Cheap Eats Japan, Part II

Where was I? Ah, yes: noodles.  Plentiful, delicious, cheap -- but also just the tip of the Japanese convenience food iceberg. And so we move on to that second major Japanese food group, fried.

Fried food on sticks:  

Kushiage (which I think literally translates to "fried food on sticks") is exactly what it sounds like.  Any kind of vegetable and almost any kind of animal product is panko-crusted and deep fried to order, served with shredded cabbage and a sweet dipping sauce (in which you should never double dip).  As the Japanese know well, fried food goes best with beer, and it's the beer that will run up your tab in such places - each skewer on its own costs less than $2.  Greatest novelty: frying quail eggs turns them into squishy eye balls with the most amazing gooey yolk when you bite into them.

Lotus root has a most distinctive shape.

Okonomiyaki: 

Though kushiage could give it a run for its money, I would have to say Japan's premier drunk food is okonomiyaki.  Seriously, I don't understand why every college town doesn't have an okonomiyaki hole-in-the-wall diner, or why Portland appears still to be lacking an okonomiyaki food cart (Note to Portland: Get on it).

Okonomi-mura

One of the best cities for okononomiyaki is Hiroshima, where there is an entire building downtown (Okonomi-mura) made up of tiny okonomiyaki stalls. It's a little tricky to find the internal staircase that winds up through five or six floors of okonomiyaki paradise, and once you do, it's hard to differentiate one from another.  

We picked one on the fourth floor that seemed like it had been around for a while, was hosting three middle-aged Japanese business men, and was staffed by an older man with a yellow towel tied around his head who looked entirely displeased to see us sit down before his grill.

Watching him make the okonomiyaki was more than half the fun. He ladled batter on to the grill like a crepe and piled on a huge mound of cabbage, bean sprouts and - of course - fried bonito flakes.  On top of this went any meat add-ons.

He used his spatulas to rotate the piles expertly from time to time so the pancakes would cook evenly, finally flipping them over to get the meat sizzling and the cabbage reducing to a tidy disc.  Meanwhile, he spread out handfuls of noodles on the grill and drizzled them with oil to get them nice and crispy.  

He tidied up the edges of our unruly cabbage piles before flopping the whole thing on top of the noodles (pancake side up). He cracked eggs on to the griddle and quickly moved our growing heaps of food on top them, swirling the piles around with his spatulas so the egg would spread out evenly underneath.  He paused, then flipped the whole thing over (to stop the egg cooking) and spread a thick, sweet eel-based sauce over the top.  (Note: If eel sounds disgusting, that's probably because you haven't tried it. It is fatty and delicious - this spread is the equivalent of Japanese BBQ sauce.)

He sprinkled the top with a salty, crunchy mix (likely containing more bonito flakes) before sliding the completed okonomiyaki directly in front of us, where we could scoop it up in sections with our own mini-spatulas to transfer to our plates (which were too small to accommodate the whole thing).

Serious okonomiyaki is not for the faint of heart.

Set meals:  

OK, so it's mid-day and you're not feeling up to heavy-duty drunk food, or anything fried for that matter, and you are suffering from noodle fatigue.  What to do?  For a balanced and filling meal, especially at lunch time, you want to hunt down a neighborhood establishment that caters mostly to locals and serves "set meals."  These come with rice and miso soup, a dish of pickled vegetables, usually a bit of fruit for dessert, a main dish and a side dish.  If you find the right sort of place, a set meal should run you around 750 yen for lunch and less than 1000 yen for dinner (so $9-$12). 

Our best experience with set meals was our first dinner in Tokyo.  We also had a good experience at a hole-in-the-wall cafe in the outer reaches of Kyoto's main market. It was all formica tables and screetchy chairs, bright lighting and fake wood paneling around the pass-through from the kitchen.  A middle-aged woman in an apron manned the front; the menu was plastered in picture form all over the walls.  We pointed to the combos we wanted and waited for our lunch while half-watching the TV in the corner tuned to a Japanese soap opera.  For 750 yen, this is what we got:

Curry: 

Another option for a cheap, filling, not fried and not noodle meal is the ubiquitous Japanese curry.  This is entirely unlike curries from other cuisines - it is the opposite of spicy, more like a thick gravy of fragrant comfort food, typically served over rice.  Optional toppings include cheese, hard boiled eggs, or extra meat.  We met an American expat who survived almost entirely on Japan's cheap and ample curries.  You can, too - especially if noodles are not your thing.

Conveyor belt sushi:  

This is not so novel for those of us living on the west coast, but what is refreshing about the conveyor belt sushi in Japan is its high quality: this isn't fast food as much as convenience food. This also means that the sushi is not all dirt-cheap, but that is probably not a bad thing when you're talking about raw seafood that one hopes has been sustainably harvested and prepared by someone who knows what he's doing. 

While the concept was not new to us, we did love a couple practical innovations.  For example, the multi-level conveyor belt: the top level carries the sushi and other food, the bottom carries dishes for your soy sauce, mugs for your tea, and other logistical needs.  The tea is therefore fully self-service, as the green tea powder is in a container at your seat and there are hot water spigots spaced out along the counter.  Since I'm a big tea drinker when eating sushi, I probably abused this system.  But I loved the self-sufficiency of it all.

Oh, and the sushi was good, too. 

Department Stores and 7-11s: 

Yes, what do department stores and 7-11s have in common?  Glad you asked.  In Japan, both are excellent places to pick up prepared food to go.  

As hard as it might be for us Americans to believe, most self-respecting Japanese eat out of convenience stores multiple times a week.  For a quick breakfast, there are rice balls filled with meat or fish and wrapped in crunchy nori (seaweed).  For lunch and dinner, there are little bento boxes (of varying degrees of appealing-ness, I admit), featuring everything from sushi to curry to Italian-style noodles (microwaves by the checkout allow you to nuke meals as appropriate).  Convenience stores in train stations do a particularly brisk business.

Then there are the food floors in the basement of department stores: vast seas of counters specializing in just about every variation of Japanese comfort food, plus some Western ones.  I love exploring grocery stores in other countries, and the Japanese department store food floor tradition is a real anthropological experience.  Often half the floor is taken up with sweets - more on that later - and many also include full-on grocery stores.  But it was the prepared food counters that stole my heart. 

Of course, even the widest sampling of Japanese convenience food does not do full justice to the country's unique cuisine.  We did have "real" meals in Japan, too - but those warrant their own story.