Sapporo Food: Sandal Diner

Sandal Diner is a small, cozy little restaurant in Kita 24 Jo. I don't think it's spectacular, but the menu is varied (carrying everything from burgers and curry to sushi, pizza and a terrifyingly large selection of onigiri) and everything I've had there has been good, and mighty satisfying. Also, and this would be the key point for me, it stays open pretty late.

I work evenings sometimes, and my girlfriend works evenings all the time, and recently we've both been frightfully reluctant to actually cook anything so we're eating out more than is healthy. But eating out late, while more possible in Japan than I reckon it is in England, is still kinda hit and miss depending on where you are. I mean, wherever you are, you can ALWAYS eat ramen late at night, and probably yakitori too, but for more choice you're often left pretty bereft of options. So sometimes I want a half decent burger, and Jacksonville in Kita 24 Jo, which I love, closes at 9 and so thank God for Sandal Diner.

That's the mexican salsa burger, with avocado, and I believe some kind of locomoco lurking in the background there. An esteemed colleague of mine from the states was once left not all that impressed by Sandal Diner's burgers when we went there, but beef-pork mix (I have no idea if it is or isn't) or not I'm getting to really like them. This thing might look monstrous:

but it was pretty bloody delicious. Also the potatoes, which come in that chunky wedge-type variety were way better than I expected. I've had badly cooked potato wedge-chips so many times that I didn't have high hopes, but they were great too. I haven't tried the pizza, which I'm always curious about due to the crimes against pizza that I've witnessed in Japan. So I can't vouch for that. The other food I've had there hasn't been flashy, but it has been tasty and satisfying and it has Ebisu beer on tap and a nice, relaxed, warm atmosphere. Oh, pretty terrible Nashville country music, but it makes a change at least.

Oh, I found another picture. Same burger last time I went, and that looks like sausage curry to me. Yeah

It's a good place and you should check it out, especially if you live in Kita 24 Jo and haven't been there yet. It's in the little car-park area around the back of one of the tall buildings on the main street - you have to walk around the block to get there basically. Confusing directions, I know, but that's why I have the map. So have a look at that why don't you.

SAPPORO!

There was a horrendous disaster in March, and an ongoing situation with the Fukushima No.1 nuclear plant, and unsurprisingly these things have had a massive effect on tourism in Japan. In that no-one wants to come here anymore. And, to be frank, it seems to me more and more that the government have the efficacy of a plywood baseball bad when it comes to confronting this problem. Not least because no-one believes them anymore.

Sad emoticon.

Still, from what I can tell people fearing radiation damage a ways away from the Fukushima plant are over-reacting somewhat. Lady Gaga did her bit, assuring everyone that Japan is safe to come to and as beautiful and awesome as always, and now, impressively the Sapporo City tourism people are doing their bit too with this website:

http://www.sapporo-now.com/en/

A design that actually looks quite nice? English and Chinese full functionality? Holy balls, I think I just dropped the crab-leg I was gnawing on! It's a nice website, and what with the updating radiation chart, it's as clear as it can be that Hokkaido is free of carginogens and mutagens and I'm really very impressed with it. Good show Sapporo council.

And Google are doing their bit too, with in-depth street-view things for big Japanese tourist attractions (the cynic in me would say - well if their panoramic shots are that good people might not actually bother with the trip, but that's just silly). They've done a whole bunch of Sapporo things that you can see here:

Google's Sapporo Galleries

I like it, but with the best will in the world Maruyama Zoo is not all that impressive. I mean, it's not even the most impressive zoo in Hokkaido - so many people stay in Sapporo and take the train to Asahiyama Zoo in Asahikawa (a couple of hours away) that they have a themed train with special animal seat-covers. But still it's the thought that counts.

Anyway, come to Sapporo because we're not radioactive and the summer is bearable, as opposed to the rest of Japan.

That is all.

Sapporo Food: Orion Kanazawa-Style Curry

First, I'd like to say that I'm losing count of the number of cafes and restaurants that I'm finding because of my iPhone. Apple, you have your problems, and your iTunes for Windows software is still like new-strain incurable gonorrhea on my computer, but the crazy world of apps you have begotten has something going for it.

On Sunday we went up a mountain, and on the way down used the iPhone to find first a cafe, for coffee, and then this place:

It is Orion and it is apparently the only Kanazawa-style curry restaurant in Hokkaido. Kanazawa curry? What's Kanazawa curry I hear you ask? It's the way they eat curry in Kanazawa city in Ishikawa-ken of course, which is like this:

Now, if you are familiar with basic Japanese-style curry, you may be looking at that and thinking... well... that doesn't look all that different from any other curry. But you are WRONG. SO WRONG. And here is a bullet-pointed list why you are so wrong:

Allow me to roughly translate these points, which set Kanazawa style curry apart from the dross they serve in the rest of the country:

- Served in a stainless steel dish

- Served with shredded cabbage

- You can't see the rice (my note: because it's hidden under the curry, not because it's invisible)

- Fork

- The topping (i.e. the meat) is served on top of the curry (as opposed to the other way round)

- The katsu (cutlet) has Worcester sauce on it

- The curry is thicker and richer.

