Intermezzo: Chicago

Apologies for the slow posting of holiday pictures. Last weekend we were in Chicago where we saw Soumyadip, Oni and Tuncay...



... and ate lots of wonderful food.







We also saw a little bit of the city.

Barf-O-Rama

To the untrained eye, this may look like a bowl of puke, but our more discerning readers will no doubt recognize this Kyoto delight of roast chicken with egg sauce.

Time for Another Random Restaurant

We felt lazy, and just wanted to have some food whilst biking back to the hotel. This restaurant looked nice from the outside.



We enjoyed many small dishes: some salad with fish...



... some barbecued peppers and meatz...



...shiitake on a stick...



...almost raw chicken liver...



...eggplant two ways...



...chicken (I think)...



...and tsukune (according to a Flickr commenter).

Home Style Japanese Food

While biking around, we saw many small, inviting looking restaurants. We decided to go into one of them, where we filled up the place by taking the second table. The cook and his wife did not speak much English, but the other two guests did, and we managed to order this plate of home style Japanese food. Japan is great.

Once You Go Bukkake

... you don't go backake.

Yum.

Best Dinner Redux

After a disappointing dinner of okonomiyaki, we went back to the best restaurant we found so far in Kyoto --- and had another great dinner.

Besides wonderfully fresh fish, we also had agedashi tofu:



But the fish really is the highlight of this restaurant (called Anji).



Highly recommended!

Okonomiyaki

Anke described Okonomiyaki as "... exactly what you would hope to make when you get home after partying all night. Not a great culinary delight, but definitely tasty." This time we did not go to the best okonomiyaki restaurant in Japan, and I would not be surprised if it actually is the worst one.

Lunch

Soba noodles. Long time ago. I do remember the herring in it. Like.

Best Dinner So Far

Here some pictures of the best dinner we had in Kyoto so far. Pictured above is a rice bowl, with marinated pieces of fish.



We also had an assortment of wonderful vegetables...



... and this perfectly grilled yellowtail fish head, which was also amazing.

Fire!

We are indeed "always so open-minded for trying new things" as Tuncay snidely commented. This time we went to a restaurant where they literally burn your food, before they serve it: burnt ramen.





The noodles were pretty good, and the burnt flavor was very interesting. We also ordered some dumplings, which I thought were really good --- actually quite a bit better than the burnt noodles for which the restaurant is famous.

Bukkake

Yum.

Ryokan

For our last day in Japan, we took a train to Hakone-Yumoto for a stay in a traditional Japanese inn.

We were lucky enough to find an affordable (just $100 pp, peanuts!) ryokan called 遊心亭, where we got a room with two huge cherry blossomed trees in front of it.



















We spent a really relaxing afternoon and evening there. The ryokan had three baths; one for women, one for men (which changed their intended audience every 6 hours) and one private bath which we rented for the measly sum of $17/hour. Afterwards, we donned our yukata (cotton robes) and were served a 4 course dinner of tiny little dishes in our room.

After dinner, the table was moved to a corner, and our futons were rolled out by the superpolite and continuously bowing staff. We took more baths (but not the private bath -- there are limits to our willingness to throw money at lovely servile folks) and sat in our window sill reading and admiring the cherry blossoms...



And that was it! This morning we had a quick bath and a 2-course breakfast of tiny little Japanese dishes, and then we caught the train-bus-plane back home, where we had yet another Peking duck for dinner.

Sushi

For lunch today, we went to a revolving-belt-sushi type of place. I have never been to a good revolving-belt-sushi restaurant, and unfortunately that is still the case after today. I guess Fodor's does get it wrong sometimes.

Anywho, the photos are beautiful all the same.