Until this trip I really had no idea how mountainous and heavily forested Japan is. I read in my guidebook during planning that part of the reason that the cities are so big and dense is because 3/4 of the country has so many mountains and woods that the land is essentially unusable. I got a big glimpse of this when heading to Matsumoto. Not even 40 minutes outside of Tokyo on the train, and we were already in mountainous country. It was the same thing on the way to Takayama. I had to switch trains in Nagoya, but after doing that and leaving Nagoya for Takayama, the mountains got big and woodsy really fast. It was an exceptionally beautiful part of the country. The icing on the cake is that up in the mountains the autumn colors had started to set in on the trees.Takayama was a very appealing city. It's an attractive place and is much smaller and more livable that Tokyo. It's also got some historic sections that are very quaint, traditional, and filled up with sake breweries. Probably the very best thing about the town, though, was the beef. Takayama is in the Hida region, renowned for its Hida wagyu beef. It's basically the same stuff as the better-known (at least in the States) Kobe beef. It's nosebleed-expensive, but man is it ever good. I've had some domestic wagyu beef before, but it didn't compare to how tender and rich this stuff was. The preferred way to eat it was as yakiniku, which is a Japanese version of Korean-style barbecue. For anyone not familiar with Korean barbecue, they just drop a big pot of burning charcoal in a hole in the middle of your table, cover it with a grate, and then you DIY grill it right there, along with some vegetables and other accompaniments. Being Japanese instead of Korean, you accessorize it differently and there are different condiments (no kimchi, use soy sauce and things like wasabi and sansho pepper, etc.). My preference was with just a touch of soy and wasabi. The beef was so incredibly rich it really didn't need much of anything. It's a good thing that it's so rich, though, as I can’t afford very much. It seems that the going rate for the stuff seemed to be about 1400 yen per 100 grams for what I think was meat from what we would call the rib eye (that works out to roughly $60 per lb, BTW).
Along with the beef, the mountain apples were also really good. They’re almost too big to eat easily out of hand, many being the size of a softball, but they were very good. This is a puzzling thing I’ve noticed about Japan—most things are modestly proportioned, be it meal portions, people, bars, restaurants, or houses, but all the fruit here is absolutely enormous. The apples are gigantic, I’ve seen Asian pears (much more flavorful, tender, and juicy than the sad Asian pears we get in the states, BTW) the size of 16-inch softballs, grapes are typically larger than ping-pong balls, and the figs look like they weigh about a quarter lb each.
After Takayama I hit Kanazawa. I promptly went from eating beef at nearly every meal to living off of nothing by fish. Kanazawa is supposedly a great place for seafood, so I was taking every opportunity to indulge in the local specialties. I had set myself up with a hotel right across the street from the city market, which was a great move. There was one sushi place there that opens very early which I was able to hit for breakfast on both days. The first day I got a spectacular-looking sushi bowl, which was basically a big pile of sashimi on a bowl of rice. All the fish was incredibly fresh, and the presentation was certainly top-notch, including a couple head-on raw shrimp and a scallop shell, but while good it didn't wow me and certainly didn't rate up to my market sushi experience in Tokyo. Wondering if it was the preparation, I got the sushi plate the next day, where they fully prep everything as nigiri sushi. It was again a nice meal, but I similarly wasn't wowed. I actually thought the chef put way too much wasabi in each piece. Still for the measly $28 I spent on the plate, it was quite a satisfying breakfast.
The better sushi I had in Kanazawa was for lunch on the 2nd day, where I went to a more widely-lauded sushi place. This was definitely a step up from the breakfast crowd, and excellent sushi, but it nevertheless didn't quite meet expectations. Granted, my expectations were probably too high. I went in expecting to have my mind blown, and while it was a great sushi meal, and a fantastic value, the mind was still unblown at the end of the meal.
