24 Hours in Sapporo, Japan 10/24-25/2015

It's taking me forever to write this trip report. Part of it's that I broke my laptop while in Japan (dropped it), and I've been spending a lot of time trying to get a new one I'm happy with. I have bad luck with laptops.

Anyway, our ride on the Cassiopeia terminated in Sapporo. My first time in the north of Japan. It's cold! Tokyo in October is like New York in August, but Sapporo in October is more like New York in December. It was a shock to the system. It even snowed the first snow of the year.

This was one of the few breaks in the weather.

The view from our hotel. Sapporo is surrounded by mountains (similar to Kyoto) but it's not a very picturesque city on its own. No postcard shots.

The reason for coming was actually the overnight train ride, but there were a few things we wanted to do here.

1: Ramen

Every region in Japan is known for its own style of ramen, and Sapporo has a "ramen alley" where about 20 different shops occupy about a half a block worth of space, each with their own take on Hokkaido ramen.

It was hard to pick one, but we eventually just went into the most crowded place, which happened to be the place Anthony Bourdain visited for one of his shows:

Yep, Anthony Bourdain came to the here. 

 When in Sapporo...

The ramen itself. Hokkaido ramen is made with miso and corn, which are specialties of the area themselves. (One of my favorite ramen restaurants in NYC, Misoya, makes this style of ramen.)

It was, as expected, really good, but I think it takes a lot to really impress me with ramen these days. I've eaten at a large enough number of ramen shops now, both inside and outside Japan, that I think I've developed my own specific tastes. I've also just gotten to be a better judge of what's good and what isn't. This was good, but not "wow, I have to come back to Sapporo just to go to this restaurant again" good. I'd certainly be up for trying somewhere else next time.

This is the place, if you're interested.

2. Sapporo Beer Museum

Sapporo's original brewery was, obviously, in Sapporo. I'm not sure if this was really the first one but it is one of them, and it's now a museum. I previously wrote about the Yebisu Beer museum, which is also owned by Sapporo, so this is actually my second Japanese beer museum tour. (Of course, the real attraction is the cheap beer hall at the end.)

The beer hall's nicer than the one at the Yebisu museum, although I think it was slightly more expensive (I seem to remember you could get four beers for 800 yen at the Yebisu museum). The whole building's been pretty lovingly restored, and updated for marketing purposes where appropriate. Those Sapporo star logos are everywhere.

The beer on the right up there - Kaitakushi - is supposed to be the original Sapporo recipe, which you can't get anywhere else anymore. It's been updated over the years for more modern tastes. It definitely tasted less filtered - "dirtier" - than modern Sapporo, but it had more flavor and personality. A little fruity, and a little hoppier. It tasted like a microbrew. I liked it a lot.

3. Soup Curry

Soup curry is not traditional - my wife says it basically didn't exist even when she last lived in the country 15 years ago - but it's become trendy, and Sapporo's known for it.

What is it? It's basically just a much thinner than normal curry served in a bowl like soup.

The place we went is called Suage+, and it had the best reviews of any of the soup curry places we found on TripAdvisor.

I thought it was pretty tasty, but it just reminded me a lot of Thai curry. Japanese curry is normally thick enough to eat with a fork (if you want to), but Thai curry is thin like this and often comes in a soup bowl. The flavor was a little different - smokier, maybe "porkier", whereas Thai curries usually taste like either peppers (red) or lemongrass (green).

That concludes our day in Sapporo! We also did some shopping, but that's not really a blog post. But if it seems like this isn't enough to fill up 24 hours, well, we did do other, more boring things.

Bonus! Hokkaido corn

One thing we really wanted to try was Hokkaido corn - you can apparently buy it grilled on the street in a lot of places in Sapporo. It's really big and sweet. I guess because of the inclement weather, we literally could not find it anywhere. We finally found a few ears pre-packaged like this at the airport, and I bought one. I kept it until we got back to New York - funnily enough, it caused me to get stopped at US Customs!

I didn't grill it (I should have) - I just boiled it. It was definitely sweeter than most corn I've had, but I'm sure this was not the best Hokkaido corn you can get. It definitely felt a little "old" in my mouth, even though the expiration date was still a few weeks away.

