Nouvelle Vague: Azabu Hop Chou a la Creme

The chou creme is very popular in Japan, not only in its familiar pate a chou form, an airy mound of pale brown, unsweetened pastry filled with cream, but also in the shorter, rounder, sweet and crunchy version that I've sometimes seen called "cookie" chou. At Nouvelle Vague, a hip little gelato/coffee/chou shop in Azabu Juban, it goes by the name "hop" chou, though I don't believe it has any relation to the hops used to brew beer. The inside of the pastry is almost as light as that of the classic chou, but the outside is textured and hard. Inside is a custard, probably the same concoction as the gelato, only in unfrozen form.
The pastries are baked right there on-site, as is obvious from the delicious smell of baking sugar and eggs that often wafts into the street, as well as from the giant mixers in plain view behind the service counter. The custard and gelato is also house-made, and comes in a seasonal variety of four or five flavors. Plain custard and chocolate are the constants; there are also, in season, such flavors as chestnut, sakura, and apple. Summertime means green tea, so that's one that's currently available. Rum raisin is one that I think they always have, but I've only been here twice before - so I'm not totally sure. I had never gotten it before, and I was a little disappointed - there was no rum taste at all, although the plump raisins in the rich custard were perfectly good on their own. As for the matcha, it was good, with a strong green tea flavor. I still think that plain custard is the best, though - it's somehow just what I want in a chou creme, hoppy or not.
Nouvelle Vague

Azabu-Juban 2-13-9

Minato-ku, Tokyo

03-5484-7707

Salade Nicoise at Aux Bacchanales

It can sometimes be hard to find a good salad in Tokyo. Having grown up in the land of the 2000-calorie salad, I'm used to a huge bowl of greens topped with an equal volume of cheese, tomatoes, hearts-of-palm, and other interesting ingredients. In Tokyo, a salad often means a few mouthfuls of shredded cabbage with a few kernels of corn and maybe some grated radish. Even if it's of decent size for the the inevitably inflated price, it usually comes smothered in dressing. I'm not a big fan of dressing, and would always order it on the side back home - not usually an option here.

So discovering the Salade Nicoise at Aux Bacchanales was a happy surprise. The plate holds a satisfying mound of various types of lettuce leaves, including the pleasantly bitter red radicchio and the gently fuzzy round lamb's leaf lettuce as well as the ordinary curly-edged red and green variety. There are three chunks of tomatoes, three olives, three slices each of boiled egg, potato and cucumber, and a pile of (canned?) tuna topped with a single anchovy (just so you know you're not in America anymore). The dressing comes on the side in a stylish silver pitcher! And at 850 yen, it may not be the best deal in town, but it is cheaper than the surrounding restaurants' salads, and you get a basket of baguette and a long-stemmed glass of water as well, for free - which seems like a steal considering how much it otherwise feels like eating in Europe, with the open courtyard before you and Westerners occupying a good number of the seats around.

