The last whisky review I posted before our trip to Japan (and our subsequent summer travels) began was of the 2013 release of the Hakushu Sherry Cask. The first review I have for you now that our travels are over is of another Japanese whisky, the Nikka Pure Malt White. I acquired this bottle many years ago, along with the Pure Malt Black (which I reviewed almost exactly a year ago). A friend picked both up from the duty free at Reykjavik airport in 2012 for all of $22 each. Rub your eyes and read that sentence again. Where the Black was dubbed “Smoky & Mellow” this one bears the words “Salty & Peaty” on the rear label. Where the Black contained a high dose of peated whisky from Nikkas’s Yoichi distillery, the White was described by them as “made mainly with Islay, Scotland type malt”. Now as to whether “Islay, Scotland type malt” means it actually contains Islay whisky or whether it contains whisky made in that style—perhaps from peated barley from Islay—I have no idea. Anyway, I’m looking forward to finally tasting it. 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
July/August 2025
It’s been a very busy month and a half. We left for Japan towards the end of June, visiting Tokyo and Kyoto. From Japan we made our way to South Korea for a week in Seoul. From Seoul we traveled to Delhi. Finally, a little over two weeks after that, we returned to Minnesota, having literally gone all the way around the world.
In Japan we were tourists; in Seoul the missus and I were working; in Delhi we were visiting family and helping sort out a number of issues with my parents’ health. Through it all we ate quite well. I’m almost halfway through my reports from Japan; there’s a bunch from Seoul to follow as well. We didn’t eat out quite as much in Delhi but I have a few more from there as well to come. I know I say this after every trip and then fail to follow through, but I’m going to try to get these reports done as quickly as I can. What this means is that for the next few months you can probably expect four restaurant reports each week—with Twin Cities metro reports returning soon as well. You can also expect my weekly booze reviews—which were on hiatus in July—to start back up next week. 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
Yoshinozushi Honten (Tokyo, June 2025)
We ate sushi for dinner on our first day in Tokyo (at Yayoi Sushi in Morishita). And we ate sushi for breakfast on our second day in Tokyo (at Dokoro Yamazaki in Toyosu Market). And so, as per Japanese law, it was required that we eat sushi for lunch on our third day in Tokyo. We were happy to do so. We headed out to a historic spot in Nihonbashi: Yoshinozushi Honten (also listed as Yoshino Sushi Hon Ten). It’s my understanding that “honten” or “hon ten” means “main office/branch”. I would normally think that means that they have other locations as well but their website does not list any others. I assume therefore that they mean to distinguish themselves from other sushi restaurants in the city with Yoshino in their names. For Yoshinozushi in Nihonbashi is not just another sushi restaurant in Tokyo with a good reputation. Given that there are so many good sushi restaurants in Tokyo, we could have been assured of an excellent sushi lunch at a number of places. But they’ve been open for more than 140 years—the current chef/owner is from the fifth generation of the family—and was the restaurant at which toro was first served and eaten under that name. And so we came here in search of not just a sushi lunch but also a piece of history. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Hinai Stand (Tokyo, June 2025)
Udon: check. Sushi: check, check; Ramen: check. Our tour of the major Japanese food genres continued at dinner on our second day with an excellent meal of yakitori or grilled chicken at Hinai Stand in Monzen Nakacho. Our apartment was located a 25 minute walk from Mon Naka, as the neighbourhood is popularly known, and we’d strolled down to Hinai Stand the previous evening in the hope of snagging a table without a reservation. These hopes were dashed but while there we made a reservation for the next evening and presented ourselves again at the appointed time. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Ginza Kagari Roppongi Hills (Tokyo, June 2025)
We began our first full day in Tokyo with breakfast sushi at Dokoro Yamazaki in Toyosu Market. Lunch featured ramen. If sushi was the thing that we were most looking forward to eating in Japan, ramen was a close second. We were more unsure, however, about how that would go. This because most of the highly-rated ramen places in Tokyo are very small (though most restaurants in Japan are very small by American standards) and it’s not easy to get into them. It’s not just that the popular places all boast long lines; ramen places are essentially built for solo dining. Which means that if you are eating with a friend you have to wait for not one but two seats together to open up. And we, of course, are a family of four. Add to this the confusion of the ordering process at the many places that require you to order and pay and receive a ticket at/from a vending machine before you enter the store, keeping in mind that the vending machine will likely only have Japanese text on it. What’s the way out if you want to eat good ramen without too much stress till the bowl arrives? Continue reading
Breakfast Sushi at Toyosu Market I: Sushi Dokoro Yamazaki (Tokyo, June 2025)
Jet lag is a real pain in the ass but when you travel from Minnesota to Tokyo there is at least one compensation: you are wide awake in the morning on the first few days and can eat sushi for breakfast—even before the sun rises. Of course, the vast majority of restaurants in the city are closed until the middle of the morning but this is not true of the ones in the Toyosu Market. As you may know, Toyosu Market is the new, larger and more organized home of Tokyo’s wholesale fish market, which moved there right before the pandemic from the better-known Tsukiji Market—which continues to exist as a tourist site for restaurants etc. even as the fish market which used to be the primary attraction is gone. There are still popular sushi restaurants in Tsukiji but some of the most highly-regarded ones moved to Toyosu Market as well. The best-known of these are Sushi Dai and Daiwa Sushi. Both open at 6 am but people—mostly tourists, I assume—start lining up at 4 am when the market opens. Now, I’m a little insane when it comes to food but I’m not that insane. Certainly not when there are other restaurants at the market that don’t require setting out quite that early (before the Metro even starts running) and which probably offer only very marginally inferior—if that—sushi. The leader of this second tier (at least in terms of Tabelog ratings) is Sushi Dokoro Yamazaki (3.59 on Tabelog to Dai and Daiwa’s 3.64 and 3.63 respectively, if you care about these things) and that is where we went on our first morning in Tokyo. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Yayoi Sushi (Tokyo, June 2025)
