Pilsners are kind of like burgers. They’re almost annoyingly common, frequently mass-marketed, and often terribly unexciting. But when they’re good, oh boy are they good.

Rise Brewery‘s Ærø Grolle Pilsner is a good reminder of how the style got to be so popular in the first place, even as it transcends the tropes of that style. Oh yes, the beer is crisp and refreshing and all that, but it’s also very nuanced and properly hop-forward. Grolle has the standard pilsner look, crystal-clear and banana-yellow, but its aroma is uniquely enticing with its mix of honey, sourdough bread, champagne, and jasmine flowers. On the palate it snaps with leafy-lemony hops and lively fizz, closing with a very dry finish and a lingering floral bitterness. Light but flavorful and only 4.6% alcohol, this is a lager you can quaff all evening, and with a variety of food: hard Italian cheeses, plump German sausages, and hearty Japanese fare like yakitori and ramen will all find a friend in Grolle.

The name “Grolle” has an interesting triple meaning. It is the word for “sparrow” in the local dialect on the island of Ærø, where the beer is brewed, and it is also a nickname for the Ærøese themselves. Plus, it is a reference to the Bavarian Josef Groll, who introduced lagering to the city of Pilsen in 1842. He is often credited with inventing or otherwise perfecting the modern Pilsner.

Randers Brewery‘s Brown Ale is an excellent example of the individualistic spirit that seems to be a hallmark of modern Danish microbrewing.

Brewing was first introduced to the town of Randers in 1855 by a Swedish adventurer named Johan Peter Lindal, who founded a Bavarian-style brewery that came to produce a popular pilsner called Thor. Thor was brewed in Randers for over a century and became a part of the local culture (there is even a “Thor Museum” in Randers today) until the brand was purchased by Royal Unibrew in 2003. The conglomerate closed the historic Randers brewery, and Thor is now mass-produced at their headquarters in Odense.

Enter Stefan Kappel. In 2005, Stefan, a beer enthusiast and homebrewer, bought a trio of copper kettles from the Czech Republic and founded Randers Brewery to let beer flow through Randers once again. He and his brewmaster, Jens Rasmussen, are dedicated to their community, and have even brewed a pale ale, called Randers Øl, exclusively for the local market (though Stefan said he might be convinced to export it to the UK). But for all their local pride, Stefan and Jens draw much of their inspiration from the global: consider their excellent and distinctive Brown Ale.

At a moderate 5.3% alcohol, the mahogany ale is English in style, and it has a mellow, roasty malt foundation with notes of peanuts, coffee, and maple. However, it is also brewed with a portion of dark rye malt (a nod to the Danish staple rugbrød), which lends it a slightly spicy character. And what makes it really unique is its liberal use of American hops, which make the beer brisk and zesty, full of bold, juicy citric flavor.

So there you have it: a delicious English-style beer brewed with American hops and Danish rye in Czech kettles, in a town with Bavarian brewing traditions established by a Swede. That’s Randers in a nutshell: highly glocal, very eccentric, and entirely Danish.

Wow, what a month it’s been. My entire August was gobbled up by the wedding – which was a rousing success, by the way! And now I can (hopefully) get my visa. Yaaaaay!

But I’ve neglected the blog, and indeed, I’ve neglected the sort of activities for which the blog exists. A lack of both time and money has precluded extravagances in culinary tourism, not to mention any creative endeavors aside from making invitations and placecards. Even so, August has seen several newsworthy discoveries and exploits on the viking front. Before I recommence posting proper, here is a recap of the past four weeks’ more interesting items:

• August began with the Great British Beer Festival, where I sampled a dozen or so excellent and almost-excellent ales from around the UK and around the world. I also tried the East London specialty, jellied eels, which sound, look, and taste like something from a Roald Dahl story.But the real revelation was the selection of beers from Italy, of all places. Like the brewers of Japan and America, whose beer cultures aren’t mired in “traditions” like those of England, Belgium, and Germany, Italian brewers adopt a playful, experimental attitude and a love of the local. I am convinced that Italy is the next frontier in craft brewing. Consider the three bottles I picked up at the festival: Shangrila Fumé, a strong amber ale brewed with spices and peat-smoked whisky malts; Barley BB10, a barleywine made from the reduction of a prized local wine; and Verdi Imperial Stout, infused with the heat of chili peppers. I plan to crack these open soon and have them with Italian cheese – stay tuned for tasting notes.
  
