Back to Seoul. When last seen there, we were eating a casual lunch at Gwangjang Market. As I noted in that post, there is no better food in the world for hot weather than mul naengmyeon, the chilled noodle soup featuring buckwheat noodles and a delicate broth made with beef and dongchimi (radish water kimchi). Nampo Myeonok is famous for their Pyongyang-style mul naengmyeon, having been serving it in Seoul since 1972. This was high on our agenda for our first meal in Seoul on this trip (as I also noted in that Gwangjang Market post, my Seoul reports are going to go up out of sequence). We took the subway to Euljiro and made our way to the restaurant through lanes full of restaurants and people of all ages outside and inside them. This aspect of Seoul in the evenings is one of my favourite urban experiences in the world; the energy of the city (and its love of food and drink) is on full display. Continue reading
Category Archives: *Food
Hot Grainz III (St. Paul, MN)
We ate at Hot Grainz’s original location in the Sunrise Plaza on University Avenue for the first time early last summer, and I was ready, on the strength of that meal, to proclaim them the best Thai restaurant in the Twin Cities. Our follow-up meals there later in the summer confirmed that evaluation. We didn’t end up getting back there later last year or early this year. But that was because of the seating situation at that location: basically, it was very difficult to find a table in the tiny dining room on weekends; and coming, as we are, from 50 minutes away, takeout was not a great option either. This seemed to become an insurmountable problem when I heard earlier this year that they had moved to a takeout-only option. I hadn’t yet confirmed this for myself when I got the happy news—while we were travelling—that they had moved to a new, larger location on W. 7th Street with ample seating. We’d planned a meal there as our first lunch out after we got back but then ran into another unexpected discovery as we were about to get into the car: they’re not open for lunch on Sundays. We ended up going to Zao Bakery+Cafe instead that day (and had a very nice meal). We finally made it to the new location of Hot Grainz for lunch this past Saturday, and I can confirm that it is indeed, in our family’s opinion, the best Thai restaurant in the Twin Cities. Read on to see what we ate. Continue reading
Chaat, Thrice (Gurgaon, December 2024, March/July 2025)
Okay, let’s jump from Seoul to Delhi but let’s keep the casual market vibe going. No, Delhi doesn’t have anything quite like Gwangjang Market but casual food in markets abounds. This report is of some casual food eaten in a market in Gurgaon (technically a separate city in a different state but part of the Delhi NCR or National Capital Region) across my three most recent trips home: in December last year, earlier this year in March and again this July. All of the meals center on chaat and all were eaten at Galleria, a popular outdoor mall in Gurgaon, some by myself and some with my nephews, who love chaat as much as I do. Continue reading
Restaurant Alma XVI, Summer 2025 (Minneapolis)
When summer in Minnesota begins to edge in the direction of fall, our thoughts begin to turn to two of our favourite restaurant dishes in the Twin Cities: the tomato water course at Tenant, and the chilled corn soup at Alma. Soon after our return from our summer travels, I pestered Alma’s executive chef, Maggie Whelan to find out when the soup would make a return to the menu. After the 20th of August, she said. And so I made a booking for Saturday, August 23 and arrived with my lawyer’s number ready to dial in case it (the soup, not my lawyer’s number*) was not in fact on the menu. I think you will agree that I would have ample grounds for a lawsuit if that were to be the case, my friendly relationship with the restaurant** be damned!. I am happy to inform therefore that there was no need for legal shenanigans: the soup was on the menu and we ate the soup; the soup was excellent but so was everything else we ate. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Back to Gwangjang Market, Again…(Seoul, July 2025)
I’ve been threatening to start posting reports of our meals in Seoul for more than a week now. Here, finally, is the first one. I will remind you that after our week in Tokyo (meal reports from which were posted chronologically), we went to Kyoto for a few days and from there to Seoul (and from there to Delhi). I’m jumping past the Kyoto meal reports just to mix things up a bit. I’m going to post a few Seoul reports mixed in with a Delhi report or two and then I’ll go back and do the Kyoto reports. And these Seoul reports are not going to be in chronological order either. This first report, for instance, is of lunch eaten on our third day in Seoul. We had an appointment in the afternoon in Sindang-dong and got off the subway a few stops earlier to eat at one of my favourite places in Seoul: Gwangjang Market. I’ve reported at great length on meals at the market before (see here, here, here and here) and will almost certainly do so again. Yes, it’s a bit of a Seoul cliche at this point but I do love the energy of the place, and across my visits had not had a single bad meal there. I am happy to report that that streak was not broken on this visit either. Continue reading
Godavari, Summer 2025
