Japan has an amazing array of food. A week in the country and you'll be eating a new dish every day
It took us 45 minutes to pick a restaurant for our first meal in Tokyo. And no, it wasn’t for the lack of choice. On a cloudy April afternoon, my wife and I had wandered across a warren of lanes and back alleys in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, been in and out of at least a dozen restaurants, perused several more menus, but nothing seemed fit for that first meal. Make no mistake, Tokyo has an incredible array of gastronomic choices and the Japanese love eating out. Shinjuku has more than its fair share of Irish pubs, Italian pizza parlours and Thai curry places. But we had set ourselves a brief.
Our first meal had to be distinctly Japanese and there could be no sushi. After all, we’d read that Japanese cuisine goes a lot beyond sushi and we had seven days to put that to the test.
We settled on a quiet Japanese fast food joint that had tables so closely packed you couldn’t take more than a step without bumping into one. “Looks like a working class place,” I muttered as we walked in.
We picked a plate of gyoza (Japanese dumplings)—after the waiter did his best to explain in sign language that they were a Japanese specialty and were made of pork—and crossed our fingers.
My history of ordering mistakes with Chinese food has made me wary of Oriental cuisine. I’ve suffered in Beijing, Shanghai and even Hong Kong (which you’d expect to be more cosmopolitan), having asked for a plate of frog legs in oil that I just couldn’t afford a second bite of. Predictably, Japanese cuisine with its penchant for raw food (sushi and sashimi, remember?) made me nervous.
I fought a feeling of trepidation as I saw the waiter walk up to my table. But the familiar aroma of pork mince, cooked of course, put it to rest. One bite and I knew gyoza had ticked all the right boxes.
The same evening, as the temperature dipped to 10°C, we decided to go out and open a bottle of sake. Made from fermented rice, this alcoholic beverage is more potent than wine and a small bottle has sent many a Japanese man stumbling home, or elsewhere. Perhaps that is why you usually pour no more than a couple of sips at a time into an ochoko (a small cup).
Towards the end of our trip, we walked across to a place that displayed in bold the magic words that can make Indian hearts sing: CURRY.
(This story appears in the Sept-Oct 2014 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)