• I am a professional food writer! I’ve now reviewed two restaurants and one pub for View London, and I will be writing more for them in the future.
• Speaking of restaurants, I’ve been to a few recently that I must recommend. Head to Abeno or Abeno Too for perfect Osaka-style okonomiyaki and miscellaneous izakaya fare that’s only slightly overpriced. Sakura and Tokyo Diner are also wonderfully Japanese, both embracing the whole universe of Japanese cooking from katsukarē to mentaiko. Tokyo Diner in particular is fantastic – modest yet superlative, and dirt cheap. Cans of Kirin and Asahi are only £1.90!A bit further into Chinatown is Leong’s Legends, a Taiwanese-Chinese joint where the service is brusque but the food is special. You must try the xiao long bao (soup dumplings), but let them cool a bit before tucking in or you’ll scald your mouth something awful. Finally, we were pleasantly surprised with Anatolian Flame, a place we hungrily stumbled into after viewing some flats in northwest London. The service was charming and the charcoal-grilled Turkish food was excellent, such as the relentlessly juicy and flavorful  lamb kebab with tomatoes served on a whole grilled eggplant with dill cream.
• I’m still going to the awesome, free life study sessions at Beach Blanket Babylon Shoreditch, and I wrote about it for a contest (which I lost) on Trazzler. If you’re in London and even a little bit arty, check it out. And if you’re not sure about the whole drawing thing, you can still enjoy a cocktail or two.
• I just finished reading Hops and Glory, a surprisingly non-geeky (alright, it’s a little geeky) book about the history of India Pale Ale. Author Pete Brown weaves meticulous historical research together with a spirited personal travelogue as he drags a keg of IPA on a journey from England to India that approximates the sea route along which the original ales were shipped. The book is peppered with sharp gastropolitical commentary and enlightening factoids, and in some places is actually suspenseful – not what I expected from a book about beer. Highly recommended to beer geeks, history buffs, or fans of good travel writing.

And now I’m off to the motherland for six weeks, where I will fork over nearly a grand to the British consulate in order to get my visa. Blogging shall continue while I’m there, and before long I’ll be able to post about trips around the UK and the rest of Europe!

When they beat on a broken guitar
And on the streets, they reek of tropical charms
The embassies lie in hideous shards
Where tourists snore and decay
When they dance in a reptile blaze
You wear a mask, an equatorial haze
Into the past, a colonial maze
Where there’s no more confetti to throw

Beck, “Tropicalia”

“Let’s send him to Burma!” Okay, where is that exactly? And isn’t it called Myanmar now? And isn’t there some reason I’m not supposed to go there? Sure, whatever – I need this job, so who am I to argue? But I really don’t want to be away for Christmas. I’m flying in from Taipei with six hours to kill at Suvarnabhumi. Burger King – a welcome break, then a disappointing break, from Chinese food. Meeting up with Nick, landing at Yangon. The airport is surprisingly modern – the city, not so much, but in the dark it looks a bit like LA. Our hotel is rubbish, the windows don’t shut and there are bugs in the room – but it’s only one night. Gmail is blocked; the military plutocracy makes its presence felt for the first time (but at least they don’t block Facebook, thank goodness).

Driving to Kyaiktiyo with a stop at a WWII cemetery. Lunch – a tasty Chinese stir-fry with peanuts as a starter. These peanuts – they’re unusually crunchy and robust! Bottled water and a flatbed truck ride overflowing with people halfway up the hill to the Golden Rock pavilion (I heard one of them tipped over last week and killed eight people) – then a refreshing hike up the rest of the way. The Golden Rock – huge, and gold. I wonder when it will roll off the cliff and kill a dozen pilgrims, but it’s beautiful in the sunset. A crepe filled with palm sugar and coconut. A dance performed by tribal insurgents. A stunning sunrise. How high up are we, anyway?

