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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
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Home at seven, dinner at seven-thirty. But just because you don’t want to spend the night in the kitchen doesn’t mean you’re prepared to compromise on deliciousness. The do-ahead weeknight meal is about last-minute assembly and shunning the stress. These recipes were first published in my column for Sunday Life magazine, The Perfect… Look out for the page in the next issue on Sunday!
Korean Mexican beef tacos
Korean tacos are gaining cult following in LA, and we’re behind them. This is all about the marinating, which is totally simple to do the night before. I used beef fillet here, but try any lean beef for best results.
2 tbsp soy sauce2 tbsp sugar
2 tsp sesame oil
750g lean beef, thinly sliced
1 cup kimchi
1 cup strong cheddar, grated
½ bunch coriander, including stalks, chopped
2 tbsp toasted sesame seeds
12 mini tortillas, heated
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 tsp mirin
1 lime, cut into wedges
½ cup Japanese mayonnaise
Whisk together soy sauce, sugar, garlic, sesame oil and mirin, add beef and mix to coat. Marinate in fridge at least 2 hours, up to 24 hours. Cook meat on high heat on barbecue or frypan in batches for 5-8 minutes. Do not overcrowd pan. Place remaining ingredients in dishes on table. Assemble tacos at table, adding a little of each element. Roll up and eat with hands. Serves 4-6.
Kimchi pickled cabbage
An essential salty fermented taco accompaniment. Made ahead a few days it’s great added to tacos or just served on the side of a Korean-spice spiked meal. As with any pickle, it gets more intense in flavour after a week or so.
Wash half a Chinese cabbage, trim and cut into about 4cm-sized pieces, then place in a large bowl. Add 2 ½ cups water and ½ cup salt, toss to combine and marinate for 4-5 hours or overnight, stirring occasionally. Drain salt water into a saucepan and bring to a boil, then cool completely. Mix wilted cabbage with 2 minced garlic cloves, 2 tbsp minced ginger, ½ tbsp hot chilli powder, 2 tsp fish sauce, a pinch chilli flakes, 2 tsp caster sugar and 1 tsp rice wine vinegar. Transfer to a 1 litre-capacity jar, cover with cooled cabbage water, seal jar and leave for 4 days and up to 6 months, until pickle has developed in flavour. Drain before serving.
TIP {do-ahead meals} Some foods actually benefit from being cooked in advance. Stews deepen in flavor, soups mellow, and a coffee-laced tiramisu is perfect dolloped into bowls a day late. Just set table, tweak meal, unwind.
PLAYLIST Joyous dinner tunes with Up from Below by Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros.
Photography by Vanessa Levis. Styling by Bhavani Konings.
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There’s a lovely place called Bangalow near Byron Bay in northern New South Wales with that old-charm, rustic, vintage, rows-of-terraces, step-back-100-years thing going on. But nice. I recently had the joy of going there with some of my newest favourite people on a great road trip adventure north. We found this heavenly nook filled with paper and pots and glass jars filled with shiny things. I’m now trying to remember the name of the shop, which had me in such a pretty bower-bird whirl I could barely look up from Instagram to get to the credit card. I welcome suggestions as to the name of this gorgeous place. There were shiny white railway station tiles along one wall, and jars for wooden spoons, and bowls that would make a green lead salad look like a masterpiece. There were two grand chairs I want to grow old in, holding the warm hand of my man in the other chair.
Bangalow is what Byron Bay might have been had I got there earlier, say 20 years. We need Byron for beach and sand, but for rain and quaint, there is Bangalow. And there wasn’t a schoolies kid in sight. It’s kind of smart and chic and has an elegant Melbourne set opening up dream shops. There’s an antique store off the main road, too, all trinkets and food-styler heaven with old Coke crates and distressed turquoise painted things. Damn it, I’ll try and remember then name of that place too.