Aux Bacchanales
Ark Mori Bdg., 2nd Floor
Minato-ku, Akasaka 1-12-32

Karaoke Dining: FIORIA

One of the most surreal aspects of modern Japanese culture is karaoke. It's definitely a mainstream activity and a booming business, with new karaoke-kan springing up all the time, and certain streets where you can't walk five meters without hitting yet another one. There are the chains, which all have about as many branches as a Starbucks (including two of the same brand virtually across the street from each other near Roppongi Crossing, which is one of the major karaoke venues). There are small, nameless establishments which simply proclaim their existance with the simple word KARAOKE, four letters in Japanese. Then there are the deluxe party joints, which are often on the fringe between ordinary Japanese other-planetness and the kind of fetishized wierd that fills an entire subculture here (and not one I've ever explored). It's fun to venture to the edge sometimes, though, and once again, it was an office party that gave me the chance to experience FIORIA.
FIORIA bills itself as a place to enjoy fine dining, and its website devotes all its space to food and rooms, each with its own "atmosphere." (The English page is one of the most entertaining I've come across, and the photos of the rooms, under the "Saloon" menu, are almost as good.) As the infamous "love hotels" have a similar attention to fantasy decor, this is where we start to pick up a warning sign. In fact, as you enter FIORIA, which is on the third and fourth floors, you go up a red-carpeted stairway. This leads to a hall where Christmas-light-wrapped trees glitter below iron chandeliers, and the walls are of faux-castle masonry. Our room (not the room with a footbath, sadly) had a somewhat volcanic feel to it, with a glowing red circle in the ceiling, red tables, and rough gray fake rocks looming out of the ceiling.
The food, so vaunted on the website, wasn't bad - certainly better than the usual karaoke-room fare. We got a set course menu, though there's a la carte available as well, and it's a sort of fusion between Japanese and Italian (this is FIORIA, after all). The fancy "antipasti" tray in the top photo was followed by huge platters of salad (most of the dishes were served family style, though the secretaries in attendance immediately took it upon themselves to dish up the individual plates and serve everyone else). Next came a fried piece of fish with a spicy mayo sauce and some sugar snap peas, stylishly clipped on the diagonal. The second photo, a chilled vegetable soup with croutons, cheese, and a swirl of olive oil, was next, and it was almost like a liquid salad. Then there was the steak, then an eggplant pasta with far too many noodles in proportion to the vegetables. Last were the tiny dishes of frozen fruits in jelly and mango-sauced panna cotta below. They look big in the photo, but that's a wide-rimmed espresso cup, and they were much smaller than they appear. Naturally, this being Japan, it was all-you-can-drink for the three hours it took to serve the full menu.
I've never really liked the combination of dinner and karaoke - it's hard to sing while eating, after all. I can't drink much, either, especially since I don't need my inhibitions lowered any more than they automatically become as soon as I have a captive audience encouraging me. On the other hand, maybe it's good to have the distraction of food to prevent my spending the entire night hogging the mic. I have to say that for all its fancy decor and Italianesque menu, FIORIA's music system isn't the most exciting. The videos are mostly the usual, eighties-era silliness that you see in almost every karaoke place, and the system doesn't have the largest collection of songs. Still, where else can you sing and dine in style in a room that looks like the inside of a volcano - or even, if you like, a room with a footbath?

FIORIA ariablu

Goto Bldg. 3-4 F, Roppongi 5-1-3, Minato-ku, Tokyo

03-5413-8877

Peach Pavlova

If not for my recent foray into tempera painting, which required me to separate some eggs and pierce their yolks to drain only the runny part for my medium, I would never have subjected myself to the pain of whisking egg whites to stiff peaks by hand. My arm is aching even as I type this. But I hate to let any food go to waste. And the result--a pillowy-inside, crispy-outside meringue that, when topped with whipped cream and fruit, is called Pavlova after the ballerina--is worth the effort, especially if you have some egg whites lying around that would otherwise just get thrown away.

I first made a Pavlova a few years ago, after reading about it in one of Nigella Lawson's cookbooks. It's one of the recipes she repeats in every book in some variation, like pomegranates to be Christmasy (she calls it Massacre in a Snowstorm, which I find hilarious!) or passionfruit to be summery. I have all her books, but I don't have them with me in Japan, so when I want to make one of her recipes I'm forced to turn to the internet. The Pavlova I made today is based on the recipe here.

I only had four egg whites after making my tempera medium, so I halved the recipe. After whisking the whites to soft peaks, I added a cup of fine sugar one spoonful at a time, whisking in between. The meringue became thick and shiny as I did so, always a gratifying visual transformation and quite encouraging when your arm is simultaneously becoming sorer and sorer. When the sugar was in, I sprinkled a spoonful of flour (I didn't have any cornstarch), a little vanilla, and about a teaspoon of vinegar over the top and stirred it all together with a spoon. I wasn't particular about measurements, other than my measuring cup of sugar, and used just an ordinary cereal spoon to eyeball everything. After spooning the meringue onto a paper circle cut from a shopping bag, I put it in my convection oven at 180C for one minute (the oven doesn't preheat the way a full-sized oven does) and then at 120C for an hour. After baking, I left it in the oven with the door shut until after dinner, about two more hours.

