Spaghetti with asari (clams), shirauo (little white fish) and arugula at Pizzeria Matsuhisa in Denenchofu, Tokyo. Someday, I will open a wafu (Japanese-style) pasta shop in Oakland.

Drunken noodles at SriPraPhai in Woodside, Queens. From Umamiventure #4 in 2007. The savory hot sweetness of the dish still hovers in my memory.

Photo by Irwin Chen.

Happy February, everyone!

Umamimart turns 5 years old this month, and I thought it would be fun to celebrate NOODLES! We’re all fans of noodles here, and there are pages and pages worth of posts, since 2007 (!), dedicated to the almighty noodle on Umamimart.

The column name “Great UM Noodletown” is an homage to one of my favorite late-night spots in NYC Chinatown called Great NY Noodletown. With roasted birds dangling from the windows, I had many a meals there–both solitary and rowdy–all on the dirt cheap, with slices of oranges always for dessert. Thank you, Great NY Noodletown. You hold a special place in my heart.

To start off the column with a big bang, I give to you Misoya, a ramen chain from Japan that has made its way to Santa Clara, CA. The first U.S. outpost opened in the East Village, NYC (looks like the owner of Totto brought it over). It’s right around the corner from Ippudo, a mega-popular ramen joint, but I hope it’s holding its ground there regardless. Personally, I think Ippudo is garbage and I absolutely cannot believe there are still lines to get in. I mean $15 for a bowl of ramen in a techno-club setting?? No thank you. Yamahomo bitched about it when it first opened. We have not been back since.

Anyhow, here’s Misoya, set in a strip mall right across the street from a hospital in sunny Santa Clara, CA. Welcome to the sprawling suburban nightmare that is my childhood. But you know I love it!

I think it’s hilarious that the South Bay Area (San Jose, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Mt. View) has all the awesome Asian eateries, rather than SF proper. [Sorta like having to go to boondocks Queens from Manhattan]. I have to say that it’s testament to the fact that the audience in the South Bay just has higher standards for Asian food. I’ll get a lashing for saying that, of course. But it’s true!!! Dim sum, Viet, sushi. Alright, I admit, the East Bay has superb Korean and Thai though.

Miso. Soul. Japan. Holla!

Don’t you dare seat yourself, asshole.

I always come early enough so there’s never a line. You get a view into the kitchen from the counter.

Hungry. The bowl of rice is FREE! Carbs with a side of carbs, please!

Misoya is known for… wait for it… their MISO ramen.

The miso broth here is komemiso, which is a Hokkaido-style, darker blend with a hint of spice. They put a dollop of the komemiso on top.

Soup is deep and hearty.

Grease bubbles are muy importante.

Noodles are bouncy and squiggly, just how I like.

It is imperative that you order the cha-shu pork ramen. I ordered the regular ramen once, thinking that it would come with the standard two slices. WRONG. That was a sad, sad day.

They boast that this cha-shu is special because of the way it is grilled over an open flame. It is the fattiest piece of pork you will have for the week, but well worth it.

Now this puzzled me: the fried potatoes in my ramen.

This must be a Hokkaido thing? The Tokyo-girl (ok, Saitama) in me shuddered a little bit.

The gyoza were chive-y pork bombs. I peeped a guy in the kitchen making them from scratch.

Delightful!

So I didn’t finish my potato, but did pretty well otherwise.

The ramen was $11, gyoza $4. Not bad!

The ramen at Misoya is a damn fine bowl of noodles. While I will refrain from using declarative statements like “Best in the Bay”, I will say that this is the CLOSEST you will get to the ramen you will find in Japan. This means: hearty, heavy, greasy broth, which is all the rage in Tokyo. Not surprising that Misoya was started in Chiba, which is where I had a great bowl of ramen at Tonikaku, on my last trip.

Washi calls most ramen he has here generally as “California Ramen”. This means an assari (light), clean, broth. Most ramen broths you find in the Bay Area are definitely light and seemingly “healthy”, California-esque. Don’t get me wrong, I like an assari, salt-based broth, but I have to say that my go-to has always been miso.

Misoya is located right across from Orenchi, which is always packed for some reason. Skip the line and just walk across the street! I am happy to have found a great miso ramen, even if I have to drive 45 minutes for it.

I’ll be writing about noodles all month! All year! Forever! Comment below if you have a noodle spot you love. And thank you for supporting Umamimart all these years!

Photo by Kelly Ishikawa, a San Francisco-based photographer and the co-owner of The Perish Trust. 

*Nahoko Morimoto is a Tokyo-based photographer. Her work has been featured in Brutus and Vogue Japan.

Happy New Year!  I can’t believe the holiday season passed so quickly, and now we are in 2012.  Soon we will be bitching about the hot summer.

