We started the meal with a mutton roll, a delicately spicy croquette filled with mutton meat, its pancake coating bright and crispy. Then an almost lacy dosa, a kaleidoscope of texture, soft and chewy and crispy, the batter a little tangy and nutty, to be dipped into sambar.
This is the second instalment of What I ate in Japan - read the first one here. After a spectacular rope-way trip over a volcanic valley, overlooking a bare mountain with thick steam rising from the surface, we made our way to our ryokan in Hakone, in the lush Japanese countryside.
There are no-frills counter seating eateries, Michelin-starred restaurants, bakeries, yakitori joints where beer and sake are drunk around the griddle, izakayas where the food complements the drinks, noodle places with their little vending machines from which you order, performance restaurants, street stalls, markets. And all these seem to all sit on top of each other, there to confuse you with enticing smells and Japanese-only menus.
The menu is utterly confident in its use of offal and traditional Chinese ingredients in the most innocent looking parcel: a steamed bun.
But food in Rome is somewhere else. It's crispy, fried supplìs with their melty mozzarella heart, in a brown bag rendered translucent by oil, eaten in tiny cobblestoned alleyways, green vines climbing up earth-coloured walls. It's squares of chewy pizza al taglio, the edges crispy, pockets of mozzarella atop delicate courgette flowers.
Imagine this: you’re tired. You’re hungover. The world is too loud, the light too bright and the air too warm and heavy for you to even think about leaving the…
But is this who I want to be? A maker of smoothies, a drinker of lukewarm lemon water, a calorie-counting kombucha-sipping consumer of kale and sweet potato, a self-righteous enemy of white foods by day.
Here is part 2 of my year in food. You can find part 1 here. – Food at Som Saa because it was genuinely some of the best I have…
