Tokyofoodcast

Photo credit:panduh:CC by-nc-sa 2.0

“Fugu is not adventurous enough!” my former boss exclaimed when planning a surprise dinner for his guest from the US; he wanted to make it memorable and adventurous. “Have you had suppon?”, he challenged me. I replied that I’d had it once about ten years ago. So, there it was, we set [...]

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This is the question I have not had the right answer for yet.
I was taking a guest to Tsukiji the other morning to see the market. As we wandered around, she asked “Can we go for sushi?” It was 8:30 in the morning.
I replied, “Sushi? Well, I don’t think we can get in. But lets [...]

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Tsukji shows two faces to the world. First is jonai, the giant, enclosed wholesale fish and vegetable market area–this is what most people think of as Tsukiji. But, there is also jogai, this includes all of the shops and restaurants running down the streets adjoining the regular wholesale market. It is easy to focus on [...]

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Once a year in October, Tatsuriki has a very special sit-down dinner pairing their sake with very nice Japanese food. This Tokyo event is something I truly look forward to; it serves as one of my signals that autumn has begun, or it is sake season.
Tatsuriki is a very popular brew and is frequently featured [...]

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If you’ve ever been to Tsukiji, you’ve probably seen some seriously big knives. The fishmongers wield their long, sharp blades with such speed and aplomb that you might not get a really good look at them. Now you can. I discovered some excellent photos of tuna knives from a small shop in Tsukiji by [...]

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I first found out about a sake event called Smile Nihonshu through the Yumegokoro website. The event was held at a reggae bar in Shinjuku and I remember thinking what an odd combination it sounded like. Nihonshu definitely belongs in many settings and occasions, but for some reason, I never associated these two: sake and [...]

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Tokyofoodcast has been hosting a couple sake meetups over the last 6 months and for the first time, we had a Bring Your Own Sake (B.Y.O.S.) party. Picking a bottle for a tasting can be tough, so there was an option to pay a small fee instead of bringing a bottle. Surprisingly, well, but totally [...]

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At the November Mitsuya benkyokai, Takase-sensei tried out a new tasting method on the group. He placed four glasses of sake in front of us and told us to guess what each of these four 720 ml bottles were priced at. Guessing grades is always a fun game, but price? Gee, I don’t know.
All of [...]

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Since we moved to Tokyo, every year around October, I plan a mystery dinner or lunch out for Te-chan’s birthday. Mystery in the sense that he has no idea where I am taking him. This year, I made a lunch reservation at Sankoin Temple in Musashi Koganei, famous for its Kyoto style shōjin ryōri and [...]

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The Official Sake Samurai title went to our sake friend Tim at Urbansake for all his much appreciated devotion to sake and culture. When he was in the ancient capital, Kyoto, did he have any idea that a band of junior samurai from the wild-wild-east, the infamous Tokyo Sake Meetup group, would be running around [...]

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