the things we ate...

I don't like not being able to eat things. I don't like to think that there is anything (apart from, say, domestic animals and primates) that I won't eat. But in Japan I hit a wall. A salty wall. I just couldn't do it - my lips and skin were like sandpaper, I wasn't sleeping right and I was thirsty all the time. After only two days of being there we had to scale down our Japanese food consumption and revert to Western breakfasts in a coffee shop and limit our choices to the less salt-laden items on menus. Dammit, we even ate pizza for lunch once. I know, I am purple with shame.

But that aside, we had a fantastic time eating our way through just one week in Japan. Even though we had salt troubles, we had them under control by the time we left and I think I could have kept on going. There were so many things we didn't get round to tasting and I was quite sad to leave.

Where to start? At the beginning, I guess. First meal, Sunday in Tokyo: lunch - minced chicken and shiitake mushroom kamameshi in some back alley in Ginza. It was a big pot of rice topped with stuff. It was tasty and good, and reminded me of Chinese steamed rice dishes. Dinner on Sunday - in some random restaurant in Nihombashi we ate a beautiful, if saltily dressed, salad, then fried tofu in miso soup followed by a chicken teriyaki dish with rice.



The highlight of the week, however, was on Monday. One of the top items on our list of things to do was to visit the Tokyo wholesale fish market at dawn to watch the auctioneering of the tuna, to see a myriad of fish and seafood for sale in this loud, bustling and frankly terrifying (watch out for the little trucks!) place, and most of all to sample the best and freshest sushi breakfast you can get. Anywhere.

So at 6am on Tuesday, full of jetlag, we were fully awake and eager to go. We squeezed in to witness the tuna auctions, and spent a long time wandering the hundreds of fish stalls, dodging trucks, being hurried along by impatient traders and wondering where on earth these famed sushi bars were to be found. Eventually we worked out that they were in a block just next to the main market warehouse. Each bar is tiny and only a handful do sushi. We didn't really know which one was the best, but we took the plunge anyway and joined a queue. Queues of locals are good. They usually mean the food is worth waiting for.


When we were eventually seated, elbow to elbow along a bar facing the sushi chefs, we simply went for the set menu. The chef at our end, who had mesmerisingly long eyebrows and a friendly, paternal smile, started to load the boards in front of us with food. I got the feeling that he likes to test people to see how far they will go, what weird sea creatures they are willing to put down their gullets. It was magnificent, bewildering, utterly gorgeous. I don't know the half of what we ate. There were tuna and salmon egg maki, raw prawn and raw squid nigiri, an assortment of unnamed fish nigiri, a little fried morsel of spicy shell-on prawn, raw octopus, eel, and a pile of wobbly, moreish roe (herring?) balanced precariously on top of rice. It was heaven. I love food which gives you little shivers of 'what on earth is this?' pleasure. It was like that, even though I've eaten my fair share of sushi before. I ate too much soy sauce even though I had told myself not to. It's not cheap at about £20 a head in the bar we went to but my LORD it was worth it.




More next time!