I was going back and forth on where to stay in Karuizawa, and by the time I’d made up my mind, all the decent hotels were already booked. That’s peak season for you. So my fallback was a pension, which is always an easy option. Pensions generally don’t have great facilities (shared bath, shared toilet) and they’re usually up in the mountains, so getting there isn’t easy either, but they have one huge upside: tasty local food at a price that won’t hurt.
After finishing up at the outlets we headed to the pension, but we ran out of time and never did finish our shopping that day. Like an onsen ryokan, a pension has a set dinner time you absolutely can’t be late for, which was a bit of a shame. On top of that, this being Japan, the taxi fares to get around added up fast, so the whole “it’s cheap” advantage went out the window. If you’re going to stay at a pension, a rental car is a must; otherwise you’ll end up spending far less by just booking a hotel with easy transport, even if it costs a bit more.
Starter
Anyway, we arrived right on time, dropped our bags, and dinner started straight away. Maybe because the place gets good reviews on Jalan, the food was properly done, but in true tourist-spot fashion everything was on the sweet side and heavily seasoned. When you’re tired from travelling you might not taste much if it’s lightly seasoned, but I did wonder if it wasn’t a bit too strong.
Salad
As expected, the cucumber was especially good.
A glass of wine
It’s a complimentary wine, a local one, and not very good. Just something to sip with dinner.
Salad dressing
Grilled flounder
A thick piece of flounder, grilled and topped with a sauce of cheese, almonds and so on. Underneath is a sea urchin sauce. The sauce was a little sweet, but the thick flesh of the flounder was cooked beautifully tender. I’d never had flounder of this quality in my life, and here I was eating it deep in the mountains. It was so good I asked where they got it, and they said their supplier just picks it out and brings it over.
Vegetable soup
This is Nagano Prefecture, so a vegetable soup is a given.
Wagyu steak
Wagyu already has plenty of fat on its own, and they’d topped it with a combination of butter and pepper. Doing that gives you a flavour that really leaves an impression, but it piles on the calories too. So I set the butter aside, scraped off some of the pepper and ate it that way. The meat itself was good enough that a plain preparation would have done the job, so that was a bit of a shame.
Anyway, it had been a hard day of running around and I was so exhausted that I just forced the food down and went back to the room to sleep..
The rice that comes with the steak
It was served on a plate, like at a Western-style restaurant. Nothing special about the rice itself..
Cake for dessert.
I didn’t expect much, but it turned out better than I thought.
And coffee
Eating this well, sleeping soundly with the forest air, and then having a warm, filling breakfast, all for 10,000 yen per person, is a real bargain. The trouble is that getting around is so inconvenient that we took taxis everywhere, and spent around 7,000 to 8,000 yen on fares alone, which was a bit of a letdown. (It did make me think I should have just gone to Hoshinoya -_-..) Then again, it’s a long drive from Tokyo and the roads are rough. My takeaway: for Karuizawa, either book about two months ahead or come a little outside the peak season. You learn these things one trip at a time.