After two weeks of travelling in China we began December with an evening in Hong Kong. In the morning we would fly to Japan. That evening was a time of decompression. We’d felt cold throughout the November in China. Now I was comfortable in just a tee. For The Family too it was a time for a change. We found a place near the Art Museum in Kowloon where we could share a pizza, a pasta, and a grilled fish. I love the knife work of Chinese chefs, here seen in the vegetables piled on the fish which look like a tangle of noodles. They also had craft beer. It all made for quite a relaxed time.
Tag: pizza
Reindeer pizza
“Finally,” The Family told me with a grin, “I found reindeer meat.” She’d ordered a pizza with the meat that she’d been dying to taste ever since I told her of having reindeer steak long ago in northern Finland. Sami hunted moose and herded reindeer for centuries, but these meats have not entirely entered into the cultures of the later Scandinavians. They are still speciality meats. The pizza used smoked reindeer, drier than the steak I now only faintly recall. Interesting flavour, we agreed, but the smokiness was what we found foremost. We’ll have to look for steaks another time.
Pizzaioli of Phewa Lake
Are you looking for a place for lunch in Pokhara? Just walk along the lakeshore and you’ll be spoilt for choice. The Family held out for a pizzeria recommended by my nephew. The salad was quite nice, but not exactly what you might expect when you order a salad Nicoise. But the pizza was rather good, and lived up to its billing. I looked in at the woodfired oven where four cheerful young Nepali boys were rolling and baking the pizzas. As soon a they saw my camera they stood at attention. No chance of getting shots of them as work, but why not the shot they chose to give me?
Yoshoku-ya: western food in Japan
It was easy to laugh at a typical mis-spelling in the village of Nikko when we walked down the highway from the Toshogu shrine to the railway station. After all, we’d just had a wonderful washoku (traditional Japanese) meal of gohan (boiled rice) with miso soup and several accompaniments. But then I tried to convince The Family that western food was really worth trying in Japan. I’ve not usually been disappointed by any of the food I’ve had in Japan.
We walked into a fairly large pizzeria (spelt correctly, of course, we were in the Ginza!). We always have a salad at dinner and this one had the Japanese bite-sized pieces of a generic western salad. Nothing particularly Italian about it. The Roman-style thin-crust pizza was exquisite, indistinguishable from what The Family had fallen in love with in Rome. We’d been adventurous in ordering one with a Neapolitan Margharita topping. The tomatoes were flavourful, the mozarella seemed fresh (we are not purists, but I would like to know where in Tokyo they make this), and the basil was replaced by the more Roman topping of aragula leaves. The Family would not accept my choice of a Tiramisu for the dessert, but held out for sharing a panna cotta. It was nice and wobbly as it is meant to be. The Family asked “But why smother it with so many other flavours?” Indeed, although each component was very well done, there seemed to be too many. We’d walked into a mirror world of food. It was the Golden Week, when all of Japan is closed (except restaurants, shops, and other touristy places) and everyone travels. Half the people here were foreigners, but the other half seemed to be young Japanese couples from out of Tokyo. Was this adaptation of Italian food particular to the restaurant, or is it widely done this way? The pizza told us one thing, but the salad and dessert seemed to say something else.
In Kyoto, on the other hand, we definitely experienced a traditional yoshoku-ya. This style of restaurants comes from the 1870s, when Japan decided to open to the west, and adopting western food was seen to be progressive and modern. An English menu was procured with great difficulty (in spite of us protesting that our phones could handle the translation) so it seems that tourists don’t want to have anything to do with Meiji-vintage Japanese-western food. But we thought that the slightly-out-of-season sakura spaghetti would be an interesting thing to try. “Absolutely no curry rice,” The Family decreed, shunning the British-inspired mess that was imported as western food in 19th century Japan. So we ordered a plate of korokke (croquets) and one of katsu (cutlets). We never did get to taste the other favourite at yoshokus, the gratin. Next time around perhaps.
Another Friday night
Friday was a pizza and beer day, except that we had the two at different times. Our usual Friday morning meetings meant a call for a pizza after that. A fresh salad and a nice crisp Italian pizza was our lunch. We followed this with a couple of relaxing glasses of an Indian pale ale in the evening. We’d run out of good beer for a month or two. Then finally, when the state government allowed alcohol deliveries, we again started to get our tipple when we want it. Unfortunately the age of the beer is not guaranteed (more signs of the collapsed supply chain), and we got some duds now and then. These two bottles turned out to be fine. A couple of samosas, some bhajia, and a small seekh kabab rounded off an evening of quiet companionship.
We’ve got to start meeting other people on these Friday evenings, over video chat of course. Pubs will not be safe again for a few years, that is the new normal. But that doesn’t mean we’ll stop having fun.
Don't hold your breath 