The top wrinkled a bit as it cooled, which usually happens when I make anything meringue. Possibly this is because I don't get enough air in them when whisking, or perhaps because my oven is too cool. Despite its less than perfect appearance, however, the texture was just right - crunchy on top, marshmallowy inside. I know it's the luscious combination of cream and meringue that makes a Pavlova a Pavlova, but to be honest, I wasn't up for any more whisking, so I skipped the whipped cream. But with just a juicy peach and a few blackberries on top, it was not bad at all. Especially considering it was a mere by-product of paint production.

Kyo-Machiya Matcha Cake

I've often been impressed by the design element involved in Japanese foods and their presentation, but this Kyoto souvenir, which I received from a visiting friend, has to be one of the nicest-looking I've ever seen, not only on the outside of the package, but on the inside as well. The way the box, the plastic wrappers on each individual cake, and the layered cake itself all contain the same shades of green and brown and the same pattern of vertical and horizontal lines is endlessly delightful to the eye. There may also be a bit of linguistic wordplay at work here, since a machiya is the traditional Kyoto house depicted on the box, and the cakes are flavored with matcha, green tea, one of the traditional flavors of Kyoto. So a matcha Kyo-Machiya Cake might be a pun, contributing to the overall mirroring effect of the total package.
Japanese souvenir foods are very often individually wrapped, and their shelf life is usually far shorter than it is normal for commercially-prepared food in the U.S. This gives them the advantage of tasting much fresher, though of course it also means they stop tasting good much sooner. Though a Twinkie can famously survive years in its plastic wrapper unchanged, a Kyo-Machiya Cake is slated to go out of date within a mere week. Considering that when you buy cakes from a Japanese bakery, they always warn you that it needs to be consumed the very same day, I guess a week is a pretty long time.
What exactly is a Kyo-Machiya Cake? Helpfully, the package includes a diagram describing each element (and an illustration showing how to tip it out of its plastic container - which I would have thought would be pretty intuitive, but you never know...). It consists of two layers of green tea genoise, three layers of black-bean-and-green-tea ganache, and on the top and bottom, green tea flavored yatsuhashi. These are a little hard to describe, but they're probably the number one souvenir sweet sold in Kyoto. They're soft and chewy, a sheet of sweetened glutinous rice dough that's sold either in plain rectangles like the ones used in this cake or else in triangles folded around a filling of bean paste or sometimes chocolate. This cake, with its faint but distinguishable flavor of black beans harmonizing with the predominant matcha, and its east-meets-west texture combination of chewy yatsuhashi with airy genoise, is a surprising creation. What's even more surprising is how good it is.

Kyo-Machiya cake is made by Otabe, which has souvenir stands all over Kyoto, including Kyoto Station.