Ra-Haku - Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum! - Japan 11/2013

A lot of this trip was spent catching up on things we've never had time for before; the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum (or "Raumen Museum" as it says on their bags) was one of those. You'd have to think it'd be a unique experience, plus good food is at least implied. My wife always thought it was super small and not worth going to, though, so we always pushed it way down on the priority list. Until now...

This is a scene from the truly unfortunate movie "Map of the Sounds of Tokyo", several scenes of which are inexplicably set inside the Ramen Museum even though none of the characters live or work anywhere near it. We'd just watched this movie, so despite it being depressingly bad, the museum was fresh in our minds and we decided to finally make the trek to Yokohama.

This sign is stupidly the only photo I took of the exterior. It's not that impressive anyway; it kind of looks like the entrance to a movie theater (and it's a little hard to find even with a GPS-enabled smartphone), although as is true everywhere in Japan, there are far more women in uniform than you'd expect standing around waiting to usher you inside.

A one-day ticket costs ¥300. Interestingly, I think a 3 month ticket was only something like ¥600 - my wife and I were saying it actually seemed like a decent deal if you worked around there and just wanted to go for lunch once in a while. You do still need to pay for the ramen itself whatever type of ticket you buy, but it's cheap and good and there are a lot of choices.

Here's the ticket and brochure - you can get them in several languages. There's some basic info about ramen and a rundown of the different shops in the museum there. We didn't really look at it, though - we just looked at the pictures on the wall as soon as you walk in to decide where to eat.

The place is small but we were honestly quite impressed. I somehow hadn't gotten this from other pictures I've seen but it's modeled to look like a typical Japanese city of 1958. I'd previously thought it was just really run down! They picked that year because it was when instant ramen was invented. Kind of an odd thing to celebrate; sort of like a "Spaghetti Museum" picking a date to celebrate the opening of the first Olive Garden.

There's a huge amount of attention to detail - this is a little "town" that runs around the side of the building, and it feels totally authentic. There are even a few real shops in here that you can go into - it's not just decoration. Since it runs all the way around the building, it actually feels like a pretty long walk, and makes the whole place feel bigger.

Period signs and weathering. They've even got the clothes on the clothesline. (A common sight still today, but you just wouldn't necessarily expect that level of extra detail at a ramen museum.)

The place we picked to eat at is called Komurasaki. They specialize in tonkotsu ramen from Kyushu. Tonkotsu is probably my favorite style, although I like shoyu ramen too and I can eat miso ramen if it's good.

To order your ramen, you first need to pick what you want from a period-style vending machine and get a ticket. This system is common in Japan; the idea is you don't spend 20 minutes with your butt taking up a seat while you stare at a menu inside the restaurant. Even at the ramen museum, you're meant to be in and out when you actually eat.

Unfortunately this system does ensure that you can (and probably will) get stuck behind a bunch of idiots like anywhere else. We seemed to have a junior high school class trip from China in front of us at this machine, so we were waiting for them to make their choices and buy their tickets for about 15 minutes.

This was our ramen and gyoza. I think I just got the regular with extra meat. It was incredibly good, as you'd expect from a place that's been in business since 1954. I wouldn't say it was better than the best I'd ever had, but it came pretty close. The meat did melt in my mouth; the broth was really well balanced; the noodles were tender and fresh.

BIRU!! This place makes their own. It was interesting, in a microbrew sort of way. It tasted vaguely Belgian, which I wasn't really expecting. It was good, though.

The place bills itself as both a museum and "amusement park". We weren't sure what that meant, but as we were walking around after eating, we saw this guy setting up... for what we didn't know at the time. We decided to see what he was planning. Have you ever seen a contact juggler? I've seen them in YouTube videos, but never one in person - it is quite mesmerizing even if you know exactly how they're doing it. This is the guy we saw:

I believe he's somewhat older and better now than in that video (he looks about 12 there), but that's the only video he seems to have up of himself. He also tried regular juggling with seven balls (you try it - I've never seen anyone do it successfully before) and that took him three tries to get right, but he finally did. But his contact juggling was perfect and we were both hypnotized. We gave him ¥500 at the end.

