Eating - Kyoto - page 67

taurants also serve chāhan or yaki-meshi (both dishes are fried rice), gyōza (dumplings)
and kara-age (deep-fried chicken pieces).
Rāmen restaurants are easily distinguished by their long counters lined with customers
hunched over steaming bowls. You can sometimes hear a rāmen shop as you wander by -
it's considered polite to slurp the noodles and aficionados claim that slurping brings out
the full flavour of the broth.
SOBA & UDON
Soba (thin, brown buckwheat noodles) and udon (thick, white wheat noodles) are Japan's
answer to Chinese-style rāmen . Most Japanese noodle shops serve both soba and udon in
a variety of ways.
Noodles are usually served in a bowl containing a light, bonito-flavoured broth, but you
can also order them served cold and piled on a bamboo screen with a cold broth for dip-
ping (this is called zaru soba ). If you order zaru soba , you'll receive a small plate of
wasabi and sliced spring onions - put these into the cup of broth and eat the noodles by
dipping them in this mixture. At the end of your meal, the waiter will give you some hot
broth to mix with the leftover sauce, which you drink like a kind of tea. As with rāmen,
you should feel free to slurp as loudly as you please.
Soba and udon places are usually quite cheap (about ¥800 a dish), but some fancy
places can be significantly more expensive (the decor is a good indication of the price).
OKONOMIYAKI
Sometimes described as Japanese pizza or pancake, the resemblance is in form only. Actu-
ally, okonomiyaki are various forms of batter and cabbage cakes cooked on a griddle.
At an okonomiyaki restaurant you sit around a teppan (iron hotplate), armed with a
spatula and chopsticks to cook your choice of meat, seafood and vegetables in a cabbage
and vegetable batter.
Some restaurants will do most of the cooking and bring the nearly finished product over
to your hotplate for you to season with katsuo bushi (bonito flakes), shōyu (soy sauce) ,
ao-nori (an ingredient similar to parsley), Japanese Worcestershire-style sauce and may-
onnaise. Cheaper places, however, will simply hand you a bowl filled with the ingredients
and expect you to cook it for yourself. If this happens, don't panic. First, mix the batter
and filling thoroughly, then place it on the hotplate, flattening it into a pancake shape.
After five minutes or so, use the spatula to flip it and cook for another five minutes. Then
dig in.