Bagels are one of those things that the Japanese don’t understand. We’ve come along way from the awful bagel-shaped bread that they used to call bagels, and there are semi-decent bagels to be found here, mainly through frozen H&H bagels or a chain called Bagel & Bagel, though a New Yorker would probably call that a gross overstatement. Still they’re okay in a pinch. What I can’t stand are restaurants that sell bagels but totally don’t get how they’re eaten.

I was at a cafe called Zoka in Akasaka Mitsuke this morning for a German lesson, and I ordered a blueberry bagel for breakfast. I made sure they could toast it beforehand. They told me yes. Literally 10 seconds later, I get a slightly warm bagel, completely unbrowned. I ask them why they can’t toast it, and they re-toast it. Another 10 seconds later, I get a slightly warmer bagel, still untoasted. Now I ask you, who eats a warmed untoasted bagel? They really should be banned from selling bagels if they don’t understand how a bagel should be eaten. The Japanese talk about issuing sushi certification. Maybe New York should consider issuing bagel certification.

My partner and I went to Seoul last weekend for the hell of it. A dear friend warned me that as a vegetarian I should bring a stash of saltine crackers with me on the plane. I chose to ignore her advice. And I lost one kilo because of it.

Koreans have never met a pig they didn’t like. You see barbecued hog jaws piled on top of each other at outdoor markets. They love their cows too. At most local restaurants, you sit Indian-style on the floor and inhale a feast of cow inards and side dishes that include tiny, whole fish seasoned with what looks like diarrhea juice. Yummy!

During our day trip to the DMZ, our tour bus stopped at some fly-infested, Korean barbecue dive for lunch. On the way there, the tour guide asked if anyone was a vegetarian. I was delighted that she asked this question and was happy to discover that there were two other herbivores. So the totemo genki tour guide pranced over to my seat and asked if egg was okay. I said yes and she smiled like I had just told her that she had won a million Yuan.

Egg. Hmmm, egg. How would it be served? Scrambled? Hard-boiled? Sunny side up? No, silly goose. Raw! My bowl of veggies came with a raw egg in the center.

It’s hard for me not to get “that face.” “That face” that my partner says annoys him until the cows come home. And I mean this quite literally as the waitress placed before him a sizeable portion of beef. “That face” that he says makes him see red. “That face” that says I’ve become Joan Collins on Dynasty.

My partner asked if I was going to eat my lunch. I looked at him with “that face” and said, “I’m not going to eat a fucking raw egg in some fly-infested shit-hole!” The men at the next table looked up from their dead cow. I said that I was going for a walk and quickly left. But my baby new that “going for a walk” was code for I was going to find some beer.

There was a gas station next door. I bought a can, sat at a table outside, contemplated my behavior and thought about the DMZ. I downed the tall boy quickly so that I would not get caught. You can’t visit the DMZ if you’ve had a drink earlier that day. Not even one. That’s like telling me I can’t have chocolate chip ice cream when I go to Baskin Robbins. Plus, I hate anyone telling me what I can and cannot do so it was my mission to have a drink before I stepped foot on North Korean soil.

Thank God I opted for the hotel room with executive lounge access. With the exception of one lunch, I ate all my meals at the exec lounge in the Westin Chosun. Scrambled eggs with salad for breakfast. Cheese with salad for dinner. All three days and nights. Now that I weigh 70 kilos, I’m two kilos away from my flat stomach, summer weight. I should go back to Seoul for a week!

I love fruit. And ever since an exploration of completely unknown fruits to me in Bali introduced me to a wonderful fruit, called the mangosteen, I am very curious and adventurous about fruit that I’ve never seen before. Besides, unlike meat or fish or other stuff, how bad/lethal could a fruit be? Well, today I found out.

On a trip back to the U.S., I found a fruit that I’d never seen before in a fancy grocery store. They called it the cactus pear, and promised an exotic sweetness. It was ruby red and had those bumps like a cactus, but smooth otherwise. I love pears, so naturally, I had to taste it. I was surprised that cacti bore fruit like this and very curious about its taste. I picked one up, rubbed my hands all over it, imagining what it would taste like, and then put it in a plastic bag in my cart. Five minutes later, I discovered the other reason why it’s called a cactus pear. It had hundreds of tiny little thorns that you can barely see, and thanks to my carelessness, they all ended up on my fingers. I pulled out the ones I can see, but they’re still pricking me.

