involve wedges of thick white tasteless bread, and some form
of eggs and salad. Away from home and hotels, many Japanese prefer a
quick kohii and tosuto (coffee and toast) to start the day, which is
served at most cafés on the "morning-service" menu.
Restaurants generally open for lunch around 11.30am and finish serving
at 2pm. Try to avoid the rush hour from noon to 1pm, when most office
workers eat. Lacklustre sandwiches are best passed over in favour of a
full meal at a restaurant, all of which offer set menus (called teishoku
), usually around ¥1000 for a couple of courses, plus a drink, and
rarely topping ¥2000 per person. At any time of day you can snack in
stand-up noodle bars - often found around train stations - and beside
the revolving conveyor belts at cheap sushi shops.
Dinner , the main meal of the day, can be eaten as early as 6pm, with
many places taking last orders around 9pm. The major cities are about
the only option for late-night dining. In a traditional Japanese meal ,
you'll usually be served all your courses at the same time, but at more
formal places, rice and soup are always served last. Heavy puddings are
almost unheard of in traditional Japanese restaurants, and you are most
likely to finish your meal with a piece of seasonal fruit , such as
melon, orange, persimmon or nashi (a crisp type of pear), or an or ice
cream (if it's green, it will be flavoured with matcha tea).
At tea ceremonies , small intensely sweet wagashi cakes are served,
which are prettily decorated sweetmeats, usually made of pounded rice,
red azuki beans or chestnuts. Wagashi can also be bought from specialist
shops and department stores and make lovely gifts. Western-style cakes
available in kissaten are often disappointingly synthetic, although
there are pastry shops across Japan that specialize in tasty nibbles (not
to mention the fab doughnut cafés, Mister Donuts ).
Bento: The packed lunch
Every day millions of Japanese trot off to school or their workplace
with a bento stashed in their satchel or briefcase. Bento are boxed
lunches which can be made at home or bought from shops all over Japan.
Traditional bento include rice, pickles, grilled fish or meat and
vegetables. There are thousands of permutations depending on the season
and the location in Japan , with some of the best being available from
department stores - there's always a model or picture to show you what's
inside the box. At their most elaborate, bento served in classy Japanese
restaurants will come in beautiful multi-layered lacquered boxes, each
compartment containing some exquisite culinary creation.
It's worth searching out empty bento boxes in the household section of
department stores, since they make unusual souvenirs .
Where to eat and drink
One of the most common types of Japanese restaurant is the shokudo (eating
place), which serves a range of traditional and generally inexpensive
dishes. Usually found near train and subway stations and in busy
shopping districts, shokudo can be identified by the displays of plastic
meals in their windows. Other restaurants ( resutoran ) usually serve
just one type of food, for example sushi and sashimi ( sushi-ya ), or
yakitori ( yakitori-ya ), or specialize in a particular style of cooking,
such as kaiseki (haute cuisine) or teppan'yaki , where food is prepared
on a steel griddle, either by yourself or a chef.
All over Japan, but particularly in the city suburbs, you'll find bright
and breezy family restaurants , such as Royal Host and Dennys ,
specifically geared to family dining. These American-style operations
serve Western and Japanese food that can be on the bland side, but are
invariably keenly priced. They also have menus illustrated with
photographs to make ordering easy. If you can't decide what to eat, head
for the restaurant floors of major department stores , where you'll find
a collection of Japanese and Western operations, often outlets of
reputable local restaurants. Many will have plastic food displays in
their front windows and daily special menus.
Western and other ethnic food restaurants proliferate in the cities, and
it's seldom a problem finding popular foreign cuisines such as Italian (
Itaria-ryori ), French ( Furansu-ryori ), Korean ( Kankoku-ryori ),
Chinese ( Chpgoku - or Chpka-ryori ) or Thai ( Tai-ryori ) food. However,
the recipes are often adapted to suit Japanese tastes, so be prepared
for the dishes to be less spicy than you may be used to.
