Though you might think, from reading my blog, that the only foreign cuisine to be found in Tokyo is French, that's very far from accurate. Not only is there a full range of western cooking, from very authentic pizza to the ever-popular Makudonarudo hamburger, but other east Asian countries are also well-represented. The other day I visited Taishikan, a Korean restaurant (the name means "Embassy" in Japanese) not far from my office, and from the moment the kimchi hit the table, it was like being in another country.
We removed our shoes before stepping up to be seated around a low table, and the menu was in Japanese, but otherwise everything was oddly dissonant for those of us accustomed to life in Tokyo as opposed to Seoul. The waitress spoke Japanese with an accent. The chopsticks were metal. And the food, of course, had the kind of fire you just don't taste a lot in traditional Japanese cooking, which is much more sweet than spicy. All the wonderful little appetizer dishes of pickled or fried vegetables had a sesame-oil aroma as well as the red chili heat, and my tofu soup, above, was like a liquid version of the same flavors, with some sliced green onions for crunch and the silky tofu for mild relief. It came with a silver box of rice.
One thing that Korean and Japanese culture share is a love of raw eggs - both my kinudofu chige and the ihiyaki bibimba, above, were adorned with that bright yellow yolk, which is quickly stirred into the dish and mostly cooked by the substantial residual heat of the stone bowl. Bibimba is the classic Korean lunch-in-one-dish: like Japanese donburi, it's a bowl of rice with toppings, but the Korean version features the rice actually cooked in the bowl, so it's nice and crispy on the edges, and the toppings are pickled vegetables and chili sauce, and often grilled meat. And of course, an egg.
I don't know if they offer dessert on the menu, but who needs it when there's Dessert Gum waiting by the door to pick up as you leave?
No comments:
Post a Comment