The Food

Breakfast on Yakushima.

Soup dumplings in a Chinese place.

This is an attempt at a tribute to ai! :) breakfast: green tea, dried persimmon, mikan & pastry from johan

Plain iced tea.

Food picked up from a depachika.

Neyn Tokyo donuts.

Depachika cakes.

Aloe drink. I like aloe yoghurt a lot.

Warabi mochi covered with kinako.

Mountain vegetables cold soba.

Matcha latte.

Simon’s lunch. Probably oyako donburi as that is one of his favourites :)

My dad trying out a crazy chocolate filled korokke in Kyoto.

Bento on the train.

Sweet potato ice cream in Fukuoka.

Macaron.

Fish on the train.

Ahh the food…. I decided to separate out my food shots into a post of its own. I wasn’t at all thorough about recording what we ate but these are some pictures that I took along the way. The food is one of the main things that I have missed since being back.

Ok so let’s get this straight right away, Japan has a fantastic level of quality of food. It is not hard to find a delicious meal in any budget range, in fact I would say it was very difficult to find a bad meal! There is no question that if I lived in Japan I would cook far less (even though I love cooking) because of the availability of high quality affordable interesting food. It is also the specialisation that is so different, travelling around the country there are so many regional specialities. You can actually be a food tourist and try something that is only made there. Also generally there seem to be much more specialisations in restaurants, for example specific gyoza restaurants, specific omelette restaurants, this is pretty mind blowing if you come from a city where ‘Italian’ or ‘Chinese’ is as specialised as it gets. The other (sorry to re-use this phrase but it is so true) mind blowing thing is the general level of food and choice that is available outside of restaurants, the snacks from combinis (corner shops), cakes from bakeries, bentos on the train (nice food on a train!!! hear me British Rail), and the depachikas, wonderful.

I could go on and on about drinks too. The vending machines that vend hot cans, the screw cap cans, sake, beer, the iced tea, the matcha lattes, the green teas.. I brought so much tea back in my suitcase that customs might have thought I was an importer-exporter if they had looked!

I avoid eating meat but I do eat fish, I think if you were a pure vegetarian you might find things a little tricky sometimes in restaurants that are not specialist vegetarian/vegan. Even if you are not chomping down on big pieces of meat I think there is quite a bit of hidden meat as lots of the stocks used will have some element of fish, chicken, or pork. We found too in a couple of places where if it said something like ‘vegetables and noodles’ it would mean chicken with lots of vegetables and noodles, the chicken was a given. If you eat fish then you should mostly be fine, in fact if you like fish you will be in heaven!