Japan 2013 - Kyoto's Fabulous Nishiki Street Market

We had some free time in Kyoto and, with two couples from the tour, I returned to one of my favorite places in Kyoto, the Nishiki Street food market. This is one of the most interesting and attractive food markets in the world, with many of the best artisanal products available in Kyoto on display, including pickles of all kind; rice crackers; tofu and yuba (tofu skin);  fu (wheat gluten); dried fish; fresh meat, fish, poultry nad vegetables; tea sweets; spices and fresh roasted tea. Many stores offer free samples, which we downed with pleasure.

Before we hit the food stores, we stopped at Aritsugu, the famous knife and kitchen ware store that has been in business for more than 400 years, where one of our tour members bought two knives. New knives are sharpened before they are packed and, if the purchaser desires, engraved, as seen below.

Santoku being engraved at Aritsugu

That mission having been accomplished, we entered into the heart of the market. Here are some of the most photogenic displays we encountered.

Edamame

Tea roaster

Rice crackers with soybeans, black beans and peanuts

Miso pickled eggplant

Baum küchen - layer cake made on a spit

Yuba and rice crackers

Gift package of fu

Pickled radishes

Nori (seaweed) concentrate

Dried baby fish

Young woman pounding mochi

And on and on . . .

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - A Great Home-cooked Meal

As the tour continued, we paid a visit to Tsujimura Shiro, a ceramic artist who is renowned outside of Japan as well as in his home country for his rustic Shigaraki tea bowls and usable vessels - vases, sake cups and pourers, etc. Tsujimura lives and works in the hills outside of Nara (the eighth-century capital of Japan) in a house that he built with his own hands, but also drives two Porsches and a Harley-Davidson.

Visiting Tsujimura is quite an experience first, for the opportunity to admire his work and second, for the fantastic rustic lunch prepared by his wife, an amazing cook, and laid out on the wood floor of the aforesaid house, where the potter works the in-floor hibachi to grill steak and other items. Tsujimura beams with happiness as his guests enjoy the feast, which ends with matcha (powdered green tea) served in his wonderful bowls.

Lunch at Tsujimura Shiro's. That's him working the grill.

Tsujimura preparing matcha

We left Tsujimura's well-fed and happy. Most of us had no dinner that night.

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - Kyoto's Omen Noodles

Not all food in Kyoto is gorgeous kaiseki cuisine. The city has the full range of Japanese food, from sushi to humble noodles, curry rice and burgers.

One of our favorite noodle places is Omen, with its main restaurant near the temples in the eastern part of the city and a branch downtown on Shijo-dori. The flat udon noodles are perfect, clean tasting and just slightly al dente. And the broth, to which customers add their own spices (from a choice of four proprietary blends) and freshly ground sesame seeds, is also excellent. The tour went to the charming main restaurant; after the tour J and I went to the Sanjo-dori branch as well.

Flat udon at Omen

Udon doesn't get much better than this.

[Omen has a highly regarded branch in New York's Soho, but it is a regular Japanese restaurant and the noodles did not capture the magic of the original when I went there, admittedly a number of years ago.]

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - Kyoto's Kanamean Ryokan

Our next stop was Kyoto, the capital of Japan for hundreds of years and the city where the traditions of Japan are best preserved to this day. Kyoto is my favorite tourist destination in the world, a city of magnificent temples and gardens, beautiful streets and areas that look much as they did hundreds of years ago and, not insignificantly, refined and elegant cuisine.

We stayed at the Kanamean Ryokan, a centrally located inn that has been in the same family for 140 years, or five generations. The accommodations are excellent, with old charm but modern conveniences, and the food is sensational. We had a traditional kaiseki dinner, consisting of seasonal dishes beautifully presented on elegant plates by significant artists. The food was authentically Japanese, but the menu was carefully constructed to avoid some of the tastes and textures that would be difficult for Westerners. The only false note was the surprise of gloppy potatoes at the bottom of what otherwise was a beautiful crème brûlée: a bad fusion idea.

I can do not better than to let the most picturesque dishes speak for themselves. I urge you to click on the images to appreciate the details in all their splendor.

Breakfast, too, was a treat, with an array of well-prepared dishes made with ingredients of impeccable quality and presented with Kyoto flair.

I highly recommend this ryokan, which has received a Michelin star for its excellent cuisine.

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - Nikko and the Niki Club

After Kasama, the tour visited two artists and the Ibaraki Ceramics Museum before arriving at the Niki Club, a chic modern spa hotel in the woods designed with elegant simplicity by Terence Conran in the early 1990s.

Niki Club main building

Niki Club villas

The food at the Niki Club is fusion, mostly Western with strong Japanese influence, beautifully presented. Here are a couple of examples.

Dinner at the Niki Club

Our excursion was to Nikko, a beautiful mountain town that is the home of the famous Toshogu Shrine, where we received special blessings, including a blessing of the tour itself, which proved to be very useful as we dodged three typhoons and an earthquake in the course of our itinerary.

Toshogu Shrine

Toshogu - blessing of the tour and its members

It's always good to have the gods on your side.

