Mochi pounding

At the beginning of this month, I saw a post on Facebook about mochi pounding at Ootoya’s Greenwich Village location in NYC. Ootoya is a authentic Japanese izakaya chain. By authentic, we mean that there isn’t anything particularly interesting on the menu, although it’s all very good, in the way you’d expect Japanese food to…

Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne

So far, 2018’s been full of food worth eating. I just visited Queen Victoria Market’s night market in beautiful Melbourne, Australia. The largest open-air market in the southern hemisphere, Queen Victoria Market’s been around since 1878 (!), but the night market just hit its 20th year of operation. This night market is definitely a must…

Japan, day 1

After leaving Shanghai, I flew to Tokyo, Japan for 10 days of learning, sightseeing, and, of course, eating. This was the first photo I snapped in Japan, travelling from Narita Airport to Shinjuku, where I would be staying. Narita is about two hours from Tokyo and a shuttle bus is about $30 per person. When…

Curry House CoCo Ichibanya

CoCo Ichibanya serves Japanese-style curry, which is much less interesting than authentic Indian curry because of the lack of variety. Japanese curry is basically rice under a slightly-goopy brown sauce that’s smooth with nothing to break up the texture, plus a fried breaded pork cutlet. Variations include covering the rice with a very thing omelette,…

The best katsudon in Paris

Katsudon is one of those iconic dishes of modern Japanese cuisine up there with takoyaki, curry rice, beef bowls and okonomiyaki. These are all comforting dishes and a good katsudon needs to be comforting as well. The term “katsudon” is a mashup of tonkatsu (breaded and fried pork cutlet) and donburi (a dish consisting of…

Ippudo Paris

I never got around to trying Ippudo in New York, although I’d been meaning to go for years, so I quickly said yes when David  from Japan Kyutsu asked if I wanted to go to the newly-opened Paris location. Ippudo Paris is the Japanese chain’s only European location besides Ippudo London. We started with the…

Princess Crêpe

Princess Crêpe is a Lolita/kawaii-themed store in the Marais, a high-end shopping district in the center of Paris. The crêpes here are Japanese style, thinner, less eggy, and with a slightly stiffer, less bouncy texture than French ones. The crêpe batter is lighter than the French kind but Japanese crêpes contain many more fillings, resulting…