Walking, then driving down the mountain – the same guy who carried our suitcases up the mountain on his back carries them down. Wow. I bought some spicy fruit preserves then let myself get ripped off by a flirty banana vendor. What the hell am I doing to do with all these bananas?! The drive to Mawlamyine – impossibly uncomfortable and bumpy through miles and miles of rubber plantations. Half the road isn’t even paved. It’s hard for people to get around, and I suspect the government likes it that way.

Mawlamyine – an hour on the internet at a cafe costs less than 50 cents, and Gmail works here! What the hell, this government is so rubbish they can’t even censor the internet properly. Y’know what else costs less than 50 cents? A glass of draft Myanmar beer! But isn’t it brewed by the government? Who cares? It’s cheap and I’m bored. I’m also starting to get sick of temples (but not Burmese sunsets – yet).

The next day was rubbish. Another torturously bumpy drive, first to a pleasant war cemetery, then to a wholly unpleasant former Japanese onsen and POW camp. If I had known I’d be trudging through a muddy river and sulphuric muck I’d have worn sandals. I’m probably going to get worms. At least lunch was nice – stunningly fresh seafood from Setse Beach. Back to the hotel to get slightly less drunk than I did the night before.

Driving back to Yangon via Bago for six hours – not nearly as horrible as I expected (I was actually able to sleep in the van). More peanuts come with lunch – why are the peanuts in this country so good?! I am getting sick of mosquitoes, and of Buddhas, but these four in Bago are remarkably cool. But not as cool as our hotel tonight in Yangon – The Savoy. Damn, I wish we could stay here for more than twelve hours! This is colonial chic; I wonder how many temples were plundered to decorate this place. And the happy hour is a damn good deal, too, but you call this a Manhattan? I’ll stick to ABC Stout for the rest of the night – one good thing about the British Empire is that it brought extra stout porters to the most unlikely corners of the globe. The sun never sets on decent dark beer.

Waking at 5:00 to catch a 7:00 flight to Bagan. Bye bye Savoy! (Sometimes this job is awesome.) A glimpse of Bagan’s red brick temples from the plane, of what may be the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen in my life.

When I went to Thailand last year, I stayed with my friend Alexander and his surprisingly non-French boyfriend Bordeaux. The pair showed me a wonderful time in and around Bangkok, and it was fitting that I experienced Thailand for the first time with their guidance because it was their blogs that made me want to go there in the first place.

Bordeaux’s Marita Says and Alexander’s Primitive Culture are not just enviable; I actually do envy them. Their tantalizing photography, decadent recipes, lucid yet succinct writing, and rapidity of posting are all things that make me feel very inadequate as a fellow food and travel blogger. It’s a good thing I don’t visit the same places they do or I’d probably just give up.

Now, I am in Taiwan, and I find myself in the frustrating/wonderful position of being somewhere that Bordeaux and Alexander have already been. It’s frustrating because I feel like I can’t really add much to their already excellent posts about the island; it’s wonderful because I can use those posts as a very unique travel guide.

Or at least I can to a certain extent. Since I’m visiting Taiwan (and Burma and Thailand) as a field agent for my company, I have annoyingly little control over what I get to see, do, and eat. That’s not to say the trip hasn’t been awesome so far and I haven’t seen, done, and eaten some pretty amazing things. But it’s weird being more or less told where to go on your vacation. Then again, this isn’t a vacation.

Luckily, I did have a bit of free time in Taipei. Taipei is an interesting city that reminded me a bit of Pusan, and although it boasts a vibrant food scene and a variety of intriguing local specialties, I found the culinary landscape a bit difficult to take in with only a few free hours to spare in two short days. The breakfast at my hotel was, of course, worthless, as was the dinner provided on one of the coach tours I was forced to take. The tour itself was actually fairly interesting, and it brought me to Huaxi Market where I tried snake soup… but the meal they gave us? Tasty enough, but completely safe and generic: all-you-can-eat Mongolian barbecue and Cantonese hotpot. Yawn.

