Rabbit Reporting

Kaiseki in Kamakura… Rabbit’s Big Bean!

Rabbit is reporting from Japan, where there are lots of very interesting things to eat.

Mr. Rabbit’s Japanese Cousin (MRJC) has been squiring us about Tokyo, and because she can speak Japanese (and read menus), we eat much better when MRJC is around (otherwise we have to go to tourist spots with plastic food replicas or eat noodles).

Yesterday, we did a day trip to Kamakura, a seaside city about an hour from Tokyo. Kamakura has lots of sights and excellent shopping, but the highlight of the trip was lunch.We ate at a very small restaurant, just four tables, located on the second storey of an old house near Kita-Kamakura station. The restaurant was initially fully booked, but MRJC managed to get a reservation by billing us as foreign VIPS (ha!).

This was our first introduction to Japanese kaiseki, perhaps the rough equivalent of a tasting menu. We worked our way through six course of small plates, all beautifully presented.

We started with a perfect oyster, brown, rippled, shockingly labial in presentation, paired with a small stack of fish-filled green peppers.Separately plated was a white radish served with slivers of tofu, the “drippings” from tofu-making, which were almost like a pasta. The radish was quite bitter, not my favourite flavour, but I loved the silkiness of the tofu, although it was difficult to chopstick.The second course was four pieces of perfect tuna sashimi served with the traditional stuffs (wasabi, grated daikon and shiso leaf), but also kiku or chrysanthemum leaves, which MCJC says are good for your eyes.The third course (my favourite) was a perfect piece of miso grilled fish, very lightly flavoured and with almost liquid tenderness. This came with a large red bean (”hanamame”) which was slightly sweet and my singular favourite thing I’ve eaten on this trip. It was large enough that when they first put down my plate I was frightened that it was a small organ. It was the colour of oxblood, and it was sweet and had a dense, soft, comforting chewiness. The big bean actually took two bites to put back. Apparently hanamame are difficult to cook because the bean is inclined to break up during the cooking process. Rabbit’s big bean also came with a small slice of “slimy potato,” a water-y root vegetable with a texture a bit like lotus root or water chestnut. This is actually the same vegetable used in yamakake, the grated “slimy potato” dish common in sushi bars.The fourth was a tofu course, with tofu served two ways. The first presentation was very white and quite porous, like travertine, which soaked up a broth that tasted a bit like a chicken stock. There was also a golden brown square of tofu that was much smoother in texture (approaching a crème carmel-y texture), and which I think had been baked. This came with another small piece of a different Japanese potato, not textured liked the first, but still very different from the potatoes we eat in North America (softer, a little more bitter).The fifth course offered rice, pickles, and miso soup, the traditional Japanese finale. I don’t like Japanese pickles, which remind me of high school biology class, and I am over trying to be brave about pickle-eating this trip. Still, these pickles were exceptionally beautiful: a pink radish, cucumber, some seaweed. I did like a tiny salad of delicate shoots and itsy, baby mushrooms, again with some chrysanthemum in a very light dressing. The miso soup was very dark brown and again had tiny mushrooms — probably the best soup of the trip thus far.Dessert was red adzuki beans with an almost tapioca-like beaded pudding on top (sort of like a slightly sweet cream of wheat, but with a bit more texture) — really delicious.This sounds like an absolutely overwhelming lunch, but portions are very small (dessert was literally about four spoonfuls, although I’m sure some Americans could put it back in one big gulp), so we left feeling perfectly full without being at all stuffed. Lunch cost about $35 per person (CN).Note: being in Japan has also dissolved Rabbit’s fears of photographing our food. This is because nobody knows us here and they automatically assume we’re boorish foreigners, but also because the Japanese photograph everything, so we’re in good company photographing dinner and almost everything else. I’m working with limited email access for now, but there will be photos to go with the report from Japan!