Where are the best Japanese restaurants in Beijing?

In terms of "where" geographically, my guess would be up near Anjialou, where I understand there to be a higher density of Japanese expats. Up there is a little pocket of a bunch of Japanese restaurants, of which I've only tried two, but both of which I liked a lot.

One is Sake Manzo but the other, next door, is my personal favorite. It's called Takenosuke and is so far one of only a couple places I've found to eat okonomiyaki here in Beijing.

Continuing with places elsewhere in the city: the only other place I've had okonomiyaki is Izaka-ya in Sanlitun. I found the okonomiyaki to not be as good but their other offerings quite tasty.

While Hatsune strikes me less a Japanese place and more a Californian take on Japanese, it does nonetheless end up on most lists of good Japanese options in Beijing.

There are a bunch of all-you-can-eat/drink types of places, be it for sushi (eg Tokugawa), or teppanyaki (eg Tairyo). While they can present a good value in the right circumstances I wouldn't argue for them being the best at most things.

There are a bunch of nondescript little Japanese-style curry places dotted around Beijing which vary a lot in quality but one I found particularly tasty is Tonkatsu and Curry Rice in Wudaokou. There's little highbrow about the place but damn if it isn't tasty.

Finally, Oden is an interesting place that places an uncommon (in my Japanese dining experiences, at least) emphasis on oden. Being a big fan of the stuff, I've liked my meals there, though the austere decor is perhaps not the most inviting.

That said, natto is definitely an acquired taste. When my chef sister first tried it she didn’t think it especially tasty, though allowed that it could have a place in fine Asian cuisine. Another friend of mine on taking her first bite declared that it was “like eating little solid bits of alcohol” (a description I didn’t really understand, though perhaps it was in reference to the somewhat ammoniac taste) along with a facial expression conveying very clear distate.

To what I assume is the typical western palate, natto is unpleasant at best (a funny read, but don’t take it too seriously, it’s not that disgusting). Just today I discovered “The Natto Project” an interesting account of some people who also decided to acquire a taste for natto, and their experience has proven interesting to me to read so far, though I’m only a couple days in at the time of writing.

In the rest of this post I’m going to recount my personal history of acquiring a taste for, as well as where in Beijing one can get, natto.

I think two years ago, maybe even less than that, I had never tried natto before. I had heard of it because it was one of those things that people told me smells bad but tastes good (like some cheeses, or stinky tofu [I like eating those too]). But I had never tried it before because I never even noticed it on a menu at any Japanese restaurants I’d been to up to that point, and having never seen it, didn’t really search for it when going shopping.

A friend of mine was living in Japan for a while and she told me a bit more about natto. I don’t remember anything specific, but she seemed to enjoy it well enough. Maybe she did from her first try? Maybe she too had acquired a taste over time, I don’t know. I think she told me it was supposed to be really healthy (“Natto: the ultimate health food“, it’s even got it’s own funny named enzyme “nattokinase“!), maybe she didn’t but that was the impression I got when I read about it online (mostly that one site and wikipedia probably). Whatever the case, I was curious.

I think about the time I moved to Beijing, I also became really curious about stinky tofu (chou dofu). The first stinky tofu that I can remember eating was at this place next to a market where I used to live in Beijing. Outside the shop stinks, though probably more due to its proximity to a public toilet than the stinky tofu itself. But I tried it, and was in love. That stuff was great. Theirs was pretty mild (I’m told) and the texture was just that of fried tofu, nothing particularly gross about it. I ate a lot of stinky tofu for a while after that and once or twice went and read a bit about it online as well.

After enjoying stinky tofu of a few varieties, and then hearing about some other fermented soy product that was also stinky and supposedly very good for you, I decided that I was going to be a person that likes pretty much whatever fermented soy food I could get my hands on. It occurred to me later that Miso also falls under this categorization, but doesn’t seem to be nearly so off-putting to most people on account of it’s lack of stinkiness. I’m not sure exactly why I was so determined about this, but I had been convinced that eating fermented foods was a really good idea because cultures that ate lots of fermented stuff were healthier or something like that. Eating lots of microbes that were alive and well in my food would give my immune system super powers. Or something. I also noticed that I really like the taste of a lot of things that are the products of fermentation: the sourdough culture I cultivated, kimchi, lots of booze, cheese, and so much more!

That was a long digression, but the essential point is that I decided to like natto, too.

Much time passed and I never really did anything about this because I continued to not notice natto anywhere.

