We’ve eaten more fish since we got to Japan than we ate in the whole of the preceding year but, as we’ve discovered, there’s a lot more to Japanese cuisine than sushi.

Where to eat…

Although food is not cheap in Japan it is possible to eat out reasonably inexpensively (under £6) in noodle restaurants, or similar fast-food type places, and many restaurants offer inexpensive lunch set meals. Izakayas are like the Japanese equivalent of British pubs and they are among our favourite places to have a drink and a meal. In them, food is served in smallish portions for sharing, like Spanish tapas, and there’s always a drunk salaryman sitting down the counter ready to engage you in conversation despite having no shared language! We’ve found food quality to be excellent everywhere.

Fish, fish, fish

When you think about Japanese cuisine you’ll almost certainly think of sushi. We’ve had it from conveyor belt restaurants and boxed from the supermarket but without a doubt it’s best when served freshly made. There’s usually a small slick of wasabi between the fish and the rice, just enough to give it a kick but hopefully not enough to make your eyes water.

Sushi (clockwise from top left): tuna is the king of sushi fish, fatty and medium-fatty tuna freshly made at a restaurant in Tsukiji market; mackerel sushi bought in Kanazawa station; mouthwatering salmon sushi takeaway box from a fish market on Kyushu

Sliced raw fish without the ball of rice is called sashimi. It’s usually served with a big pile of shredded daikon radish and sometimes with plain rice on the side. Dipped in soy sauce and at its freshest it just melts in the mouth.

A plate of sashimi from a fishmonger in Kanazawa

We’ve had small fillets of grilled fish too, sometimes as part of a buffet or set meal and often one of the oily fish like salmon or mackerel. Squid and octopus are also common. We ate both freshwater eel and conger (sea) eel, both served grilled on top of rice with various condiments (spring onion, dried seaweed…).

Clockwise from top left: a whole grilled squid; minced fish cake; grilled eel served on rice in Nagoya; a small grilled fish as part of our breakfast meal in Tsumago

Meat

Just as the fish in Japan is fresh enough for sushi and sashimi, the meat is also of high enough quality to serve raw. We had ‘basashi’, or horse meat sashimi, in Matsumoto and tender beef sushi in Takayama just flashed under a blowtorch, and of course the lightly grilled wagyu steak in Kobe.

Basashi – horse meat sashimi

At the cheaper end of the spectrum, deep-fried breaded pork fillets, called tonkatsu, often form the protein component of a meal. Variations made with chicken are also common. Slices of roast pork are the usual topping for bowls of ramen noodles. We didn’t see lamb or mutton on the menu anywhere.

Delicious tonkatsu meal in Kyoto

Noodles

We have found three main types of noodles in Japan – ramen (egg noodles), udon (fat noodles), and soba (made from buckwheat). Soba noodles may also be served cold with the stock on the side as a dipping sauce. Supposedly, this allows the flavour of the noodles to come through and it’s actually much better than it sounds.

In noodle soup shops we’ve found that you usually don’t order from a waiter or waitress but by paying for what you want at a vending machine by the door and handing over the ticket that it prints out at the counter. That’s all very well if, like this one, it has pictures and English but we’ve had lucky dip noodles before by just choosing a random button!

Japanese noodles (clockwise from top left): ramen are commonly topped with roast pork; udon noodles with raw egg, mixed through the hot noodles with soy sauce we thought of it as Japanese carbonara; cold soba noodles with mushrooms from the convenience store; ‘hoto’ noodles are a specialty of the area north of Mt Fuji, these ones were served in a deliciously savoury beef broth

Onigiri

Onigiri are balls of cooked rice often with a small filling of meat, fish or vegetables. For us they’ve been a reliable option for packed lunch from any convenience store or supermarket. Because of the shape of the convenience store version we call them ‘rice triangles‘. I love the ingenious packaging which keeps the seaweed away from the rice and hence dry and crisp when you come to eat it. It depends on the shop but they rarely have pictures on (and never any English) so choice is generally pot luck. A grilled version flavoured with soy or miso is available in izakayas and we’ve found it to be a good filler amongst all the protein options.

Convenience store ‘rice triangles’ and a grilled version in an izakaya

Tempura

You might have come across tempura before. It’s deep-fried vegetables and fish in a light and airy batter. Most tempura restaurants had a set meal of tempura on rice with miso soup which was cheap and tasty, but it’s a common dish in izakayas too. It is always fried to order and so very fresh and crispy. We always save the prawn until last, but I like the slice of kambocha pumpkin too, and in one izakaya we had a sweetcorn version containing a slice from a corn cob – yum!

