Food I Ate While Traveling Through Japan!

When I travel to Japan I really enjoy all of the food. Since my vacation is only for a few days, I like to eat really great food, even if it is a little expensive. Here are some pictures of my favorite restaurant meals from the trip (of course the best meals were the meals prepared by Keizo's wife, but I didn't take any pictures).


A very delicious tonkatsu set that included sake and ice cream for dessert!


Hot soba with duck. I ate this with Keizo and his family after visiting a temple in the mountains. This was a great day, and very good soba!


All you can eat shabu shabu / sukiyaki. Since I cannot read or speak Japanese, I did not know this was "all you can eat" until they offered to bring me more food. After that I ate a lot!!! I drank 2 large beers and had a total of 14 plates of meat (9 beef and 5 pork). This day I walked almost 17 miles (27.35 km), so I had a very large appetite that night for dinner!


Deluxe tuna set. This included tuna, fatty tuna, extra fatty tuna, broiled fatty tuna, and 2 different types of tuna rolls. Excellent!


Premium beef lunch. This was a sampler platter of all the different cuts of beef that the restaurant offers. This meat melts in your mouth, it is very good!


Another premium beef meal... this was on my last night in Kyoto. Another excellent dinner!


I also stopped at a tea room in Jui and had some great tea. It was very cold and raining that entire day, so this was a nice way to get out of the cold for awhile.


I ate some junk food as well on my trip. I think my favorite junk food in Japan is available at the convenience stores. The sandwiches they have available are pretty good, and the hot food is very good too, especially very late at night after lots of beer! In the USA convenience store food is not good, not fresh, and you only eat it if you have no other options.


I ate a hot dog and a soft pretzel while at the baseball game. These items look very similar to the American versions, but are very different.

The hot dog looks identical to a hot dog in the US, but the taste of the sausage is completely different. The spices are not the same. The bread is also a little different in taste and in shape. The Japanese hot dog sits on top of the bun, but the US hot dog is nested inside the bun (makes it much easier to eat). The Japanese hot dog was very good, just different.


The pretzel looked different as soon as I got it. There is a different topping on it, and the outside texture is different (very soft). The US version has a slightly firmer outside texture, and is usually only topped with large salt. The other big difference was that there was a cream filling in the Japanese version. The US version does not have this. Instead you dip the pretzel in mustard or a hot cheese sauce. Again, the Japanese version was good... just a little different.


Finally, I had a Mc Donalds Apple Pie. In Japan the pie is still fried, and is very hot and crispy. This is the same way Mc Donalds in the US would make their pies when I was a child. However they changed to baking their pies many years ago (which doesn't taste as good), so it is a nice treat to have a pie made the original way.