Kyoto - Kiyomizu Dera Tofu & Red Bean Dumpling

3 March 2009 - 13:00 (Tuesday)

Kiyomizu Dera (Pure Water Temple) is one of the most celebrated temples of Japan. Founded in 780 (Note the 3 digit year...), it stands in the wooded hills of eastern Kyoto. This temple was added to the list of Unesco World Heritage Sites in 1994.

In my opinion, it's one of the most beautiful places that Japan has to offer BUT NO.... this is a food blog, not a temple blog so i won't waste any more alphabets describing how beautiful it is, how it's heaven on earth, how the view from the temple top is magnificent, how everyone should visit this temple at least once in their life time..... It's seriously a DIE DIE MUST GO place when in Japan but NO..... i'm not wasting any more of my time writing about such an amazing place cos this is a food blog..... :P


Outdoor seating...

Nestled in the midst of Kiyomizu Dera is this little eatery that has both indoor and outdoor seating and they are famous for serving the silkiest of Tofus (Soy Beancurd). If you don't already know, Kyoto is famous for their Tofus... they taste so much better than what you get in other parts of the world. Why? Apparently it's cos Kyoto has a large number of underground springs and it's the spring water that makes the Tofus softer and silkier in texture.

We had the luxury of watching snow fall from the sky when we were at Kiyomizu Dera and it was one of the most beautiful sights we've ever seen in our lives. Temperature was 0 degrees and when we reached this Tofu eatery, what did we do? We chose to dine on Tofu.... Al Fresco style! Think all the Japs were looking at us and thinking "These crazy Chinese will one day rule the world..." Something like that...



The Tofu is served in a wooden bucken with very very hot water. See that little ceramic pot at the top of the bucket?it's base actually extends through the top of the bucket into the hot water. The ceramic pot contains some soya sauce for the Tofu and the sauce is kept warm by having the base of the pot dipped into the same hot water as the Tofu. So cool!

The Tofu simply took both Wen and my breath away. It was as how legend has over the centuries described it... so Soft, so silky.... Nice!! What you do is place some of the sauce into your bowl, next scoop the Tofu from the bucket into your bowl via the metal netted ladle, top it with some green onions on it then you have an option of either sprinkling it with the spicy powder or the magic salty powder. Yummm!



Being the alcoholics that we are, what's Tofu without Sake right? :)



Now, i'm not sure if Kyoto is famous for their Red Bean dumplings but these dumplings has got to be the BEST BEST BEST BEST BEST dumplings i have ever sunk my teeth into. Wen doesn't like Red Beans ever.... just that it was so cold and she wanted something hot going into her system. She drank some of the red bean soup, took a bite of the dumpling and her whole face lighted up like the 4th of July. The Tofus were fantastic but these Red Bean Dumplings.... DIE DIE MUST TRY!!!

If you are ever in Kyoto, please please please for the love of mankind.... go visit Kiyomizu Dera and then have some Tofu and Red Beans Dumpling. I'll personally castrate my best friend if you do not enjoy that experience.


Kiyomizu Dera
Kyoto

Osaka: Kani Doraku Crab Restaurant

02 March 2009 20:30 (Monday)

You've travelled 4940km from Singapore to Osaka... you've spent the earlier part of the day exhausting all your energy in a Universal Studios where the super heroes speak Japanese... You are suffering from the unfamiliar cold of close to 0 degrees... You are tired and hungry... you see this large crab above a restaurant which is suppose to be the iconic restaurant of Osaka... what do you do? We know what we did..... we smiled, walked in and asked for a table for 2... non smoking section please :)

Kani Doraku is one of the most famous crab restaurants in Osaka. The six and a half meter crab at the front of the restaurant is mechanized which means its arms and eyestalks move! Built in 1960, this mechanical billboard soon spawned imitations, including a squid that puffs steam and oni (demons) that light up at night. We were soon to find out why it's so famous..... food was Marvelicious!!!


Cute Crab Chopstick Rest.


So many things to order on the menu so we decided to go with one of the sets. Started off with this cold crab starter along with some jelly thingy and a bowl of prawn and brocolli in some yummy sauce...


Crab Jelly + Prawn & Brocolli...


Cold Crab Starter...


