Japan Food Stories

I’m not gonna lie: one of the reasons I decided to come to Japan was the food. And so far, it’s been… interesting. Well, actually it’s been almost entirely good. For example, across the street from my apartment is a ramen place that makes the most incredible ramen I’ve ever had. I’m definitely going to get spoiled there and have a hard time enjoying the ramen in the states as much as I used to. Everything about it is incredible, including how efficiently the kitchen at the restaurant is run. In fact, calling it a restaurant would be a bit of an overstatement. It’s really just a counter that people sit at while looking at the completely open kitchen. You don’t even tell the people who work there your order; you take a ticket from a machine at the entrance to the restaurant and give it to one of the three people who work there. Yes, there are only three people who work in the kitchen, and they manage to serve ramen to probably about fifteen people at a time. It’s incredible.

But other than that, I’ve had some slightly stranger food experiences in Japan. One of them was when I went to a Japanese Denny’s, which was absolutely nothing like it is in the states. Most of the menu consists of pasta dishes, but they also have ramen at Denny’s. And they do have hamburgers, but they come in different sauces rather than on a bun. What amazed me even more than how different the restaurant was was that not only were the Japanese students I went with completely surprised that Denny’s exists in the states, but they were even more surprised that you can get hamburgers on a bun rather than pasta and ramen there. It was one time where something completely normal to me was a shock to Japanese people, and vice versa.

The other interesting experience I’ve had here involving food taught me that cake is nearly impossible to find in Japan. One of the other international students had her birthday on Monday, and I went with a few other students to go get a birthday cake for her. We seriously spent two hours looking for a cake. In that time, we only found four bakeries, none of which had any large cakes. We finally settled for getting her one tiny slice of cake from the fourth bakery we found, which was about an hour walk away from our apartment building, and learned that next time someone has a birthday they will have to settle for some other kind of food.

Overall, however, the food has been great, as has everything else so far.