The Cook’s Thesaurus says they’re popular in Hispanic and Mediterranean countries for the color they can add to salads and other dishes. If the store had called them by some of their more helpful names — like “prickly pear” — I might have been forewarned. Of course, once we bought the fruit, and I bore the pain, I couldn’t not eat it. And so arming myself with a rubber glove to hold the thing down, I peeled it with a knife, carefully wiping the blade on a paper towel in between cuts (per my sister’s advice), touching it as little as possible. The fruit was as ruby red as the outside with seeds inside that made it look a little like a pomegranate. I took my first bite in anticipation of seeing heaven. The reality? It was bitter and tasted like watered-down watermelon — just like the Cook’s Thesaurus said it would if I had bothered to look it up before I cut it up.

My advice: If it looks like a cactus and is called a cactus, then it probably feels like a cactus. My only consolation is that I didn’t bite into the damn fruit.

One of the most pleasant discoveries about our neighborhood recently has been the existence of a small twice weekly farmer’s market — literally a stand run by a couple who owns a big farm in Chiba, the neigboring prefecture. They occupy an empty parking lot underneath an apartment building from about 6 a.m. til a little past 11. I pass by them every weekend on my way to the gym and back. The tomatoes still smell like the earth, just the way they smelled when we grew them ourselves, the cucumbers were picked yesterday and even the rice was refined the day before. They also have sweet watermelons, juicy honeydew melons, edamame (soy beans) and the sweetest, crispest corn ever. A pleasant surprise in particular were the huge bags of fresh green beans that they sell for a few hundred yen unlike in supermarkets that package 15 or so green beans for the same price. I usually go home with a basket full of fruit and vegetables and I never spend more than 3,000 yen ($27 or so), which is a bargain in Tokyo.

After shopping there the past several weekends, I finally got to chat with the woman, and she told me that they’ve been around forever since the days of the grandmother. They come year around to sell the freshest of what they produce on the farm. They used to set up shop up the street in an NHK employee residence building, but had to move when the apartment was torn down. The landlord of the building they now occupy offered them the space because no one in the neighborhood wanted them to stop coming.

We’ve been ordering a lot of our groceries from an organic delivery service, but lately I’ve stopped ordering vegetables, preferring instead to buy from the farmer couple. Because they even have eggs, I’m finding myself entertaining the thought of canceling the service all together.

I recently read Ruth Reichl’s latest book called “Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise.” It’s about the former New York Times restaurant critic’s experience, and her stories about disguising herself to fool restaurant managers and owners is very entertaining. Part of the charm of the book is that she intersperses a handful of recipes throughout. One of them is Nicky’s vanilla cake, named after her son. I love vanilla, so I decided to make this for a brunch I hosted a week ago. The result was so disappointing — it tasted too much like baking soda — that I decided to make it again this past weekend. After all, what’s the likelihood that the former NYT critic and current Gourmet magazine editor-in-chief would get a recipe wrong? It seemed more likely that I made a mistake and perhaps put too much baking soda in.

I made it yesterday, and as hard as it is to believe, it appears that there’s something wrong with the recipe. I got a little worried so I used less baking soda than the recipe called for, so it tasted a bit better but there’s still something wrong with it. This time, I know I didn’t make any mistakes because I was very careful. I can’t believe I wasted a pound of butter to make the two cakes. The second cake is on its way to the garbage.

We have now revised our record for eating the most expensive ice cream ever. For those who do not remember or have not read my last blog entry on this subject, I refer you to the Babbi entry in the food section. Babbi in Tokyo sells a “piccolo” size” ice cream for 600 yen, which according to my very rough calculation is probably about $8.

The picture you see here is the one we had in Paris that topped that price. For two scoops of ice cream and a tuile cookie – albeit very delicious scoops of banana and salty caramel – we paid 8 euros. Yes, that would be about $10-12. I don’t remember the name of this place, but if you’re in Paris and curious, it’s the little corner cafe near Notre Dame across the Seine. You can also get ice cream to go, but I might think twice about that. When we were there, we saw pigeons landing on the stack of cones and picking at it while the server was serving customers. It could also be that the server noticed and didn’t care but either way, you’re probably safest if you go in and sit down. I can recommend the salty caramel. The cafe has a great view, but they reserve the outside tables for people having real meals.