A tempura set meal

Gyoza

Japanese dumplings are one of Andrew’s favourites and he always orders them as a side dish with noodle soup. I was unenthusiastic about them until we went to a gyoza izakaya where the range of fillings and cooking methods was wide. We had them boiled, fried on one side (the most common way of cooking), deep fried and with pork, vegetables, and even whole prawns inside the dumpling wrapper.

Japanese curry

Somewhat reminiscent of fish’n’chip shop curry sauce we found Japanese curry to be a cheap, filling and comforting meal. It is usually a large portion of rice topped with a piece of deep-fried breaded meat (often chicken or pork) and covered with curry sauce. A special mention should be made for the oxtail beef curry which we had at a tiny restaurant near our apartment in Tokyo – something that I’m dying to try to replicate as soon as I return to my Le Creuset pot and a good source of oxtail.
If you need your curry on the go you can pick up a curry doughnut from a bakery!

Yakitori

Yakitori literally translates as grilled chicken but it’s so much more – skewers of all kinds – meat, fish and vegetables.

The open kitchen in a yakitori izakaya, grilled chicken and skewered prawns

Okonomiyaki

A specialty from Osaka and Hiroshima which have different styles. We tried the Hiroshima version – pancakes, cabbage, noodles, sauce, fillings (mixed seafood and oysters in the ones we had) are piled high and served on a hotplate.

Andrew anticipating tucking into okonomiyaki in Hiroshima

Soy

Products made from soybeans permeate Japanese cuisine. Soy sauce is used as a seasoning and a dipping sauce for sushi and sashimi, edamame or soybeans cooked in the pod are a common and tasty beer snack or starter, tofu of various kinds fills the supermarket chiller section which would be devoted to cheese back home, a bowl of miso soup is included as part of every set meal and natto, or fermented soybeans, are eaten as a breakfast food.

Clockwise from top left: Edamame; a cube of tofu as part of a set meal; slimy natto is a taste we didn’t manage to acquire; a different kind of tofu as a topping for noodle soup

Regional specialties

Despite the ubiquitous nature of much of Japanese cuisine, each region still has specialties which it is very proud of. From okonomiyaki in Hiroshima to lots of foreign influences in Nagasaki, different kinds of noodle dishes everywhere, and fresh peaches in Okayama.

Regional specialities (clockwise from top left): gohei mochi from the Nagano and Gifu regions of central Japan is a cake made from pounded rice, coated in a sweet nutty sauce and cooked over a charcoal grill; champon is a noodle dish from Nagasaki, its glutinous sauce and bamboo shoots betrayed its Chinese influenced origins; Kakuni Manju, tender roast belly pork in a steamed bun is another Nagasaki specialty from its Chinese immigrants; the area around Kagoshima in southern Kyushu is known for the quality of its ‘black’ pork (from the local black-skinned pigs)

Vegetables

For all its reputation as a very healthy cuisine we’ve found Japanese food to be very lacking in vegetables (restaurant food anyway) with the exception of the many varieties of pickled vegetables, a small dish of which accompanies every meal. The most common is some form of daikon radish, the enormous Japanese radish that is more like the size and shape of a giant white carrot. The only exception seems to be tonkatsu meals which are served with half a plate of shredded white cabbage only just made palatable by the addition of some sesame oil dressing.

A typical small plate of pickled vegetables

Bento boxes

When we weren’t eating rice triangles for lunch a good option was to buy a bento box from the supermarket or convenience store. A mini feast, it will have a good portion of rice, some pickled vegetables and some form of protein, maybe a piece of salmon or katsu pork or prawns or a square of omelette or some combination of these. Then you’ll have a little sachet of soy sauce, and disposable chopsticks and a wet wipe from the cashier, and you’re all set for a picnic!

Baked goods and sweets

Breads tend to be soft, sweet and white with the exception of the expensive European style breads from upmarket bakeries that we gorged ourselves on in Tokyo. Similarly, cakes are usually extremely light and wispy in texture with extra sweet icing. We became obsessed with finding the small pancakes sandwiched together with margarine and super sugary syrup from the 7-11 convenience stores – just as trashy as they sound but completely addictive.

More traditional Japanese ‘sweets’ are often not actually very sweet. Mochi, made from pounded rice, are shaped into small balls with a variety of flavourings. Green tea is used as a flavouring more often than it ought to be in my opinion… Red beans, aduki beans cooked until very soft and gloopy, are also a frequently used ingredient.

Clockwise from top left: sweet and light cakes; a mochi filled pancake; toasted white bread with coffee was a standard hostel breakfast; convenience store pancake sandwiches

Drinks

Nearly every time we sat down in a restaurant or cafe we were automatically given a glass of iced water which is a really nice touch especially if you’ve been out and about on your feet all day. Occasionally it was a cup of hot or, more often, iced tea also without charge and with as many refills as we wanted. About half of the time it was green tea, and half of the time a brown coloured beverage which we found to be vaguely reminiscent of buckwheat. I think that this was made from roasted barley, but we definitely tried a version made from roasted soybeans too.