If our first meal in Japan was eaten shortly after arrival in the airport itself (at Hanayama Udon), we didn’t go so very far for our second meal either. Well, that’s both true and not true. It’s true that our dinner was located only about 100 feet from our apartment’s door in Morishita (a residential neighbourhood in Koto City); but we only arrived there after having walked a long distance in the heat and humidity. You see, our original plan had been to eat at Hinai Stand, a well-regarded yakitori restaurant in Monzen Nakacho/Mon Naka, about a 25 minute walk from us. But on arrival we were disabused of the notion that we could just walk in without a reservation. (Why didn’t we have a reservation? As at many restaurants in Japan, you can only make one on the phone and you need to be a Japanese speaker for that. There are services you can use to get around that but we didn’t bother with all that on this trip.) We made a reservation on the spot for the next day (Google Translate is a lifesaver in Japan) and walked back to our neighbourhood sushi spot: Yayoi Sushi. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Hanayama Udon, Haneda Airport (Tokyo, June 2025)
We recently spent 10 days in Japan: a week in Tokyo and then three days in Kyoto. This was our first time in Japan. As you might expect, we ate out a lot in both cities. We were staying in places with small kitchens but only ever cooked breakfast. This means I have a lot of meal reports for you from both cities. (We did more than just eat in both cities but I’ll spare you reports on our visits to museums, temples etc..) The eating began almost on arrival. Our flight from Minneapolis to Haneda airport arrived (early) at about 12.30. By the time we had got off the plane, cleared immigration, picked up our luggage and sorted out our Tokyo metro cards (and our Shinkansen tickets to Kyoto the following week), it was almost 2 pm. In other words, time for a late lunch. A number of well-regarded restaurants have branches in the airport and we were aimed at one of these in particular: Hanayama Udon. Continue reading
Recently Released Whiskies: What Am I Missing?
I can’t remember the last bottle of whisky I purchased. Over the last couple of years I’ve probably only purchased 2-3 bottles a year. I still get every release of the Laphroaig Cairdeas; if lightning strikes and I come across a bottle of Springbank 10, I get it. I used to get whichever new release I saw of the Laphroaig 10 CS, but I haven’t even looked for any of those in a couple of years. A significant part of the reason for this—and my lowered rate of reviewing—is that I am trying very hard to drink my whisky hoard down over the new few years. Another part is that unlike in the period when I purchased a lot and accumulated most of the whisky I am drinking down now, the last few years—maybe more—haven’t seemed like a good time for whisky drinkers. Prices have risen dramatically across the board; whisky with any age on it has become either scarce or too expensive or both. Indeed, I’ve lost touch with the whisky industry almost completely and barely even read any whisky blogs anymore. Of course, this means there’s a good chance that as a result I am unaware of recent/new releases that are in fact worth purchasing. If you are someone who is more in touch, and thinks there have been new things hitting the market that are worth checking out, tell me what I’ve been missing.
June/July 2025
Here is the customary look back at traffic on the blog in the last month and a look ahead to the next month’s posts. June saw a significant rise over traffic in May in terms of unique visitors, but page-views, overall, stayed flat. Once again, most of the traffic was garnered by my restaurant write-ups, though a few whisky reviews also picked up a lot of views. The top 10 list of most-read posts has a bunch of the usual suspects from recent months on it but a few others got knocked off by a couple of newcomers to the rankings. In some cases there’s no mystery about the high traffic: my review of Bucheron was doubtless goosed by their Beard award win for Best New Restaurant in the country; and Semma being named the top restaurant in New York surely led a lot more people to my review of dinner there almost two years ago. (And just outside the top 10 is my review of Mingles in Seoul, who were just ranked highly in that stupid Best Restaurants of the World list.) Less easily explained is why my review of the special release Talisker 11 from 2022 or my first ranking of Indian restaurants in the Twin Cities should suddenly have shot back up the rankings. Anyway, here is the complete top 10 list. Continue reading
Glenburgie 24, 1992 (Cadenhead)
Here to close out the month in whisky reviews is my review of an older Glenburgie. This 24 yo was released by Cadenhead in 2016 and is a vatting of two bourbon hogsheads. I thought it might be the oldest Glenburgie I’ve yet reviewed but I see I previously reviewed a 29 yo from Signatory in 2018. I rather liked that one, and I also quite liked this 23 yo from Chester Whisky. Those were both bourbon cask whiskies as well and so I have high hopes for this one. Let’s see if they’re borne out.
Glenburgie 24, 1992 (51.6%; Cadenhead; two bourbon hogsheads; from my own bottle)
Nose: A lovely mix of oak and fruit. The oak is toasted and the fruit a melange of citrus (lemon peel), pineapple, tart-sweet apple, gooseberry and kiwi. Just a bit of freshly cut grass as well. Sweeter as it sits and a bit of cream emerges. With time the oak recedes; the lemon expands and picks up some honey. Water resets it and brings some of the oak back. Continue reading