(Miso-nikomi)Udon in Nagoya

Again, another food in Nagoya. A friend of mine who lives in Gifu where is next to Aichi prefecture took me to a restaurant that is famous for Udon.
Udon is a pretty common food in western part of Japan, but this type of Udon is barely seen. First of all, the soup is dark because of miso-base. This miso-nikomi-Udon (Miso stewed Udon) is another Nagoya food.

The taste of the soup was not salty as looks. The udon was very thick and sticky. I almost thought it was not well boiled.

What I like the most in this restaurant was the pickles that they served as appetizer, which is not shown in the picture though. They were very lightly seasoned and nice texture.

The name of the restaurant is Yamamotoyama. According to my friend, it is very famous around here so everybody in Nagoya knows if somebody want to find it.

Famous food in Nagoya

This is something I had when I visited a friend who lives near Nagoya.
Nagoya is located in just between Tokyo and Osaka. Tokyo and Osaka are kind of representatives of eastern and western parts of Japan (excluding Hokkaido and Okinawa). Since Nagoya is in between, its culture was mixed and has been developed to be a original one.
To me from Osaka, people in Nagoya like relatively strong tastes. Sometimes it is a bit salty, but sometimes it is too much source on a food.

In the picture I had Miso-katsu (deep fried pork,Ton-katsu, with miso source) and Udon though Udon is not a Nagoya food. Ton-katsu is a pretty popular food in Japan, but once it is served with a miso source, it becomes a Nagoya food. I do not think any special Miso is used for this, but this combination of the fried pork and miso source is quite nice. And always Ton-katsu is served with shredded cabbage, which is nice match , too.

Okonomiyaki

There is a couple of routine things that I do when I go back to Japan. One of them is to visit my advisor in undergrad. He moved from Osaka to Tokyo a few years ago so I missed a change to meet him for a while (my home town is Osaka.).

Before I met him, I had about half hour to kill at the station where his campus is located. I walked around a bit and found a Okonomiyaki restaurant. Okonomiyaki is one of my favorite foods even after I lives in U.S. If you go to a Okonomiyaki place in Osaka, you would have good taste Okonomiyaki at any restaurant because people in Osaka love Okonomiyaki. I wanted to try in Tokyo if it is true. In Tokyo, there is a similar food called Monjayaki. It is much softer and the shape is not like a pancake. So people use a small steel tool to scoop and bring to the mouth. I am not sure nowadays, but people in Tokyo used to prefer Monjayaki to Okonomiyaki in old days.

The Okonomiyaki I had in the picture was acturally quite good. The mixture of flour, water, potate and eggs was very soft and the souce was a little sweet but spicy.

The one bad thing was that I had to eat in rush because I was almost late to appointment to meeting my advisor...

Beef bowl (special)

Like fast food hamberger chain stores for Americans, there are beef bowl chain stores for the Japanese. The major three chains are Yoshinoya (probably the largest in Japan), Matsuya, and Nakau. I forgot where I had this in the picture, but I am sure at the one of their places in Yokohama.

The standard menu is a just beef bowl from the size of medium (Nami), large (Ohmori) or extra large (Toku-mori). The miso soup, pickels and raw egg are the sides. So having a beef bowl with sides is a kind of "Special". The shredded red things on the beef is ginger. The slightly spicy tastes of the ginger match the thin sliced marinated beef. The raw egg with a few drop of soy souce is alos poured onto the beef and mixed well. This is like Sukiyaki, which thin sliced beef dipped into raw eggs.

Well, if you like salty soy souce taste, you don't want to miss this.

Cheese Cake

This is a cheesecake that I had at a cafe in Tokyo. There was nothing special about this cake. The taste of the cake is ,I would say, just good. It is as good as NewYork cheesecake, but much lighter so that you can eat it easily after you have dinner. What's nice in Japan if you love sweets is that wherever you go, you can find this type of delicious cheesecakes at cafes, cakeshops, restaurants.

Kamo Seiro (Soba)

It's a Soba again...
This Soba in the picture is called Kamo Seiro.
There is no word of Soba in the name of the dish, but we can expect it is Soba or Udon.
It looks like a bamboo Sushi rolling mat on the right, but this is Seiro. I think Seiro is a cooking tool used for steaming. Here it is just used to be under Soba. Soba is not steamed.

Kamo is a sort of duck meat. You can see some fat floating in the dipping sorce. It had roasted Kamo meat, shiitake mushroom, and mitsuba (herb leaf).

The combination of plain taste of Soba and salty soup was really good!!
Like I wrote some days ago, I prefer Udon to Soba, but this was one of the best foods when I traveled in Tokyo area.

Kakiage Soba (Noodle)

Soba (Noodle) is one of the most loved noodles, other than Ramen and Udon. Generally, people from western part of Japan including me like Udon better and those from eastern prefer Soba to Udon.
One reason is the soup.
Soup for Soba is darker and more salty because of soy souce. I think this dark soup match Soba so well.

Anyway, the picture is a set of Soba and rice when I traveled to Tokyo. As I expected, the soup was dark and salty. On the top of Soba, the fried stuff is a fry of mixture called Kakiage so that this set is called Kakiage Soba.
Kakiage is a mixture of samll shrimps, chopped scallops and cubed vegetables. It is fried, but not mixed tempura.

You can try many types of Soba or Udon conbo with rice or just a noodle.