And then to the right of that is the stuff which I thought really defined the difference between Kanazawa curry and regular Japanese curry, which is that you mix the cabbage in with the curry and more importantly that you add mayonnaise to the curry and mix that in too. Now that's an interesting (if in terms of Japanese cuisine, not unusual) variation - adding mayo to your curry. But the bullet points seemed to be, really, trying too hard. I'm sure many purists would disagree, but when you're emphasising the serving-ware, the cutlery, and the layering order of the food, you're kind of reaching.

And to be honest in the end the curry wasn't all that different from other Japanese curries. It was like curry+ or curry with a twist. What it also was though, was delicious and that's the most important thing! It was rich and thick, the tonkatsu was crisp and good, the Worcester sauce was only a little thing, but it added to it too, and I could dig the mayo concept. It was a satisfying, hearty meal and I'd recommend it to any fan of Japanese curry. You're also encouraged to add as many toppings as you feel like to the curry, and the place has a whole other half-a-menu devoted to potato noodles and pasta if that's what you feel like.

I'm a huge fan of B-gourmet (simple, cheap food done really well) and I'd say that this place is something like that. I dug it and I'd recommend it to anyone in the area. Oh, coz it's in Fushimi, pretty far out towards the mountains in the South-West of Sapporo. Car or streetcar would be the best way to get there. Check it out on the map here.

Sapporo Cafes: Cafe ZILL - UPDATED

Posting more than once a month? What is this, Wikipedia?

That doesn't make sense, does it?

Anyway, here you are: Cafe ZILL.
UUUUUUPDATE! Zill closed for about a year (despite the lady saying that it would only be closed for three months to me) and when it reopened it was a lot fancier and now only opens in the evenings for dinner. So I can't go there for lunch and check it out. It looks very nice in the evenings though, so I'm sure it's still great. I'll post again if I ever go there but for now I'll leave this here for posterity and take away the tags.

ZILL is on Gyokei Dori which is a nice shopping street that cuts through the - what I like to call - null zone in the middle of the street car loop. Is that a bad way to put it? I'm sure there's all sorts of awesome stuff tucked away in that area (Yamahana, I guess?) but the fact that it's off the subway line (Horohirabashi on the Namboku line is the closest station) and hemmed in by the street car line makes me always think of it as a kind of 'heart of darkness' or perhaps a 'dark country' whose borders it is perilous to cross. It is neither. It is a nice suburban neighbourhood nestled up next to the city centre and now I work there one day a week.

And on that day I go looking for somewhere to eat lunch, and it didn't take me long to find ZILL. ZILL seems to be subtitled both "Soul Soup Shop" and "Creative Lounge" which should give you a good idea what it's like. It's a cozy little cafe, heavy on the dark wood and vintage furnishings (perhaps a little too dark? that doesn't seem to be a problem around here - every branch of Miyakoshiya Coffee feels like they've carved the walls from the darkest of dark chocolate), and the kind of place where you can buy handmade bags alongside the regular cafe stuff.

It's a divinely relaxing place, a lot like Nesco in Kita-Ku, and as such perfect for a slow lunch on a crazy day. Unlike Nesco though, their music kind of sucks. The guy at Nesco plays an amazing mix of down tempo contemporary indie, most of which I don't know, whereas ZILL tends to play those annoying CDs of lounge and bossanova covers of pop and rock songs. Fuck, I'm coming to hate those CDs. Well, clearly that's an exaggeration, because the music never stops me enjoying reading a book in ZILL.

I've been there quite a few times now, and I almost always get something that looks like this:

That's the lunch set. They offer soup, sandwich and rice-ball, and you can choose whichever you like and if it comes to more than 800yen they throw in a free tea or coffee. That's really not bad, and the food is really great. That's a squash potage and cheese omelette sandwich there and both were far better than anything I normally eat during my working day. One criticism would be that their sandwiches are great, but really difficult to eat. One time I got a full sized sandwich and it was HUGE, and so impractically constructed that I made a thorough mess of myself trying to eat it. Chalk that one up to some places in Japan making fancy sandwiches following some theoretical concept of 'the sandwich', that end up as something involving bread and filling that falls into this void between 'closed' and 'open-face'. I've given this too much thought, but then, I give everything too much thought.