I’m a little behind on blogging, but before we left for Paris last week, PMK and I paid a visit to a beekeeper’s store that we spotted in our neighborhood. You may ask what a beekeeper’s store would have — it’s got everything you need to start beekeeping minus the bees.

The lady there told us that this was the only beekeeper’s store in Berlin, and most people who buy stuff are hobbyists. That is they are regular people that keep a little beehive as you would a garden. A little beehive is defined as a few thousand bees, by the way. Apparently people come from miles around to shop at this store, and there’s even a person that keeps bees on her apartment balcony.

We bought two kinds of honey there. The white one on the right is supposedly the best for your health. The other on the left is also good for lungs and breathing however.

It’s strawberry season in Japan. I’m not sure how that can be since it’s still cold, but I think Japan developed a few kinds of greenhouse strawberries. At any rate, the country goes strawberry crazy around this time of year and stores start selling fresh strawberry-flavored snacks, cookies, candy and cakes.

I was passing by a fruit store in a department store this afternoon when a certain display caught my eye. It was a stack of huge strawberries nestled on a small styrofoam pillow in individual plastic containers. Each cost about 400 yen ($3.50 or so) — this is PER strawberry. Of course, I had to buy one (see the picture). The strawberry was about the size of a small egg and when you cut it open, it was as red inside as it was on the outside.

It was definately one of the sweetest strawberries I’ve ever had, but probably not worth 400 yen.

If you’re ever in Nakano, one stop on the Chuo Line from Shinjuku, I recommend a little music store called Nakano Meikyoku Do. It’s located on the second floor of the Nakano Broadway shopping mall hidden in a corner. Look for the little store with shelves of cassette tapes on the right, and rows of coffee cups behind the cash register. Don’t let the man at the store scare you. He’s an eccentric but nice man and will serve you the best cup of coffee you’ve ever had if you’re lucky.

My mom and I were shopping there last weekend. Despite it’s shady ambience, we spent a very pleasant and interesting hour there. We didn’t spend time going through the shop’s selection, which is solid but small, but we just hung out.

It turns out that my mom is sort of an old regular there, or at least as regular a customer as you can be when you live in New York. The owner didn’t remember her, but when she mentioned that he treated her to coffee once, he invited us to sit down and have coffee with him. He let us choose our favorite cup and served us better coffee than I’ve had in many cafes — he apparently goes through 10 kilograms of coffee a month although summers are slow because it’s so hot. While we sipped our coffees, he played a cassette for us with some old Japanese comedy routine/riddles and challenged us to guess the answer (we got one right and one wrong).

It’s nice to know this kind of old local store still exists in thoroughly modern Tokyo. If you would like a cup of coffee at this place, my suggestion would be to ask about his coffee cups. That should get him going in the right direction.

You may not be able to read Japanese, and this may not be the greatest picture (it was taken with a phone camera), but trust me, it says it’s whale sushi.

My parents and I were in Shizuoka for lunch this weekend before my mom and I headed to the hot springs. We ended up at this rotating sushi place in the train station building. The fish was fresh, the cuts were generous, but imagine my astonishment when I saw this sign.

If you’re wondering, I didn’t try it. The last time I had whale was in fifth grade in elementary school. It was probably one of the last school meals that served whale in Japan. We were served whale steak, and it was pretty terrible. It sort of reminded me of liver, which I also hate.

More recently, PMK and I were once served a little bit of whale tongue as a little appetizer. According to PMK, what we ate was probably about 10 years old because that’s how much whale Japan has stocked up. His point was that I wasn’t saving any whales by not eating what was put in front of me. I’m not typically a squeamish person about eating foreign foods. I’ll try anything once, but the thing about whale meat is that it doesn’t taste good. I know some people love it, and I think that’s fine as long as they’re not driving whales into extinction, but it’s one of the few foods in the world that I don’t understand.

