Before I went to Japan, I and others worried what I was going to do about eating out.
Ian what are you going to eat in Japan?
I joke but its a deadly serious question for me. Either I’m going to come back from Japan having lost a load of weight (i’m going to carry a lot of antihistamines in lei of a epipen) or gained a bunch from eating Burger King and KFC all the time.
Obviously I don’t want to eat western food but a mistake/error could mean the difference between endless puking and a trip to the hospital.
Well as I wrote earlier, I didn’t do so bad. I insured I had a reasonable breakfast of eggs and toast (although the only bread I could find was white bread and finding butter was tricky).
Out of 14 days, I had 1 incident which resulted in me projectile puking my guts up into the toilet where I was staying (we got a taxi back asap!), eating 3 antihistamines pills to try and dampen the unavoidable and falling a sleep pretty much straight afterwards. It wasn’t pretty but it wasn’t the worst I have been luckily.
The problem seems to be the marinade on the Yakitori (やきとり) skewed meat dinner
I did show the allergy card but we think the skewed meat I picked and some of the skewers the rest of the party picked got mixed up. Part of the issue for this was because the veggie skewers couldn’t be eaten by me for some reason (can’t remember why?) So I ended up eating more meat than I actually ordered. Things got mixed up too, as you can see its hard to tell which one is which.
I was doing so well up that moment and afterwards I decided found this very useful guide to Japanese food types and then a nice simple way to find them. Mainly Korean BBQ style Yakiniku (焼き肉) and of course Teppanyaki (鉄板焼き). After a while I got use to looking for the Japanese 焼き肉 (Yakiniku) and avoided やきとり (Yakitori).
Most of the time I had mainly meat plus vegetables, and it was lovely. Especially the very well marbled Wagyu Beef...! Which wasn’t too badly priced at all.
Classic Yakiniku style, embedded within the table. Its just a matter of switching it on, along the side of the table.
This is the other style which seemed very popular. They bring the whole BBQ unit over to your table.
This one is similar to the one above but instead of moving the whole unit, they just add white hot coal to the unit.
Teppanyaki style dish, lovely tender lunch time dish in Ginza.
Another Teppanyaki dinner in Shinjuku.
With all that meat and veg, it was surprising to come back to the UK almost exactly the same weight as I left. Yes I missed all the Sushi and other types of great food in Tokyo but what I had was great and I even tried tounge, but avoided the heart, womb and whale jerky! (seriously!)