Yakiniku Ran: For a Very Satisfying and Affordable Steak Lunch

Not all yakiniku, or Korean BBQ restaurants are open for lunch so it's interesting to see what's on the menu for lunches. At Yakiniku Ran there's only one option for menu, teppan grilled steak. You can choose the weight though, 100g (1000 yen), 150g (1500 yen) or 200g (about 2000 yen). For lunch the chef grills it for you and it is brought to your table in a hot skillet along with sides of potato salad, napolitan (Japanese ketchup pasta), and veggies. Being Nagoya, where napolitan is often served in a hot skillet with egg poured underneath, here too, egg was added into the hot cast iron skillet. Lastly, rice and a clear broth soup with wakame seaweed was also included. 

The meat definitely was wagyu (a Japanese breed of cow), and was so soft you wouldn't need a knife. You can use chopsticks and bite into the large thick pieces of meat. Once you sink your teeth in, the juice just succulently bursts out into the mouth. 

Area: West side of Nagoya Station, 3-min walk southeast of Kamejima Station 亀島駅
Restaurant: Yakiniku Ran 焼肉欄
Map and Info: https://tabelog.com/aichi/A2301/A230101/23002384/

Banana Juice, the Next Trend in Drinks?

 The past couple of years have seen the surge of "tapioca tea", or bubble tea in Japan. Perhaps not as popular but still trendy is the banana juice. The most basic ones being just a blend of real banana and milk. Since they can be so easily made, you can see them on menus of many cafes as well, but one thing that confirms their trendiness is the emerge of banana juice specialty shops. These places search for the sweetest bananas and most suitable ingredients for their drinks. 

Just recently a new specialty banana cafe has opened in Nagoya called Banana O-Koku バナナ王国, 0-koku meaning kingdom. The menu consists of banana juice with a choice of milk, almond milk, amazake (a fermented rice drink), soy milk and banana mixed with other fruits such as berry. Food items include banana curry, banana pie, banana waffle, cheesecake, pancakes and fried banana.

This is the banana juice made with almond milk. If you like almonds, this one might be for you as the flavour of almonds is very prominent. I think next time I'll go for the regular milk so the milk isn't clashing with the banana.

Before opening in the morning

Area: a couple blocks east of Honjin Station, 本陣駅（東山線)
Shop: Banana O-Koku バナナ王国
Map and Info: https://jouhou.nagoya/banana-oukoku/
Hours: 11am-6pm, closed Mondays

Lumbini Curry House: A Friendly Indian and Nepalese Restaurant

As the numbers of cases of Covid were decreasing, and I already had an appointment at the nearby Nakamura Nisseki Hospital, I decided to have lunch at an Indian and Nepalese Curry restaurant, Lumbini.

Today's lunch menu

The lunch menu consists of several choices and combos, but I love lamb so I went with a mutton curry set. First came the side salad, dressed with a sweet and creamy thousand island-like dressing. Then came a couple pieces of chicken tikka, which was sprinkled generously with cumin. It was salty and although not entirely juicy, it was not dry either. The plain lassi drink was like a thinned out yogurt, great to balance out the bold flavours of the curry and salty chicken tikka. You can't have curry without naan, which was slightly sweet and had kind of a doughy flavour. I always find that naan in Japan is sweet and the size of it is always gigantic (both not a bad thing)! The owner made sure to let me know that the naan was unlimited here. There's no way I can eat 2 of them though!

Lunch menu

Chicken tikka

Lassi

At last, the mutton curry. It had 4 big pieces of mutton and was not that spicy, as I had chose level 1 spiciness when ordering. It actually had some sweetness that would be perfect for the Japanese palate and for kids. I could really taste the cardamon in it.

Mutton curry and naan

Lumbini is a small restaurant with ethnic decorations and music playing in the background. The owner is Nepalese and is very friendly. The shop was not so busy, but then again it was during corona virus times that I visited.

Area: about a 7-min. walk southeast of Nakamura Nisseki Station (Higashiyama Line) 中村日赤駅（東山線）
Restaurant: Lumbini Curry House ルンビニカレーハウス
Map and Info: https://tabelog.com/aichi/A2301/A230113/23054993/
Hours: Lunch 11am-3pm (LO 2:30pm), Dinner 5-10pm (LO 9:30pm), closed for dinner on Mondays

Izakaya Takumi: A Modern Little Restaurant in an Old Part of Town

I actually didn't plan to come to this restaurant, the cafe I intended to visit wasn't open so I kept walking and stumbled upon this place, and I'm glad I did. It used to be a sushi restaurant and the Japanese-style interior does reflect this with its modern wooden counter and tables.