Getting back to the sushi place. If you’ve never been to a rotating sushi restaurant, plates of sushi are placed on this belt that moves in a circle along the counter. You pick up what you want to eat and stack the plates in front of you. But not every plate is the same. There are usually different colored plates with a different price for each color. Fish like fatty tuna or sea urchin are placed on the more expensive plates than say a cucumber roll. At the end of a meal, someone comes by to add your plates and present you with a bill.

In the case of this store, they just waved a little handheld machine near the plates and, voila, we had our bill. It turns out the plates have IC chips in them and can be scanned. I’d read about this, but never saw it before.

I wasn’t crazy about going out of my way to have rotating (cheap) sushi with my parents in Shizuoka (an hour away by bullet train, about $40 one way), but it turned out to be worthwhile.

PMK started a new blog called Fugu Diaries. It’s an English language restaurant review for Tokyo. I’m in charge of sweet shops (i.e. cakes and ice cream) and bakeries. Take a look.

We found a new cafe in Omotesando. At least I think it’s new. The cakes looked incredible. And huge. I had a banana caramel cake and PMK had a caramel mocha cake. PMK did point out that all the cakes were designed so they could be created on a shell without baking. But they were yummy.

(This isn’t the best picture but it was taken with my mobile)

PMK and I are in search of a good sushi restaurant.

Those of you, who have visited us have probably wondered what happened to Kyubei. In a nutshell, we got the worst service there that we’ve ever gotten anywhere the last time we were there. We made reservations for 8pm, and they didn’t seat us until 9pm. We asked for the head chef, and we got someone else. The chefs were incredibly apologetic, but the wait staff that answered the phone couldn’t care less. Besides apologies are pretty pointless after an hour anyway.

We realize we’re not “regulars” in the sense that we don’t drop a bucketload of money there once a week, but surely we might qualify as semi-regulars in the sense that they know our name and recognize us. We’ve been quick to defend Kyubei as different from most other Ginza restaurants, where they discriminate based on who you are and how much you spend. Sadly, it seems like we were proven wrong, and this is very upsetting. You might be able to tell how upset this makes PMK by the fact that he hasn’t even mentioned it on his blog.

We have a place we can go to casually callled Hanazushi in our neighborhood, and there’s always Sushi Zanmai with a family atmosphere and Daiwazushi to satisfy sushi cravings on weekday mornings, but we have yet to find some place we can go to for a really nice sushi dinner.

We’ll keep you posted.

120 year old imo store

Back in October, I wrote about a 120 year old sweet potato store. I can now finally upload pictures, so here is a picture thanks to my sister, who sent this to me ages ago.

A Japanese discount grocery store chain that specializes in meat looks like it has latched onto the Atkins Diet. The Ginza location of Hanamasa had a large sign in front of its store that said: Be healthy and eat a low-carb diet. Buy meat.

Seriously though, it’s probably impossible to go on the Atkins Diet in Japan, even if you wanted to. Japanese food is healthy, but it’s also starch intensive. Almost any dish I can think of includes some carbs. Just think: udon noodles, sushi, curry, rice bowls with chicken, meat, fish… the list goes on.

It’ll be interesting to see if the low-carb diet takes hold at all in Japan.

It definately pays to be a food-loving foreigner in Japan because you can go into a restaurant just a couple of times and they remember who you are. The latest incident with my husband takes the cake.

There’s an amazing pizzeria about 15 minutes from our house. They serve Neapolitan pizzas, as good as you could get in Italy. Unfortunately, it’s also always crowded, and it’s impossible to get in on weekends. On Saturday, however, we decided to try and get in as soon as it opened at noon, before we caught a movie.

We got there 10 minutes early and lined up to get in. Little did I know that this would be the last time, we’d have to do this. I knew my husband went there pretty regularly for lunch, but I don’t know that he thought of himself as a regular there. Apparently, he is because we were greeted with two glasses of champagne as soon as we ordered “to celebrate the new year.” When my husband paid, he found out that his glass of wine was on the house. The GM also gave us his card and told us to call him if we ever wanted to make a reservation even for weekend lunch. Because lunch is more expensive on weekends than on weekdays, he told us that he would provide “a lot of service” (code word for free stuff) if we came in on weekends.