More Cold Crab with an option of 3 different sauces...


Crab Sashimi! Now, that's something you don't get here in Singapore everyday!!! Texture was a little strange cos it was soft yet chewy. But the meat was so sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!!!


Crab Chawamushi... check out the little bowl they serve it in, so nice... like a peach!


Crab, potato and cheese in a sizzling hot plate...


More Crab... this one cooked in some sauce...


Ok, this was interesting. What you have is a bowl of rice served over a burning stove. The waitress told us to leave the rice cooking for about 15 mins. Once it's cooked, you are suppose to place the crab into the rice and then you see that little tea pot? It contains some sort of soup base which u are suppose to mix into the rice and the crab... How strange...


Crab mixed into the rice after 15 mins...


Soup based mixed into the rice and the crab..... stirred for a few minutes and scooped up on a plate. The taste of the whole dish was refreshingly nice!


And finally, we finished off our dinner with Macha Ice Cream. But here's the twist... instead of serving us a Green Tea Ice cream, it was a scoop of Vanilla Ice cream with concentrated Green Tea sauce distributed over it. That had gotta be the most awesome Macha Ice Cream we have ever had!!

Kani Doraku isn't the cheapest of restaurants, heck i wouldn't even consider it to be in the mid range pricing. It's rather expensive and u will find yourself down by a couple of hundreds if you go ala-carte. The Set Menus were rather comprehensive and it certainly helps manage the dinner cost. If you have been to a crab restaurant in Hokkaido then my recommendation would be to give this a miss cos while it is very good, it ain't as good as those in Hokkaido. But if you haven't been to Hokkaido and don't plan to go there for awhile, then you are going to have the best crab meal of your life here :)


Kani Doraku Crab Restaurant
1-6-18 Dotonbori, Osaka
Tel: 06-6211-8975

Osaka: Aka-Oni Takoyaki

02 March 2009 20:00 (Monday)

When in Osaka, you MUST try the Octopus Balls, otherwise known as Takoyaki. It's a city specialty and it certainly taste fantastic!!! It was so good we had it every single day that we were in Osaka.

Aka-Oni Takoyaki is located along the main strip of Dotonbori. With a stall decor like that, you can't possibly miss it. Along Dotonbori there were way too many Takoyaki stalls but we settled on Aka-Oni simply cos it had the longest queue. Ah yes.... we adopted the Herd Mentality and this time round, the Herd proved right :)

There were a few choices of how you would like your Octopus Balls done, we went for the spicy sauce and ...... Yuuuuuummmmmm......


Bad picture cos it was close to 0 degrees outside and we were freezing our a$es off and the moment I removed my hands from my gloves to take a camera shot, my fingers would freeze up. It was a street brawl between good picture of food vs hands need for warmth..... hands won...


Aka-oni Takoyaki
Somewhere along Dotonbori...
Can't miss it, the stall with the red devils is way too prominent...

Ramen @ Omotesando

01 March 2009 11:30 (Sunday)

Right... Sometime during my holiday in Japan, i figured i would have a problem with my blog due to the eatery names being in Japanese. This would be the first of my problems. The Japanese character is rather similar to Chinese and i figured the words at the end are Fire and Mountain but i cannot figure out what's the word in the middle. As such, i shall henceforth call this Ramen Eatery the Mountain Fire Ramen Stall.

Now, the Mountain Fire Ramen Stall is located along Omotesando which is near Harajuku. If you were to stand at the opposite side of the road from the Omotesando Hills Shopping Mall and face the mall, you should then turn left, walk about 134 paces then turn left again, you should face an alley, walk another 23 paces and the below scene should greet you....


At this point, i certainly hope you did not stop at the earlier paragraph, hopped on a plane to Japan and followed my instructions cause i doubt that was correct. General directions are correct, just not too sure about the number of paces....

Again, it was Kevin and Pauline that brought us to this relatively obscure ramen eatery but boy was the ramen good! The weather outside was about 4 degrees and it was drizzling and that Oh so tasty Soup ramen certainly helped warm up the body in the most wonderful way...