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - Kasama

Leaving Tokyo, the tour headed north towards Mashiko, an important pottery area and the place where the mingei (folk art) movement in the mid-twentieth century was centered. We visited a young ceramic artist, the Mashiko Messe ceramic museum and the Hamada Shoji museum (Hamada was the leader of the mingei movement).

After a busy day, we spenth the night at a typical onsen (hot spring inn), Mashikokan Satoyama Resort Hotel.  This is not a luxury inn and does not generally cater to Westerners, but rather to office and youth groups having off-site retreats and to families taking short vacations in the country. Here we found gaudy lavender yukata (robes) and generally unimpressive accommodations, including colored plastic tatami mats. However, we also discovered really nice public baths and surprisingly good food (and that's what the onsen experience is really about) served on strangely colored dishes that seemed reflect the proprietors' odd aesthetic vision.

Our guide in lavender yukata

Dinner at Mashikokan Satoyama Resort Hotel

Custard in weird dish

Breakfast at Mashikokan Satoyama Resort Hotel

Wonderful cabbage dish at breakfast. How did they make this?

Mashikokan Satoyama Resort Hotel is the best place to stay in the area and, despite our initial misgivings, it turned out to be a nice first stop.

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - Tokyo III

The members of our tour gathered and had a day in Tokyo before setting out for ceramics regions to the northeast. For lunch we stopped at Honmura An, a well-known soba shop in Roppongi.  (There was a branch in New York for a number of years, which closed a few years ago when the man running it returned to Tokyo to take over the main restaurant when his father died.)

The soba was, of course, excellent, highlighting the nuttiness of the buckwheat from which it is made and with a slightly al dente texture. My only problem is that, for some reason, Honmura An cuts the noodles in half, rendering it impossible to hold the noodles 12-18 inches above the tray before dipping them in the accompanying sauce, the classic technique for eating cold soba.

More surprising, however, was the high quality of the other items at Honmura An: crispy tempura, beautiful salad and a whole series of excellent side dishes.

Shrimp head tempura at Honmura An

Mushroom tempura at Honmura An

Salad at Honmura An

A good way to start the tour.

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - Tokyo II

Kamameshi at Shofukuro

Our next dining stop in Tokyo was at Shofukuro, a Kansai-style restaurant located in the new Tokyo Building, a new skyscraper opposite Tokyo station, courtesy of our friends Ted P and the lovely Reiko.

The meal was beautiful and showed off the refinement and seasonality of Kansai (Kyoto) cuisine. My favorite presentation was the kamameshi (soupy rice) covered with chrysanthemum petals and topped with a karikari umeboshi (crunchy pickled small plum). What could better reflect the middle of October?

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - Tokyo

My wife Joan, the leading dealer outside of Japan in contemporary Japanese ceramics, is leading another ceramics tour for some of her most avid clients. (See my numerous posts from November 2011 for a chronicle of her last tour.)

We are now in Tokyo preparing for the 2013 tour and visiting friends and Japanese art events and dealers. On our second night we were taken to Kuouesu, a counter-style restaurant whose owner-chef enjoys collecting fine ceramics and using them to present his refined food. As is typical of this type of restaurant, there were numerous courses, many of which highlighted autumnal foods and ingredients as well as showcasing the plates and vessels in which they were served.

Here are some examples:

More beautiful food to come as our trip unfolds.

Bobby Jay

One of the Best Meals I've Ever Cooked

We had dear friends for dinner last night, and one of the guests has complained that when he eats at fine restaurants, the food is too heavy and too much. So in his honor I made the following nearly all vegetarian meal (but with fish and a cake containing eggs and buttermilk). A huge success!

Hors d'oeuvres

Toasted baguette slices with Salvatore smoked ricotta and diced sun-dried tomatoes. My own idea.
Puff pastry bâtons filled with tapenade, inspired by Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table.

Appetizer

Roasted butternut squash with sweet spices (fresh-ground allspice and smashed cardamom), limes and sliced jalapeño peppers, and yogurt-tahini sauce, slavishly following the recipe in Ottolenghi's brilliant Plenty. This was just sensational, with the interplay between the sweet cardamom and allspice, the sour limes and the spicy jalapeños mediated by the mild but nutty tahini-yogurt sauce.

Main

Striped bass with preserved lemon dressing and baby carrots, from Joe Isadoro (via Ina Garten), with squished potatoes from Laura Calder. Another winning new dish, with wonderful freshly caught Long Island bass filets from the Sunday morning greenmarket behind the Museum of Natural History.

Salad

Simple salad of local micro greens with a mild citrus dressing.

Dessert

Candied fennel lemon cake, from a 2009 Gourmet recipe, with homemade rosemary ice cream, both  standby favorites. The counterpoint between the licorice-y flavor of the fennel and the tartness of the lemon zest and juice leaves your head spinning but in a really nice, comforting way.

Everything came out perfectly, a nearly unprecedented feat for me. No leftover parsley or cilantro that I forgot to put in, nothing overcooked, etc. Lots of courses, but light enough for our friend and full-flavored enough for all of us.

Bobby Jay