Summer's Bounty By Post

It's always a treat getting a box in the post. A refrigerated box, which in my experience has sometimes meant roses and sometimes chocolates, is even more exciting. And now that I've signed up as a Kawakami Farms supporter, I can look forward to big, chilled boxes of seasonal produce every two weeks. I'll admit that I was sceptical about the idea of mail-order vegetables at first, but so far they've arrived perfectly intact and far more delicious than any I've ever bought. They're so fresh - just look how the stems on two of these tomatoes are still green, as if they'd just been picked. Since the box was mailed two days ago, I know the tomatoes have been off the vine at least that long - and I think that suggests something about how long it's been since the ones in the store were growing in the dirt.
Speaking of dirt, the potatoes are dusty and humble-looking, but they're some of the best I've tasted. Japanese potatoes in general are sort of a cross between the waxy and floury types we eat in the US - they're small and thin-skinned, but have a much more fluffy interior than our new potatoes. These are buttery and sweet, not just a background starch but a star flavor in their own right. I've had a sack of them in all three shipments I've received from Kawakami Farms so far, and I've had no trouble eating them all up in time for the next box.
This week's box was almost an embarrassment of riches, with far more than the promised 3-5 types of vegetables. I know that summer is the season when most vegetables grow, so it shouldn't really be a surprise - but unpacking my box, pulling another and yet another cellophane bag out of the newspaper nesting, felt like discovering Ali Baba's treasure cave. Tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, garlic, eggplants, okra, green and yellow peppers, and water spinach - quite a harvest to arrive at my door in a cardboard box!

Kyo Hayashiya - Green Tea Roll Cake

In Kyoto, where I lived for three years, nostalgia is not just an art form, it's part of the fabric of every day life. The geisha district, Gion, is a picturesque neighborhood of narrow canals, reed blinds, and streets so clean they look polished. Right across the gracefully arched bridges spanned by round wooden posts with old-fashioned lantern tops, the riverside restaurants of Kiyamachi-dori extend their dining areas with decks built out over the water in summer time. Sanjo Ohashi is one of the main bridges, and one of the oldest - it was the traditional end point of the road that led from Kyoto to Tokyo back in the Edo period, when all communication between the two main cities of Japan had to be carried by transalpine runners, on foot. Nowadays, Sanjo Ohashi has a Starbucks alongside the traditional sweets vendors. And Kyo Hayashiya, one of those vendors, has an outpost in Tokyo Midtown, one of the most modern office-retail-living complexes in Japan. Like so much else here, it's a classic case of old and new coinciding and getting along quite politely.
Kyoto is one of the few mostly-landlocked provinces in Japan, so its traditional culinary focus has always been on fruits of the earth, including tea. Kyo Hayashiya sells not just tea, but a variety of sweets flavored with it, including cookies and cheesecake. I was most intrigued by the roll cake, though. Roll cakes are another one of those very Japanese adaptations of something we have, but don't see much of, in the west. I guess they appeal to the Japanese taste for circular simplicity in design (exhibit A: the flag), relative plainness in a not-too-rich dessert (exhibit B: mochi), and endless adaptability to local ingredients in any trendy food (exhibit C: soft ice cream). I've seen sweet potato, chestnut, cherry, sakura, and mango roll cakes in addition to the ever popular plain vanilla and chocolate versions, and this particular green tea cake is but one of various possibilities, such as bean-filled and green-tea-flavored cream-filled. The sponge cake here is dense and not terribly sweet, and the cream includes a swirl of chocolate as well as a few unobtrusive adzuki beans. I'd never seen chocolate and adzuki combined before, and I'm not sure quite how I feel about it - I think the whole cake would have been fine without any chocolate. But it was also fine with it - I'm not complaining. The proportions of cream to cake were perfect. And being a Kyoto product, it gave me a very appropriate sense of nostalgia for those happy days of wandering along the riverside and looking out for any geisha crossing Sanjo Ohashi.

Kyo Hayashiya

Tokyo Midtown Shop

Akasaka 9-7-3

Minato-ku, Tokyo

03-5413-0396

Mulukhiya

Several years ago, I got into Middle Eastern recipes and acquired several cookbooks. Though I was able to make a number of the dishes very successfully, including preserved lemons, baklava, and falafel from scratch, I remember feeling thwarted when I read about a vegetable called mulukhiya. The cookbook's Egyptian author remembered it fondly but noted that it was difficult to find outside of the Middle East, and that there was really no substitute. So I resigned myself to ignorance, and forgot about it.

