Izakaya, Monja okonomiyaki restaurant and Yakitori-kann

Late night, Yakitori-kann

The hotel we stayed at during our time in Ashikaga was in all respects a very nice accommodation. We ate most of our breakfasts and dinners at the hotel restaurant and the fare was consistently excellent.  Most of the dinners, if I had enjoyed them in the United States, I would have rated them extremely highly.  They did have one notable peculiarity however, they were all exclusively French cuisine.  It was an oddly ambiguous experience to be sitting in Japan and eating French cuisine, something that we all remarked upon repeatedly.
To have French food, or Italian or Mexican or Chinese while in the U.S. hardly merits a mention.  But to go to Japan seeking Japanese cuisine and be confronted with night after night of French meals approaches the surreal.

Joking aside, I got to sample many different kinds of Japanese fare; miso, gohan, ramen, soba, udon, tonkatsu, gyudon, yakitori, sushi, okonomiyaki, taiyaki, wagashi, matcha, sake, umeshu, biru, kaiseki and hot pot. The food was uniformly excellent across the board. (Well, maybe not the natto.)  It was always perfectly prepared with fresh ingredients and served promptly.  On a few occasions, I experienced some uniquely Japanese dining experiences.

There was a tiny hole-in-the-wall yakitori restaurant close to the hotel, recognizable from the red paper lanterns and the counter with two stools out front.  I had hoped to experience an izakaya, or local pub, while in Japan and this seemed pretty close.  Izakayas are known more as drinking establishments that also serve pub-food.  Usually it is very basic fare, but sometimes there is a very large menu or small dishes.  One evening several of us went there and sampled many of their dishes.  The environment was warm and inviting and even if a bit cramped and hot and smokey, was altogether a very enjoyable experience.  We ordered plate after plate of meat on skewers and round after round of biru.  At one point, the cook came out of the kitchen and sang a melancholy Spanish ballad in Japanese accompanied on the ukelele.

We had a similar experince on our last night in Ashikaga.  A friend took us to another humble local establishment, this one serving okonomiyai and monja, sometimes called Japanese pizza or Japanese pancakes, although neither of those terms quite do it justice.  The unique characteristic of this restaurant was that you did you own cooking of a hotplate set into the table.  We ladled the raw ingredients onto the griddle and started nibbling with chopsticks and spatula as soon as the edges started to turn brown.  There was a huge variety of food as well as a huge quantity; kimchi, vegetables, squid, potatoes, chicken, all smothered in batter to form huge crusty blackened pancakes and then smothered again in sauce and Japanese mayo and washed down with biru or shouchou.     

There is something about these experiences that makes them truly unique and authentic.  There is something to be said for sharing good food with good friends in a quaint homey setting. Again, I noted that there were no tourists in these places, except for us.  It felt very much like what real Japanese people eat and where they would go to eat it. Of all the fantastic fare I sampled in Japan, these two stand out to me as maybe the most Japanese.