I’d said last week that if our weekend plans held I’d have another review from St. Paul this week (following last week’s look at lunch at Zao Bakery + Cafe). But our plans didn’t hold. The rainy weather on Saturday had us feeling too lazy to go out and the place we’d wanted to go to is not open for lunch on Sundays. But I do have a Twin Cities meal report for you anyway. I had an annual appointment in Eden Prairie last Friday and what is becoming a bit of a tradition, I ate lunch after at Godavari—currently my favourite Indian restaurant in the Twin Cities Metro. I was hoping to eat another lunch thali (having enjoyed it last year) but it turns out they don’t do lunch thalis on Fridays. No, on Fridays it’s a lunch buffet. I swallowed my disappointment and picked up a plate. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Breakfast Sushi at Toyosu Market II: Sushi Ichiba (Tokyo, June 2025)
Here, as promised, is my last meal report from Tokyo. We left for Kyoto by train before lunch on a Monday—almost exactly a week after we’d arrived. Our original plan had involved a light breakfast at home and then a bento-based lunch on the train. Well, the bento-based lunch on the train still happened (courtesy bentos from Ekibenya Matsuri at Tokyo Station) but the older boy and I had decided the night before that, if we managed to wake up early enough, we would head back to Toyosu Market for a farewell meal of breakfast sushi. So it came to pass. The missus and the younger boy elected to stay at home and eat sandos they’d purchased from the Mitsukoshi department store in Nihonbashi the previous day, while the two of us repeated our first Tokyo metro trip from the day before. This time we were headed not to Dokoro Yamazaki but to the establishment right next door: Ichiba. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Zao Bakery + Cafe (St. Paul, MN)
It’s been two months since my last Twin Cities restaurant report (of two lunches at two locations of El Super Taco) but here I am again. I have for you today a look at a restaurant we’ve been wanting to eat at for the last seven months: Zao Bakery + Cafe. They opened on University Ave. in St. Paul (where else?) just short of Dale last December and were rapturously received by the masses for their self-service offerings of Chinese buns and dumplings and other snacks as well as a limited offering of noodles, noodle soups and congees from the kitchen. These are all things we enjoy very much and hence our desire to eat there. Why it took so long, I can’t quite explain but we did finally get there last weekend. And I am glad to report that we were not disappointed in the slightest by it. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Shabusen (Tokyo, June 2025)
Our tour of the major Japanese food genres arrived at a new stop at our last dinner in Tokyo: shabu shabu. I have to confess this is not my favourite genre of Japanese food but the missus loves it. As it happens, after this meal, the boys are big fans too. We ate shabu shabu at Shabusen in Ginza; they also have a branch in Yokohama. In Ginza they are now located on the 8th floor of the Exit Melsa building. They don’t take reservations but they’re open from 3 pm onwards for dinner on weekends and so we hoped that we wouldn’t have to wait too long around 7 pm. As it happened, we didn’t have to wait at all. It’s a large restaurant with two separate dining rooms and they had four seats together open in the smaller one. We sat down and got down to business. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Taimeiken (Tokyo, June 2025)
I’d hoped to finish my Tokyo reports this week. Thanks to some unexpected chaos at home—with two appliances suddenly requiring repair—I’ve not had time to get to all of that. As a result there are still two reports to come after this one, which covers lunch at a famous yoshoku restaurant in Tokyo: Taimeiken. Taimeiken has been around for a while—I believe the current owner/chef is from the third generation of his family. Among their claims to fame is their omuraisu or omurice, specifically their Tampopo omurice, which was developed by the restaurant for Juzo Itami’s film Tampopo in 1985. My good friend John B. was my roommate in graduate school for a few years and Tampopo was one of his very favourite films. As a result I think I’ve seen the film (in whole and in parts) several times. I wish I could say we ate at Taimeiken in tribute to John; the truth, however, is that the younger boy, having seen many videos of the preparation on Youtube, had really wanted to eat omurice in Japan and Taimeiken seemed like a good place to eat it as they serve a full spectrum of yoshoku dishes. Continue reading
Manten-Sushi, Nihonbashi (Tokyo, June 2025)
One of the decisions we’d made ahead of our trip to Japan was that we would take the boys with us to every meal we ate out. This meant we were not going to do meals that were either very expensive or which were likely to feature too many things that they might not eat—they have pretty wide-ranging palates compared to most Minnesotan kids their age but they’re not exactly omnivores. Both these things therefore ruled out high-end omakase and kaiseki meals. (And, in any case, I also did not want to spend any time chasing hard to get reservations at places where you need introductions and special handshakes and so forth.) But this is still Tokyo we’re talking about: an accessible sushi omakase at the affordable end of the market is still going to blow out of the water any comparably priced meal in the US and challenge much more expensive places. So it proved to be at our dinner at the Nihonbashi location of Manten-Sushi. Continue reading
Kyushu Jangara, Akihabara (Tokyo, June 2025)