I do remember the name of the cafe-restaurant Town, though. There is Uptown and Downtown at this restaurant. Downtown is big eggy breakfasts and massive salads and Paul Bassett coffee. Uptown it’s a degustation serious affair that locals told me was the best dinner in town. Ha. An amuse bouche come just before a Kingfish starter with ponzu, macadamia and wild rice. There are pink scallops served with cauliflower, buckwheat and mustard, then a snapper done with ginger, shallot and choko. Hearty mains begin with duck served with carrot, verjus, Brussels sprouts. Basically it’s a fresh trail of flavours with a tinkering of Asian flavours. Then there’s Gabriel Coulet Roquefort cheese cake, which comes with a celery and caramelised walnut salad. Migas is done with a shaved mango granita, a great dollop of sauternes custard, crumbs and a mango “Egg”. The restaurant Town helps turn this little intricate town Bangalow into a must-see day trip from Byron, or an essential stop on the great adventurous road trip north.
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If cooking with fire is going to be the big thing in 2012, and I have no doubt it will, then Al Brown’s book Stoked is going to be the hot cookbook of the year.
Labelling the barbecue an icon of Kiwi life, the book explores a vast range of cooking outdoors techniques, from grills to smoking, spits, outdoor ovens including tandoor and pizza, and how-tos on smoking and firing up the best barbecued meat. He forages for mushrooms and does whole pigs in underground spits, he does smoked duck. The book is a veritable (smoke)house of new cooking, or old cooking styles brought back in vogue.
There are more than 100 recipes, there’s an emphasis on fast and tasty, and there are recipes for bruschetta, burgers, pizza, fritters, chargrilled seafood, beef, lamb and chicken, ribs, plus slow roasted meats. There’s game including venison, duck and goat, plus salads and classic cake tin slices. How very New Zealand.
My father’s mother, a New Zealander (like my dad), used to make the most gorgeous slices, coconut and jam things I used to adore as a child. And I remember sitting as a toddler on the beach in Auckland, before it was the developed and upmarket place it is now. We’d pick pippies from the sand with our toes, then cook them on an open fire – me wrapped in terry towelling nappies and draped in (New Zealand) wool blankets on the beach, the billowing smoke curling around me. Having my happy sandy-footed family around me, and sucking pippies from shells, is one of my enduring childhood memories. I’m going to bring back family tradition with this book and start cooking open fire again.
There’s a gorgeous video to go with the release of the book, it’s enough to inspire you to hand in your Australian passport and cross over the Tasman for a simpler life. I’d do just about anything to traipse over there right now and do a day’s foraging and food exploring with this guy. My favourite part of the video is the last scene, a gorgeous labrador flop in three parts (sitting, elegant lie-down, and … flop), resigning to the atmosphere, an open fire, and no doubt exhaustion from a day’s outdoor exploring.
The book features stunning photography by Kieran Scott, shot in NZ’s amazing scenery, including the high country above the Wakatipu Basin in Central Otago; the rugged south Wairarapa coastline; hunting and fly fishing at the 8000-acre Ngamatea Station in the Central North Island; wild porcini mushroom gathering in Canterbury; an outdoor tandoor oven with Indian friends in Wellington, and a hangi up the Whanganui River. Buy the book, Bro.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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This completely gorgeous hotel is Sir Terence Conran’s first foray into hotel design. The English designer, oddly, has gone to Vienna to showcase his clear talent. There’s not standard issue room design, and instead a nod to individual modernity is made in each room.
The design reflects a dedication to modernity and high quality materials and workmanship. This is not some mass-produced furnishing found in franchised hotel chains, and instead the rooms and suites of the hotel Das Triest have each been designed to actually fit each room. The hotel is decked out in art and accessories by local and international artists. The lighting concept sets out to create an intimate atmosphere in every corner of the house. The hotel itself says it is going for an eye-candy look. Looking pretty delicious too.
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How sweet it is to visit Kangaroo Island’s colony of Ligurian bees, writes Kate Gibbs
Perhaps its their renegade status that keeps us enthralled with the bee: hard workers, mass producers, a sense of social order, the mystical ability to turn an egg into a queen, and a violent sting to boot.
“Next to humans, bees are the most studied living things on Earth,” the manager of Island Beehive and a quietly spoken authority on all things honey, Peter Davis, says.
[FULL STORY here: 8 February 2011, The Sydney Morning Herald]
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