tokyo food file

Summertime. And the sippin' is easy.

Enter the dragonfly…

Natsu-yago nigori sake, from Izumibashi Shuzo (Kanagawa Pref.), nicely chilled and ready to pour into the glass, slightly fizzing and petillant... 

 

Natsu is Japanese for "summer". And yago are dragonfly larvae — as shown on the label of the bottle — before they metamorphose into the adult insects.

Sansho-yaki & Shinkame at Bird Land

 

It's always good to be back at Bird Land in GInza. And as always, the highlight of the evening has to be Wada-san's wonderful sansho-yaki:

Premium shamo gamecock, grilled expertly (of course) with the skin crisped just right and the flesh still juicy and rich, dusted with sansho powder — and then given that extra kick with the garnish of kinome leaf. Outstanding!

 

What else is good? Well, just about everything, from the gizzards served in nikogori jelly to the delicate but meaty shiitake sprayed with dashi to keep them nice and moist. Here are a few more highlights:

Starting with the sasami: very lightly cooked breast meat, here served with an ume-jiso seasoning — that's umeboshi paste (the bright red you see on each morsel) with slivers of shiso leaf…

 

And the renkon: a "wheel" of lotus root, crunchy but not in the slightest bit mealy, stuffed with minced chicken meat and then slowly grilled…

 

Kawa: a simple, plebeian cut, but so good when grilled well. Soft but lightly crisped; rich with fat and its own inherent umami.

And what about the myoga? It's given the dengaku treatment, with a slather of white miso to accent its fresh floral flavour (say that fast):

 

And of course the evening was enhanced by the excellent sake — from the effervescent nigori to the 2-year matured junmai-shu — all from the ever reliable Shinkame, in Saitama.

 

 

A long time back I introduced Bird Land in my Japan Times column, here…