Fry Me a Liver

Can we agree that everything is better fried? At Kushiya, twenty-five hundred yen gets you your own little deep fryer and an endless supply of stuff to fry in it. For me and my crew, that’s heaven.

Kushiage is essentially deep-fried yakitori, which in turn is essentially bits of meat and veggies skewered and roasted on sticks like miniature shish kabob. It’s a common favorite all over Japan. You’ll see the yakitori trucks in front of markets and at festivals. That’s good enough on it’s own and no one should spend a week in Japan without having some. It’s even vegetarian-friendly. But how about if we take some yakitori, roll it in batter and bread crumbs and give it a few minutes in hot oil? Mmmmm, if Homer Simpson knew about this…

While you can find these kushiake restaurants at the top of many department stores, this is the only one I’ve ever seen that lets you do it yourself. We were initially a little worried about letting our eight year old get that close to a deep fryer, but the way it’s set up put us at ease.

The table is a lot like the yakiniku tables you see with the griddle in the middle, only instead you get a narrow trough of hot oil encircled by a draining rack. This design was such that we never felt threatened and our son who’s normally terrified of getting burned became at ease with it before too long.

You start by taking a little plate down a row of deli windows where the chefs have cut and skewered any number of edibles on pencil-sized sticks and laid them out for your approval. Take any and all you want; it’s a buffet. It’s the only buffet I’ve ever really enjoyed in Japan, the rest being just a smorgasbog of mediocre food. But this was good food and so much fun. After you’ve collected your foods, you’ll need to get a boat of bread crumbs and another of batter. Get some more trays of different sauces. Some rice, some salad, a drink, pickles, miso…I must have made a dozen trips between my table and the serving area before we were ready to start, but that was also strangely fun.

Once you’re all set and ready, you take a skewer of whatever and roll it first in the batter, then in the bread crumbs. Dangle it in the oil for a few seconds to get a firm shape, then put it the rest of the way in. The end of the skewer will stick up far enough above the surface that you can retrieve it without getting burned. It doesn’t even pop that much. Very easy.

But here is where the real fun lies. Kushiage is not easy to make, but it’s not so difficult, either. It has a nice, sharp learning curve and in no time you’ll have your own technique down and feel like some kind of tempura master. Each one of us thought we had the better method. My family doesn’t realize that I had the best way. But however you do it, you only give it a minute or two and then pull it out to drain and cool on the rack.

Beyond the sheer fun of the cooking is the surprising variety of fry-ables on offer. Asparagus, ocra, cheese, shrimp, beef, bacon, various mushrooms, tater tots, sweet potato, acorn squash, lotus root, okonomiyaki…I asked my son what he liked most.
“I liked that broccoli thing, that egg thing, that shrimp thing and that takoyaki thing, too…that was nice! Yes, we all loved the deep-fried takoyaki (grilled and battered octopus bits). It was our unanimous favorite. Crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside.

Then for the sauce. We have over eight different sauces including four kinds of soy, a cheese mayo, and a pickled ume (plum) sauce that was out of this world. But if you have a truly refined palate for Japanese food, they say you’ll prefer just a light sprinkling of salt.

We’d found this one at the Kawaguchi Jusco Carat mall and we’d originally intended to go by the Krispy Kreme afterwards, but by the time we waddled out we knew we’d have to take the donuts on the road.

Kushiya

串家物語　靖国通り店
■住所： 〒160-0021東京都新宿区歌舞伎町1-6-1　ｼﾛｰﾋﾞﾙ7F

■TEL/FAX： 03-5292-9401

■定休日/営業時間： 無休/平日16：00～22：00 日･祝12：30～23：00

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串家物語　新宿西口大ガード店
■住所： 〒160-0023東京都新宿区西新宿1-3-1　ｻﾝﾌﾗﾜｰﾋﾞﾙ5F

■TEL/FAX： 03-5321-6166

■定休日/営業時間： 無休/16：00～23：00

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串家物語　吉祥寺店
■住所： 〒180-0004東京都武蔵野市吉祥寺本町1-11-30　ﾀﾞｲﾔﾊﾟﾚｽ吉祥寺2F