I was in Japan for the holidays, and had quite a few good food moments. I am really thankful to iPhone since I can now take pictures anywhere (and pretty decent quality ones).

Wine in a can.

Top part becomes a glass for your drink — a brilliant idea. But it tasted pretty crappy. I bought this before my flight to Melbourne, after enduring a 13-hour flight from New York to Tokyo, and I went right to sleep after drinking it, so thank you crappy canned wine.

Very pink shabu-shabu beef from Nagano. I think I had four shabu shabu meals during my stay, and every time the beef was extremely pink. I am not young any more, and my doctor warned me that my cholesterol is too high and to avoid beef, but when I am in Japan, it’s just impossible not to eat fatty beef.

People say you don’t need teeth to eat these babies, and it’s very true. They literally melt in your mouth.

MOS burger. The best hamburger chain EVER.

Despite so many selections like pork tonkatsu with cabbage, or teriyaki chicken with crispy lettuce, which are two of my favorites, I ordered the original MOS burger, which has a huge slice of tomato, minced onion, and meat sauce. Heavenly.

For the first time in my life, I went to the Tsukiji fish market. I was not interested in seeing bunch of fish, but I was very much excited about going to a sushi restaurant there. Since they are directly connected to the market, the quality of fish is superb, and prices are very reasonable.

Neighboring restaurants Sushi Yamato and Sushi Dai, are the most famous ones in the area, hence the lines are very very long. I hate waiting in lines, and I asked one of the shop persons in the area for another recommendation and he suggested Iwasa Sushi. We still waited about 30 minutes, but it was SO worth every minute of the wait.

I am still salivating from looking at this picture.

From left: very sweet squid, aji (horse mackerel), kohada (gizzard shad), fatty tuna, and my favorite of the day, katsuo (bonito).
The katsuo was so sweet, and almost creamy, as was the tai (snapper). So good.

This place  features a lot of different kai (clams), and my friend ordered kai galore. I can’t remember what they were, but they were apparently awesome.

Uni, say no more. When I was in San Francisco, I had very good Santa Barbara uni, but it doesn’t compare to this one.

Shirako, aka raw fish jizz. It literally bursted in my mouth…

It was like dessert.

This is the original Yoshinoya.  I had no idea they started in Tsukiji.

After Tsukiji, I went to Kappa-bashi, which is sort of similar to Bowery Street here in New York. Store after store of restaurant supply and kitchen gadgets. I was in heaven. Look at these food items made out of wax!

The reason I went to Kappa-bashi was because I was picking up my press. I ordered MOTO logo press. How cool is this?

How cute are these coffee cup balconies??

I was done with busy Tokyo, and went back to my hometown. On my way back to rural Japan, I stopped by at a home supply store (I needed to buy scissors to cut nose hair since they were getting way too long), and found bags of fermented cow poop as fertilizer.  I mean we all know animal poop is used to fertilize soil, but I’ve never seen them packaged and sold in bags. Look how happy both farmers and a cow are.

Japan is obsessed with crab meat during holiday season. Holiday season is all about spending money, and Japan is no exception. In the US, the holiday meal is usually turkey, ham, steak, etc., but in Japan, it’s crab or beef. This was a newspaper ad filled with crab meat.

My brother went fishing in the middle of the night one day, and came home early in the morning with super fresh horse mackerels.

He served this fresh sashimi for breakfast.

Unfortunately there was no rice to eat with, so I had a bagel. Bagel and horse mackerel sashimi for breakfast. I usually don’t care too much for small fish, but these were super fresh.

By the way, WTF does “Orange & Lemons said the bells of saint clements” mean on the plate?  Is this a total Japangrish? What an odd mixture of dishes, too. Anders wouldn’t approve of this. Soy sauce on a fake Pooh-print dish? My home is equipped with very odd mixtures of dishes, in sets of 3, since mom, brother and sister-in-law are the only regular residents of the house.

A couple days before New Year, I tagged along with a friend of mine to a fish market nearby. Extremely busy, since everything there was quite reasonably priced. Snappers are also big during the holiday season, and there were bunch of them. Did you know there are various types of squid? Mongo, aori, yari, to name a few, and each has different shapes and texture.

Here are the items I brought back from Japan.

This is one of the fine purchases from the trip. Silicon cooking chopsticks. I wanted dishwasher safe chopsticks since my wooden ones got pretty bent from high heat, yet I refuse to hand wash them.

These are far better than wooden kind since the tip grips extremely precisely. Unlike the wooden kinds, they don’t slip at all.

Do you know what this is?

Slide in a piece of seaweed.

And it punches out smile face. How cute?  There were a couple of different faces. I bought them at a dollar store. I may have to start character bento spree.

