by Kate on April 14, 2012
From footpath cooks to alcoves, bars and nooks, here’s where Tokyo insiders stop for delicious, inexpensive meals, writes Kate Gibbs.
Tokyo’s neon-lit alleys are packed with food carts and hole-in-the-wall haunts where queues of in-the-know locals and visitors seek ramen, soba, yakitori and tako-yaki. In a city known for its Michelin-star options and with 160,000 eateries – four times the number of Paris – street vendors win loyal customers by satisfying the desire to eat quickly, well and inexpensively.
“People in Japan are very particular, they are perfectionists,” says Kazuki Watanabe, who manages an elegant izakaya-style restaurant called Higashi-Yama in Meguro-ku. “This includes eating the best possible food, no matter if it is bought by the side of the road.”
Golf-ball size tako-yaki filled with tender octopus is the mainstay of food-on-the-run. Typically cooked in cast-iron custom-made pans by the roadside, the balls have a crisp exterior, are drizzled in a syrupy sweet and salty sauce, then mayonnaise, and topped with smoky, delicate shaved bonito fish flakes.
Some of the best food in Tokyo is found near or within train stations, as people like to eat before they commute home. Outside Shibuya Station, for example, a popular nook called Gindaco serves eight balls of tako-yaki for ¥500 yen (about $6).
Kerbside eating can involve ceremony, too. It’s not uncommon to place an order by buying a meal ticket from a vending machine by the front door of a tiny bar and walk through two squares of fabric into a place that has served the same secret ramen recipe for the past 150 years.
Glutinous rice balls spiked on to a stick and grilled with a sweet cloying sauce are often served outside temples and train stations. Odango-ya is sweet and one of the best-value street foods in the city.
This is an extract of an article published in The Sydney Morning Herald. Read the full article on SMH here.
Photographs by Kate Gibbs
by Kate on April 10, 2012
Happily, this article I wrote about the forest dessert at Sydney restaurant Sepia was published in The Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks back. Here’s the online version.
by Kate on December 2, 2011
Mochi sweets, those glutenous rice balls, are traditionally filled with sesame paste, cream or red bean paste. But the wagashi parlour and cafe, Higashiya, has overhauled the culinary tradition, filling the doughy balls with the likes of peach, edamame paste and blueberry. Rolled balls of gelatinous rice are gem-like sculptured pieces, pretty morsels of silk and goo.
There’s pumpkin and cheese, mashed chestnuts and brandy jelly, ginger, orange and chocolate, sweet potato and black sesame butter, macadamia and sweet potato, rum and fermented butter, cashews in mashed sweet potato.
The powder-coated or polished bites are served with the spirit Shochu instead of the traditional thick green tea. Though eating any any of the stores still feels like some ancient Japanese tea ceremony.
by Kate on October 6, 2011
Review of Manly Pavilion, published in February 2011 in Sunday Life magazine.
by Kate on August 22, 2011
Fresh off a one-star Michelin nod in 2010, Longman & Eagle, a restaurant that does snout-to-tail pork and all meaty good things in Chicago, decided to start its own hotel as well – as a place to sleep off food comas perhaps. Jared Wentworth is the chef here, and he offers a regularly changing menu that includes small plates like smoked Becker Lane pork rillettes with cornichons and mustard, and roasted marrow bones, red onion jam, and sourdough crostini mains.
In an Americanised menu that meets Asia and France half way, Longman & Eagle does a grilled Berkshire pork chop with head on prawns, hush puppies, bacon braised Swiss chard and black pepper shrimp sauce. Wentworth does wild boar sloppy joes and things like pork shank with collard greens and grits. A great restaurant it might be, but it’s the chance to stay late and elbow wrestle with other local chefs in the wee hours over a dram of whisky that really gives the place deserved mention. Early breakfasts help recovery with the likes of sunny side duck egg hash with duck confit, Nichols Farm spring onions, Yukon gold potato and a black truffle vinaigrette (a culinary hangover cure, to be sure).
Longman & Eagle has six rooms available for overnight stay, casual yet completely beautiful offerings for seasoned travellers. Rooms vary in both price and proportion, and start at $75 a night.
