Sonoji 浅ノ字 My wife and I just finished a wonderful lunch of tenpura and soba at Sonoji, a Michelin one-star restaurant that is only a few second walk from our home in Ningyōchō. When Sonoji first opened I often went for soba lunch, with a piece or two or three of ala carte tenpura. But those days are long gone; it is now course only, although in the evening there are two choices for the course, one […]
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KYOTO DINING This past weekend my wife and I decided to go down to Kyoto to celebrate the 2682nd anniversary of the birth of Japan. At least according to the ancient histories. The trip was actually more about taking advantage of the current dearth of foreign tourists and an opportunity to try out some restaurants for the first time. And for my wife, a chance to do hakamaeri (visiting her parent’s graves). She easily made reservations at […]
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The other night I had dinner with my wife and a couple of friends at a nice little soba izakaya in Meguro called Kawasemi (川せみ). The occasion was to have a night out with ‘Y’’ a Japanese friend who now lives in New York who had to come to Japan due to her ninety-five year old mother’s recent death, the dinner not just an opportunity to honor her mother, who the rest of us all knew, but […]
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WASABI ENDANGERED!!! The front page of today’s (February 9, 2022) New York Times International Edition featured a story that took up over half the page about Japanese wasabi being endangered, mainly because of environmental factors (“A Fiery Delicacy in Peril”). Native to Japan, wasabi has been eaten for over one-thousand years, not so much as a food but as a condiment with beneficial medicinal properties. Until quite recently, wasabi was grown only in Japan, making it, in […]
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An interesting thing happened back in mid-December; thanks to the corona virus, my wife and I were able to eat at Sugita Sushi twice in a week (actually, the full name is Nihonbashi Kakigarachō Sushi Sugita, which is really way too much to write over and over). I had talked to Sugita san’s wife (Okamisan) sometime in November about making reservations, and she said there were plenty of openings and to give her a call. So my […]
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Today is Setsubun (節分), the last day of winter according to the traditional lunar calendar in Japan. So as has been a custom for several hundred years on this day, I did mamemaki (豆撒き), which consists of throwing dried or roasted soy beans out of each window and outside door of one’s house while saying “oni ha soto, fuku wa uchi!,” meaning something like “demons out, fortune in!” before eating one bean for each year of your […]
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This past Saturday I took a short trip down to Enoshima, a small island just south of Kamakura that is famous for being home to Benzaiten, the deity associated with music and entertainment, and a popular travel destination for the Kantō region for hundreds of years. It’s also where the 1964 and 2020 Olympic sailing competitions were held. I’d been there once before several years ago. This time the plan was to meet two friends, one Japanese […]
Read moreA few days before New Years, as part of our annual household cleaning, my wife made a small change to our recycling and trash sorting. Rather than put plastics, the kind food comes in, not PET bottles, into the general nama gomi (basic trash), she made a separate sort in the same box with our unburnable trash. Most plastic is not recyclable where we live, the exceptions being PET plastics and Styrofoam food trays which are not […]
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My wife and I recently took an overnight trip to Yamanashi’s wine country, the area around the city of Katsunuma in the Kōfu district. It was my first visit to area, and really the introduction of my knowledge of Japanese wines. The area is just over an hour from Shinjuku by express train, with lots of things to do, especially for people that enjoy wine. There are some historic temples, onsen, and quite a few wineries, many […]
Read moreŌki Shichimitōgarashi Closed After some 400 years in business, Higashinihinbashi’s Ōki Shichimitōgarashi has closed. It actually closed back in July of 2021, but despite passing by the shop quite frequently, I was not aware of the closing until I saw a notice on the door last week. Ōki Shichimitōgarashi, along with its previous other half, Yagen Shichimitōgarashi, based in Asakusa, is considered to be the first shop to make the now ubiquitous seven spice mix known as […]
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