On our way out we stopped at the museum shop (which includes a giant slot car track for some reason). I didn't get pics of the shop but this is one of the things we bought there, as a gift for SCANDAL at their concert the next day. (I also bought some ramen for my nieces back in the US.) This is a ramen set; four packages of ramen from the places in the museum. One of them is Komurasaki, the place we ate at.

The neat thing about the ramen they sell there is that it's fresh. I went a little nuts on Minca in NYC here a few years ago because they seemed proud of using dried noodles, and I went even more ballistic on the NY Times for dismissively saying noodles were "the easy part" of ramen. You can totally taste and feel the difference between fresh and dried ramen noodles. It's like saying dried spaghetti is just as good as fresh, because the only part of a spaghetti dinner that matters is the sauce. No!

Definitely recommend this place. It's pretty tiny but cheap and jam packed full of eye candy - no corner of it hasn't been touched by someone trying (and succeeding) to make it look authentically old, like something out of an original Godzilla movie. And the ramen is good!

Foooooooooood! - Japan 11/2013

Whenever I come home from Japan, I really, really miss the food. And I'm not just talking about stereotypical Japanese things like sushi and sashimi and ramen... well, ok, maybe ramen. But other things too. I've written about Kobe beef, tonkatsu, taco rice and other Japanese fast food before, but every time I go there I feel like we eat really well, and this time I ended up gaining 5 pounds in 11 days (yikes!).

I confess I'm not always the best food photographer and my phone is not always the best camera, but here's a little pictorial ode to some of the best meals we had on this trip:

Our hotel at Nasu Highland Park had a great shabu shabu restaurant. This is the style of cooking where you boil thinly sliced meat yourself, along with vegetables and other things, then eat them with rice and sauces. We had beef and pork in several different broths.

The one on the right is a pork broth. I think the one on the left was just a chicken broth. Both added a ton of flavor to the meat. No further seasoning needed. We had another pot going that had other stuff in it too.

Usually when you see shabu shabu on American TV, they show the hosts just dipping the meat in for a second before quickly taking it out. That's not quite right - you're going to get sick from eating raw meat. (Look at this Martha Stewart clip - see how she keeps taking the meat out and wants to eat it immediately, whereas the Japanese guy just leaves his piece sitting in the broth? Martha, you're doing it wrong!)

You're not even really supposed to use the same chopsticks - you pick up the raw meat with one set, then pick up the cooked meat with another. (My wife knew this already, but the waitress was careful to point it out just in case.)

These are udon noodles! Everywhere you go has their own noodle style. These noodles were about as thick as a finger! We used these to finish off the broth after eating up all the meat. It was actually really good - it was like gnocchi.

I'm going to write a separate post on Nasu Highland Park itself, but this was from a 50's style American diner inside the park. This burger wasn't very American but I learned long ago to get over that hangup - nothing "American" in Japan really is, it's always a crazy mashup. This had a demi-glace sauce on it - Japan loves its demi-glace, they put it on everything. Those tater tots were the best tater tots I've ever had - incredibly light and crispy. Japanese fried food comes with all the trans fat you can eat, so you know it tastes good!

In New York, this dish would be illegal. Yes, that's raw chicken. (I don't think they called this "chicken sashimi", because it doesn't quite qualify.) It was actually tasty! Ironically the part that I could not eat was the vegetables.

I would not have had the guts to order this myself - this was at a bar/restaurant that a couple of business associates of ours took us to, and this simply appeared in front of us. My wife laughed beforehand because they asked us "can you eat chicken?" Little did we know...

We got about seven different chicken courses there. I wish I knew the name of this place - it had great atmosphere and I was mesmerized watching the bartender's technique for getting the perfect head on a beer every time. But we were just dumped in a taxi and eventually arrived there. It was the kind of place without a sign, hidden in the back of a building on the second floor.

Believe it or not, this was at a highway rest stop in between Ibaraki and Nasu! I didn't have one of these but my wife and everyone in her family did. My in-laws just ate them like popsicles, although my wife ate hers more like an American, picking around all the bones and steering clear of the head and tail.

