Back to Kyoto, back to eating sushi in Japan. We’d had reservations at Sanmikouan for lunch on our second day in Kyoto and we also had reservations for dinner. These reservations we had not made ourselves and, frankly, I can’t remember why I’d bothered to make them anyway. Maybe I was worried about hanging around in a line in the heat/humidity outside a good sushi place or not being able to get into one at all? At any rate, we managed to get a reservation at Sushi Komatsu, which was in the general area we were going to be in at the end of that day, not by calling them ourselves but by asking a Japanese colleague who happened to be finishing up a year’s teaching in Kyoto if he would kindly make it for us. He was happy to oblige and so we showed up knowing it was not going to be a hassle. Well, it wasn’t a hassle but it wasn’t exactly the most pleasant meal either. Read on to find out why. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Japanese Food
Sanmikouan (Kyoto, July 2025)
Back to Kyoto. I’d hoped to get this and another report from the city out late last week but things were a bit chaotic in Delhi. Among all the other mayhem, I also managed to screw up the site design and broke everything and had a panicked half day wondering whether I’d lost most of my images from the last 13 years. Thankfully, the folks at WordPress.com support got me back and running again without much hassle once I managed to get in touch with them. Anyway, here I am now with a report on the best meal we had in Kyoto in July, at Sanmikouan, a soba specialist. Continue reading
Tori Shin (Kyoto, June 2025)
Here, finally, is my first report from Kyoto in the summer.
After a week in Tokyo, we took the shinkansen to Kyoto (where we barely managed to disembark before the train continued to Osaka: the missus and I had dozed off and the boys were lost in their devices and the train stops for just a couple of minutes). We were in Kyoto for just three days before heading to Seoul. Our eating out in the city had not been scoped out ahead of time quite as much as our meals in Tokyo had been. We’d eaten lunch on the train—having picked up excellent bentos at Tokyo station—and after a spot of touristing it was time to think of dinner. The younger boy had not been able to eat much at Hinai Stand the previous week and so he put in a request for yakitori. As our plans were to wander the Gion neighbourhood after dinner, I checked Tabelog to see what the yakitori options in the area were and hit upon Tori Shin (or Torishin). After a bit of absurdist comedy on arrival, we had a nice dinner there. 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
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
Tenka Ramen (Minneapolis)
We ate in Minneapolis’ Lyn-Lake neighbourhood a few weeks ago—see my report on dim sum lunch at Jade Dynasty—and were back there again this past weekend. This time we were eating Japanese, not Chinese food, not dim sum but ramen. Tenka Ramen is located just a few doors down from Lake St.’s intersection with Hennepin, not very many blocks away from Jade Dynasty. I’m not sure when they opened; they only flashed on my radar when someone recommended them in a comment elsewhere on the blog. Having recently begun to check out the Twin Cities’ ramen scene in earnest—see my reviews of meals at Ramen Kazama in Minneapolis and at Tori in St. Paul—I’d made a note to check them out at some point. That point turned out to be for Mother’s Day lunch. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Tori (St. Paul, MN)
Another month, another review of a ramen specialist in the Twin Cities. Though our lunch at Ramen Kazama in Minneapolis last month didn’t blow us away, it did make us interested to check the state of ramen offerings more generally in the Twin Cities metro. Here, accordingly, is a report on St. Paul’s premier ramen outlet: Tori. They first opened as Tori Ramen in 2016 on Victoria St. in St. Paul and later opened another location in Northeast Minneapolis. The “Ramen” was dropped from the name at some point when the menu expanded to include more cooked items. Both of those locations are now closed and the only remaining location is the one opened in early 2020 in a restored train car on West 7th St. in St. Paul. This location too is only called Tori, even though they currently only serve ramen. We descended on them for a quick lunch this weekend ahead of some grocery shopping at Dragon Star. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Sushi Chitose (Redondo Beach, CA, June 2024)
I keep saying that I plan to post my write-up of our dinner at Tenant in Minneapolis at the start of June and also my remaining reports from Seoul in February and March—to say nothing of the last report from New York in May; but here again, instead, is another report from our current trip to California (which will end soon). There’s a whole bunch of these reports as well: after a week in Southern California, we drove north for another week and are now back in Seal Beach for a few days before returning to Minnesota and we’ve been eating out a lot everywhere in the state. I’d rather make a small dent in the pile of reports from these meals before getting back home and finishing up with that older backlog at leisure. Here, therefore, is another report from Los Angeles’ County’s South Bay, and it features sushi. Continue reading