Japan Adventure #7

For lunch today, I went out to a restaurant around the corner from our hotel. It had a buffet lunch special, which was 1000 yen per person. This is the same that I have been paying for a box lunch at the hotel, so that’s a good price, given the variety of food available. There was a noodle dish, some sweet and sour-style chicken, salad, miso soup, and a few other things. The food was good, but I don’t think I had anything all that new and different.

Tonight was Sushi. In a lot of ways, it’s not that much different from the standard US Sushi place, except that we went to a small place that we had mostly to ourselves, and had to take our shoes off and sit at a low table, somewhat like I imagine a traditional Japanese home might have. The restaurant had an English menu, so that made ordering a bit easier. They had a great selection of the standard sushi fare and rolls, but we also had a few things that are not as common. We had squid, which is one of the few types of sushi I have had that I didn’t really enjoy. It’s not that it tasted bad – it has a pretty neutral taste, but the very chewy/slimy texture was pretty foreign, and hard to get past, especially compared with the butter-soft, melt-in-your mouth texture that many other types of sushi has when it’s very very fresh. I had trouble suppressing a gag reflex, solely because of the texture, but I eventually got it down. We also had some sushi rolls topped with salmon roe, as well sea urchin, which was very soft and buttery, and light brown in color. We were able to get a plate of sashimi, which included Toro (from the fatty underbelly of the Tuna), and something I have never tried before, truly raw shrimp. While I have had sushi-style shrimp plenty of times, it is simply cooked, trimmed, and served cold, sort of like shrimp cocktail. This was shrimp served whole, on ice, and the body was split so that you could simply pull the tail out and eat it. It has a very different texture than the cooked shrimp, almost like a noodle. It tasted a bit more “briny” than a cooked shrimp, and the fact that I haven’t had any gastrointestinal distress (I’m writing this two days hence) tells me that it was VERY fresh. Topped that off with a good bit of Asahi beer, and it was a good evening. Given the quality of the sushi, 13700 Yen for 3 people including beer is pretty good in my opinion.