But this week, mulukhiya came back into my life quite unexpectedly, included in my box of organic vegetables from Kawakami Farms. Of course, I was thrilled to have the chance to try a Middle Eastern vegetable that's difficult to find in the west, but I had no idea how to cook it. I don't have my old cookbooks with me, so I had to look up a recipe online. Most of them called for it to be finely chopped or shredded and then boiled in a chicken soup for about 5 minutes. I didn't want to make chicken soup, so I decided to sautee the chopped leaves and stems in olive oil with some of the baby garlic in my Kawakami Farms box and with a not-very-hot red pepper. I also cooked some chick peas, for a Mediterranean protein, and cut up some of the Kawakami Farms tomato and cucumber I received as well. Rice, though good old koshihikari rather than basmati, was a nice accompaniment.

And the mulukhiya? To my astonishment, the rather coarse, rose-like leaves turned soft and gummy as they cooked, exuding a mucous almost like that of okra, though not nearly as copious. They had a pleasantly bitter, assertive taste, similar to collard greens. If I ever get to try them again, maybe I'll try making soup - their viscosity would probably give them a thickening effect. But meanwhile, I've packed the leftovers in individual servings for my lunchbox, so I'll be eating like an Egyptian all week long.

Giotto

Though there are few cakes in this world that don't grab my immediate attention, I have to say that the Giotto counter, whenever I've passed it in a fancy department store food basement, is even more attractive than most. Their cakes are taller than average, some of them of unusual geometric design, and most topped with something distinctive, whether a hard, clear disk like a piece of bottle glass crowning the mont blanc or an infinity-sign-shaped nest of nuts and chocolate atop the chocolate cake. But for some reason, I'd never actually taken one of these creations home before. Now that I have, I'm pleased to report that Giotto is just as good at pleasing the palate as the eye.

Built on the model of Japan's favorite cake, the strawberry "shortcake", and reminiscent of those fabulous east-meets-west matcha parfaits they served all over Kyoto, the Koi Cha, pictured above, is three layers of green tea spongecake spotted with sweetened black beans the way an English cake might contain nuts or raisins (the bean has a bit of the flavor of both - soft and sweet, but with a savory depth almost like a candied pecan). There's a layer of thick whipped cream, a layer of soft matcha cream, and a topping of both, plus two slices of gilded candied chestnut. This dessert is both light and rich at the same time, like the buoyant atmosphere at a street festival on a humid Japanese summer night.

Giotto's eponymous take on the strawberry cake is a straightforward exemplar of the form. Three layers of lightly lemony sponge brushed with a pink but not noticeably flavored syrup and sandwiched with an equal thickness of strawberry-slice-containing whipped cream, it has a decorative swirl of cream around the four glazed and somewhat overbearing strawberry halves on the top.

Giotto

Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi

Basement 1st Floor

03-3231-6289

and other locations in Japan

Summery Cakes from Sadaharu Aoki

Sadaharu Aoki's patisserie always gets top marks for style, and the Valencia is no exception. The eye-catching decoration, three paper-thin slices of candied kumquat captured in a hardened-syrup web, is only the start. That citrusy wheel is sunk in a citrusy mousse flecked with orange peel, which tops a layer of chocolate cake. Then there's milk chocolate mousse, a thin but assertive smear of caramel-nut praline, and the flaky, crunchy almond millefeuille crust. It's a surprising combination of textures, but they give the tried and true flavor combination - orange, chocolate, and almond - a new vibrance, as each texture makes you think about the flavor itself as if for the first time.
This is Bamboo, Sadaharu Aoki's famous breakaway cake, a confection alternatively known as Opera The Vert. It's a riff on the classic European gateau opera using powdered green tea (matcha) instead of coffee as the beverage-inspired flavor base. And it's fantastic. You wouldn't guess that green tea would be such a natural partner for chocolate, but they work incredibly well together. The cake is a simple stack-up of alternating layers of green tea cake (brushed with a syrup that contains just a tingling whisper of some kind of alcohol), chocolate ganache, and matcha buttercream.