For  lunch there were 5 choices; a sashimi teishoku (set meal), chirashizushi (sashimi on a bed of sushi rice) set, kara-age (fried chicken) teishoku, fish miso katsu (fried cutlet) teishoku, and the fresh pasta set. The pasta of the day was chicken and kabocha (Japanese squash).

 I asked the chef for a recommendation and it was the healthy fish katsu. Normally katsu is done with pork but here it’s done with the fish of the day, which was a flaky white fish. Eating it without the sauce reminded me of a good fish and chips even though it was panko crusted. Perhaps it was made with a batter similar to fish and chips. Although it’s meant to be eaten with the sauce I actually liked the flavour of it on its own. Nagoyans  (my word for people brought up in Nagoya), like bold flavours so this red miso sauce is a popular condiment in this region. It is quite sweet yet full of umami.

The side of hijiki (a type of seaweed) and mountain vegetables nimono (simmer) was seasoned well, not too sweet and with a nice dashi flavour. The egg salad was chunky and seasoned mildly which was a good contrast to the bold miso sauce. The salad of fresh greens was dressed with a Japanese style, soy sauce-based dressing. The miso soup used a mix of red and white miso and to me had a hint of sansho flavour (Japanese pepper), although I have no idea if that is just my imagination!

Soft instrumental jazz music was playing in the background. I could hear the echoes of other customer's voices but it was not loud or crowded so I found it very easy to relax and eat.

Area: about a 5-min walk from exit 2 of Nakamura Nisseki Station 中村日赤駅
Restaurant: Izakaya Takumi 居酒屋たくみ
Map: https://tabelog.com/aichi/A2301/A230113/23065764/dtlmap/

Baan Tawan: Authentic Thai Food (Finally, Jasmine Rice in Japan!)

I've found that it is difficult to find places that serve different kinds of rice than Japanese rice. I do like the stickiness and sweetness of short-grained rice, but sometimes I would like basmati with my Indian food, jasmine with my Chinese food, or arborio rice in my risotto.

I finally came across a Thai restaurant that does serve jasmine rice with their meals! Baan Tawan, located not far from Honjin Station, is quite a popular little restaurant with 5 or 6 tables and a few counter seats. The lunch menu consists of green curry, massaman curry, Thai fried chicken, tom yum noodle soup and dorias (baked rice dishes). They also have a plate lunch option where you choose 1 main and 2 sides (880 yen plus tax). All come with jasmine rice except for the noodle dish and the dorias (which use Japanese short-grained rice because they are more suited to this type of dish).

I ordered the plate lunch with green curry as the main. The nice thing is the curries can also be chosen as a side, so I chose massaman curry and a tsubasa (yellowtail) carpaccio. The carpaccio was on a list that changes daily. The green curry main had chicken red pepper, fried kabocha (Japanese squash), bamboo shoots and thai basil. It was mildly spicy and went REALLY well with the jasmine rice. Perhaps it's the combination with the curry but the vegetables were incredibly sweet. The massaman curry had a more peanut flavour with chicken, potato and carrot. I could taste the lemongrass, coconut milk and cardamon in it. The chicken wasn't as soft as that in the green curry, it was kind of a dry chicken breast. I found that the green curry was a bit saltier than the massaman, but wasn't overly done. The tsubasa carpaccio was topped with an Italian dressing flavour. The plate also comes with a salad of purple cabbage, regular cabbage, mizuna and a Japanese style sesame dressing.

Although a packed shop during lunch hours, I was still able to eat my lunch at a relaxing pace. There was American pop music playing in the background but it's not too noisy.

Area: about a 2-min. walk from exit 2 of Honjin Station (Higashiyama line), 本陣駅（東山線）
Restaurant: Baan Tawan バーンタワン
Website and Map: https://www.baantawan.info/shop-info-access
Hours: Lunch 11:30am-2pm (LO 1:30pm), Dinner 6-11pm (LO 10pm), closed Sundays

Cafe Grace: A Simple Morning Service As a Satisfying Breakfast

Here's another little kissaten, or Japanese cafe, in the middle of a residential zone. This one might be a little easier to come across since it is near a main road and across from a post office.

Today I came for the “morning service”. This is when you order a drink, and a small breakfast comes included in the price of that drink.

Banana juice and "morning"

Since banana juice is still so popular and I’m still liking it, I ordered that as my beverage of choice. Here they use real banana blended with milk. The drink came refreshingly cold but smooth with no chunks of ice. It was very sweet. I suppose they used really ripe bananas because it didn’t feel like added sugar to me. The yogurt was plain with no added sweetener, and on the thicker side of Japanese yogurts which is what I like (often cafe’s serve a sweetened yogurt). Here the only sweetener was a dollop of strawberry jam. The white bread toast is great on its own. Milky and with a light buttering bringing out the perfectly toasted flavour, almost like a shortbread cookie. It wasn't sweet like many Japanese bread can be. I also like the denseness of the bread, being not too light and fluffy. This bread went nicely with the ogura (red bean paste), which looked and tasted homemade to me, chunky and less sweet compared to store-bought.

