I'm now in Beijing visiting Mike. I've been down with the sickness for the past week though - a stomach illness of some kind. It really sucked, and I couldn't eat a whole lot or really enjoy my food in general. Anyway, I had one more very interesting set of photos from HK, but I left those on my desktop back home, so I'll just move ahead to Japan for now.
A small intro to the Japan trip may be helpful, I guess. Longtime readers of the site will notice that my family tries to have a yearly reunion trip type of thing. Last year, it was our trip to France, which included a lot of awesome meals that were tons of fun to blog about. This year, we went to Japan, and with a bigger group than ever before. There were 11 of us in total: me, my dad, his four sisters, 2 of their husbands, my grandma, my grandma's sister, and my little cousin. As you might imagine, planning activities and meals for 11 people was a bit of a logistical nightmare, but my dad (as usual our official trip organizer) was up to the task. Fortunately, everything ended up working out pretty smoothly.
As usual, the focus of the trip was food. We spent 4 nights in Tokyo and 3 in Kyoto, so we had little time to hit all of the different types of Japanese meals. Some of you might know that Japanese food is my official Favorite Cuisine (the amount of it that you see on here is no coincidence). In fact, it was a 2003 trip to Sapporo, Japan that inspired me to actually start the site, so you can imagine my delight when I found out I was going to Japan again. I've been wanting to blog about this stuff for years now.
The cool thing about Japan is that there is room for specialization within Japanese food. What I mean is that they have restaurants that specifically serve sushi, tempura, ramen, sukiyaki, shabu shabu, tonkatsu, or whatever other yummy Japanese delight you can think of. Back home, we have sushi-specific places and ramen-specific places, and that's about it. Having done no research whatsoever, I've concluded it's simply because there just isn't enough of a market for specific types of Japanese cuisine. We have Japanese restaurants that serve all kinds of stuff at once because they can't survive otherwise (with sushi and ramen places being the exceptions). I guess that explanation makes enough sense to me that I haven't looked into it much further, and have decided that I just need to go to Japan as much as possible for the rest of my life to get my Japanese food fix.
Our first meal in Tokyo (and I mean like, 2 hours after we got off the plane) was at Hanamura, a tempura shop in Akasaka that was established in 1921. It's a family-run place, and we had the man of the house (photo of him at work) along with one of his sons cooking for us. Japanese tempura pretty much exemplifies what I said in the last paragraph. Only in Japan will you find restaurants that focus solely on tempura, and serve it the proper way.
The beauty of Japanese tempura is freshness. At Hanamura, the room we ate in (another picture with a slightly better view and both father and son) was basically a center cooking area with a counter built around it. Every item is cooked individually and then immediately served, like at a sushi bar. You eat each piece as it's made, so nothing ever gets cold. The concept is simple enough, and it makes a world of difference. At any proper tempura house, you sit at a counter, and the chef behind it is individually battering ingredients, frying them, and serving them to you throughout the entire meal. Usually, you pick from a few choices of set menus. At Hanamura, we got the best one at 11,000 yen, which is actually be quite a bargain for the meal we ended up getting, especially for a tempura place in Tokyo. Anyway, I've written a lot already - on to the food. 
sesame tofu We were first given an appetizer of cold tofu. It was actually quite rich, with a pretty strong sesame flavor and a thick texture. Not bad, but I was ready to eat some fried stuff. 
tempura sauce with daikon The anticipation continued to build when they gave us the sauce. Tempura sauce in general is one of my favorite sauces in the world - it's the type of stuff I could probably put on rice and eat plain. It's also one of the things each individual tempura house takes a ton of pride in. Each place will make the sauce their own way (as well as make their own batter), and so the flavor varies slightly from restaurant to restaurant. I've heard that the old tempura houses guard their secret family recipes the way that I guard... well, I guess I don't have anything that valuable to guard. In any case, I didn't ask for the exact recipe. I also love adding a healthy dose daikon, which is constantly replenished. Hanamura's sauce had a wonderful, light flavor - not too salty but just right. 
prawn Prawns are, of course, the primary tempura ingredient, and they got us started right away. The prawns they served were quite small - easily edible in 2 or 3 bites - and had a great shellfish flavor. The tails were trimmed well enough that I could just eat the whole thing. The batter was light, crispy, and piping hot. Absolutely delicious. I had about 5 or 6 of these before we moved on. 
shiso leaf Next up was a tempura shiso leaf. Nice, refreshing, herby flavor. My Uncle Jack didn't know what shiso was before the trip, but we'd all become very familiar with it over the next week... 
tai and ika sashimi At this point they served us a small plate of sashimi. I was too eager and ate some before I snapped the photo. It was pretty good - the ika had no fishiness like most of the ika back home, and the tai was nice and bouncy. 
ayu Ayu is a very small white fish that was in season during our stay. This is the fish served whole, with some of the skeleton and the head removed. It was just delicious, with a nice balance of crunchy bits and soft meat. 
asparagus Asparagus was pretty good, though I almost burned myself eating this one. Very hot and crisp. 
lotus root Lotus root, so often left to boil for a long time in Chinese soups, turned out to be a great tempura ingredient. It was very lightly cooked and actually crunchy. 
pumpkin The pumpkin was also excellent. It managed to retain a bit of solidity, which I think is always the biggest problem with starchy tempura things. In the US they always give you these yams that have gotten all mushy and gross. This pumpkin was just the right thickness and texture. 
kisu Kisu is a type of smelt, and actually a fairly common tempura ingredient. I liked it a lot - it has a very delicate, flaky white meat that does a great job capturing tempura sauce. 
anago Anago, aka conger eel, is probably my favorite (along with prawns). It's the primary tempura fish in my mind - meaty, crispy, and always big. It's also served sort of like the main dish, since the prawns go first. This anago was just great, with a flaky texture and delicate eel taste. People were starting to get full so by now I was happily cleaning up other people's servings... :) 
eggplant Next we got these cute tiny Japanese eggplants, which are more squashlike than a typical American eggplant. Since they're so small, the skin to flesh ratio is higher, which gives it more of a veggie-like texture, and a nice strong eggplant flavor. 
string beans Hanamura fried the stringbeans in groups of 3 or 4, which made for big stringbean fritters. The beans themselves were very fresh and crunchy. 
pickles At this point, the main frying portion was winding down so they started bringing out the end of the meal. Japanese people like to eat some soup, rice, and pickles at the end. These veggies were very lightly pickled and quite refreshing. 
fried seafood cake At the end of a tempura meal, they always make this awesome fried cake thing of mixed seafood, and serve it on top of rice drizzled with a bit of tempura sauce. This was mainly small shrimp and scallops. You can't make all the stuff out I guess, but rest assured there's a lot of seafood mixed in there. This had more scallops than versions I've had in the past, which is great because I love scallops. 
miso soup And of course, we got some miso soup. This was red miso and had a whole slew of different mushrooms in it. 
orange and melon They finished us off simply with some orange and honey dew. I wasn't gonna post this but the fruits were so damn sweet that I had to. Japan really has the best melons I've ever had. Actually, in the food sections of department stores, they sell ridiculously expensive melons that can cost up to like US$200 each. I've never had one that expensive, but this melon was good enough for me. Hanamura was an awesome experience, and a great first meal in Japan. Battered frying in its highest form - what more could you ask for?
