For someone like me, getting on in years, swamped with work and without a girlfriend, Christmas doesn’t mean any special plans. I was going to quietly drink some wine with cake as a snack after work, when suddenly I got a call about a nabe party. An izakaya I know well was shooting photos for a newspaper article and needed people to eat the hot pot. Not many people would have had time on their hands on Christmas Eve, so I was probably the perfect man for the job.
The whole spread
Off to one side, the newspaper’s cameraman was directing the shoot. It was a newspaper-led project where restaurants around the area serve special winter-only hot pots, and we’d gathered so they could write a promo piece about it. My role was just to eat, of course. But it turned out the promo photo ran huge on the front page of the paper the next day.. Anyway, I earned my dinner, so I figured that was good. You can read the full article here. http://www.sanin-chuo.co.jp/news/modules/news/article.php?storyid=517007004
Nabe for four at 1,890 yen per person
Since it’s for the photo shoot, it looks even prettier than usual. I’m not sure you’d get this much if you actually ordered it ^_^ There’s monkfish, yellowtail, crab and more, and the crab was insanely good. Unusually, the broth is made with ark clams, which they said is the special touch. Honestly, though, I couldn’t really tell whether that’s what made the soup taste good.
Into a broth like this it all goes.
It’s miso-based but not heavy. At first I thought it might be something like kenchin-jiru, but it was a proper, classic nabe. Loaded with seafood, it had a clean, refreshing flavor.
In goes the crab too. Proof shot..
This crab is the kind called matsuba crab, and it was on a whole other level from any crab I’d had before. The height of fresh, clean flavor. They say it’s caught around the East Sea (Sea of Japan), but apparently not many people eat it on the Korean side. I don’t really know much about that, so I’ll have to check next time I’m back in Korea.
Amasagi in vinegar (nanbanzuke)
A snack to go with beer. When even a simple little dish like this is this tasty, winter around here really is gourmet season.
Yuzu kosho and ginger
Add ginger or yuzu kosho to taste. I went with ginger, and it made the flavor even better.
Amasagi tempura
Amasagi is a freshwater fish, and apparently hardly any are caught these days. They’d just come in for the first time this year, so I ordered them as tempura, and it was the best fish tempura I’ve had to date. It reminded me all over again that ingredients are what matter in tempura. The frying itself isn’t top-tier, but amasagi have soft bones, so they fry them whole with almost no prep, and the result is pure, delicate tenderness. It felt like seeing the royal road of white-fish tempura.
Yokowa
Young bluefin tuna is called yokowa, they say. It’s much softer than regular akami (lean tuna).
Vegetable tempura
This was good too.. but from here on the portions got to be a bit much, so I don’t really remember the taste
Yokowa, sea bream and squid sushi
For the first time in a while, I had sushi eaten by hand, no chopsticks. The rice was a little soft for sushi, but for the level you’d get at an izakaya it was pretty impressive. It was better than what I had before at Minato in Osaka, a place with a similar concept. With this around, there’s no reason to go far out of your way for Japanese food.
Cake from a sponsor
Since it was Christmas, they even gave us cake for dessert. It was made by a teacher from a certain baking school, and with strawberries tucked all through the middle it was delicious, but I nearly burst. Still, when someone’s gone to that trouble, you can’t exactly not eat it.
Sponsored cake 2
We moved on, and the nabe party crew went to a karaoke-slash-bar. Being people with so little going on that they came to a nabe party on Christmas Eve -_- the mood was pretty good in its own way. We also promised to have another nabe party before winter’s over. Another cake came out here and we shared it, but unless you had a stomach like mine, it would have been hard to survive this crowd.
Stollen
It’s a German Christmas bread.. My original plan was to spend Christmas alone and lonely with this bread and an Egon Müller Riesling. In the end I didn’t get to it on Christmas Eve and had stollen and wine -_- for breakfast the next morning -_- But wow, this thing was ridiculously sweet. The outside is pure sugar and the inside is bread soaked in sugar -_- There was nothing delicate about it, so I ate only half and threw the rest away…
Fruit tart cake
Another cake I picked out as a snack for wine. -_- This cake shop’s fruit selection holds its own against any shop in Tokyo. The cake itself isn’t bad either, so rather than going to Qu’il fait bon, I’ll just buy from this place.
And with that, I got through another Christmas more or less intact. Thinking about it, it was maybe only a tiny bit better than spending it alone? But hey, that’s something.. At this pace, here’s hoping I can escape the single life next year.