I mentioned Brise Verte in my post about the Prince Park Tower hotel - this was the sashimi salad that started our price fixe set. All the dishes they served us were really pretty - cell phone pics really don't do them justice. It looked like they had placed every individual element on every plate separately by hand.

Of course there was plenty of ramen. This was at the Ramen Museum in Yokohama - a post's coming about that place too. This was really good. This place also makes their own beer. (All the restaurants inside the museum are independent shops like you'd find on the street, which is kinda the point of the museum.)

This is ramen at Yo! Teko-ya in Odaiba, which is still the best ramen in the world, or at least in my world. I wanted another bowl, but you know just one of these is like 1,500 calories and an entire day's worth of cholesterol. Not that I was watching my weight (again, I packed on an extra 1/2 pound per day, which is 1,750 extra calories above what I normally eat, every single day), but you gotta draw the line somewhere.

I even love coffee in Japan, which is based more on French and Italian style coffee than American coffee. They have a separate thing on the menu called "American Coffee" that's supposed to be weaker. Since I can't get decent decaf anywhere in Japan without waiting for them to make it from scratch (which they are always happy to do, but I am usually not happy to wait), I almost always just order a cappuccino. This one was at Cafe Dotour, a chain like Starbucks - I love Dotour because a) they use real china, and b) they do cappuccino art!

See the fish, eat the fish, drink the coffee: Boston 2013 Day 2

The big reason my wife and I go to Boston every so often is actually the food. Sorry, NYC people, but there are some things we just don't have the best of - you gotta get out more! One of the things Boston does better is, obviously, New England clam chowder. Hey, you wouldn't say someone could get a decent slice of New York pizza outside of New York, right?

This is Legal Sea Foods, which is a Boston-based sort of casual seafood restaurant chain, but about eight notches above something like Red Lobster. We actually didn't go here for the chowder, because I've had it before and it's not my favorite. They've won some surveys I guess, but I find it a little light and milky for my tastes. I'll get back to talking chowder in a little bit - I'm going chronological here.

We did go to Legal (or as Bostonians call it, "Legal's") for the fish, which is always fresh and good every time I've gone there and at every location I've gone to, and this time was no exception. I had a "Boston Scrod" (I forgot to ask what it actually was that day) that was just simply breaded and baked... it was so good.

This is their version of Boston cream pie. I have never had a real Boston cream pie before (it's apparently actually a cake), I've only had it in donut form. This was amazing, like a highly evolved... er, Boston cream... donut.

Across the street is the New England Aquarium. This was the line to get in. Yikes! You can't even *see* where the actual rope line starts, that goes around and around about 20 times. I and a few people ahead of us had the bright idea to buy tickets with our phones, pick them up at the will-call window and bypass this entire line, so we did.

Penguins at the aquarium! Truth be told, we got a little spoiled on aquariums by the amazing one in Okinawa (seriously, click that link and watch the video) - the New England Aquarium is tiny and cramped by comparison. But they do have many penguins of different types, which the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium didn't.

This is the best cappuccino I have ever had. We stumbled onto this place by chance on our first visit to Boston - it's the Caffe Vittoria in the North End. We ordered cappuccinos on that first trip and were both amazed - the top, we think, is actually brûléed chocolate, underneath is always the perfect amount of froth, and below is just the smoothest possible espresso. I almost always have to add a little sugar to cappuccino, but not here - and not because it's sweet, just because it's so smooth. We come here every time we go to Boston now. We looked the place up after that first trip and discovered that a lot of other people feel the same way we do about their cappuccino.

The last time we went to Boston, we literally drove 4 hours just for this cappuccino and a bowl of clam chowder, then we drove 4 hours home.

Hard to miss Caffe Vittoria - it literally surrounds a cigar store with a giant cigar as a sign. It's on Hanover Street.

Now, back to the chowda!