But then one day in Texas of all places, I tried some natto. I was in Austin attending a friend’s wedding and in the days leading up to the big event we went to get lunch at this sushi place near where he lives. Not excellent, but considering our distance from, uh, oceans, not bad. While skimming their menu, I noticed that they had natto rolls, and I remembered my new goals. I ordered some.

It was gross. I don’t know if my memory of this is simply that it was my first time trying natto, I don’t know if it was actually gross Natto at the Japanese restaurant in Texas, I don’t know if it was something else. It was just natto and rice, wrapped up in seaweed, and I did not like it. I ate one, and what I remember thinking was that it tasted weirdly smoky, had a strange texture and that I didn’t want to eat anymore. I forced down the first roll, and later in the meal tried a second, thinking maybe it would be better. It wasn’t. I didn’t actually finish the roll and if you know me, you’ll know that I am not one who takes not finishing what is ordered lightly.

I didn’t give up though. A while later, long enough that I had forgotten the specifics of my first bad encounter with natto, I discovered natto as an appetizer on the menu of my favorite okonomiyaki restaurant in Beijing. I had to get it because maybe it would be better this time, different, palatable even. This time it came in a little bowl, a mound of natto, topped with some pieces of nori, chopped up spring onions, and a raw egg yolk. A bottle of soy sauce (also a fermented soy product!) was brought with it to the table. I wasn’t really sure how to eat this, so I poured in a bit of soy sauce and gave it a vigorous stir with my chopsticks.

This was my first experience with the sticky strands that are part of natto. They looked gross. I touched the sticky mass, and they felt gross. They also stuck to everything. Those strands stretch for a very long time, and they got all over me as I was sitting there playing with my food. I’m sure I looked very silly.

After enough of that though, it was time to give it a try. I worked a bite into my mouth, getting more strands on my face in the process. It was… weird. The texture was still taking some getting used to but this time it didn’t actually taste all that bad. I think having the egg and the soysauce and the onions all together really made a big difference for me because I finished that bowl without a problem.

And since then, I’ve come to really like natto, so much so that at some point I was thinking how I’d really like to have some, but didn’t know where to get it without going out to dinner at a Japanese place. I checked briefly when I went to by groceries a few times but never saw it anywhere, and for a while, I just assumed that it would be too difficult to find so why bother?

Then of course, my want to eat novel foods overtook my inertia and I started actually thinking of where I would get natto in Beijing. After a bit of google handiwork it seemed that my best bet would be to try a grocery store in a Japanese owned mall/building. The places that I found in searching for these were the grocery areas in Scitech plaza, SOGO, and Ito Yokado. I don’t actually know where the latter two are, but I do know where Scitech is (Jianguomen Wai) so I decided to swing by there after work one day.

Success! All sorts of Japanese foodstuffs can be found there, miso paste, natto, a bunch of other weird things I don’t know what they are, and so on.

I read that other places I could try are other big supermarkets such as Carrefour or Walmart and then browse their international foods, and that also the grocery area in Pacific Century Place (on Gongti Beilu) has a lot of Japanese stuff. I’ll have to check out these alternatives as some of them may be a bit more convenient for me. (Update: Sept 20 2009 – Pacific Century Place’s basement does indeed also have Natto, and moreover, there are more different brands there.)
(Update: Dec. 20 2009 – turns out the BHG marketplace supermarket right next to where I work has the cheap brand that I have taken to buying regularly. These supermarkets are all over the place in fancier malls and such! How did I miss this for so long?)

Now I’m curious what other tastes I may decide to try and acquire. Maybe the next thing to try and find is tempeh? I’m also slightly curious to improvise an incubator and make my own natto, but that’s a bit more involved of a project than I think I’m ready to taken on right now.

There was also a link to this article from the NYTimes dining section about the street food of Mumbai and while I can’t say I really sampled much in India, my own experience with street food in China agrees that it’s not the same off the street.

Right now I would enjoy some dosa so much. so so so much.

First, I read about this ridiculous thing here and decided I would try it. I didn’t realize that I would decide to try it quite so soon but I ate it. Surprisingly not horrible but entirely too much of a mess.

Second, I wish I understood what that sign up there means. I’ve seen it a few places now and I still don’t really get it. No exploding here!

And lastly I saw this car flipped over and a bunch of people gawking (like me) the other night while biking home. This was like a block from home, awesome.

While I was reading it, I had a brief moment where I was gripped with a visceral fear. I do not often find myself dreading the future as I did just now. I’m not really sure what caused it, maybe it was just a vague and unspecified fear of change, fear of an unknown future in which maybe I’m going to live through food riots in my time.

I don’t know, I’m overreacting and now that I’m considering it in retrospect I feel like instead of dread I kind of want to figure out how to get some land to my name in the middle of America and then how to make it productive.

