NOT ONLY SUSHI Chapter I (Pietro)

Japan is expensive. Lately, in particular, the change has become so awful –with the yen becoming so strong against both the euro and the dollar- that every time you put your hand on your wallet you feel like crying. Eating out in Japan, though, is one of the few things that are relatively cheaper in than in Europe. So let us find some comfort by going out to eat and let us discover the many specialities that the Japanese cuisine offers and the many restaurants of all kinds that are the main sight in so many Japanese streets. Eating out in Japan is quite more common than in Europe: people who want to have a quick meal before taking the train back home, families, friends, students looking for cheap places, couples, restaurants specialised in one kind of meal only, fast-food restaurants, traditional restaurants where you’ll sit on the wooden floor, Italian, Indian, Swedish restaurants: let’s make some sense in this myriad of options that we have if you find ourselves hungry in Japan.

Those who are used to eating Japanese cuisine abroad and then come to Japan might be surprised: they are very likely to find rather different food. On the one hand, just like many Italian restaurants in Japan try to make their dishes closer to Japanese taste –maybe garnishing a carbonara with some dried seaweeds- Japanese restaurants abroad tend to avoid flavours that might be too far from the country’s taste and that occasional customers might not appreciate or understand. On the other hand, the importance of some dishes is emphasized, while other dishes –although extremely popular in Japan- are scrapped from the menu all together.

One example is sushi: every foreigner will associate Japanese cuisine with sushi. Yet, the first time I went to Japan and spent two months with a Japanese family I never found sushi in my plate. Instead, I was greeted with a plate full of funny looking pseudo-spaghetti and my breakfast for the whole first week was a soup made of potatoes, seaweeds, onions and other mysterious ingredients. Every meal was accompanied by a bowl of way-too-cooked rice which, to my Italian taste, was lacking salt and had no taste whatsoever. This does not mean that Japanese cuisine is not good: although my first encounter with it was so difficult, I discovered that Japanese cuisine can be extremely tasty. What I want to say is that you will need time to discover, get used to and –in the end- appreciate flavours that are so far from those many Westerners know.

In the majority of restaurants in Japan you will not find any sushi. If you feel like sushi you will have to go to restaurants that specialise in sushi as this is no daily food for almost every Japanese.

In these pages I would like to concentrate on those Japanese dishes that international Japanese cuisine tends to forget, on the Western cuisine as you can find it in Japan, on the different kinds of restaurants the streets of Japan offer and, finally, -as you might want to grab some sushi while you’re in Japan!- we will have a look at the funny and strange world of thekaitenzushi.