These are very convenient — you can now make conbini (convenient store) style rice balls. Seaweed can be stored separately and so whenever you eat it, it’s always crispy.

Japan is filled with cool food stuff.

I don’t miss Japan much as a whole, but I do miss Japan’s high quality food. I went to Mitsuwa market in New Jersey to feel good, and surely I found a lot of good stuff, but Mitsuwa is always very dangerous. $32o, for I don’t even remember what I bought….

Chicken + waffles at Lois the Pie Queen in Oakland.

Five minutes.

That’s litterally how much time I had to decide whether I was going to accept the out of the blue New Year’s Eve dinner party invitation from my friends in Stockholm at 12:30 in the afternoon on Dec 31, 2011. That’s all the time I had including packing my socks/curlers/laptop/night cream, locking up my apartment and get on the bike down to the Central Station in order to catch the train which would arrive at dinner time in Stockholm, five hours up into the cold, freezing wood lands of Northern Sweden.

Of course I said yes, and I had the most fun three days in the old, beautiful capital.

On the surprisingly empty train I got a window seat on first class which included free drinks, snacks, wifi, electric output for my laptop — and a most scenic view from my seat across icy mountains, deep dark forests, vast lakes and cozy villages hiding beyond the hills and valleys of a wintery Sweden. So much more fun and relaxing than the stress of flying.

Having finally arrived in good spirits just before the other guests arrived, I was handed the evening’s first glass of champagne and felt more than ready to let the air out of this horrible horrible year called 2011. Really, it’s been crap, including all that happened in Japan. Let’s have a new one, shall we?

As we all know, setting a table is of absolute importance to the succes of your dinner party. Creating a safe and intimate atmosphere is essential, making sure no guests are blinded by your table light or feeling cold and bleak from bluish neon lights in the ceiling. Many Americans decorate their kitchens like it was the staff room at McDonalds, but I say that is an abomination. Respect your eating environments, please. A little light & table decor love can go a long way.

Here in Stockholm, the dinner table is set fabulously with lots of Danish design:

Tablecloth “Fold/Unfold” by Margrethe Odgaard.

Plates and porcelain from Royal Copenhagen, silver ware + water pitcher from Georg Jensen.

The red wine was decanted before being served in a nice glass pitcher.

Main dish of the evening:

Julia Child’s famous (and very tedious to make) Beef Bourguignon from her cookbook Mastering French Cooking which was reintroduced to the public after the Julie & Julia movie came out a few years ago. If you like movies about food you must go and rent it right now.

Side dishes as the recipe demands: green peas and potatoes (and kindly cooked rice for me due to my insane food allergies).

Sorry about the blurry pic, I only brought my shitty little Casio cam for this trip

All the food was very delicious and a nice contrast to the usual New Year’s fish dishes you’re always served. A warm beef dish just matches slushy ice rain better than flaccid fish.

A nice, spicy red wine which goes well with the Bourguignon served in cool wine glasses with no stems.

For dessert:

Home baked chocolate cake with freshly whipped Swedish cream.

Lovely gold sparkling truffles for the champagne:

And if you’re still in doubt whether we’re all a bunch of fags, this should put your mind to ease:

On the shelf in the livingroom: the official DVD of the Royal Danish Wedding back in 2004 between his Majesty the Crown Prince Frederik II and Princess Mary. The gayest DVD in town.

So this is where I could end this post. I have no more pics of the dinner party, and all the guests were in a relationship so there are no slutty singles table dancing actions to report on anyway.

But since this was my first time in Stockholm and since I was very taken by its Swedishness I want to share more pics of my macro holiday.

We took a long walk on Jan 1st to inhale the fresh cold air of a new year.

Stockholm is a city built on islands so there are water fronts and rocky stone walls everwhere, always super close to the elements. It was raining sleet and slush the whole time so no cozy snow pics, but imagine this city on a quiet romantic summer night and you’ll fall in love instantly.

Ferries in the many little harbours are sailing to close island destinations or maybe offering dinners and music on board while sight seeing from the waterside.

The many bare rock walls, like standing next to a mountain, were covered in beautiful ice patterns.

Even the metro stations around Stockholm are decorated as if they were cut out into the mountains… which they actually are. So it’s very meta.

The metro interiors though are super East Germany 1979. Brown/orange/yellow totally rules.

Gamla Stan (old city) is the old part of Stockholm, really old and really charming. Seems everyone was out walking on Jan 1st.

The narrow streets remind me of Italian villages, it’s super cozy.

People are rushing about, looking for a warm seat to hide from the icy rain.

There are many souvenir shops of course, most of them focus on Pippi, Moomin and viking heritage.