Coffee shops ( kissaten ) are something of an institution in Japan,
often designed to act as an alternative lounge or business meeting place
for patrons starved of space at home or the office. Others have weird
designs or specialize in, say, jazz or comic books. For this reason, in
many of the old-style kissaten a speciality coffee or tea will usually
set you back a pricey ¥500 or more. In recent years a caffeine-fuelled
revolution has taken place, with cheap and cheerful operations like
Doutor and Mister Donuts springing up across the country, serving drinks
and nibbles at reasonable prices; search these places out for a cheap
breakfast or snack.
The best-value and liveliest places to drink are the izakaya pub-type
restaurants, which also serve an extensive menu of small dishes. The
major breweries run reliable izakaya chains, such as Sapporo's Lions
Beer Hall and Kirin's Kirin City , which are generally large with a
boozy atmosphere. The traditional izakaya are rather rustic looking,
although in the cities you'll come across more modern, trendy operations
aimed at the youth market. One type of traditional izakaya is an aka-chochin,
named after the red lanterns hanging outside, with another variation
being the robatayaki, which serves food grilled over charcoal. Most
izakaya open around 6pm and shut down around midnight. From mid-June to
late August, outdoor beer gardens flourish across Japan's main cities
and towns; look out for the fairy lights on the roofs of buildings, or
in street-level gardens and plazas.
Regular bars, or nomiya , often consist of little more than a short
counter and a table, and are usually run by a mama-san (or sometimes a
papa-san ), a unique breed who both charm and terrorize their customers.
Prices at nomiya are high and, although you're less likely to be ripped
off if you speak some Japanese, it's no guarantee. All such bars operate
a bottle keep system for regulars to stash a bottle of drink with their
name on it behind the bar. It's generally best to go to such bars with a
regular, since they tend to operate like mini-clubs, with non-regulars
being given the cold shoulder. Nomiya will stay open to the early hours,
provided there are customers.
If there's live music in a bar you'll pay for it through higher drinks
prices or a cover charge . Some regular bars also have cover charges,
although there's plenty of choice among those that don't, so always
check before buying your drink. Bars specializing in karaoke are not
difficult to spot; if you decide to join in, there's usually a small fee
to pay and at least a couple of songs with English lyrics to choose from,
typically Yesterday and My Way .
Ordering and etiquette
On walking into most restaurants in Japan you'll be greeted by the word
Irasshaimase (Welcome), often shouted out with brio by the entire staff.
In response, you should indicate with your fingers how many places are
needed. After being seated you'll be handed an oshibori , a damp, folded
hand towel, usually steaming-hot, but sometimes offered refreshingly
cold in summer. A chilled glass of water ( mizu ) will also usually be
brought automatically.
The most daunting aspect of eating out in Japan comes next - deciphering
the menu. We've included a basic glossary of essential words and phrases
in this section; for more detail, try Japanese: A Rough Guide Phrasebook
, or the comprehensive What's What in Japanese Restaurants by Robb
Satterwhite (¥1200; Kodansha). In addition, it's always worth asking if
an English menu is available ( eigo no menyp ga arimasu-ka ). If a
restaurant has a plastic-food window display, use it to point to what
you want. If all else fails, look round at what your fellow diners are
eating and point out what you fancy. Remember that the teishoku (set
meal) or kosu (course) meals offer the best value, and look out for the
word "Viking" ( Baikingu ), which means a help-yourself buffet.
Chopsticks ( hashi ) come with their own etiquette; don't stick them
upright in your rice - an allusion to death. If you're taking food from
a shared plate, turn the chopsticks round and use the other end to pick
up the food. Also never cross your chopsticks when you put them on the
table or use them to point at things. When it comes to eating soupy
noodles, you can relax and enjoy a good slurp; it's also fine to bring
the bowl to your lips and drink directly from it.
When you want the bill , say Okanjo kudasai (Bill please); the usual
form is to pay at the till on the way out, not to leave the money on the
table. There's no need to leave a tip, but it's polite to say gochiso-sama
deshita (That was delicious) to the waiter or chef. Only the most
upmarket Western restaurants and top hotels will add a service charge (typically
ten percent).