Homemade cookies and cake options to go with your coffee or tea

There are a also a variety of homemade pastries that I would like to try next time. These are to be eaten in the cafe, not for take away.

There was no music playing, but a big screen tv showed the news for all the customers to watch. Most of the patrons seemed to come solo in the morning with coffee tickets, a sign of being a regular (usually 11 coffee tickets for the price of 10 coffees). There is no smoking allowed in this kissaten.

Interior

Area: about an 8-minute walk southwest of Kamejima Station (Higashiyama Line) 亀島駅（東山線）

Shop: Cafe Grace カフェグレース

Map and Info: https://retty.me/area/PRE23/ARE61/SUB6102/100001424081/map/

Kunihisa: For Gourmet Tempura

Tempura can be quite an extravagant affair in Japan. Many restaurants specializing in tempura are high-end, so it's not often I go. For special occasions though it is a nice change from the regular fare. Most restaurants such as this have counter seating so that the chef can fry the tempura and place it in front of you, one by one, explaining what is concealed underneath the batter. Because of this, the whole meal may take a couple hours which is why it's nice when you want to prolong the evening and spend time with someone special, or impress a client.

Because tempura is essentially just an ingredient that is battered and fried, at a place like this, the ingredients must be carefully selected. At this restaurant, they definitely were, and the chef was sure to use rare ones and interesting combinations.

The first two dishes, or appetizers, looked like this;

And now the mains, the first tempura was kuruma ebi, a type of shrimp that is considered a delicacy. It is very plump and sweet. The first thing I noticed was that the tempura here had a considerable sesame oil flavour.

Shrimp tempura

Usually gobo (burdock root) is much skinnier than this. It was a specially selected variety that had a good texture and sweetness perfect for tempura.

Burdock root tempura

Next was a type of whole onion. It was so soft and sweet, and just melted in my mouth.

Onion tempura

The palate cleansers, tsukemono (Japanese pickles), and raw namako (sea cucumber). I'm not sure what the orange coloured slices were but it was almost like cheese. The namako was very fresh and had a wonderful crunchiness to it.

Sea cucumber

I love spring rolls so there was no going wrong with this dish. It was filled with tara shirako (testicles of cod fish), which was so fresh with no fishy flavours, and was cooked perfectly, retaining the characteristic creaminess of it (cooked too much it will become hard),

Shirako spring roll

This was a first for me, Bora no heso, literally meaning belly button of the bora fish, but it is not actually the belly button. It is called that because it has the crunchy texture that chicken sunagimo (gizzard) has.

Bora no heso

There's still more:

Mochi and mentaiko wrapped in seaweed

Shirako, again creamy

Fish tempura

To end the meal was a half-cooked egg tempura on rice, a take on tamago kake gohan (raw egg on rice) and miso soup. By this time I was so full, so the egg tempura seemed a bit too oily and heavy for me, but I'm sure it would have been more tasty had I not been so stuffed! 

Egg tempura and miso soup

Normally, I usually associate tempura with dipping it in a tentsuyu, or sweet and savory soy sauce and dashi based sauce but here the chef mostly recommended using just course salt (even though tentsuyu was provided). I suppose he wanted the ingredients to be able to stand alone without much added to it, and many of the dishes did do just that. 

I believe the only menu available is the chef's omakase or chef's choice course meal (8000 yen). The ingredients he uses change daily depending on the season and freshness. It is a small restaurant with a nice atmosphere great for couples celebrating a special anniversary or for catching up with an old friend.

Area: about 260m south of Kamejima Station (Higashiyama Line) 亀島駅（東山線）
Restaurant: Tempura Kunihisa 天婦羅・國久
Map and Info: https://tabelog.com/aichi/A2301/A230113/23058220/
Hours: 5:30-11pm (LO 10:30pm), closed Wednesdays

Montpar: High Quality Patisserie At Reasonable Prices

I first discovered this quaint patisserie a couple of years ago, in a residential but quite travelled street.
They have wonderful sweets, a bit pricier than the standard convenience store desserts but definitely worth it. I'd say they are the same level, but not not as expensive as the high end department store patisseries. And the good thing is that you can have a seat and take your time to enjoy your dessert (department stores are usually take-out only)!