Longman & Eagle
2657 N. KEDZIE AVE / CHICAGO, IL 60647 / 773-276-7110
www.longmanandeagle.com
The Barbican in London has recently launched the Food Hall and Book Bank. Market stalls, a deli and sweet counter contained in this extensive arts centre, which has more than 18 different stores and nooks. There’s also a Book Bank – a bring-and-take-away bookstall stocked by Pan Macmillan. The formal restaurant upstairs boasts a macaroon mixologist – truly. It’s a man who matches macaroons to cocktails, of course.
.PSLAB collaborated with architects and designers SHH to create a site-specific treatment for the project. Light fixtures were conceived to suit the rough style of the building fabric and also to abide by the restrictions of the listed building. The ground floor is spatially divided into multiple seating areas via low ceiling levels; due to the duct system and various seating layouts. Floor-to -ceiling shelving structures hold multiple glass jars holding energy-saving light bulbs. The result if a twinkling gorgeous place, where a lacquered steel metal structure complements the rustic space.
The jar-shelving structures were then adapted into ceiling suspended modules to provide functional light. And then smaller modules of these shelves are repeated into wall-mounted fixtures over the seating booths. Pretty lovely.
Barbican Food Hall and Lounge; (barbican.org.uk).
by Kate on January 26, 2011
The early bird catches the sesame seed bun. Hanging out today with my wee friend Atticus in Melbourne, traipsing around and making lamingtons and finding distractions instead of going for a run around Albert Park lake. We made an early stop at the South Melbourne version of Grill’d, the burger spot. Walls are amusingly scribbled and chairs are fire engine red. The burgers, his a mini with cheese and lettuce and mine with mustard, pickles, sauce, are soft and actually juicy.
Grill’d is all over Aus, but I went to this one..
278 Clarendon Street
South Melbourne
(03) 9686 6866
by Kate on December 13, 2010
Love these things from creative design studio Ma + Chr, who have done restaurant and bar interior designs as well as their own happy little pictures you can buy. It’s based in Paris and was founded by Mathilde Aubier and Christine Delaquaize.
by Kate on December 10, 2010
Kangaroo Island is not just about kangaroo and other cuddly things, a new culinary world is burgeoning as enterprising islanders take on pursuits other than the traditional wool farming. Abalone and marron farming, samphire pickling, rare breed farming and Ligurian beekeeping are bringing travellers across from the mainland as epicurean adventurists. First stop off the ferry from Adelaide is Penneshaw, where we find the best fish and chips on the island.
Sue Pearson’s Fish attracts tourist buses and locals for her whiting fillet in a beer batter. She also does more intricate local marron with a lamb chorizo risotto when I am there. Here are some pics, including the view opposite of the Adelaide ferry coming in.
by Kate on November 23, 2010
If Sydney’s Japanese restaurants’ menus could be lined up in a row, we might be excused for thinking it is a case of the usual suspects. Salmon avocado rolls, crispy fried soft-shell crab rolls, beef teriyaki.. sigh. But a New York style Japanese fusion restaurant, Monkey Magic, is setting a new agenda. Suzuki jewfish with dashi and lemongrass consomme (below), a salted caramel semifreddo with pineapple chip … New head chef Shea Crawford (above, right) has joined the restaurant having worked at New York’s acclaimed Nice Matin and Oceana Restaurant, where he worked under the tutelage of Andy D’Amico.
Now as head chef at Monkey Magic, Shea has collaborated with Tsuboi and head sushi chef Michiaki Miyazaki to create a new menu flush with European influenced Japanese fusion fare. The so-named Crab Leaves is crab meat bedded on a betel leaf with a touch of ginger, chilli and lime, not a bad thing to go with a tall lemongrass julep (above), a gin and lemongrass cocktail. The slow cooked pork belly is braised and served with apple and ginger puree, salad of fennel, chinese cabbage, orange and chives ($27).
The usual suspects are still here, but the soft shell crab roll ($15) comes with flyingfish roe, tomato, mizuna, fried leek and spicy mayonnaise. And then it can be followed by the wonderfully unusual silken tofu cake (above), with white lemon sorbet and tuille ($13) or the sugar cinnamon beignet, which comes with a chai latte and sweet cream ($13).
Monkey Magic: 3&4, 410 Crown St. Surry Hills (02) 93584444