Kiseki-Ryvri: Japanese haute cuisine
At the top end of the eating spectrum is Japan's finest and most
expensive style of cooking, kaiseki-ryori , comprising a series of small,
carefully balanced and expertly presented dishes. It began as an
accompaniment to the tea ceremony and still retains the meticulous
design of that simple, elegant ritual. At the best kaiseki-ryori
restaurants the atmosphere of the room in which the meal is served is
just as important as the food; you'll sit on tatami , a scroll decorated
with calligraphy will hang in the tokonoma (alcove) and a waitress in
kimono will serve each course on beautiful china and lacquerware. For
such a sublime experience you should expect to pay ¥10,000 or more for
dinner, although a lunchtime kaiseki bento is a more affordable option.
Sushi, sashimi and seafood
Many gaijin falsely assume that all sushi is fish, but the name actually
refers to the way the rice is prepared with vinegar, and you can also
get sushi dishes with egg or vegetables. Fish and seafood are, of course,
essential and traditional elements of Japanese cuisine, and range from
the seaweed used in miso-shiru (soup) to the slices of tuna, salmon and
squid laid across the slabs of sushi rice. Slices of raw fish and
seafood on their own are generally called sashimi .
In a traditional sushi-ya each plate is freshly made by a team of chefs
working in full view of the customers. If you're not sure of the
different types to order, point at the trays on show in the glass
chiller cabinets at the counter, or go for the nigiri-zushi mori-awase ,
a slab of perhaps six or seven different types of fish and seafood on
fingers of sushi rice. Other types of sushi include maki-zushi , rolled
in a sheet of crisp seaweed, and chirashi-zushi , a layer of rice topped
with fish, vegetables and cooked egg.
While a meal at a sushi-ya averages ¥5000 (or much more at high-class
joint) at kaiten-zushi shops, where you choose whatever sushi dish you
want from the continually replenished conveyor belt, the bill will
rarely stretch beyond ¥1500 per person. In kaiten-zushi , plates are
colour-coded according to how much each one costs, and are totted up at
the end for the total cost of the meal. If you can't see what you want,
you can ask the chefs to make it for you. Green tea is free, and you can
usually order beer or sake.
If you want to try the infamous fugu , or blowfish, you'll generally
need to go to a specialist fish restaurant, which can be easily
identified by the picture or model of a balloon-like fish outside.
Fugu's reputation derives from its potentially fatally poisonous nature
rather than its bland, rubbery taste. The actual risk of dropping dead
at the counter is virtually nil - at least from fugu poisoning - and
you're more likely to keel over at the bill, which (cheaper cultivated
fugu apart) will be in the ¥10,000 per-person bracket.
A more affordable and tasty seafood speciality is unagi , or eel,
typically basted with a thick sauce of soy and sake, sizzled over
charcoal and served on a bed of rice. This dish is particularly popular
in summer, when it's believed to provide strength in the face of
sweltering heat. Restaurants specializing in crab (kani) dishes are also
popular and are easily identified by the models of giant crabs with
wiggling pincers over the doorways.
Food and drink language lesson
To begin, select a topic in the navigation bar to the left
Noodles
One of Japan's most popular and best-value meals is a bowl of noodles ,
the three main types being soba, udon and ramen. Soba are thin noodles
made of brown buckwheat flour and are particularly ubiquitous in the
central Honshu prefectures of Gifu and Nagano, though available all over
Japan. If the noodles are green, they've been made with green tea powder.
There are two main styles of serving soba - hot and cold. Kake-soba is
served in a clear hot broth, often with added ingredients such as tofu,
vegetables and chicken. Cold noodles piled on a bamboo screen bed, with
a cold sauce for dipping (which can be flavoured with chopped spring
onions, seaweed flakes and wasabi - grated green horseradish paste) is
called zaru-soba or mori-soba . In more traditional restaurants you'll
also be served a flask of the hot water used to cook the noodles, which
is added to the dipping sauce to make a soup drink once you've finished
the soba.
In most soba restaurants, udon will also be on the menu. These chunkier
noodles are made with plain wheat flour and are served in the same hot
or cold styles as soba. In Nagoya, a variation on udon is kishimen ,
flattened white noodles, while the Shikoku and Okayama-ken version is
known as sanuki-udon . For yakisoba and yakiudon dishes the noodles are
fried, often in a thick soy sauce, along with seaweed flakes, meat and
other vegetables.
