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.