Eat, drink, travel Japan.
Japanese food and the dishes that pair with the drinks.
I came into Nagoya planning one meal between Tokyo and Kyoto. I left three days later, full of red miso, with a notebook of bar addresses I still had not visited. The city does not market itself the way Osaka markets street food or Kyoto markets tea. It just feeds you, hard, with a regional … Read more
Hiroshima Station to Saijo by local train: 31 minutes, ¥420. From the platform, you walk five minutes to a thousand-year-old sake town with seven working breweries lined up between two thin streets. The Peace Memorial Park, the place every guidebook starts you, is in the other direction. Most foreign visitors never make it to Saijo. … Read more
The first time I really understood sake pairing, I was sitting at the counter of a tiny seven-seat kappo in Yanaka. The proprietor, Mr Sato, watched me start with a chilled daiginjo and a piece of grilled mackerel and shook his head, almost imperceptibly. Then he poured me a cup of warm kimoto junmai from … Read more
The first kushikatsu I had in Osaka was a single skewer of pork belly at a counter in Shinsekai, around 18:30 on a Wednesday in October. The man behind the fryer dropped six bullets of breaded skewers into the oil at once, lifted them out about ninety seconds later, and slid them onto a wire … Read more