Ramen , or stringy yellow noodles, were originally imported from China
but have now become part and parcel of Japanese cuisine. They're usually
served in big bowls in a steaming oily soup, which typically comes in
three varieties: miso (flavoured with fermented bean paste); shio (a
salty soup); or shoyu (a broth made with soy sauce). A range of
garnishes, including seaweed, bamboo shoots, pink and white swirls of
fish paste, and pork slices, often finish off the dish, which you can
spice up with added garlic or a red pepper mixture. As with the other
types of noodle, many regions of Japan have their own local versions of
the dish, such as Sapporo, which specializes in the rich bata-kon (butter-
and corn-flavoured) ramen. Wherever you eat ramen, though, you can
usually get gyoza , fried half-moon-shaped dumplings filled with pork or
seafood, to accompany them.
Rice dishes
Although fluffy, white tasteless bread is becoming more and more popular
in Japan, it will never replace the ever-present bowl of rice as the
staple food. Rice also forms the basis of both the alcoholic drink sake
and mochi , a chewy dough made from pounded glutinous rice, usually
prepared and eaten during festivals such as New Year.
A traditional meal isn't considered finished until a bowl of rice has
been eaten, and the grain is an integral part of several cheap snack-type
dishes. Onigiri are palm-sized triangles of rice with a filling of soy,
tuna, salmon roe, or sour umeboshi (pickled plum), all wrapped up in a
sheet of crisp nori (seaweed). They can be bought at convenience stores
for around ¥150 each and are ingeniously packaged so that the nori stays
crisp until the onigiri is unwrapped. Donburi is a bowl of rice with
various toppings, such as chicken and egg ( oyako-don , literally "parent
and child"), strips of stewed beef ( gyu-don ) or katsu-don , which come
with a tonkatsu pork cutlet.
Finally, the Japanese equivalent of beans on toast is curry rice , which
bears little relation to the Indian dish. What goes into the sludgy
brown sauce that makes up the curry is a mystery and you'll probably
search in vain for evidence of any beef or chicken in the so-called bifu
kare and chikin kare . However, the dish most definitely qualifies as a
top comfort food and cheap snack.
Meat dishes
Meat is alien to traditional Japanese cuisine, but in the last century
dishes using beef, pork and chicken have become a major part of the
national diet. Beefburger and fried chicken ( kara-age ) fast-food
outlets are just as common these days as noodle bars. The more expensive
steak restaurants serving up dishes like sukiyaki (thin beef slices
cooked in a soy, sugar and sake broth) and shabu-shabu (beef and
vegetable slices cooked at the table in a light broth and dipped in
various sauces) are popular treats.
Like sukiyaki and shabu-shabu , nabe (the name refers to the cooking pot)
stews are prepared at the table over a gas or charcoal burner by diners
who throw a range of raw ingredients (meat or fish along with vegetables)
into the pot to cook. As things cook they're fished out, and the last
thing to be immersed is usually some type of noodle. Chanko-nabe is the
famous chuck-it-all-in stew used to beef up sumo wrestlers.
Other popular meat dishes include: tonkatsu , breadcrumb-covered slabs
of pork, crisply fried and usually served on a bed of shredded cabbage
with a brown semi-sweet sauce; and yakitori , delicious skewers of
grilled chicken and sometimes other meats and vegetables. At the
cheapest yakitori-ya , you'll pay for each skewer individually. Kushiage
is a combination of tonkatsu and yakitori dishes, where skewers of meat,
seafood and vegetables are coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried.
Vegetarian dishes
Despite being the home of macrobiotic cooking, vegetarianism isn't a
widely practised or fully understood concept in Japan. You might ask for
a vegetarian ( saishoku ) dish in a restaurant and still be served
something with meat or fish in it. That said, Japan has bequeathed some
marvellous vegetarian foods to the world. Top of the list is tofu ,
compacted cakes of soya-bean curd, which comes in two main varieties,
momengoshi-dofu (cotton tofu), so called because of its fluffy texture,
and the smoother, more fragile kinugoshi-dofu (silk tofu). The most
popular tofu dish you'll come across is hiya yakko , a small slab of
chilled tofu topped with grated ginger, spring onions, dried bonito
flakes and soy sauce. Buddhist cuisine, shojin-ryori , concocts whole
menus based around different types of tofu dishes; although they can be
expensive it's worth searching out the specialist restaurants serving
this type of food, particularly in major temple cities, such as Kyoto,
Nara and Nagano.