Just look at the soup..... yes, it's as tasty as it looks! Mountain Fire Ramen stall serves their pork separate from the soup rather than dumping everything in. Idea is for you to decide how much and when you want to mix the pork into the soup. I'm sure there's a highly logical explanation as to why this is so but i decided i would leave the chefs to serve the long queue of people in and outside the eatery rather than have him figure out what i am trying to say to them...


The bowl with the green stuff is actually Dou Miao vegetable with rice below. No sauce, no condiments.... just Dou Miao, Seaweed and Japanese rice. So simple yet so nice. The Gyoza was to die for! Skin was super crispy and the meat was awesomely tasty!


Another shot of the ramen.... u can't possibly tell me u aren't salivating yet....


Looking at these pictures certainly bring back wonderful memories. If only i could have this for dinner tonight.....

Mountain Fire Ramen
Somewhere in Omotesando

Gonpachi - Nishi Azabu

28 February 2009 19:30 (Saturday)

Gonpachi is a bit of a legend over in Japan. When the former US president, George Bush, came over to Tokyo, the former Japanese prime minister apparently brought him here for some bites. For those of you who are into Quentin Tarantino films, you will find this restaurant highly familiar.... yes, that's cause the set for the scene in which Uma Thurman decapitates Lucy Liu and her Crazy 88 gang was based on this restaurant. Have i gotten you a little excited yet? :)


This is a view from our table on the 2nd storey of the restaurant. Doesn't the restaurant look so cool! It's always packed so reservations are a must! Gonpachi is a bit of an Izakaya, where people have small bites, drink huge amounts of alcohol and talk as loud as they can. And to reciprocate, the waiting stuff are always shouting some greeting whenever someone walks into the restaurant. The Chefs will then reciprocate with more shouting.... It's noisy, but it's oh so cool!


What's a good meal without sake right? Isn't this Sake pot so cool!


Starters to stimulate the stomach....


Errr.... i think this is the pork belly with a dose of Wasabi... Yuuummmm.


Grilled Beef... Mmmmmm....


Can't remember what fish this is but trust me, it taste better than it looks!


Black Miso Cod fish..... Meat so soft, Meat so smooth, Meat so tasty......


This one was our favourite of the night.... grilled Foie Gras with Strawberry. The liver melts the moment you pop it into your mouth. WHOA... i think i just fell into a 10 second trance just writing this bit about the Foie Gras....


More grilled meat.... too much alcohol to remember what is what....

Ok, i'll be honest. Gonpachi is a restaurant you gotta visit when you go to Japan.... but just once will suffice. It's a must in my books only because of it's decor and the electrifying atmosphere. You cannot find anything remotely close over here in Singapore. The food is great but it isn't fantastic... Don't get me wrong, it's very nice but you can have the same quality of food here in one of the better Yakitori restaurants in Singapore. We were looking for uniquely good in which we found in the atmosphere.... food was good, just wasn't unique. Still it's a must go... and you can quote me on that!

Gonpachi
1F,2F
1-13-11 Nishi-Azabu, Minato-ku,
Tokyo 106-0031
Tel: 03-5771-0170

Tsukiji Market - Sushi Sen

28 February 2009 11:00 (Saturday)

It's been 28 hours since we arrived in Japan and we haven't sunk our teeth into any sushi yet. Sacrilegious!

Sushi Sen @ Tsukiji Market wasn't exactly where we had in mind. I did a lot of research prior and apparently the best sushi places in Tsukiji market would have been either Sushi Bun or Daiwa Sushi. For some reason, the map printout i had was completely useless cos it was probably drawn by an eight year old where the scale and the navigational indexes were wrong.... either that or we simply didn't know how to read maps!

Anyway to gut a long story short, we didn't manage to find either and that's where our dear friends Kevin and Pauline decided to bring us to Sushi Sen cos this is where they usually have their Sushi in Tsukiji market and they swear by it. It wasn't going to be long before we realise that if Kevin and Pauline swears by a restaurant, you better believe it's goooood!


Sushi Chefs behind the counter..


Being the uninitiated in a foreign land, we decided to let our friends, the local foreigners, do the ordering. First up was this plate of Aburi Sushi. I hear some of you asking "What on earth is Aburi"... well, it's similar to Flambe.... what the chef does is to blowtorch the sushi for a few seconds before serving. If done correctly, you will end up having a slightly cooked surface but with all the freshness of the raw fish. I can't quite remember what each piece in the photo is but they were all .... what's the word i can use here.... AWESOME!