Montpar

Dessert showcase

I tried the satsuma imo, or sweet potato tart since it seemed a bit rare for me. It looks like an apple crumble tart at first but then you can see chunks of yellow sweet potato with its purple skin layered underneath the crumble. Because there are chunks of potato it has quite a densness to it, which is not a bad thing. I like that they chose to keep the texture of potato instead of mashing it all. Much of the natural sweetness of the potato was used here, and I think I tasted a hint of apple. The crust was a biscuit type crust which is perfect to standup to the density of the potato. The crust was flavourful and not doughy or bland like many of the convenience store tart crusts. The hints of salt here were a nice touch to bring out the sweetness. It was served on a plate with creme anglaise made with real vanilla beans. This was quite nice, along with the orange jelly which gave a bit of tang. Adding each accompaniment ever so lightly changed the overall flavour of the tart, making each bite more fun and interesting to eat.  I didn’t imagine sweet potato would work so well as a tart!

Satsuma imo tart

Area: about a 10 min. walk southeast of Nakamura Nisseki Station (Higashiyama Line) 中村日赤駅（東山線）

Shop: Montpar モンパル

Map and Info: https://tabelog.com/aichi/A2301/A230113/23026161/

Hours: Patisserie 10am-8pm, Eat-in area 10am-6pm, closed Mondays

Masa Cafe: A Different Type of Sandwich Bread

In the midst of a shoku pan boom, I was excited to have lunch at a shoku pan specialty bakery. Shoku pan is the Japanese for a loaf of bread, the kind that is square or rectangular shaped when sliced and is often used for a sandwich, or toasted and buttered in the morning. This trend has been going on strong for a couple of years now with new shops opening around the country still. The price of one loaf could be at least 3-4 times more than that of the loaf you can get in a regular grocery store. Here, at Masa the price of half a loaf is ¥400. These specialty shops put a lot of time into trial and error when creating their signature bread and mostly always claim to use only the best of ingredients in the best way possible to bake the kind of bread the creator had in mind. Here they claim to use ingredients only from Japan. The flour is from Hokkaido, the milk from Hakodate (a slightly richer milk than the regular 3.0% milk, this one being 4.0%). The honey comes from bees that feed on Japanese lotus, rapeseed and other flowers, and the butter is also from the large dairy producers, Hokkaido.

I decided to try the Running Egg open sandwich ¥580 (¥638 with tax).  I first pushed away the toppings of the toast so that I could try the bread on its own. It was generously buttered and just by pulling it apart I could tell the inside was soft and moist. Upon first bite I could taste something flowery and it hit me that it must be a special kind of honey (I only found out later that they use a particular honey). The crust of the bread, although crispy, I could tell that it is the soft type when not toasted, something that many people here like.

Running Egg open sandwich

The bacon was soft and wasn’t overly salty. It had a good amount of fat streaked through it. Running Egg is a brand of egg where the eggs have been laid less than 3 days ago and is supposedly higher in nutrients than a regular one. I liked the crispy edges, and the yolk was nice and runny. The yolk itself was mild but that perfectly brought out the honey flavor and buttery bread. Using this bread gives egg toast a whole new flavour. The egg, in combination with the shoku pan and the bacon makes it have a sweet and savoury flavour because of the prevalence of the honey used in the bread.

The accompanying salad of mixed greens and a cherry tomato was dressed with a light, peppery olive oil vinaigrette.

The eat-in area has a comfortable atmosphere that is not too busy. Although simple, they do put some time and care into making their dishes, so be prepared to wait. You can fill your own cup with the orange water they provide and sip on it while you wait. On this day Christmas music was playing in the background. I noticed that they have a pianist come in and perform every Thurs .

On the way out, I picked up a peanut cream bread that was being sold on the table near the register. It had the same honey aftertaste as the shoku pan which went well with the sweetened peanut butter. The bread was very soft, but had a denseness to it that made it a bit chewier than the shoku pan.

Peanut cream bread

I just had to come back to try their number one recommended open sandwich (I saw it on tv), the gratin open sandwich (¥580 plus tax). Their signature bread is covered in bechamel sauce and baked with bacon and cheese on top. Course black pepper is sprinkled for accent. This time the salad included a cabbage coleslaw, nice for some sweetness to go with the bitterness of greens and olive oil. I didn’t particularly care for the black pepper because it overpowered the sweetness of the cheese and mild honey flavor of the bread (which is what makes this bread unique). The thick small strips of bacon on the other hand was a good addition with the mild saltiness bringing out all the other flavours. I thought the bread would get quite soggy from the toppings, but it was still palatable and the crust remained chewy.

Gratin open sandwich

I really liked the Butter Rusk (150g  for ¥150) sold at the entrance. It was the perfect amount of crispness, toastiness and sweetness. 

Butter rusk

Butter rusk

Area: a couple of blocks northwest of Nakamura Nisseki Station (Higashiyama Line) 中村日赤駅（東山線）

Restaurant: Masa cafe マサカフェ

Website and Map: http://masacafe.nagoya/shopinfo/

Hours: 8am-4pm