Make your own Medieval Clothing. Awesome.

Beer mugs made from animal horns, belt knuckle copies from the bronze age. This truly is the Skankynavia: Style edition.

White chocolate “flødeboller”/gräddbullar:

There is a range of beautiful designer/boutique and traditional hotels along the many waterfronts round the city.

We stepped into one of them to inspect this amazing lounge situated inside an old courtyard which has now been transformed into a hangout space for guests. The ceiling is supposed to be a pixelated version of looking up into green leaves from the ground.

For lunch we stepped into the upscale, but still relaxed Swedish restaurant Sturehof. The interior is like a French bistro with a Swedish undercurrent. The waiters were wearing three different colored jackets — red, black or white, all with military flavoured ornaments and emblems, depending on hierachy.

Fresh bouquets everywhere, how elegant.

The big menu card is unique and printed new every day (!)

It’s also very expensive. But then again, Stockholm is super pricey. Even the real estate market is booming like mad.

We start out with a basket of different homemade crackers and “knækbrød”. Scoop on butter or eat bare.

Two of us decided to go for the “rimmad salmon with stewed potatoes in dill and cream” ($39!).

Rimmad salmon is salmon marinated in sugar, salt and spices. It was just beautiful. And so tender you could cut it with your eyelash.

Potatoes also perfectly stewed and soft.

My other friend had bouilllabaise, the traditional fish stew with blue mussels and er.. other stuff. It had a deep umami flavour and was very filling.

The next day we went out for an art exhibition and then went for lunch at Råkultur, a sushi place.

When we arrived, the very friendly staff placed us at a table and went to fetch warm water for the little glass teapot with green tea leaves in the middle of the table.

Then an hour glass is flipped and when all the sand has run out, we could sip the tea.

Your own private little tea ceremony right there, for free, at your table. I think that’s good service and great fun.

The sushi was also very good. And that white thing resting on a maki roll there?

Yes, ladies and gentleman, that’s a popcorn. It was on both our plates so it probably wasn’t a mistake. Borderline silly but whatever, there’s a long way to Tokyo, the mothership of sushi, after all.

An hour later I was stepping onto the train back to Copenhagen, away from this great city which I’d love to explore more. I’ll just have to come back again in summertime, when you can take long walks along the harbour fronts and soak in more of the Swedish culture.

Happy new year — let’s all wish for an exciting and tasty 2012. And don’t forget to set your tables nicely!

By Johnny Lopes

Being in Paris for the first time, I wanted to see the city life — the real hustle and bustle. So what better place to witness this chaos than Les Halles? It was jammed with bars for your aperitifs and tabacs for your nicotine fix. But aside from this typical parisian fare, I noticed a recurring food theme. A food theme which caught me off-guard, quite frankly.

Apparently, the French have a mighty appetite for baguette sandwiches. The baguette itself wasn’t the strange part to me so much as what they called it: a panini. Being raised in the States, I’ve grown accustom to the standard “panini” you’d find at a cafe — pressed and oily. This is not the case in Paris where you’d get a variety of buns (ranging from doughy, to flakey awesomeness) stuffed with some damn fine ingredients (meats galore and gourmet cheeses). You could tell there was a difference in quality from each vendor depending where you were in the city.

When you do shell out your hard-earned euros for one of these prizes, they do something unorthodox: they stick the paninis into the microwave for 40 seconds to reheat it. I suppose you can’t expect some new-fangled reheating method when you’re chowing down on street food.

Duck panini! Aside from the bread, it was pretty damn good 

Parisian weiner + cheese

*Johnny Lopes is a professional cyclist critic (aka biking curmudgeon) living in San Francisco. He commutes to Oakland to see his girlfriend via the ferry, never the BART.

Danran, a little sushi spot in the Sakurajosui station in Tokyo, is no stranger to Umamimart. Yoko introduced us to the place in 2008, and Tmonkey reported on it again later that year. Yoko took me to Danran for the first time several years ago, and I very much looked forward to visiting again on my last trip in October.

The place had not changed a bit — the master, his wife, and her brother, all greeted us with warm smiles as we happily retreated from the autumn rain. The small space was brightly-lit, and the wood interior gave off a cozy glow.

Naoko, Yoko and I sat at the counter of Danran, laughing, chatting and catching up, over wonderful food and drinks made to order by our hosts. We never looked at the time, and when it was time for us to say farewell, there was no one left in the restaurant. It was midnight. We had been there for something like six hours.

The photo above was one of the first dishes presented to us by the Master. It is stewed fish eggs, probably tai (snapper) or hirame (fluke). The lightness of flavor, with the bounciness of each fish egg, is just delightful.

This was one of my most memorable meals of 2011. Please take a look at the rest of our meal.