~jonashietala.se

Food vacation in Japan

Me and my friend spent 2 weeks in Japan and had a great time. I wasn’t planning on taking a lot of pictures, but I ended up sending a bunch back home as a ways of keeping my family up to date. When I look back most of them are about food… So I’ll turn this into a post about the various foods we ate in Japan!

Breakfast and dinner at an Onsen.

Japan has this supposedly famous breakfast, it’s more like a dinner than what we in Sweden call breakfast. And sure enough we got to eat our bellies full. I don’t usually eat breakfast, but this was actually pretty nice. Maybe it was because we slept almost 12 hours after our trip?

We also had dinner with a lot of different courses (I only took one picture though). It was also very good but I don’t really know what we ate…

What I ate at a Maid café. The ketchup is supposed to be Yotsuba, but I don’t see it.

And of course we had to visit a Maid café. The whole experience as extremely weird… Unfortunately the food wasn’t that great either, it was the only time I was disappointed of the food in the whole trip (except the worthless airline food).

Wagyu. Japanese beef.

We ate some kind of local meat—Wagyu—at a fancy restaurant. It was extremely good. We ate a lot of great food during our trip but this was my favorite. Of course it was expensive, but you should still consider it if you ever go to Japan.

Yakiniku, meat we got to grill ourselves.

My friend was really hyped to go to an all-you-can-eat place where you grill your meat yourself. And for good reason—it was amazing. I love meat, and the meat was great, and I enjoyed the process of grilling the meat. Also a must if you ever go to Japan IMHO.

Shabu-shabu. A hot pot where we dumped meat and vegetables then fished them out and ate them.

Another similar concept is Shabu-shabu. Instead of grilling the meat you drop it into a pot with boiling water and fish it up after a few seconds. It was also very good, but not as great as Yakiniku.

Assortment of sushi and sashimi.

Of course we had to eat sushi. I don’t remember how many times, but we ate it several times in different forms. This was the fanciest setup I came across.

Some kind of meat explosion. It wasn’t done in the middle but we had a small stone we could finish it off with.
Different meals with puffer fish.
Rice bowls with sashimi on top (don’t know the correct term). We also took some dishes we could grill ourselves.

As you can see we grilled our own food (more or less) several times. I really liked to interact with the food and of course how you can decide yourself how well you want your food grilled.

And we tried another famous Japanese food: Fugu—the puffer fish that’s deadly if you don’t prepare it correctly. It was kind of underwhelming to be honest, they weren’t all that tasty.

Yakitori. Skewered chicken.

Skewered chicken was also really, really good. My favorite type was absolutely the one with chicken skin. It was sooo good. Unfortunately you could easily eat very many of them…

Conveyorbelt sushi.

Another concept I loved was conveyor belt sushi. You have a bunch of plates going around and you can just grab one whenever you want. You can also order specific sushi if you don’t see the ones you like.

Conveyor belt sushi can be dangerous. Each plate had about 2 sushi pieces, you can see my tower to the left and my friend’s to the right. I ate 30+ sushi pieces, which is more than double what I normally eat.

Of course I do have a love-hate relationship with it. On one hand it’s great that you can eat as much as you want, and only your favorite pieces, but on the other hand your wallet and stomach will complain if you have poor impulse control—just like me.

Having a screen where you can order drinks or food was quite common.

We ate a bunch more food which I didn’t capture with my camera. For instance:

In summary I’ll conclude the food in Japan was great.