Miso (fermented bean paste) is another crucial ingredient of Japanese
cooking, used in virtually every meal, if only in the soup miso-shiru .
It often serves as a flavouring in fish and vegetable dishes and comes
in two main varieties, the light shiro-miso and the darker, stronger-tasting
aka-miso . One of the most delicious ways of eating the gooey paste is
hoba miso , where the miso is mixed with vegetables, roasted over a
charcoal brazier, and served on a large magnolia leaf. This dish is a
speciality of Takayama, where vegetarians should also sample the sansai
(mountain vegetable) dishes.
One question all foreigners in Japan are asked is "can you eat natto ?".
This sticky, stringy fermented bean paste has a strong taste and
unfamiliar texture, which can be off-putting to Western palates. It's
worth trying at least once, though, and is usually served in little tubs
at breakfast, to be mixed with mustard and soy sauce and eaten with
rice.
Scraping into the vegetarian category as long as you avoid the fish
versions is oden , a warming winter dish that tastes much more delicious
than it looks. Oden is large chunks of food, usually on skewers,
simmered in a thin broth, and often served from portable carts ( yatai )
on street corners. The main ingredients are blocks of tofu, daikon (a
giant radish), konnyaku (a hard jelly made from a root vegetable), konbu
(seaweed), hard-boiled eggs and fish cakes, and all are best eaten with
a smear of fiery English-style mustard.
Other cuisines
Said to have to been introduced to Japan in the sixteenth century by
Portuguese traders, tempura are lightly battered pieces of seafood and
vegetables. Best eaten piping hot from the fryer, tempura are dipped in
a bowl of light sauce ( ten-tsuyu ) mixed with grated daikon radish and
sometimes ginger. At specialist tempura restaurants, you'll generally
order the teishoku set meal, which includes whole prawns, squid,
aubergines, mushrooms and the aromatic leaf shiso .
Japan's equivalent of the pizza is okonomiyaki , a fun, cheap meal which
you can often assemble yourself. A pancake batter is used to bind
shredded cabbage and other vegetables, with either seafood or meat. If
it's a DIY restaurant, you'll mix the individual ingredients and cook
them on a griddle in the middle of the table. Otherwise, you can sit at
the kitchen counter watching the chefs at work. Once cooked, okonomiyaki
is coated in a sweet brown sauce and/or mayonnaise and dusted off with
dried seaweed and flakes of bonito fish, which twist and curl in the
rising heat. At most okonomiyaki restaurants you can also get fried
noodles ( yaki-soba ). In addition, okonomiyaki , along with its
near-cousin takoyaki (battered balls of octopus), are often served from
yatai carts at street festivals.
Authentic Western restaurants are now commonplace across Japan, but
there is also a hybrid style of cooking known as yoshoku (Western food)
that developed during the Meiji era at the turn of the century. Often
served in shokudo, yoshoku dishes include omelettes with rice (
omu-ryisu ), deep-fried potato croquettes ( korokke ) and hamburger
steaks doused in a thick sauce ( hanbygu ). The contemporary version of
yoshoku is mukokuseki or "no-nationality" cuisine, a mishmash of world
cooking styles usually found in trendy izakaya .
Drinks
The Japanese are enthusiastic social drinkers, several shared bottles of
beer or flasks of sake being the preferred way for salarymen and -women
to wind down after work. It's not uncommon to see totally inebriated
people slumped in the street, though on the whole drunkenness rarely
leads to violence.
If you want a non-alcoholic drink, you'll never be far from a coffee
shop ( kissaten ) or a jidohanbaiki (vending machine), where you can get
a vast range of canned soft drinks, teas and coffees, both hot and cold,
though canned tea and coffee is often very sweet. Cans from machines
typically cost ¥110 and hot drinks are identified by a red stripe under
the display. It's worth noting that vending machines selling beer, sake
and other alcoholic drinks shut down at 11pm, the same time as liquor
stores. A few 24-hour convenience stores may sell alcohol after this
time; look for the kanji for sake outside.
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