Having come here, I’ve got a much better appreciation for the artistry in making sushi. At both of these places in Kanazawa, the fish was extraordinarily fresh and of good quality, but the end product, while very good, wasn’t phenomenal, and didn’t have the little touches that really put the sushi at Tsukiji market in Tokyo over the top. One other thing I’d note is that I’m feeling pretty good about the domestic sushi we can get. If you go to a top-tier place in the States, I feel the sushi is every bit as good as most everything I’ve gotten here at restaurants that are highly-regarded by the locals. Granted, for comparable quality I think we need to pay 2-3 times as much, but if you’re a sushi freak, you can take solace in the notion that you really can get the good stuff in the States.
Kanazawa was also a great little city. People were, again, extraordinarily friendly, and I had a fantastic time at the izakaya I went to my first night there. I’m noticing a recurring pattern at all these little izakaya I go to. The initial reception I get can come off as being a little bit cool and that it appears that they may not be excited about the idea of having a lone, overgrown (by their standards) gaijin in the place. They usually warm up pretty quickly, though. My best guess is that once I’m able to demonstrate that I know how to use chopsticks properly, have a basic understanding of Japanese dining etiquette, and know at least a little Japanese, they know they’re not going to be stuck with someone who is going to ruin the vibe of the place.
The market in Kanazawa was amazing. I think I spent at least 6 hours there over my two days walking around and talking to vendors, sampling stuff, eating grilled scallops and sea snails right out of the shell, and taking photos. The most dramatic thing in the market was the freakishly large crabs and maitake mushrooms they had everywhere. Seeing this I’m thinking, “MMmmmmm, good soup”, so I figured I needed to go out of oden my 2nd night there. You can think of oden as basically a Japanese take on pot au feu where all kinds of proteins, starches, and veggies are boiled together and you’re served a plate of the pickings you want with some of the broth and a hit of outrageously spicy Chinese mustard. I went to the highly-recommended oden place in town, though, and no crabs or maitakes to be seen. The white-shelled sea snails (baigai) and other shellfish seemed to be the big thing, but no crabs. Granted, the fact that the 2 foot long crabs I saw in the market were being sold for between $60 to $100 each might have priced them out for such a simple dish like oden. Ditto for the maitakes, which you can think of as a Japanese equivalent to porcinis, and are priced accordingly. In retrospect, I think I needed to find a place that was serving nabemono (Japanese hot pot) rather than oden, but at the time I really didn’t understand the difference.At the market I encountered quite a few things that were challenging even for my palette. One or two of these was even included in the omakase meal I got at the izakaya my first night there. There’s one set of vendors in particular that sells all these strange-looking vats of soupy seafood stuff at the market. I’m not sure what you’d call this stuff collectively, so I simply refer to it henceforth as the “freaky shit” (FS). A lot of it appears to be uncooked squid or cuttlefish products. The most common are these tiny little whole, uncooked baby squid which I’m guessing have just been marinated in soy sauce for a while. I think the salt in the soy draws out their own juices, so what you’re left with is this dark brown semi-gelatinous, mucousy soup of little baby squids. I had gotten a small plate of this at the izakaya the night before, and I must admit I was choking it down. Ryan no likey. I think I do prefer it to the other signature product at the FS table, though. It was difficult to understand the full explanation as the FS guy’s English was pretty lousy and we were mostly communicating with sign language, but my best understanding on this one is that it’s long, cut-up pieces of raw squid (they kind of resemble short, fat noodles) marinated in a reddish-pink sauce that I believe is all the guts, brains, and contents of the digestive tracks of the squid, presumably minus the ink sacks (otherwise it would be black). Again, Ryan no likely.
There were many other additional vats of gooey, soupy things at the FS table, but the lone other thing I could identify was some kind of raw squid product where the squid were marinated in their own ink. “Aha! This is for me”, I thought, as I love cooking with cuttlefish ink and I’m perfectly fine with raw squid, so long as it’s not swimming around in a soupy mass of its own entrails. They guy gave me a sample, and while I wasn’t choking it down like the baby squid marinated in its own bodily mucous, I didn’t exactly ask for seconds.