This is where Alexander and Bordeaux came to the rescue; Primitive Culture in particular had some fantastic posts on food in Taipei. I didn’t really plan to follow Alexander’s lead so precisely, but, completely by chance, I kept finding things that he and Bordeaux had eaten. The first “Taiwan treat” I found was a slice of chocolate Swiss roll decorated like a log cabin, at a cafe near Longshan Temple. The little cake struck me as very Japanese – I was reminded of one of Kitakyushu’s more dubious meibutsu, the roll cake.

Initially I was very surprised at how deeply Japanese food and culture in general is ingrained into modern Taiwanese culture. Of course, this makes a lot of sense, considering that Taiwan was a colony of Japan for half a century and today remains on the receiving end of a constant stream of Japanese pop culture and Japanese tourists. So the little log cabin roll cake and a number of similarly kawaii confections sold in Taiwan may be derived from Japan’s adoration of delicate pseudo-European sweets; or it may be purely coincidental that the Taiwanese have developed a similar fetish independently of Japanese influence. At any rate, it was as soft and delicious as it was adorable.

The next night I was mine to enjoy “at leisure,” as we say in the biz. So I hightailed it to Shilin Night Market, by all accounts the best night market in Taipei; here I was delighted to find and taste a number of things highlighted in Primitive Culture. First off was shaved ice, which is a sort of no-brainer when it comes to eating in Taipei, but I was certainly more determined to have some after reading Alexander’s post about it. I decided to forego the typical fruit toppings in favor of something more uniquely Taiwanese: peanut jam, almond jelly, and condensed milk. The mountainous dessert was like powdery snow, melting evenly and smoothly with the gooey sweetness of the peanut jam and milk. The almond jelly was tasteless, overwhelmed by the cold ice and the rich, nutty topping, but it did add a pleasantly weird texture to the whole delicious mess.

Then there was the sausage, one of Alexander’s first tastes of Taipei, and a specialty, I later learned, of Shilin. I can’t really read Chinese, although occasionally I can figure stuff out based on their Japanese equivalents. In this case my weird obsession with obscure fish, insect, and plant kanji paid off. I could read the character 蒜 that forms part of 大蒜, more commonly written as the hiragana にんにく (ninniku): garlic, as I correctly guessed. The sweet, succulent, sausage was drunk with the stuff – a mellow, musky flavor perfectly tuned to the low frequency of fatty pork.

To wash it all down, I chose… wow!! Frog’s eggs: boba and lemon jelly in a refreshing, lightly sweetened iced tea. As bubble tea goes, it was pretty standard, but like Alexander, I was unable to resist the charmingly bizarre graphics on the cup.

I also saw coffin bread, a specialty of Tainan, but alas, I was too full to partake even though it looked really good, especially in the photos on Primitive Culture. Too full, after only a sausage, a dessert, and a cup of tea? Some viking you are. Ah, but I’ve not mentioned the other things I ate that night at Shilin, the things in which Alexander and Bordeaux didn’t partake. First was pig’s brain soup. This, unlike frog’s eggs, is not just a cute name; in fact, there was little that could be called cute about this simple dish. In a thin, nondescript broth bobbed hunks of porcine cerebral cortex, unadorned but for a few shreds of lettuce and ginger. The brain, which was of course the most interesting thing going on here, had a lovely flavor like cream cheese blended with liver, and yet it just didn’t work in the soup. There was nothing to offset it; the ginger helped a bit, but in the end it was just a bowlful of brain. Though I didn’t like it, I’d definitely try brain again; the mild, funky flavor and supple texture was just too intriguing. I’d like to have it seared, maybe with a passion fruit sauce, or in a pate with fennel and sage.