■TEL/FAX： 0422-28-7735

■定休日/営業時間： 無休/17：00～23：00

■備考：




串家物語　立川北口店
■住所： 〒190-0012東京都立川市曙町2-5-17　ｲﾉﾀｹﾋﾞﾙ5Ｆ

■TEL/FAX： 042-540-8948

■定休日/営業時間： 無休/平日16：00～23：00　土日祝11：30～14：30 16：00～23：00

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Stairs and Stares: Osaka

Ever noticed how the most organized people have the least personality, and vice-versa?
We managed to pack three people adequately into a rolling duffle bag and hop a last-minute SkyMark plane from Haneda to Kobe Monday afternoon. Smooth forty-five minute flight with no check in to claim. Hop on a train to Osaka. But lugging a duffle and a family around Japan’s second biggest city is a lot harder than in Tokyo and Yokohama. Escalators are a rarity and when you change trains at any station, you can expect to walk yourself ragged. Consistency is also sorely missed on the Kinki area train lines. From one station to the next, there’s no telling what form, if any, information will take. It could be a center-platform screen with a video-analog clock telling where the next train is going, but not when; looking unlike anything in Kanto. It could just as easily be a faded poster board with hand-corrections, or a station master at the end of a long line of confused travelers. If you’ve lived your life in Osaka, you just know which trains split to which lines, and where to get them. The rest of us don’t live there, so to hell with us. I thought I was pretty adept at Japanese training, but even my wife, a native found it maddening. Navigating the sprawling commuter catacombs was a challenge. Where signs should guide you, turn-by-turn toward the exit or transfer or wherever it is you’re trying to go, about every other junction lacking a sign and there’s very little uniformity to distinguish station information from advertisements.

Oh, and when they say that Japan’s population is aging, they’re thinking about Kansai. At every turn you’re met with walls of elderly Zaks, walking as if blind to everyone else and each other. It would be funny to watch on a surveillance camera, from a comfortable hotel room. And for as many seniors as there are, we noticed a marked absence of foreigners. We realized that we were being “noticed” everywhere, the way it isn’t in Kanto. Stairs and stares!

But after we found our hotel we headed out for a little nightlife in Nihonbashi. Mingling with the masses, I could say for sure there was something different about Osaka folks, but I couldn’t quite say what. A slightly different rhythm. I’ll say, they really know how to do neon. They even have a tower that casts a bizarre shadow way up into the sky.

The okonomiyaki was everything I heard it was. As of this day, my son now considers it amongst the food he will eat.

The main reason we went was for Universal Studios, Japan. Most of the attractions have three stages. Stage one: stand in line for 20 to 200 minutes (depending on when you go). Stage two: one or more large antechambers where an actor or video screen welcomes you and stalls for time. Stage three: everyone pushes into the main theater, trying to get seats together (ha-ha…good luck!) wherein you’ll watch something in 3-D or something like that. But it’s usually worth the wait, if just barely.

No one knows how to milk a good thing like Osaka. Where places like Disneyland would set you up with a fast pass free, based on when you ride, USJ will charge you an extra 5,000 yen for seven of their top ten. I paid it, and I’m glad I did because when we went it was spring break and it would have taken all day to get into maybe four attractions. I’m a chump, I know.

So get the fast passes and try to ration them out over the day. Even with the fast pass, it took as much as twenty minutes to get into some attractions (notice I’m not saying rides? There are few, what you’d call, rides). Each fast pass ticket entitles you to one of three or four attractions. Use the information boards around the park to see which of the choices has the longest wait, and use the pass on that. Then wait out the lesser ones. And around eleven o’clock, a lot of people start eating what USJ creatively calls, “food.” That’s a good time to catch a few shortened lines. For all my barbs, there were some unforgettable points.

Backdraft was my wife’s and my top pick. After a lot of video stalling, all in Japanese, we were treated to a few harrowing minutes of pyrotechnics, and I don’t mean fireworks. They showed us fire doing things that ordinarily would be the last thing you ever saw. There’s no seated part. Make sure you sandwich it between two seated affairs. My son preferred the new Spiderman ride by a narrow margin. I can understand why. It was a spectacular work. It was like Disney Sea’s Indiana Jones ride, with some of the best 3-D I’ve ever seen. The Terminator performance was pretty cool, but the bad overacting is still rasping in my brain.

