Requisite Food Post

I have to have at least one post on food, so here is the Japan installment.

For some reason, whenever I'm in an Asian city I become more Japanese at breakfast. In the U.S. I love eggs and pancakes for breakfast. In Asian cities, I eat more traditional Asian breakfasts although I never grew up on them. I typically eat a bowl of miso soup (with tofu and green onions), a couple of pieces of tofu, the daily fish (mackerel or salmon), steamed vegetables, a salad, some Japanese side dishes (changes daily) and rice. Every now and then I have some yogurt with watermelon (really sweet) and granola (no granola for days now). The photo is of my Saturday breakfast with the yellow stuff some sort of pumpkin salad (similar to potato salad with egg...it sounds awful but it's quite yummy).

As I've mentioned in other posts, eating in restaurants has been quite challenging in this trip because few have English menus or menus with pictures. Most do have lovely displays of plastic food, which help somewhat (if you memorize the price of the item and the first character). A lot of the restaurants are on one or more levels of a shopping building. For lunch today I took photos of my restaurant choices on one level to illustrate the variety of food available and to show how specialized these restaurants are. The specialization makes it difficult to find a restaurant that my colleague and I are interested in (should be even more interesting in week 3 when our reviewer arrives).

Sushi...of course!

This is the tonkatsu restaurant, which is basically fried food. Typically meats and shrimp, but I've also had potato-type tonkatsu as well. Usually served with cabbage and rice. I doubt I'll ever eat here.

This is a soba restaurant, which is a buckwheat noodle. They serve it either in a hot broth with items such as tempura, pork, etc. or cold (top row). I like soba if it's not too whole-wheaty and preferably fried with cabbage and worcestershire sauce (as I had at the baseball game).

Some kind of fish place....I think.

The udon place where I had lunch. Udon noodles are fat and made with flour. I grew up with my mom and grandmother making homemade ones. These were homemade and quite yummy. No English menus but my favorite is tempura udon so I asked if they had it ("Tempura udon aremasu ka?"). It sort of was the item on the far right on the second shelf, but had 2 pieces of fish and some vegetables as well. Yum!

This looks to be a tempura restaurant with chawanmushi (a hot egg custard). I'd love to try this place, but am afraid that I would have to resort to memorizing the character and price of what I want. Plus there are a lot of unknown items in these meals.

We had dinner at this place one night. They had picture menus and I ended up with their cold soba noodles. This place was rather healthy with the calories printed on the menu and oats in the rice. Food was good and very quick and we would consider returning.

In addition to these Japanese restaurants I've found Chinese, Indian (2 of them to quench my saag paneer craving), Thai (excellent Yom Yum soup!), California Pizza Kitchen and lots of Italian.

Plus Beard Papa's (my favorite cream puffs in Hawaii), gelato, and Portuguese donuts (malasadas!) for dessert. I have yet to find my favorite cookies - palmiers - but I'm sure I'll find a bakery with them. I definitely don't starve when I'm in Japan. I'm in dire need of exercise though!