Tenkin is a place in downtown Hamamatsu famous for its tendon. The line is long whenever you go, and when a place out in the provinces has people queuing, I trust it even more than the ones people line up for in Tokyo. They seem to do a tempura omakase in the evening, but I went at lunch to eat the tendon.

On the way

The weather was lovely.

The front entrance

Good timing — I caught it with no line.

The owner

He had real charisma. What amazed me was that he fries a raw egg as tempura, and if you think about it you’ll see that dropping a raw egg into oil, frying it, and then fishing it back out is no easy trick. Yet this man was reaching into the furiously boiling oil with his bare hand to pull it out. It was like watching a sideshow stunt.

Tea

Miso soup

Tendon

Fresh ingredients, fried beautifully. Add rice soaked in that sweet sauce and it can’t help but be good. The ume-shiso tempura in particular was wonderfully refreshing.

Nori-maki ebi tempura

At the very end they brought out a nori-wrapped prawn on the house, and it tasted like a classy seaweed roll.

It might well be worth coming back in the evening for the omakase, but it’s a bit of a shame that there aren’t many people in Hamamatsu to go eat tempura with.

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