Shabu Shabu, Kushikatsu ...

Lunchtime in central Tokyo

Where was I? Back in Tokyo, where we ate a few Japanese meals, not as many as we should have, perhaps, given the opportunity, because we were staying in the middle of the city where food of every origin is available, slightly modified to suit local tastes; we ate at north Indian restaurants, Thai and Vietnamese restaurants, at a very good Italian trattoria near the Nihonbashi bridge (twice) and at French bakeries for breakfast in the mornings where you could pick up croissants and quiches with the metal tongs provided and put them on clean trays to take to your table. To collect your cup of coffee you have to bring a paper receipt to the drinks station and wait.

Before and after eating, moist hand wipes wrapped in plastic are liberally supplied. In the posher places you're given a hot flannel roll for this purpose, also wrapped in plastic, more often than not.

The Japanese seem to enjoy eating beef; a popular thing to do is to eat at the places where they serve "steak and hamburg" (i.e. hambagu, a hamburger steak without the bun, smothered in Teryaki sauce).

Shabu shabu beef portion

A couple of the people with whom Chris was working in the city invited him and me out for a meal at a Shabu Shabu restaurant. The meal — of the sort sometimes called a Chinese Fondue — was cooked at our table, effectively by the four of us, although a waitress came by from time to time to supply the ingredients and scoop unsightly foam from the broth that was cooking in two shiny copper, lidded bowls. The amount of raw beef on each of our plates looked daunting (see photo) but the slices were so thin that they disappeared fairly quickly, once quickly dipped into the broth with our chopsticks, then consumed. "Shabu shabu" indicates the gesture and perhaps the sound you hear as you do this. You mustn't keep the meat cooking for long. You're encouraged to grind your own seeds and spices in which to coat and flavour it; each diner has an individual bowl of soy sauce too. We also had a bowl of fresh, raw vegetables, tofu and rice noodles to coat with sauce and add to the broth, one ingredient at a time. The finale to this meal entailed drinking the broth from soup cups, having cooked ramen noodles in it and eaten them also.

Shabu shabu sauce, seeds and spices

Shabu shabu vegetables with tofu and noodles

Left to our own devices, we found a small place one evening in the Kanda district where kushikatsu, a speciality of Osaka, was served. This meal was fun, eaten close to a table of noisy young men squatting on small stools. The kushi are the bamboo skewers, whereas katsu are the breadcrumb coated, deep fried pieces of meat, fish, prawns or vegetables (onion, Lotus root, pickled turnip, aubergines, green peppers, asparagus spears, mushrooms) or hard-boiled quails' eggs. You're meant to dip these delicacies into a black sauce to flavour them, presented in a stainless steel dish, but double-dipping is not allowed. In case you'd like extra sauce on your katsu, raw cabbage leaves are provided; again, don't dip them twice because it is unhygienic, but you can use them as spoons to scoop some sauce from the dish.

At one restaurant I ventured into, on an upper floor (many eating places are not at ground level), I was shepherded into a private annex; I'm not sure why. There wasn't much English vocabulary on the menu here so I chose from the photos, although what I was served didn't match the picture very well. 

On a hot afternoon towards the end of our stay we cooled down in the piano bar below our hotel, where we were treated to a sort of clarinet and piano recital as we sipped our drinks, an elegant place hung with splendid lanterns.

Dining out in Nihonbashi

Yesterday I ate two extraordinary meals in Nihonbashi our local district, the official centre of Tokyo.

Chris and I at Tempura Benkei, in our aprons

The first was my lunch on Yaesu Dori near Tokyo station, the street above one of the underground shopping arcades there that stretch for miles. It was about time I tried a Japanese lunch, I thought, so took the plunge when I found a place with pictures of what looked like tasty food and entered a cavernous doorway and to take some narrow stairs into the dark depths of the place. The girl employed to approach arriving diners didn't speak a word of English and a queue of customers immediately formed behind me but a man at a nearby table helped us out: "This is a chicken restaurant. You must pay fast." After a moment's confusion I gathered that he meant, order your choice of meal and pay first, before taking a seat. The choice was limited to four items, that were Fried Chicken with (something) and Rice, Fried Chicken with Egg and Rice, Fried Chicken with Rice and Miso Soup, Fried Chicken ...

"I'll have that last one," I said, nodding, pointing at the line on the menu and proffering my 1000 yen note. "Arigatoo gozaimasu" (thanks), and the transaction was done. The girl led me to a sort of cupboard with a sliding door behind which two tables each with four chairs stood in close proximity and motioned me to go in there. I squeezed in, pouring myself some O-cha (green tea) from a thermos flask into one of the teacups without handles. Jazz was playing softly as background music and there was a bell to push on the table if I needed assistance. My meal arrived very promptly on a lacquer tray. "Hai!" said the girl, meaning "yes!" or "bitte schoen." On a smaller tray were little receptacles for salt, toothpicks, cayenne pepper and soy sauce as optional extras; my meal consisted of breaded chicken with thinly shredded cabbage and mayonnaise, rice and a bowl of pickles. Before I'd finished, some business men squeezed in at the adjoining table in my cupboard and started smoking, so I didn't linger.

Supper, as illustrated in these photos, was a slightly more formal affair, with five of the people Chris has been working with this week. We were treated to this meal at "the best tempura restaurant in Tokyo," according to Hayato, who led us there from the hotel in a taxi. It is called Tempura Benkei, Benkei being a character in the Noh or Kabuki plays of old. This place too was accessed by way of narrow stairs, going up, not down. It's apparently typical for restaurants to offer small rooms to private parties, one above the other, in the narrow older buildings of Tokyo. We had our own chef and we sat in a semicircle to watch him work. Tempura means coating foods in batter and deep frying them, a cooking method introduced from Europe in the 17th / 18th century (the Edo period). In those days the fish came fresh from the nearby riverside fish market. It has to be fresh still, because you eat some of it raw. White aprons were put round our necks before we tackled this meal.

Our starters on an oblong tray were a square of fish paste, a piece of marinated (but still raw) octopus (you can see what it is from the suckers) and a slice of radish. A green salad and wasabi paste was provided, but we kept that aside for the sauce to go with the fried items, that could also be dipped into salt or have lemon dripped on them. The chef started beating the egg and water in a metal bowl with a giant pair of chopsticks, stirring in flour to make the batter, with a pile of uncooked fish, prawns and vegetables on wooden slatted trays beside him.

We began with a battered shrimp and a piece of raw fish and thereafter worked through two or three kinds of battered white fish, a sardine complete with its head, a big prawn, a thick slice of sweet potato, some greens, a big mushroom, a "devil's tongue" and a spear of asparagus, all of these vegetables likewise battered and deep fried. As honoured guests, Chris and I were each given a keyring with a plastic battered shrimp as a momento and in case we hadn't had enough batter, or so as not to waste the leftovers at the end, each member of the party was given a bag of bits of batter to take home with us as well. To drink, we were served beers, small glasses of colourless Sake and, at the end, some tea. When we thought, too full to move, that we had finished our meal, bowls of fried rice and soup were brought in as an extra course. The dessert, finally, was very good quality melon and strawberries with a dash of cream.

Our conversation with the Japanese gentlemen was lively and interesting. We got back to the hotel from Mitsukoshimae station on the Metro.