So I don't like the music and their sandwiches are tricky, but those aren't serious criticisms and ZILL is a weekly godsend for me. All of the food is delicious, the coffee that I tried was good and it's a really nice, warm place to relax. It's out of the way of most people I would imagine, but if you're in the area, check it out. And of course it's on the map!

Japanese Junk Food Times - Pepsi Dry and Kit-Kat Zunda

Oh! I didn't see you there! Let me just put my gourmet hat on, and then tell you about my journeys in the realm of... flavour.

I don't need to go into how the Japanese snack food market retains its vim and vigour by trying out new flavours of existing products all the time, do I? I've read about a zillion other blog posts explaining the concept recently, so let's just say that I am thoroughly down with the concept. It reminds me of Grant Morrison's Seaguy a little, and also makes me think of white suited cowboys of the lab - pouring bubbling test-tubes into each other in search of the essence of... pistachio nut shells or something.

Above you will see Dry Pepsi. What is Dry Pepsi? It is non-sweet Pepsi. It makes no claims about being especially healthy on the bottle (though you would assume the lack of sugar is a good thing) and instead talks about being light and refreshing or something. I don't like Pepsi really, weirdly it is a little to sweet for me. So I figured that non-sweet Pepsi might be something worth checking out.

It was not.

It is not less sweet, as I was foolishly imagining, it is not sweet at all. In fact, it doesn't taste like Pepsi, it tastes like soda water, and I soon found myself wondering why it existed. If you like the bitter tang of soda, try it, or better yet JUST BUY SODA. After Shiso Pepsi, Azuki Pepsi and Montblanc Pepsi... this was a let down.

Better, but not incredible was, Kit-Kat Zunda - Zunda-Mochi being soy-bean rice cakes from Sendai. A quick google reveals that Pocky Watch - based in Sendai - reviewed this back in 2009. Tohoku was devastated by the tsunami in March of course, and now it looks like they're rolling out this flavour nationwide and giving 10yen from every bar to support the rebuilding effort. Good stuff.

The bar itself was nice, faintly bean-y, faintly rice-cake-y, but nothing to write home about. Wait, what am I doing here? Is this more effort or less than writing home? I'm lost. Anyway it was ok, but as usual they nail the scent a lot more than the actual taste - which comes out a little bit like funny white chocolate.

Anyway, that's my traditional Japanese food post. You're welcome.

Sapporo Food - Dominika (Soup Curry)

A soup curry shop so good that I went there twice in one week? That's... that's... well, not unheard of actually. Anyway, Dominika was good.

And it's in Odori, where it's always nice to find good Soup Curry. Sadly last order is at 8.30, and I need victuals later than that sometimes, but that's the way the disk of fried cheese crumbles I suppose.

Yeah! Check that bad boy out - a circular cheese wonder that you can break up or allow to melt into your soup as you see fit. Amazing as that is I did actually find I preferred the pre-melted cheese, but this fried cheese topping is apparently the most popular so you should really try it at some point.

Dominika was recommended by a friend, and it's a little tucked away on the ground floor of an office building thing just along from Tokyu hands. I must've seen that bloody wooden elephant outside a thousand times though, and that makes it pretty hard to miss.

You have a choice of four soups, should you choose to go to this place. Yellow is the regular soup, delicious and with a pretty sharp, strong flavour to start off with. Black is a richer soup, made with beef stock I think the dude said, and that was certainly the impression I got from it. These are the two I've tried so far, but there's also white - which is made milder with added soy milk - and red which involves tomatoes in a way that me, Yuki and the very, very chatty dude who works there couldn't get to the bottom of. Like - not a tomato based soup, not like tomato soup, not soup with added tomatoes... he just told us to try it next time.

The dude who took our order by the way - worth mentioning. He is very chatty, eager to explain everything about the menu and to crack jokes (or he was with us when he worked out our Japanese was ok) and quick to weigh in with advice while you're making your mind up. A lot of warnings about the spice-level of the curries, let's put it that way. I had a five both times, and it packed a punch but it was ok (the regular actually seemed a little hotter than the black one). Some other Westerner in the guest book had picked a number eight and it sounded like tough going. Anyway, the Dominika guy - best intentions in the world, but he rubbed one of my friends the wrong way, and it was kind of difficult to chill out at times with him buzzing about. It was okay by me, but... I cannot speak for all of humanity.

The top photo is the black soup with pork. The soup and the vegetables were strengths, coz while the pork was good, I've had some sensational pork curries using buta kakuni (slow-cooked pork) that have raised my standards unrealistically high. When I went back I had the tontoro (pork neck) which looks like this:

And actually feels like two dishes, since the pork comes in a wonderful teriyaki sauce that means you're not meant to transfer it into the soup. Whatever though, because that tontoro was absolutely delicious. Strongly recommended sir!

So, the best soup curry I've had in Odori. Oh and free salad! Check it out. It's on the map.