Australia – The Cavendish Banana, 57, Australia, died October 12, 2011. The last commercially viable Cavendish plantation succumbed to Panama disease race 4, surrounded by its offspring, after a valiant many-years and global struggle with the disease. Services will not be held worldwide at 10:30 AM GMT October 15 with representatives from United Fruit and Standard Fruit (Chiquita and Dole respectively) presiding.

The Cavendish was born in the early 1950s after the Cavendish’s predecessor, the Gros Michel, succumbed to Panama disease race 1. It was chosen as the successor to Gros Michel due to good performance in transportability, shelf life, ability to grow in Gros Michel’s old plantations, and a variety of other factors. Guided by the strong hands of Chiquita and Dole, the Cavendish ascended to global acceptance and the throne passed easily to this young, supposedly disease-proof strain.

Originally hailing from South-East Asia in regions of China and Vietnam, the Cavendish has been successfully raised in tropical locales all around the world. Bananas remain a popular choice for subsistence farmers due to the lack of need for replanting coupled with consistent fruit yields through many seasons.

The Cavendish was preceded in commercial death by the Gros Michel, and is survived by a number of new hybrid and more-resistant cultivars, such as the Goldfinger.

I was reading about bananas, in the assorted links below and I thought it might be interesting if there were an obituary for the Cavendish, which is evidently in some danger of not being so cheaply available the world over. Of course, an obituary for the world’s favorite fruit would probably need to be taken on by a better writer than myself, as this would be entirely too little to do it justice. I’d nominate Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World.

1. Yes, We Will Have No Bananas – Op-Ed – NYTimes
2. Can This Fruit Be Saved? – Popular Science
3. Cavendish banana – Wikipedia
4. Gros Michel banana – Wikipedia
5. Banana – Wikipedia

I was not particularly impressed. The dog soup wasn’t that great; certainly not in comparison to the crunchy rice bowl thing with beef I had. I’ll stick with beef I think.

I’m told that the title is also the title of some danish movie but I’ve not seen it.

All this is is just another step in my culinary adventures in China. A few weeks ago I ate some donkey for the first time, too. At least that’s what they told me it was.

My first reaction was in line with my often-libertarian leanings. I was stumped on why it mattered if somebody wanted to ingest something that might be hazardous. I thought if they want to do it, that’s their choice.

Much of the press I’ve seen on the subject has people lambasting raw milk on the grounds that it is a hazard to public health. I have difficulty understanding this because unless I am misunderstanding something, it is not that the milk is being presented as a perfect substitute for pasteurized milk, nor is it being foisted on to unsuspecting consumers who are being beguiled into consuming this purportedly dangerous beverage.

But, in this consideration I hadn’t thought about people who aren’t in charge of their own consumption: children.

In the current absence of compelling research to say with authority if it’s a good or bad idea to give raw milk to kids, I’m unsure what to suggest.

For comparison, I understand there is some large body of both well planned studies and anecdotal rules about what pregnant women should or shouldn’t eat. Are there rules dictating that it’s illegal for them to eat what they want because it’s understood that eating such things carries a risk to their child? We don’t legally forbid pregnant mothers from smoking.

I think smoking is actually a good comparison. Though the detrimental effects to health are much clearer on smoking, anybody who wants to go buy them can, while children are (supposed to be) restricted in their access. Perhaps an approach like this would be suitable to raw milk until somebody can say more convincingly that raw milk is good or bad to eat, against the mountains of anecdotal evidence both ways.

It is much harder for people to be attacked publicly by do-gooders in the case of raw milk. It’s easy to see a pregnant woman smoking and condescend and vilify them, but with milk, how will anybody know? How powerful a deterrent is this stigmatization and what are the implications for milk?

For now, I don’t even have the luxury of choosing raw milk. While I did briefly, I made a point of trying it out and while I did like the taste, I don’t think I like and consume milk enough to justify the additional cost (in price or in finding supply or whatever). Goat milk though, that stuff is delicious (and pasteurized and homogenized when I tried it).

They have tasty baked goods! I really enjoyed the croissant and muffin I had this morning, and now I wonder if I will start having them for breakfast more, or continue eating more healthy-seeming things for breakfast like oatmeal rather than sugary buttery delicious pastries. I don’t know if it is a promotion or something but I paid only 6 RMB for these two things, which strikes me as outstanding.

After walking past the place every day it’s good I finally went there. It was depressingly empty though when I was there, so I guess they don’t exactly have a breakfast rush. I don’t think Starbucks opening next door will help things, which is a pity, too.