For the "foodie" in all of us: a snapshot of Japanese cuisine

I probably should have remembered to keep my camera with me at all times. Or, I could even remind myself to use my Japanese camera phone (it is 5.1mpx after all) when I don't have my regular camera. But, fortunately, I have managed to snap a few good shots of the food here. Not much to say about the food, except it's good.



These bread bowls filled with chocolate looked pretty tasty at the French bakery. This bakery is located in Shinigawa Station, a local train station on the JR (Japan Rail) Yamanote line. The larger train stations are actually a pretty good spot for good food and shopping. After all, most Japanese spend the majority of their lives (this is not documented, just a personal assessment) on the trains.


Here's a larger shot of the pastry shop. The yellow one is pretty tasty - it's a croissant filled with custard.


Snacks are a big part of the Japanese lifestyle as well. Every store, and 99yen (dollar store) is filled with a variety of snacks. This is a shot of apple pie cookies. While these are pretty tasty and offer a real likeness to apple pie, it's not my favorite.


This right here is the snack of the century. Pancake cookies are like little butter laden cookies with Log Cabin syrup dripping off of them. These cookies are unreal and actually taste just like a pancake (of course, the cookie is crunchy). I must bring some of these home with me!


I didn't get a chance to buy this "Deep & Mild" ice cream, but it sure sounds tasty.


These chips claim to be the hottest chips ever made; I disagree. While these chips are pretty spicy, I'm not sure they deserve the hype or the super scary packaging - nonetheless, pretty tasty.


This is a bowl of Paitan (white soup) Ramen. This is no cup of noodle soup, but it is fast food. This ramen comes from a small restaurant about a block from school.


This is a typical fast food meal consisting of a beef bowl (beef over rice), miso soup, cabbage salad, tea, and a raw egg for the beef bowl. I was not a fan of this establishment, but the same meal, only tasiter, can be found elsewhere.


Everywhere I go vending machines are available. This one actually has a television inside of it (center of the machine) serving up advertisements. If you click on the picture and enlarge the image you'll be able to see that some of the items are listed in red and some in blue. The ones listed in red let you know that the beverage is hot, and the items listed in blue are cold. Getting a hot beverage out of these machines is awesome because it's always perfectly hot.

Green curry with chicken at a nice Viet-Thai cafe in Kamakura - I liked the curry serving bowl.



Maybe I should have been a food artist - the curry looks too good to eat.

This picture was taken when we went to all one can eat Mongolian Bar-B-Que in Sapporo (located in the Northern Island of Hokkaido). Our meal consisted of peel and eat prawns, scallops, salmon, beef, and pork. In Japan, it's pretty common to do tabi-ho-dai (all-you-can-eat), but it always comes with a time limit. Our limit on this night was two hours, which was plenty of time to get stuffed.

Three fried minnows - not my favorite dish, but it looked tasty.

Basashi - horse sashimi. This is one of my favorite dishes here. The items to the right of the sashimi are ginger, scallions, and minced garlic. These items are mixed with soy sauce to make the maranade for the sashimi - so tasty. Horse sashimi has nice smooth, tender texture with the flavor of a salty beef.

Here's a dish I can never pass up, meguro no sashimi (tuna sashimi).

Here we have chicken and onion skewers (lower left) and fried squid legs (upper right)

This is asparagus wrapped in bacon...so good. These last four dishes are all from the same Izakya (I'm not sure what this translates to). An Izakya basically has lots of different appetizers to eat, and we just selected a bunch of different items until we got full.

This is my new favorite fast food. I don't eat fast food in the States but, here, it is impossible not to, as the food is good and typically good for you. This is a seafood jambalaya burger - not its technical name. It has sticky rice buns and is stuffed with various tempura and veggies: scallops, crab meat, and squid. I get these at Mos Burger. The burger joints here sell really tiny burgers and I'm not very impressed with the burgers, but this sandwich is excellent.

Tsukiji Shijo is home to the local fish market. Fortunately, that means the freshest sushi on the planet has a very short distance to travel to get to this conveyor belt sushi restaurant. I am in food heaven when I eat here. The sushi is fantastic and the sushi chefs are awesome and really add a lot of character to the place. The conveyor sends around sushi, but if there is something you want that's not on the belt, just order it up and the chefs are happy to make it. And, when I order something they wouldn't expect a gaijin (foreigner) to order, the chefs get excited and then yell my order for everyone to hear and applaud me for making such a good choice. The plates you can see in the picture have a sensor built into them. When I'm finished eating my fill the waitress will come by and scan my plates. The scanner tells her how many plates and what I owe. The plates are also color coded. The color corresponds to the price for that plate of sushi. I can't rave enough about this place; it really is the best sushi I've ever had, and I eat sushi as often as possible.