Last weekend I went down to Kyoto to hang out with my friend Matt, who I hadn’t seen in five years or so. Zooms don’t count. Matt is currently a professor of Japanese language and culture at a university in Australia, but also is director of a traditional performing arts program held in Kyoto each summer. Each summer save for the last two. The program consists of lessons in noh, kotsozumi drumming, and rakugo, each class taught […]
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Soba Again!!!
After nearly two and a half years, I finally was able to make soba again this past Saturday with the Nihonbashi Konanokai (日本橋粉の会). The group had made soba a month or so ago, but I was in Oregon at the time. There were only ten of us this time, down from the usually fifteen or twenty people. And while we did have a small party after finishing making soba, we did not eat any of our production. […]
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Kanda Kikugawa Unagi
The other evening my wife and I went out to celebrate a birthday. Nothing too fancy this time, just unagi at a well known place in Kanda, Kikukawa. The restaurant doesn’t take reservations, which isn’t usually a problem. Unless, that is, you want to eat the extra-large serving of unagi, which tends to sell out early. The place being close, and the weather dry but with rain forecast for later in the evening, we rode our bikes […]
Read moreChinook Salmon Dying From Warming Waters
I was reading The Guardian newspaper online yesterday when I came across this headline: Major New Zealand salmon producer shuts farms as warming waters cause mass die-offs Actually, it wasn’t the headline itself that caught my attention. News like this is becoming all to common lately. It was what I read a few lines into the article that stopped me in my tracks: New Zealand has a huge Chinook salmon farming industry! The biggest in the world. […]
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Eating Along the Old Tōkaidō Road 旧東海道食べ歩き
Over the course of two and a half years or so nine friends of mine—all Japanese—and I walked the old Tōkaidō road, from Nihonbashi in Tokyo to Sanjō Ohashi in Kyoto, finishing in November, 2020. All fifty-three post stations (juku), all 500 km, plus side trips, in twenty-six days of walking, basically two post stations per day of walking. And no, we did not do it all at one time, but broken up first two juku a […]
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Tansōan Soba 丹想庵蕎麦
Tansōan Soba Lunch 丹想庵蕎 I happened to be in Asakusa around lunchtime today so I decided to swing by one of my favorite soba shops, Tansōan, for a good—and cheap—tenpura and soba lunch. I’ve been a fan of this place for over ten years, since a year or two after it opened, back when I was trying to eat lunch at every soba shop in the area, way back before Kenji san, the owner, received a Michelin […]
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Sonoji Soba & Tenpura 浅ノ字 蕎麦&天ぷら
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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A Weekend Dining in Kyoto, August, 2022
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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Kawaseri (Teuchi Soba) 川せり手打ちそば
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!!!
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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