Since we started coming to Boston, I've had the chowder at a bunch of different places all described as the "best" by someone - Legal Sea Foods (several different ones), Atlantic Fish Company, Union Oyster House, etc. They're all different and they're all good, but... maybe Bostonians would think this is sacrilege, but my favorite clam chowder is right here:

Quincy Market. We actually made a special trip back here just before leaving so I could get the clam chowder I really wanted. My Fenway Park/Legal Sea Foods chowder the night before just didn't take.

I dunno how appetizing this picture looks to anyone out there, but to me this looks like a bread bowl full of heaven:

Yes, a bread bowl. I love the bread bowl - so sue me. I'm always secretly worried that to a Bostonian this is kind of equivalent to going to New York just to eat a stuffed pizza at Sbarros. I hope that's not the case, because this really is great clam chowder - it's really clammy, really fresh, and just has a really balanced broth. I don't know if it's really the "best", but it's better than all the other places I've been to that people have said were the best.

The place I usually go to is this:

Boston Chowda Co. But there are a couple other chowder stands in there too... I've been to at least one other and I remember it being pretty much the same. You probably can't go wrong in there.

That was our weekend - took the scenic route back on the Merritt (which can be an adventure at night) and we were back home in New York, where I have to eat clam chowder out of a can and root for the Mets.

Okinawa Food 2: Ashibina - Japan 2013 trip report part 12

Admittedly probably hard to tell (all of these are cell phone photos), but this is a restaurant called Ashibina, specializing in local Okinawa food. This is the kind of place Okinawans go to eat after work - nothing fancy, but completely authentic. It was right near our hotel, and it came up highly ranked in searches we did.

Here's a map. Sorry I can't be more specific, but they have no web site and they don't even pop up often on English review sites (though they are English-friendly!). Open this up for a better look.

The (wet) menu, not that you can probably see anything. I was happy that inside, they had a charmingly hand-printed English menu that had apparently been prepared using MS Word. They only had one, but it seemed to be enough - I doubt they get more westerners than that every night. But they are a restaurant near a resort hotel, so they're not unprepared.

I didn't take pictures of the overall restaurant (it seemed rude) but we thought initially that we'd have to kneel at the table - this is the kind of Japanese place that has tables right at floor level. Interestingly, though, they've dug holes in the floor where the tables are, so you actually sit there as normal, with your feet below ground. Best of both worlds!

A few of the things we ordered:

Orion beer (of course!). I really like this beer - it's like a cross between Asahi, Sapporo and Kirin. It's has no aftertaste like Kirin, but it has some real flavor like Sapporo, and a hint of dryness like Asahi. That amuse-bouche next to the beer was tofu and... well, I'm not sure what. Cucumbers, a soy sauce-based sauce, and... maybe mushrooms?

Total Okinawa - my wife's fried goya itame. It is basically tofu, egg, spam and bitter melon, fried. An acquired taste, that's for sure - I couldn't have eaten this whole plate. A bite was enough for me.

One of Okinawa's traditional noodle dishes, soki soba. Soki is a kind of pork spare rib, with the bones removed.

I was a little afraid to be too adventurous so I ordered pork katsu. There was supposed to be something uniquely Okinawan about this (the menu proclaimed "Okinawa style tonkatsu!") but we couldn't figure out what it was. Possibly something about the sauce, which I didn't even take a picture of. This was fine, but I've already written about how Katsusen at Haneda Airport has ruined both of us for tonkatsu anywhere else.

If you have a coupon, you get a free plate of Okinawa pineapple. My wife had one on her phone and they said that was good enough. She was a little disappointed in this (she said it tasted like any pineapple) but I actually thought it was very good. Very sweet.

Go ahead, get it out of your system. This is a ball sack, and yes, I laughed a little too when they handed it to me on the way out. Actually, these are sata andagi, which are Okinawan donuts. They are a specialty of the region, and you can get them almost anywhere (and we had others), but these were definitely the best I've ever had. As with donuts, freshness counts, and these were just made. They were very crispy on the outside and soft on the inside.

Many places seem to make these once a day and then sell them throughout, so they're soggy. Honestly, that's how I'd started to think they were supposed to be. But these were not, and because of that, they were really good. If you go to Okinawa - or anywhere that claims to sell Okinawa food - and get soggy andagi, go somewhere else!