We changed to a different hotel for the second night, one overlooking a soba shop with an all-night barker, a woman who called out welcomes to the world with a piercing voice that could cut through three feet of soundproofing as easily as our balcony window. And she never got tired. She kept on for hours. I can’t decide if it was more annoying or impressive.

I had developed a bad cold over the last few hours we were all kind of tired, so we packed up and went home the next day.

But we had a great time. I know it doesn’t sound like it, but we did. Man, it’s good to be home.

Mall'ed

National Foundation Day. Wife, son and I have the day off. Woo-hoo! Kinda cold and potentially rainy day; park’s out of the question. It’d be nice to get some exercise. What are we going to do? How about drive out to the massive new Aeon-Jusco LakeTown shopping mall? Krispy Kreme, Cold Stone, myriad stores and a bunch of good eateries with lots of room to run around in. It might have been an amusing diversion, if everyone else on the Kanto plane hadn’t had the same idea. National holiday? What was I thinking??? It’s not like this is my first year in Japan, or on Earth for that matter. Ordinarily, the drive from Asaka to Koshigaya wouldn’t have taken more than 40 minutes. But the last 2 meters before LakeTown alone took 40 minutes because of the immobilized traffic cue trying to press into the parking facilities. It didn’t help that my my passengers both needed to pee. But if you’ve ever been out there, it is as boondocks as you get. It looks like they’re building an airport out there, it’s so flat and desolate. Now, I’ve been in squeezes like this, before. I’ve learned that rather than park near the doors, park somewhere a little remote that’s easy to get out of in the evening, when everyone is trying to migrate in unison. We found a remote lot about a block away, perfect. A ten minute walk in freezing winds, trying to “hold it in” until we finally found the toilets. But we’re not happy, yet. It’s three and we haven’t eaten since breakfast. We expected to be there alot earlier. We’re so hungry, we could eat at Saizeria. Where to dine? The Vanguard cafe for scrumptious, gourmet burgers? Country Kitchen for a large stack of pancakes? Pizza Salvatore? Hong Kong-style chinese food? Okonomiyaki? No point thinking. Nearly every place had a waiting line of at least another 30 minutes. We’d be unconscious by then. First place with a visible table. Old Man’s Grill turned out to be a pretty decent steak house. But after that, we spent another four hours trudging through the morass of humanity from one end of the mall to the other. I tell you, if you think Narita Airport offers a long walk, it’s just a warm-up for this place, except Narita has some interesting shops. Here, it was essentially cosmetics shop, single-young-girl’s boutique, baby shop, shoe shop, repeat; like a background loop when cartoon characters run. Nothing in either of our sizes, and little else of any interest. But it took us all that walking to figure that out. No, scratch that…we’ve been to nearly every mall from Saitama to Yokohama and they’re all like this, only about a fifth the size. Okay, we’re slow on the uptake, I know. I prefer to call us eternally optimistic. After five hours of walking and little more to show than a cell phone bob and a dozen donuts, we were ready to head home. Now where was that remote lot? Simple, exit the far corner of the mall, shamble a block down and off we go. It was pretty dark, but after a few blocks, that remote lot was clearly not where we thought it was. You see, as I said before the area is desolate. Therein, every side of the immense complex looks about the same. I gestured off into the distance and suggested, “it must be way over there.” My wife couldn’t get a fix on the point in the distance I was looking at. “That red traffic light, way off in the distance? You might think it’s a radio tower on the horizon but it’s a traffic light. See, it just turned green? I think that may be where we’re parked.” We marched another good length to the next far corner, then to the next and finally to the last of the far corner. My son worried, “what if we don’t find the van?” I reminded him that we were on an island, and eventually we’d either find the van or hit water, and if we did reach the ocean, I decreed we’d give up our life and live on the beach. “Really?” he asked, pinning me down. I think he liked the idea of being beach bums…like in Brandy and Mr. Whiskers (for all of you with the Disney channel). I considered it…”yes.” Now I had REALLY better find that van. Last corner we hit pay dirt and found the remote parking lot. Deductive reasoning never fails-eliminate everywhere the lot is not to determine where it is. Legs aching, gravity set on “eleven,” we agreed this family excursion was a mistake-let us never speak of it again. We’re not going to feel guilty about eating those donuts, because we done-got more than our share of exercise for the week.