Japan is a wonderland of food. The result is the following 25 edible treasures — from tempura and miso to ramen and takoyaki (delicious octopus balls) .
Japan is a culinary wonderland thanks to its unique heritage, a national obsession with cuisine and an almost religious embrace of freshness and perfect production.
The result is the following 25 edible treasures that we can never get enough of:
Breaded, deep-fried until crisp and golden brown, then drizzled with a sweet and piquant sauce, meat doesn’t get any better than tonkatsu. At Tonki, they don’t take reservations.
The lines are long, but the succulent hire tonkatsu, served with a mound of shredded cabbage to assuage your guilt, is well worth the wait.
Without a doubt, sushi is one of Japan’s greatest gastronomical gifts to the world. Almost poetic in its simplicity, good sushi relies on two things: the freshness of the ingredients and the knife skills of the chef.
Whether you like your raw fish draped over bite-sized balls of vinegared rice, rolled up in toasted nori seaweed or pressed into fat rectangular logs, delicious sushi can be found in every price range.
Eating it involves a procedure that borders on ritual.
The fish and rice are first mixed with soy sauce and wasabi, and later with pickled vegetables. When most of the mixture has been eaten, dashi broth is poured over the remaining third, which is consumed as a soup.
Wooing the world through the international language of deep-fried deliciousness, tempura is one of Japan’s most popular culinary exports. Actually, this iconic Japanese dish finds its roots abroad — in Portugal.
When Portuguese missionaries and traders arrived in Nagasaki in the mid-16th century, they brought with them a taste for rich foods and the technique of deep-frying. Christianity may have been slow to catch on in Japan, but tempura was an instant hit.
At Kondo, deep-frying is almost an art form: Here are greaseless morsels of tender asparagus, delicately crisp kisu fish and plump scallops still pink in the center.
More books, blogs and movies have been dedicated to ramen than any other noodle dish in Asia. No wonder: Ramen’s intoxicating combination of fat and salt sends powerful messages directly to the endorphin-producing parts of the brain.
It’s very, very difficult to choose just one ramen shop, but Enji is one of our newest favorites for tsukemen, ramen noodles dipped in a thickly concentrated fish-and-pork-bone-based broth.
Nothing quite compares to that first bite of lavishly marbled wagyu. It’s like butter, meltingly tender and decadent. Once you’ve had wagyu, other steaks seem downright stingy in their leanness.
At first, those fine white veins of fat may seem shocking, but compared to regular beef, wagyu actually contains higher levels of Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids, which help reduce the risk of heart disease.
Most of the buckwheat noodles on the market are mass-produced, inoffensive yet forgettable. Once you’ve tasted te-uchi hand-rolled soba, though, it’s easy to understand why soba chefs take great pride in making the perfect noodles.
Served cold as zaru soba, or in a hot bath of dashi broth, their mildly nutty flavor and firm-to-the-bite texture are addictive.
Matsugen offers expertly prepared, traditional te-uchi soba in a stylish modern setting. The bukkake soba for ¥1,200 ($12) is garnished with a dozen aromatic herbs and served with a sesame dipping sauce.
Like so many revolutions, the rise of Sanuki udon began with a book.
Shikoku’s special brand of thick wheat noodles had long been revered by udon connoisseurs in western Japan, but the release of Kazutoshi Tao’s four-volume « Osorubeki Sanuki Udon » (« The Astounding Sanuki Udon ») sparked a craze that spread like wildfire across the country.
What makes Sanuki udon special is its chewy and silky texture. Slick, slurpable, and immensely satisfying, Sanuki udon noodles offer the firm bite of al dente pasta combined with the pliant density of mochi rice cakes.
Apples and honey in curry? Indian chefs would be quick to declare heresy. However, Japanese curry diverged from its roots on the subcontinent long ago and has evolved into a celebrated dish in its own right.
It’s commonly served atop white rice, or in a kitschy silver tureen, with a side of tart and crunchy rakkyo pickles. Beloved by schoolchildren and salarymen alike, its particular blend of sweetness, gentle spice and soothing, viscous mouth-feel has made curry rice one of Japan’s most popular dishes.
Manten in Jimbocho is wildly popular among curry rice junkies.
Although technically Chinese, gyoza are now a key part of Tokyo culinary life. Bite-sized and rich, these dumplings are normally filled with a mix of pork, cabbage and nira chives, then dipped into a tangy blend of soy sauce and vinegar.
Unlike most Japanese foods which come in somewhat skimpy portions to help you know when to stop eating, it’s pretty easy to keep ordering round after round of gyoza until you are about to burst.
The gyoza capital of the world is Utsunomiya up in Tochigi, but in Tokyo, the best gyoza experience is Harajuku Gyoza Roh and its sister establishment in Sangenjaya (Taishido 4-4-2, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo; +81 03 5433 2451) .
The best part about Gyoza Roh is that you can get garlic-free gyoza — a rarity in the city.
Come wintertime, Tokyo’s streets are filled with the nostalgic, nutty aroma of roasted sweet potatoes, and a plangent call emanating from the yaki-imo trucks can be heard in every neighborhood.
Yaki-imo usually disappear around late spring, but the curiously named daigaku-imo (university potatoes) sugar-crusted sweet potato snack can be found all year round. Take a look around your local grocery store, or the basement food courts in department stores like Takashimaya, to get your daigaku-imo sweet potato fix.
The term « octopus balls » doesn’t do justice to this delectable snack from Osaka.
A crisp exterior surrounding a gooey center of octopus, pickled ginger and scallions, takoyaki carries the heft of a meal in a few ping-pong-sized globes of dough. Brushed with a sweet sauce and sprinkled with nori, they’re a favorite at festivals and as a late-afternoon snack.
Tasty, filling and cheaper than a cup of coffee at Doutor, these usually triangular rice balls are the ultimate fast food. The fact they’re available at every convenience store means you’re never far from a snack.
Onigiri come stuffed with anything from spicy cod roe and pickled greens to grilled slices of beef with mayonnaise.
In depachika department store basement food courts, you can find them filled with seasonal ingredients such as fresh takenoko bamboo shoots in the spring or matsutake mushrooms in the fall. Onigiri can be found anywhere and everywhere, but we’re partial to the rice balls at ampm (they use 100% domestic rice) .
Natto is easily the most divisive food in all of Japanese cuisine. Like blue cheese or durian, these fermented soybeans have an aggressively pungent aroma and idiosyncratic flavor that people either love or hate.
Detractors complain of its stinky smell and slimy texture, but fans are addicted to its potent umami-rich goodness. It’s delicious tossed with raw tuna and kimchee, or folded into the pork filling for gyoza.
Washed down with an ice-cold beer, these grilled chicken skewers are ideal for outdoor grazing and summertime snacking.
Yakitori most often refers to grilled dark meat, but a typical meal also includes prized treats such as lightly seared breast meat smeared with wasabi, as well as livers, hearts, buttocks, gizzards, skin and more. Most places slather the ingredients with a thick syrupy sauce made from soy, rice wine and mirin, but gourmets prefer their meats sprinkled only with salt.
Indulge in rarer and pricier delicacies like grilled suzume (sparrow) , uzura (quail) , and the show-stopping chochin (ovary and fallopian tube) at Toriyoshi’s Nakameguro branch, or their Ginza location (1F Ginza Corridor Gai, Ginza 7-108, Chuo-ku, Tokyo, +81 03 5537 3222) .
These fat, savory « pancakes » can be made with any number of ingredients — thin slices of pork belly, octopus, shrimp and even cheese — in a variety of combinations. Hence the name okonomiyaki, which loosely translates as « as you like it.