What's with the manga?

I have been reading manga recently. I say reading, but really I apply that verb with a variety of degrees of accuracy, considering I'm reading in Japanese, and my Japanese remains not-great. So what's with this stack?

Well Joe-Bob, it's a funny story. Yuki was selling an old mobile phone, and got a 500 yen voucher for the used store. But there was nothing either of us wanted to buy, so I picked out five first volumes for a hundred yen each and now I have a bunch of extra manga that I might not read.

Was that a funny story? Not really. Sorry, Joe-Bob.

Anyway there are some manga that I'm reading pretty seriously. Lets see - working down from the top...

Deathnote Vol. 1 - Everyone knows Deathnote, right? Popular enough to spawn three movies, a forthcoming American remake and the Manga's available in English too I believe. This was one of my 100 yen  purchases, and that only one I've started so far. There are sections where the Japanese is beyond me, but everything has furigana - small characters telling you how to read the kanji - so it's easy to look stuff up if I don't know it. Looking anything up takes time though, and I can understand Deathnote pretty well so far so I haven't bothered. The story of a boy who finds a notebook with the power to kill anyone whose name is written in it, I'm not all that far into it, but I like how it doesn't take long at all for the boy to become a budding sociopath and start killing people like crazy. It might be a crude reduction, but I'm guessing that, like Evangelion and Gantz to some degree, Deathnote is another smash hit series aimed at somewhat antisocial insular folk who hate the world, with the underlying message that it's not good to hate the world. Could be wrong about that.

Drop Vol. 1 - is another 100 yen snap. It's a yankee manga about delinquent youths, and it looks like it has a slightly cartoony style, which I kinda like. I haven't read any of it, but a movie of it came out just after I came to Japan, so I'd heard of it before.

Touch Vol. 7 - is my most serious manga reading project. Recommended by the wonderful Yukiko, it's a 1980s high school, sibling rivalry, love-triangle, baseball story by Adachi Mitsuru. It has furigana spelling out the kanji, but the dense 80s high school slang makes it a little tricky to unpick the grammar at times, and I'm told that some of the phrases used are dated to say the least. But it's a fun story, and with Touch I'm looking up and translating everything. It takes a while, which is why I'm only on volume seven, after reading it forever, but it's kind of worth it, and I like Adachi's drawings too.

Gantz Vol. 14 - So, I started reading Gantz when the first film was coming out, because... I don't remember why. The concept piqued my interest or something. Anyway, I care about missing things in Touch, and I take care reading it, but Gantz is basically high-concept trash so I've just been blazing through these volumes like anything. In fact the only thing slowing me down has been the fact that the series is so popular now it's hard to find the volumes in used stores when you want to read them. There's no furigana,  which makes it irritating to look things up and so I haven't bothered. There are fan translations online, and at first I was reading both at the same time to test my understanding. Then I realised that in Gantz there are often action sequences that are two hundred pages long, and that most of the dialogue in those is "GODDAMNIT!" and "AARRGH!" and "IT HURTS!" and most often, "OH SHIT! OH SHIT! I DON'T WANT TO DIE!" And it's much more fun to read comics on paper than on a screen so now I just blast through the Japanese books and if there's something really important that I think I'm missing I look that bit up online. I half like / half hate Gantz. The writer, Oku Hiroya, said that he had the idea for Gantz in high school and boy does it feel like that. People die, but instead of dying they're sent to a mysterious room where a mysterious ball gives them crazy future-tech weapons and sends them off to defeat 'aliens' that are hiding on earth. After that they're free for a while until the next 'game'. There's insanely gratuitous violence, nudity and sex, and for a while it really did feel like a very well rendered 16 year-old boy's wish fulfillment project. But the internal logic of their tasks and the problems they face are so really well done, and I did want to see where things were going enough to keep reading at the start. Then after a while I guess I became inured to it, or it just got better, and certainly the main character developed a lot, and I was thoroughly enjoying the big arc that I just finished, which had some amazing action pieces. Now there are some vampire dudes and I'm not digging it so much though... I'm halfway through the whole run thus far though, so I reckon I'll still keep going.

Hana Yori Dango Vol 1. - This is a super-popular high-school romance manga. I haven't read any of it yet, but I will! I need an antidote to Gantz.

Rideback Vol 1. - I don't know anything about this, but I liked the colours on the cover, and I liked the loose illustration style inside. It seems to be a girl and robot motorcycle vs. facist state thing? Or a race thing? No idea really!

20 Seiki Shonen Vol 1. - I already know the story to this, and I love Urasawa Naoki, but I've never read the manga. So I figured, I really should start. After all, James read the entire bloody thing.

So that's too much rambling about manga. Next time more food, or possibly music. Depends on how lucky you are.