Teishoku is a pre-set meal — a main dish, always with miso soup and a bowl of rice, and it builds from there according the chef’s seasonal fancies (pickles, tofu, salad, etc). These meals are very popular during lunch, when salarymen and women can quickly run into a restaurant and get a warm, complete meal for as
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Washio is one of my favorite nomiyas (watering hole) in western Tokyo. I spent an afternoon with fisherman, enka singer, bar owner extraordinairre Taro Washio and captured it all on video.

For more enka pleasure, please watch this amazing music video by superstar Jero.

Danran, a sushi spot in the Sakura-jyosui neighborhood of Tokyo, is no stranger to Umamimart. It was frequented often when Yoko and Washi lived in Japan (on one of their very first dates!), and has been the subject of many a fine blog posts, here and here.

Yoko and I visited Danran tonight, to
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By the time you read this, Yoko and I will be in Niigata, Japan, a prefecture three hours north of Tokyo, on the west coast, the side of the Japan Sea. It’s also directly west of Fukushima City, home of the Daiichi Power Plant. We will be visiting a sake brewery, as well as harvesting rice.
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I am ecstatic, beyond words, to announce that Yoko and I will be joining the Bay Area-based art and food collective, OPENrestaurant, on a special trip to Japan in October. We will be there for three weeks, visiting farms and fisheries, interviewing people, blogging and producing live video coverage throughout Japan–all which
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Chef Maria Suzuki was exhausted. She’d spent the last two days cooking her heart out for our second Gochiso event, Food Is Art, and it was already half past eleven when she finished packing her car for the eight-hour drive from Tokyo back to Nara. The weariness pulled at the corners of her
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My city has experienced the wettest summer in the recorded weather history of Denmark.

Just this morning I woke up to a two hour thunderstorm with the most insane cracks, blitzes and a mustard yellow hazy sky. It felt like some aliens were landing on the planet in giant yellow spaceships. Unfortunately they didn’t, and another
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“Are we really doing this?” I asked, uncertainly nibbling on a grilled shiitake mushroom.

Eriko paused before answering. “I know I was talking some pretty ambitious stuff the other night, but I think we should try it,” she replied. “We could end up pulling off something really cool.”

I vividly recall the tipsy conversation that had
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These photos my friends in Tokyo sent me gave me a glimpse of what is going on there. The images have also reshaped my idea of what to include in my pathetic earthquake kit consisting of some nonperishable food and 4 gallons of water. (Note to self: buy sweet things and dried foods).

Most of my
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The kawaii (= cute) world of Japan is a very positive dimension of happiness, beauty, bunnies, rainbows and ribbons. And not just something that contains characters, but also an aesthetic approach that appeals to your heart, with a rather feminine touch and usually a soft design that makes you go, “Awwwww, that’s so CUUUTE”. Girls
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