Beer was the most common form of alcohol that we drank. Due to some kind of strange tax loophole, the main breweries also produce something which is called malt drink. This more or less tastes like lager, and has a similar alcoholic content, but because it doesn’t contain hops it is around a third cheaper, so that was our carry-out drink of choice most of the time. And no trip to Japan would be complete without some sake (rice wine) drinking. We also tried its cousin, shochu, a spirit made from sweet potato, which tastes more like vodka. It was especially common in the far south of Kyushu with local varieties available in both Kagoshima and Yakushima.

Tasting sake at a brewery in Takayama

Having visited Yo! Sushi in the UK and seen pictures of conveyor belt sushi restaurants in Japan, we were curious about how the two would compare, so when the lovely Rio at our hostel in Kobe recommended a branch of the Kura Sushi chain we decided to take a break from the beef and give it a go.

On arrival we were given a small board with a diagram of the restaurant and arrows showing us how to get to the table. OK, they don’t even show you to your table, this is definitely going to involve less human contact than we are used to in restaurants… Our table was a small booth with the conveyor belt moving along beside it.

Can you tell how excited I am?!

We soon spotted the screen above the conveyor. Aha we thought, we know what’s going on here, we’d heard that you can order extra items using the touch screen so we settled into our seats secure in the knowledge of what we were doing… That all changed pretty quickly when we spotted a plate that we fancied moving past. We tried to lift it off, but we couldn’t detach it from the little train of two or three plates all with plastic domed lids. We looked around to see if we could take a cue from a nearby table. Nope, everyone was either eating or ordering from the screen. OK, we’ll try that then, why don’t we order a beer? So we scrolled through the menus until we found the drinks. Hit the picture of a glass of beer and sat back to wait. After about 5 minutes and another attempt, nothing had appeared so we collared a passing woman who was wiping down tables. “Biiru?” we enquired (yes, that really is the Japanese word). She motioned to the back of the restaurant and when Andrew went to investigate this is what he found:

A draught beer vending machine!. Insert a ¥500 coin, take a cold glass from the fridge, place it on the stand and press start. The machine tilts the glass, pours the beer with a perfect head and away you go!

In the meantime we’d figured out how to get plates off the conveyor, you just need to grip the edge and lift slightly to trigger the release for the lid. We’d got through a few dishes that way, it’s pretty compulsive choosing things from a constant parade, but we still wanted to order from the menu screen and have something delivered, this is how it works…

By this point we were accumulating quite a stack of plates, but we could see that the nearby tables were empty apart from plates with food on. What were they doing with their empties? We’d already noticed a kind of plate shaped post box at the side of the booth, maybe we put them in there? In Yo Sushi! the plates are different colours which signifies different prices but here they’re all the same ¥100 (about £0.60) or some dishes are double and come on two plates held together with a clamp so it made sense.

Disposing of dirty plates – I bet you wish you had a slot like this at home!

As we fed the plates into the slot we noticed a counter in the corner of our display incrementing. When it got to 5, there was a loud trumpeting sound from the screen and it started to play a little cartoon of a contest. We had no idea what was going on but it must have been a success because the hitherto unnoticed vending machine above the screen clanked into action and delivered us a prize in a plastic ball! It was a rubbishy plastic mobile phone charm, but still, we wanted another… The cartoon was activated on multiples of 5, but despite feeding in 10 and then 15 plates we didn’t see the winning version again.

Cartoon ‘contest’, you can just see the prize balls in the dispenser above the screen

And if you’re wondering what we had for dessert, here it is – banana toffee sushi :-)

We figured that the bill probably wouldn’t be brought to the table and that, with our little table number board that we received at the start, the cashier would just be able to pull up what we owed from how many plates we’d posted. But we missed out a step, at the till we handed over our table number which generated a little flurry of activity as the cashier called across to one of the cleaning ladies who bustled off in the direction of our table. I think we were supposed to press a button to let them know that we’d finished so that someone could check that the table was clear and all plates counted. We apologised for holding up the payment and in typical Japanese fashion, he brushed aside our apology and apologised to us that everything was only in Japanese – not many places in the UK would apologise for having inadequate translation into foreign languages.

Yum!

It was fun to see how mechanised the restaurant experience could be and at an incredibly low price too – we greedily ate until we were almost ready to burst but still spent less than £5 each (not including drinks). We enjoyed the experience so much that we sought out another branch of the restaurant in Tokyo, it was just as yummy but not quite the same without the adrenaline rush of trying to figure out how everything worked!