tokyo food file

spring hassun with azalea

 

Clockwise from the front: a single ama-ebi shrimp; a slice of bō-zushi of tai (young snapper) covered with tororo kombu seaweed; tatami-iwashi (sheet of tiny dried shirasu fry).

Nama-uni urchin on a bed of coarse-grated daikon-oroshi, topped with a dab of fresh-grated wasabi.

Hotate scallop on a bed of wakame seaweed bathed in a jelly made with yonezu rice vinegar.

Hyaku-nen Tamago, a small ball formed from mashed pitan preserved egg with yurine lily bulb.

Azalea bud: late spring is here.

 

That last item is the give-away: it's the house specialty of Chef Hirohisa Koyama of the well respected kaiseki house Aoyagi (Tokushima and Tokyo).

 

Two British classics done just right

British food does not get a great rap in Japan. But there are a few places that fly the flag — the Union Jack, of course — for Albion. And they're doing a great job.

 

Strictly speaking, shepherd's pie should be made with minced mutton. This version I had for lunch the other day at Margaret Howell Cafe in Shibuya was made with coarsely cut beef (more like what you'd put in steak and kidney pudding), mixed with finely chopped carrot, onion and celery and topped with smooth-mashed potato browned exactly right.

Like just about everything I've had there, it was excellent (even if it should rightly be called cottage pie...). So good it deserves a close-up shot!

 

You can't get much more British than fish and chips. And you can't get much more Anglophile than Atarashi-san at The Market SE1 down in Enoshima on the Shonan coast. He's got the recipe down perfectly.

The fish — today it was sawara — couldn't be fresher, as he gets it in the morning from the fish market a few hundred meters away from his shop. The batter is just right, not tempura-wispy but thick, golden, nice and crisp on the outside. And served with thick-cut chips, made from really good fresh spuds. It comes with a little pot of tartare sauce, with a bottle of Sarson's malt vinegar and a pack of sea salt on the side.

And then, for afters, there's his great selection of ice cream. We had the spicy kabocha (pumpkin with various aromatics). And a tub of the seasonal SE1 sundae, which he whips up from his milk ice cream blended with marinated fresh figs plus nuggets of caramelized walnut and bread crumbs (from his own spelt bread, baked in-house).

That was today's lunch well sorted!

 

I introduced the Margaret Howell Cafe in a JT column over a decade ago. It's still one of my favourite places for lunch in that part of Shibuya, especially sitting at the big outside table on a mellow autumn early afternoon. More here (scroll down)...

I wrote up The Market SE1 rather more recently...

soba dipped in refinement – Edo-soba Hosokawa in Ryogoku

My Tokyo Food File column, up today in the Japan Times, shines the spotlight on artisan soba — and specifically on Hosokawa in the back streets of Ryogoku. 

You can tell from the outside: it really is a classic contemporary. The materials and the motifs are entirely traditional, but the design and feel are entirely modern.

 

You enter past the long white noren of handspun cotton...

 

…through an anteroom — this is where you wait to be seated (or lurk if you're a smoker)...

…and then into the main dining room, with its rough-textured walls, handsome hard-wood tables and "tokonoma" built into the central pillar.

 

The menu is bound between two thin wooden boards, hand-painted and lacquered with a folksy-naïf look.  

 

These are the pages to turn to first: On the left, the soba-mae (literally "before the soba"), a traditional euphemism for the sake list: Isojiman honjozo; Hayase-ura junmaiginjo; Kuheiji junmai daiginjo; Amanoto junmai; and Daishichi kimoto junmai (those last two served as atsukan). Tasty indeed...

 

 

And on the right is the 'sobamae no otomoni' — snacks to match the sake. Hosokawa has some great buckwheat-based appetizers, starting with those two sobaya classics, yaki-miso (as described in my column)...

 

…and soba gaki. Often described as a buckwheat flour dumpling, a good gaki is actually more like a stiff but smooth soba polenta or porridge, but made with ultra-fine flour rather than gritty meal. Hosokawa's is brilliant, so smooth and so flavorful you can eat it on its own. However, it's served up with little sheets of nori seaweed. You eat it as a norimaki, rolled up in the seaweed, with a dab of fresh-grated wasabi root and a dip of savory shoyu. [I was so keen to try this I cut into it before I remembered to take a photo.]

 

What else? Well the other day I had the anago eel and cucumber su-no-mono — the eel lightly grilled and just laid out over the slivers of vinegared cucumber, with a dab of wasabi on top.

 

Another great side dish: finely sliced wasabi stems, lightly pickled in shoyu, dashi and mirin. Piquant and savory, perfect  with the sake!

 

Tempura goes superbly with both sake and soba: here, gobo (burdock) tempura, nice and crunchy, fibrous and earthy-wholesome.

 

And to close: seiro soba is the de facto classic. Simple and complex. But the anago tempura has to be tried too: this isn't the greatest of pictures, but you can just about see at the back that the eel comes with plenty of morsels of seasonal veggies too.

 

And to close: in my column I mention the fig simmered in sake. It's even better than it sounds. It's a single whole fig, with the skin removed, sitting on top of a thin slab of kanten, garnished with sweetened buckwheat kernels and and topped with a sprig of mint.

 

Outstanding. No wonder Hosokawa boasts a Michelin star!

A few more things about Hosokawa: it's no smoking (apart from in the anteroom); you may be asked to share your table with other customers; they don't allow you to take photos inside; and they ask you not to bring young kids (ie younger than elementary school age).

Here's  the Hosokawa home page...

And here's a map link...

 

Update, after talking with Hosokawa-san earlier this month (October 2012): The good news is that he is back in charge of the kitchen after several months off due to ill health; the bad news is that currently he isn't offering any of his delectable tempura as he's short-staffed. So the anago and gobo in the photos above are not being offered at present. Hopefully he'll be back up to his best before too long.