Japanese Food-Porn (Part 3)

This is the third part of my Japanese Food-Porn series. Check out the second one if you missed it: https://findpenguins.com/6jjjgruit3szw/footprin…

I want to start off this part with the Hakata Ramen 🍜 that I ate in Osaka. Hakata Ramen - aka tonkotsu (meaning “pork bones”) - is a special kind of Ramen, that is cooked from pork backbones, head, and certain other ingredients. Sounds a bit disgusting but it was really yummy 🤤 Due to the completely desolved bones, this hot noodle soup is a dish with a particularly creamy, white and rich broth. In addition, this Hakata Ramen was topped with a slow-cooked super-tender piece of pork meat. It was very filling. So, if you ever going to try it I recommend not eating much before that 😅

Another curiosity was the grilled octopus 🐙 on a stick that I ate in the surrounding park of Osaka castle. It came with a savoury sauce which made the dish even more delicious (side note: I have no problem eating almost any kind of seafood).

But of course, my absolute highlight so far has been the Kobe Beef 🥩 that I ate as sushi as well as steak in Osaka. What has surprised me a bit was the way how it was eaten in the restaurant I went to. In Europe, a steak would come in one piece but the chef, who prepared the beef right in front of me, served it always in a group of 3 dices so that I could season it with salt, slices of garlic, miso paste or wasabi. It was an interesting experience and the meat was of course great as well 😌

In the Universal Studios themepark in Osaka, I tried christmassy minion cookies 🍪 Needless to say, there have been plenty of other sweets and deserts in the different parts of the park. Unfortunately, I was not able to visit the restaurant in the Super Nintendo World. They are supposed to have particularly creative designs from the Super Nintendo franchise for their food 👾 It’s a pity I could not see that.

When I didn’t feel like eating in a restaurant, I had plenty of onigiri (rice balls) 🍙 from Seven Eleven as an easy to grab and go meal while I was here in Japan. Onigiri consists of rice wrapped in seaweed, with ‘stuffing’ in the center for flavor. 😋 The „loco moco“ version, I included as a photo here for example, consists of white rice topped with a small sliced hamburger patty, fried egg 🍳 and is drizzled with brown gravy. There are also smoked salmon, tuna and mayonnaise and many more kinds of onigiri 🍙

In Hiroshima, I went to „Kura“ (a popular running sushi place here in Japan) again and ordered udon noodles 🍜 with shrimp tempura 🍤 as a side dish. Usually, you always get table water for free in any restaurant here. In that Sushi place, there was only a water dispenser for hot water. It was supposed to be mixed with matcha powder for a matcha tea 🍵 I drank it but it is not my favourite.

In contrast to this, the matcha latte and apple pie 🥧 I had after my arrival in my Hostel in Nagasaki was really good - only quite pricy. But that’s normal for western-style food here.
On my one evening in Nagasaki, I went to a restaurant that served gyoza 🥟 with a cheese and oregano topping and spicy ramen 🍝 Both were again unusual but tasty to me.Read more