( Estimated reading time: 5 min )

FOOD

Have you ever tried dishes with a great taste although there were barely any spices added?

>>>This is Japan

It’s very difficult to remember and name all the dishes we’ve tried during our stay in Japan. Nevertheless, once you travel there, you’ll learn that the cuisine has way more to offer than just sushi. Fresh ingredients, salad for breakfast, tasty sashimi, awesome tempura, superb miso soup, and last but not least  –  sweets with matcha flavour. After three weeks we had a pretty big collection of food pictures, so I decided to post some of them.

And so, we’ve got here a dish consisting of chicken, vegetables, and lotus root. I still remember how delicious it was.

I guess, I had many food stereotypes before flying to Japan. The must-have for breakfast is bread. The best time for fish is Christmas Eve. The only thing you can mix with hot milk foam is coffee. Hence,  I was very surprised how quickly I’d changed my food habits in Japan. It became normal to us to have soup or salad for breakfast and drink matcha latte instead of cappuccino.

Udon noodles. Quite difficult to eat if you don’t use chopsticks too often. After some couple of days each of us mastered the art of eating with chopsticks. Other guests in the restaurant were secretly observing us and Haru and her family were proud that we, gaijin (foreigners), were so brave and kept fighting the food with chopsticks. We also mastered the art of making really loud noises when eating a soup 🙂

Vegetarian curry from the Buddhist cuisine in Koya-san.

Ordering food in Japan

The best thing about ordering food is that even if the menu is only in Japanese and you have no Japanese friends around you, and you have no idea how to read it, you can always point out the dish in the menu or in… the shop window. Many restaurants present their dishes in a form of plastic plates with plastic foods in a windowed cabinet outside the shop. This way you know what they serve and one incredible thing: the food you order will look exactly like the artificial one and will be edible.

This deer seems hungry. No wonder, these foodies look very real and yummy. Have a look and pick your dish!

Sometimes the menu is quite limited, like in this ramen shop in Tokyo. Haruka explained to me that they all are different dishes.

Food in ryokan

Well, after 2-weeks stay, we attempted to have some spaghetti but we immediately regretted having Italian food in Japan. It was anything but tasty. But Japanese food…look at some of the dishes from our 13-course dinner (that lasted 3 hours!) during our stay in the ryokan – a traditional Japanese guest house.

Believe it or not: this is bamboo

Here we can see sashimi. The green paste cube ended up in a soup.

Here I’m waiting for my soup to get the correct temperature to start putting other ingredients inside. In my opinion, the best part of having food in Japan is the fact that some of the dishes you need to cook by yourself. This was so much fun. However, even more fun was to find out what’s inside and how to eat it.

More sashimi. Always so fresh and tasty. After dinner, we were relaxing in the onsen.

This was our breakfast in the ryokan on the following day. Although there no more 13 courses, it was as fancy as the dinner.

Fascination: matcha

You know that green tea is very popular in Asia, don’t you? And you know that Japanese like tea. And here comes the magical tea: matcha. Matcha is actually a green tea powder that is being used not only for drinking. In fact, in Japan, many, many things are matcha flavoured. After coming from the trip, I started ordering matcha powder online and drinking it almost every day.

We’ve ordered matcha and cake. Can’t you see the cake? Well, it took us also some seconds to realise that these were cakes.

Ice cream with matcha flavour. And red beans. Matcha and red beans are a great duo. Yummy!

Even pastries in this French boulangerie in Kyoto were green. Matcha is everywhere.

Matcha as a snack? No problem! There’s KitKat with matcha flavour. And of course, with red beans 🙂 I brought many of such KitKats, so that everyone in Europe could try it. Some people loved it, some spit it out… I suppose, one needs to get used to this specific taste of matcha.

My top 3 picks

Everything was tasty in Japan. Everything. And nobody has paid me for saying this here. Everything. Because all the dishes were so yummy, it’s hard to tell which one was the best. However, I decided to introduce these three dishes below. It’s not only about their tastiness but about the way they were prepared or served.

3. Rice with unagi (eel) under omelette. The chef showed us the eels swimming in the barrels. This was my first time seeing and eating an eel.

2. This is one of the sweets served on Haruka’s wedding. I love the idea of the dripping sweet sauce which completely changes the taste of the whole dish. Amazing!

1. And the Oscar goes to…fish! Yes, this fish is still alive! You might think, this is cruel but can the fish be fresher than that? One of our dreams in Japan was to try this kind of food. We had it in a restaurant in Amanohashidate. First of all, we picked our fish swimming in a pool, then the owner caught it, and finally, her husband prepared for us three dishes made of this fish. This is the first, alive version: sashimi.

And here comes the sadness: when you’re back from Japan, you start missing the food. You probably don’t like anymore the taste of sushi in Europe. Except you’re lucky and know some good sushi place or even a Japanese restaurant in your town. Well, my town doesn’t have any of them but I keep ordering matcha powder online 🙂