Japan Food Part 2

Trip dates: November 8, 2016 - November 10, 2016

Blogging is a lot of work! We're a little behind but rest assured, updates are still coming.

Here's the second part of our Japan fooding - mostly highlights and not a full play-by-play. 

It was kind of sad but we actually ate too much sushi in the first week or so and ended up eating a lot of other stuff for the second half of our trip. This did mean that we went on a search for other popular tonkatsu to compare among the top ones! 

In particular we ate at both Maisen and Tonki, which have very devoted followings. Maisen was much fancier (most expensive of the bunch). They offered various types of pork (think Kobe and wagyu for beef, but for pork instead). We weren't very impressed with Maisen, especially since Lishan thought hers was way too greasy compared to the others we've tried. We were also there in mid-afternoon so maybe we just got the B crew making ours. 

Tonki was much homier and casual, with an elderly gentleman operating the by-hand frying who looked like he had been doing it for the past 70+ years - it was pretty cool. He also had hands with absolutely no feeling because he was touching cutlets that came out directly from the fryer with his bare hands, ouch! Tonki's breading was very different from all the other tonkatsu we had; it was less panko and more of a batter. Lishan liked it a lot, but my favorite is still the one we had in Tokyo Station (from Japan Food Part 1) from Tonkatsu Suzuki.

Besides tonkatsu, our other mission for our time in Japan was to find the best ramen. We went to a couple different joints for different types of ramen. In the second half of our trip, we went to Ippudo in Kyoto and Nansuttei in Shinagawa Tokyo for black garlic ramen. Nansuttei was probably our favorite, although Oneshiki Jun (see Japan Food Part I) was a close second for Lishan.

I am shocked to say that after Nansuttei, Lishan was ramen-ed out. Who knew that was possible! We didn't have a chance to make it to Ramen Jiro but maybe in our last days in Japan before ending our trip, we'll make it out there. 

We also visited a Sake brewery tour (for Gekkeikan) in Fushimi. The water here is very smooth (and tastes slightly sweet, like chrysanthemum) and we got to fill our water bottle from a public fountain of the stuff. I also tried out some undiluted sake while we ate some izakaya, which was cool since they poured it from a giant vat sitting out in the middle of the restaurant when you ordered it.

Here's a sampling of all the food we ate, check out the images and enjoy!