tokyo food file

pining for the tajines of summer

It's chilly and wet, there's a typhoon raging outside... and I'm dreaming of summer and the Maghreb.

Cousous and tajine, maybe a merguez sausage, definitely a beer on the side — who cares if it's only water-weak lager, just as long as there's some harissa on the table...

At Tomigaya Terrace, the 'tajine' was no more than a casserole of chicken and vegies simmered down in a tomato-based soup. And the couscous was reconstituted in minutes flat out of the package. But at least there was a tube of Ferrero's best to spice up life.

Over at Enrique Marruecos in Higashi-Kitazawa, the food is about as authentic as you're likely to find here in town. Owner-chef Ogawa Ayumi has written a book on Moroccan cuisine — she lived there for 5 years or so, she told me — and has a very good recipe for merguez sausage, which she serves with a dollop of home-made harissa.

The beer is imported Casablanca lager, but the palm trees on the label are enough to put a wistful, nostalgic smile on my face...

And the tajine is excellent: lamb (not mutton) simmered down with whole prunes to imbue it with sweet-sharp flavor...

Too bad the atmosphere in Ogawa-san's one-counter diner/restaurant — she runs it all on her own — is so serious (I was going to say funereal but that would be unkind), otherwise I'd be back like a shot.

That name, it doesn't sound very Arabic — or even Berber — does it? Apparently, when Ogawa-san took over the premises of a Spanish restaurant (back in 2006) she decided to keep the same plaque on the door. 

Here's another blog's take (in Japanese)...

And here's a map link...

heavyweight 'sumo' halloween pumpkins hit the UK

As in Japan, the whole halloween phenomenon is pretty recent in Britain — but clearly it's catching on in a BIG way...  

This year the halloween pumpkins are larger than ever, thanks to ideal growing conditions (warm weather early in the summer; a typically wet August) and they're weighing in at as much as 40 kg apiece.

Needless to say, these giants are being marketed as 'Sumo Pumpkins'.

As spotted in a branch of Waitrose. 

This was the price tag...

photo from 247magazine.co.uk 

More here: Giant sumo vs munchkin pumpkins: and what to do with them!

Autumn in a ramen bowl: Afuri's chestnut tantanmen

There's always a line at Afuri. Our general rule of thumb is that if the queue only goes as far as the door — about 10 people ahead of us — then we wait. But if it extends out onto the street, then we come back later or eat elsewhere.

 

But we'd spotted the sign for the new autumn special — so we decided to wait anyway.

 

Aki no kuri-tantanmen — autumn chestnut spicy noodles.

 

One reason we like Afuri so much is the look, the style, the ambiance. The staff wear black tees and caps, and look like they're enjoying their job, despite the incessant flow of punters filling the seats along the narrow counter.

 

The kitchen is clad in white tiles and shiny stainless steel. The walls are scuffed white concrete, plain and unadorned. And overhead a widescreen monitor flickers silently, playing loops of music videos or anime movies. Post-industrial ramen was how I described it in my first Japan Times mention...

Plus the noodles are excellent. One of the features is that they grill the sliced chashu pork over charcoal before it's placed on top of the ramen, to give it an extra level of flavor.

 

Of course it also adds to the waiting time, so we usually order a beer or two. The house brew is draft Kohaku-no-toki, a premium amber lager from Asahi, with a lot more flavour and character than the bog-standard SuperDry.

 

It usually takes 5 minutes or so until the noodles arrive. They are certainly worth the extra wait. And it's always good to watch the kitchen crew in action...

 

This was the kuri-tantanmen. The spicy ground pork was mixed with bits of chopped chestnut; and alongside the half-hard boiled egg there was half a chestnut as a garnish.

 

The noodles were great, and so was the soup, even though not as spicy as I'd hoped. However, the chestnuts were sweet and straight out of the can, which I found detracted from the overall balance.

Verdict: good but not as great as anticipated.

 

However, we also ordered a bowl of the standard yuzu ramen, and that was the same as it ever was — great.

The noodles are garnished with the powdered peel, and the heady aroma of fragrant citrus wafts up with the steam from the broth.

[NB in the background, the conical cover over the pan in which the charcoal is brought up to glowing heat]

 

You'll find Afuri outside the back entrance of Ebisu Yokocho.

Here's a map link...

"adult" KitKat — a new guilty secret

KitKat (or rather Nestlé) have introduced a dark chocolate variation, and — whisper it in private — it's actually pretty good.

The Japanese name for this version is otona no amasa — literally "adult sweetness." 

After all the recent white-chocolate-plus-exotic-flavourings versions of this evergreen, newly-hip choco sweet, the semi-bitter taste of the dark chocolate comes as a very welcome development.

This is not Valrohna by a long chalk, and it's still a lot sweeter than I like. But when it comes to konibini chocolate, this is about as good as it's ever going to get whenever those insistent chocoholic cravings hit.

It comes in two styles — a) the classic rectangular boxes with four sticks inside;

and b) an oversize single-bar version...

To me, it's the latter that has the better balance of sweet flaky-crunchy biscuit to chocolate. After all, for us adults it's not the outside layers — the clothes, the chocolate enrobement — that counts. It's what's underneath.

A new guilty little secret... 

soup and sunflower seeds

A nice warm bowl of butternut squash soup with crispy flatbread...

 

followed by sunflower seeds...

And I managed to make it out of there without being asphyxiated or dying of dust...