Day 33 Taste of Japanese Art & Spring in Kumamoto

May 12 • Blog, Kyushu • 1387 Views • 11 Comments

My arrival to Kumamoto the day before was so nice that I decided to stay another day to walk around the town. I actually put on some non-cycling, regular clothes and headed out for a walk.

I came by a small sign that had a 500 yen lunch of Kumamoto’s local food. Without a high expectation, I went up the stairs into a small Japanese restaurant.

This is very Japanese, just in case you’ve never been to a Japanese restaurant before. You often receive a damp towel called oshibori when you get seated. It is often warm, and it’s for you to clean your hands when you arrive.

This place was serving Kumamoto’s staple, horse meat. Some of you may not like the idea, but it is what’s famous around here. This basuji, slow cooked horse meat lunch was extremely nice for 500 yen, I was really surprised. The little ceramic fish under the chopsticks is a chopstick rest. It comes in all kinds of designs.

This was a simple, yet really beautiful eggplant/aubergine dish.

Not only was it a bargain, the owner chef of the restaurant gave me a couple glasses of Kumamoto’s shochu in a pretty blue glass sake cup. Looked pretty, tasted delicious!

Cheers for Kumamoto!

The owner was great fun to talk with. He had so many amazing and crazy stories about restaurant business which he entered when he was a teenager as an apprentice cook. He also told me about another cyclist who randomly visited here about 10 years ago, who had also been cycling around Japan at the time. I had such a great time that I told him I’d be back for dinner later.

Before I left, he showed me a Kakuuchi place just nextdoor. I didn’t know what Kakuuchi was, and he explained to me that it was actually a liquor shop, where you could just stand and have a quick drink without any service like a real bar. That term is only used regionally especially in Kitakyushu and some areas, and apparently Kakuuchi was a place for workers to stop by for a quick drink before going home or as a start of real drinking afterwards elsewhere. I was introduced to a glimpse of a historical regional culture. I skipped having a drink here though.

Kaku is a word for “corner”, as in the corner of a square wooden sake cup, and uchi is “to hit.” If you think of taking a quick shot and hitting the bar counter with the empty glass afterward, I think that is pretty much the picture of what Kakuuchi is.

There was a reason I had to hurry back from lunch to the hostel where I was staying. This hostel, Nakashimaya, was managed by a cloth dyeing artist, and I was going to try it too that afternoon.

This particular dyeing technique is called, Rouketsu-zome, in which you use hot melted wax to paint the pattern before dyeing the cloth. That painted area stays white while the other area gets color from the dye you choose.

Guess what color I picked. What a surprise.

On a tenugui, a traditional Japanese cotten towel, I designed a sakura globe using one of their patterns and placed a bicycle on top. What do you think? I added some butterflies too, like the ones from Iheyajima, Okinawa, where I cycled with lots of them. The color came out exactly the same as my bike, Sakura. What a coincidence!

After the artsy afternoon with the dyeing artist, I took my bike this time to go back to the earlier restaurant for dinner since the owner chef wanted to see my bike. I had a glass of umeshu, which is sake made with plums, also known as plum wine. They had several selections just for the umeshu. Umeshu is a little sweet, and I remember occasionally nibbling the sweet plums themselves soaked in sake when I was growing up.

This is Kumamoto’s famous staple, Basashi, which is horse meat sashimi. It’s frozen cold, and you have it with garlic soy sauce.

Grilled itoyori and its shirako (Goldenthread and the soft roe). This fresh fish plate was so melty delicious. The flavoring was very simple with salt, and julienned shiso (Japanese mint) on top.

The chef showed me these Japanese spring wild vegetables from the mountains before turning into a tempura dish. From left: tara-no-me (fatsia sprouts), takenoko (bamboo shoot), fuki (butterbur). This takenoko is so tiny cute!! The smaller it is, the more tender and harder to find, because it is not sticking out of the ground surface.

Tempura, the after. No tempura sauce is needed, just a little bit of salt enhances the flavor of these seasonal vegetables. The brown salt in the back is what the chef brought back from Okinawa himself, which was mildly salty and had a hint of kokutou. (See my kokutou story in Okinawa if you haven’t, it’s really fun!)

Macchan, the chef, gave me some of this delicious Okinawan salt as a souvenir!

The dinner was a blast with other customers sitting at the same counter too. Everyone talked about the food of spring, and taught me all kinds of delicious fish in Kumamoto throughout the year.

Feeling the change of seasons in what we eat is one of the most wonderful things in Japanese cuisine. Having what is in season also means having the food when it’s the most nutritious as nature intended.

What’s your dinner tonight? Does it have what’s in season?

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