As I said in an earlier post, our main ramen desires in Tokyo were to eat good versions of our favourite ramen styles and, as far as possible, to do so in an environment that did not cause stress. Our first stop, at Ginza Kagari’s Roppongi Hills branch, gave us fantastic tori paitan ramen with zero stress (ordering via a multilingual ticket machine that took credit cards; very easygoing atmosphere inside). Our second stop, at Ramenya Toy Box in Arakawa, gave us fabulous shoyu (and pretty good shio) ramen but a little more stress in the ordering process (courtesy a Japanese-only ticket machine that accepted only cash) and a relatively austere dining experience. Our third stop, at Koukaibou in Monzen Nakacho, gave us outstanding pork bone and seafood ramen and a warmer experience. Our fourth and final stop was at the Akihabara location of Kyushu Jangara. They specialize in tonkotsu ramen and I am pleased to say that not only was the ramen very good, but the experience was also very easy. Here are the details. Continue reading
Yakiniku Horumon Arai-ya, Shibuya (Tokyo, June 2025)
Our fifth day in Tokyo was the first day of our trip on which no sushi was eaten (there was to be only one more such). We’d eaten ramen for lunch at Koukaibou in Monzen Nakacho and after lunch we’d gone back to Asakusa to visit the kitchen stores in Kappabashi St.. There I purchased a couple of kitchen knives at Kama Asa; and we also purchased some excellent nori from Numatanori. We then visited the Sumida Hokusai Museum (small but well worth a stop) and walked home from there to rest under air conditioning. The evening’s plan was to head out to Shibuya, wander a bit and eat some dinner. It was a fun evening—though the Shibuya Scramble may be the stupidest tourist attraction in the world—anchored by a very good dinner. Continue reading
Koukaibou (Tokyo, June 2025)
It’s an obvious thing to say but bears repeating anyway: there is excellent food to be found all over Tokyo. Why does it bear repeating if it’s an obvious thing to say? Well, there’s a foodie tendency to go far out of one’s way to eat at the purported “best” of some kind of food. In a city like Tokyo—or Hong Kong—I would suggest that there’s no reason to do this. For one thing, there’s no singular “best” anything. In Tokyo the baseline for everything is very high, and while you’re not guaranteed a transcendent meal at a random place you might walk into off the street, the chances of having a bad meal are pretty low. And excellent iterations of pretty much every kind of food can be found pretty close to wherever you are staying in the city. We were—as I’ve mentioned before—within 20 minutes walk of Monzen Nakacho/Mon Naka. We had excellent yakitori there at Hinai Stand; and we also had what was my favourite ramen outing of the trip at Koukaibou. Continue reading
Sushi Hinatomaru, Kaminarimon (Tokyo, June 2025)
Back to my reports from our brief trip to Japan, back to sushi in Tokyo. I’ve previously reported on three sushi meals: dinner on our first day at Yayoi Sushi; breakfast on the second day at Dokoro Yamazaki at Toyosu Market; and lunch on the third day at Yoshinuzushi Honten. No surprise: we ate sushi on our fourth day as well. Lunch that day had been outstanding ramen at Ramenya Toy Box. We’d then repaired to the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno and spent the first half of the afternoon there. The plan originally had been to go from there to Asakusa, visit the Senso-ji temple, wander Kappabashi (the kitchenware street) and then eat an early sushi dinner before heading back to the apartment. But this was our third scorcher of a day in a row and we decided to rest under air conditioning at home during the afternoon and then head to Asakusa in the evening when it would be a little cooler. Senso-ji is lit up in the evening and is less crowded—both of which sounded good to us. Looking around on Tabelog for places to eat sushi near the temple, I’d already identified the location of Hinatomaru near the temple’s Kaminarimon Gate and that is where we went. Continue reading
Ramenya Toy Box (Tokyo, June 2025)
Here is my second ramen report from Tokyo in June. I’ve previously reported on glorious bowls of tori paitan (creamy chicken) ramen at the Roppongi Hills branch of Ginza Kagari. Here now is a quick look at some more glorious bowls of ramen, this time at Ramenya Toy Box in Arakwawa City. While I had been sure that we would not have much trouble getting seated at Ginza Kagari’s satellite branch, I was not very confident about our chances at Toy Box, which has neither any branches nor very many seats: just seven or eight around a small counter in a tiny dining room. But it’s not just the small number of seats that makes it a challenge; it is the fact that they have quite a bit of acclaim as one of the very best purveyors of shoyu ramen in all of Tokyo. And they don’t open for very long: 11-3 for lunch and 6-9 for dinner. Add to that the fact that we were a party of four and the odds of our being seated together seemed somewhere between slim to none if we were to just waltz up to the place for dinner. So we didn’t. Continue reading
Katsukichi, Nihonbashi (Tokyo, June 2025)
Udon? Check. Sushi? Check, check, check. Ramen? Check. Yakitori? Check. Next up on our tour of key genres of Japanese cuisine was tonkatsu or katsu. After lunch at Yoshinozushi Honten we had wandered Nihonbashi for a while and then headed to the Yanaka neighbourhood in Taito City where we wandered some more. We then cooled off in our apartment before heading back to Nihonbashi for dinner. Our port of call was a branch of Katsukichi. Founded in 1958, they also have locations in Shibuya, Marunouchi, and Hibiya. In Nihonbashi they are one of the many restaurants located in the Takashiyama S.C building, up on the 6th floor. None of the restaurants have any English signage but it wasn’t very difficult to figure out which the katsu specialist was and we were quickly at our table. Here’s how the meal went. Continue reading