Next up was the mixed plate of Sushi. Ok, here's where i admit i am a wuss.... yes, i almost cried when i placed these little pieces of goodness into my mouth. Back in Singapore, we probably eat more Japanese then the usual local delights. But never in the most vivid of our imagination did we imagine that the Japs in Japan can do it so much better than in Singapore. Ok, i guess the freshness of the seafood used helps but still.... how can anything taste so good?!?


Without discrediting any of the other sushi on the platter, my favourites were the Uni Sushi and the Aburi Salmon Belly Sushi (next to the Uni Sushi) with a droplet of Japanese Mayo. I'm lost for words to describe just how good they are..


Yes, they were this good we had 2 more orders of the Uni Sushi...


Anago Sushi (Sea Eel), So so so so so so so goooooooood.....


Hotate Sushi (Scallop). If i were to blindfold you, put this piece of hotate in your mouth, have you savour it, then i place a piece of the freshest hotate we can get in Singapore in your mouth, your natural reaction would be to spit it out simply cos your mind tells you the hotate has gone bad. For some reason, the hotate in Japan just taste ultra fresh and ultra sweet. The texture is so different from what we get around here!


Clams cooked in Sake Soup... MMmmmmm...


Can't remember the name of this Sashimi but boy was it good..... even though the picture does look a little barbaric, wouldn't you say?

First Sushi we had in the land of Japan and we were thoroughly floored by the experience. It's just our second day and we are thinking we want to consider spending the rest of our lives here... yes, we are simple people.... we gravitate mindlessly to where good food is....


Tsukiji Sushisen
6-chome jogaishijo ten
Akimoto building 1F, 6-23-12,
Tsukiji, Chuo-ku
Tel: 03-3549-1136

*Out of curiosity, can anyone tell me if there is a plural for Sushi?!? This one had me baffled...

En Japanese Dining Bar - Mohd Sultan

Date: 23 August 2007 19:30 (Thursday)

En Japanese Dining Bar, also affectionately called En Bar by fans of this restaurant.... Ah, Memories...

You know how when you first started dating your partner and how there would be a specific cinema that the both of you would always go to, or a shopping centre that both of you like to hang around, or a specific bush in a specific park that the both of you would romp in (ahem...) Well, En Bar is the restaurant that both Wen and myself built our dating days upon. There were times when we would be at En Bar no less than 3 times a week. I think i probably spent more time at En Bar in the last X years than in the office! (Ooops...) We must have tried every single dish on the menu...

There's obviously a reason why we go to En Bar so often.... it may be that the place is really chill out and it's in a very centralised location (Mohd Sultan) but mostly it's cos the food and sake they serve are so AWESOOOME!!! (though i suspect the cute jap manager, Ibuki Horie, might be a reason why Wen suggests going to En Bar so often... don't think i never catch you stealing secret glances! *wags finger*)

Ok, back to the food...

We've been to En Bar so many times we could just say "The usual" and the waiting staff will probably get it right. So without further adieu, presenting...... En Bar Food....

We first started with a nice pot of Hot Sake... just to whet up the Appetite :)

Next up, Tako Wasabi - slightly boiled Octopus mixed with Wasabi... Mmmmm...

Salmon Sashimi... So Fresh... Mmmmm

Hotate Sashimi aka Scallop Sashimi... So Fresh... Mmmmm

Mekajiki Sashimi - Swordfish Sashimi... So Fresh... Mmmmm

Kokuryu Junmai Ginjo Sake - translated as "Black Dragon".... this has got to be one of the best Sakes around...

Kubu Irichi - Seaweed with pork...

Daikon Salad...

Shitake Tempura

Assorted Sushi

Wafu Steak


Yup, all the above for 2.... it's any wonder why we are not as fat as Sumo Wrestlers! And oh no, dinner wasn't over... we proceeded across the road to.... CANALE!!! But that's a different story altogether...

En Japanese Dining Bar
207 River Valley Road
UE Square, #01-57
Singapore 238275
Tel: 67352212