Now, if I could only figure out how to get this kind of treatment on my own.

I went to a French restaurant called Petit Marche in a fashionable part of outer Tokyo called Jiyugaoka yesterday with a source. I found the restaurant in Zagats, and the food for the most part was okay. Except for two complaints. One: The truffles on my risotto were the most vile-tasting truffles I’ve ever had. They were like medicinal-tasting cardboard if there is such a thing. I wondered if they had bought pre-shaven truffles, which I think could be entirely possible.

Second, the steak I ordered as my entree was 60 grams, which is a little more than 2 ounces. I could have gotten 100g (a whopping 3.5 oz) of steak if I paid an extra $9. I didn’t. With these kinds of portions you’d think I’d lose weight in Japan but eating with my husband does not allow that. Even as I write this, I’m dying of stomache pains (seriously) from eating too many oysters tonight for dinner.

(By the way, my comment function is back on. I’ve decided to risk the spam once again.)

There has been, if I’m not mistaken, 24 typhoons in Japan so far this year. This is a huge number, compared to typical years. I didn’t realize until recently how this impacts my life. Yes, typhoons bring rain and yes, I realized I’d have to endure soaking clothes and shoes. But no, I did not anticipate the rise in the price of vegetables. The typhoon has been destroying fields, making this harvest season a meager one.

A few weeks ago, there was a news program that said lettuce and daikon radish were costing $3-5 a piece.

Yesterday, I believed it. I just paid nearly 300 yen ($2.80 or so?) for a third of a radish.

I was in Kyoto today with my father and sister at the Nishiki Ichiba (market), which is a really fun strip of vegetable stands, butchers, pickle shops, tea shops, and sweet shops. I hadn’t been here since I came with my in-laws a few years ago (Note to DPK — the tofu donuts are still good).

After awhile, we went to look for a sweet potato stand my father used to go to 20 years ago. After about five minutes or so we found a little stand with 4 or 5 people waiting. The store was about the size of a small home office, and looked like it had been there for 100 years. As it turned out, it had been there for 120 years and the current owner told us he was the fourth generation. (When my dad went there 20 years ago, it was manned by an old man, presumably his dad.)

I wish I could put up a picture of this place but a large bamboo bucket of huge potatoes called Naruto Kintoki were being cooked from the bottom by some thing that produces steam right up the bucket.

Any self-respecting Japanese establishment, where owners are serious about their food, has rules or at least a spiele they give to customers, and this one was no different. While we were waiting to make our purchases, the owner told us that he only sells potatoes to take home, and that we weren’t to eat it there, on the street or at a park (obviously, this was a problem at some point because this rule wasn’t there 20 years ago). He then told us that these steamed potatoes were good for a week, and they get sweeter every day. He said the potato would taste best after three or four days. While we should refrigerate them, under no circumstance were we to heat it up before eating it.

Aside from these rules, he was quite nice. And to our surprise the potatoes were cheap. My father bought three large potatoes for about 2,000 yen. The owner told us that the price — 100 yen for 100 grams — hasn’t changed in 28 years. Wild. (Though my father was quick to point out that the potatoes seem cheap now, but they had been expensive 28 years ago)

PMK, who is in Canada right now, would have loved this place. Unfortunately, he’s going to have to wait til March because this guy was going to close up shop for the next several months until the potatoes come back in season. We were pretty lucky this time too because the line was short. My dad told us that he has been there sometimes when the line is so long and people buy so many that you could wait an hour without any luck.

I had a slice today and it was okay. But I have great hopes for my potatoe in a few days time.

It totally pays to watch television in the morning. A couple weeks ago, I was watching a morning show before work and they were running a segment on fancy ice creams — one of them included Babbi, a genuine Italian gelato place in my neighborhood.

P and I went looking for it yesterday and found it within a 5-7 minute walking distance from our house. It’s a little expensive — about 600 yen for a piccolo, which comes with two small scoops of your choice. I chose creme caramel and tiramisu. P had tiramisu and pistachio. The cone was also very good as befits a gelateria that started out as a cone manufacturer.

It was totally my idea of bliss. It’s a good thing that it takes a little effort to get there because if it were any closer, I’d have to double my weekly running quota.