Finally, I tried the Taipei-only da bing bao xiao bing, literally “small pastry wrapped in little pastry,” which is more or less exactly what they are. The way they are made amused me: a perfectly fine, deep fried and flaky pastry filled with black sesame seeds is smashed to pieces with a hammer, then indelicately dressed with your choice of sweet or savory toppings and sheathed in a chewy round of dough like a burrito. The end result is so much more than the sum of its parts: a chewy mess of a dessert (I got mine with sweet coconut) with a terrifically satiating crunch.

Though I was only in Taipei for two days, I feel pretty satisfied with what I ate there, thanks in part to my comrades Alexander and Bordeaux. Eating can be frustrating when you’re in an entirely new place and you don’t read or speak the language and you don’t know east from west, but as Primitive Culture, Marita Says, and hopefully I am a viking have shown, you’ve just got to find a decent night market, and the good food will find you.

It seems to me that the English in general have a very high tolerance strange affinity for camp and kitsch. The four-meter-tall statue of Freddie Mercury on Tottenham Court Road, the Charles Dickens theme park in Kent, and the endless pages of High School Musical 3 coverage in the free papers all seem to suggest that kitsch is as much a part of English culture as kawaii is of Japanese culture.

Nowhere is this more apparent than at the Jorvik Centre in the charming city of York. York is so far north it may as well be in Scotland, and it has a castle, and cool old city walls, and attractive buildings dating back to some ridiculously early period. Of course, practically every sizable city in England seems to have a castle and cool old walls and buildings, so what what really makes York special is the Jorvik Viking Centre. Around the same time The Specials gained national fame for “Ghost Town,” York was making headlines for the discovery of huge amounts of viking bones and artifacts below the city streets. The vikings apparently pillaged York in the early 900s, and the chilly, wet Yorkshire soil acted as a sort of refrigerator for all their stuff, preserving it neatly for a millennium or so. In 1979, a bunch of archaeologists decided to dig it all up, and the unlikely outcome of this massive excavation is the Jorvik Centre, a viking museum-theme park that feels like something that could have been an EPCOT Center reject.

Visitors are taken into a time machine that dumps them in the year 927, a few decades after the initial viking invasion of York, at that time called Jorvik (pronounced “you’re Vic”). Here they are loaded into a helmet-shaped gondola that tugs them through the viking settlement, complete with horrible animatronics, considerably better architectural recreations, and weird smells. Actually, make that weird smell – the literature on the Jorvik Centre says that visitors will be able to smell distinct things – viking food, viking poo, etc. – but really there is just one, overbearing odor through the whole thing, a sort of musty, yeasty, vaguely cheesy odor.

Following the viking settlement tour there are cabinet-style displays and employees acting like vikings who give little talks and demonstrations about viking material culture. This part was actually pretty interesting. I especially liked the information about the vikings’ diet – who knew they ate so many oysters? – and the interactive “Are you a viking?” quiz, which allows visitors to see how closely they resemble the vikings physically, culturally, and gastronomically. There was a queue for this and I was too impatient to find out whether or not I am a viking by the Jorvik Centre’s standards. But screw them, anyway – I don’t need their seal of approval!

I also liked the viking skeleton they had laid out which detailed all his wounds and grotesque ailments. The skeleton had about a dozen injuries from spears, arrows, and clubs, and the placard merely stated that he “probably” died in battle. Really, probably? The man had a spear wound that severed two of his cervical vertebrae. Ouch.

I am a viking. The title, and indeed the blog itself, worked so well in Japan; I chose those words to try to express the thrill of exploring, consuming, and being the Other in bountiful new territory. But now I am moving to England; does the title fit? Will the blog work?

I, for one, don’t see why not. In the early ninth century CE, the vikings invaded the British Isles. So it works on at least that level. But it works on a more important level, too; the UK, as far as I can tell, has a lot of delicious and bizarre foods (those wacky Brits!), many of them tied to specific regions and local cultures, just like Japan’s meibutsu. Hopefully I’ll be able to explore the British Isles’ idiosyncrasies, culinary and otherwise, in keeping with the spirit of this blog.

Oh, and of course, the vikings went on from Britain to invade much of the rest of Europe… so stay tuned!

]]> http://iamaviking.com/2008/09/19/the-future-of-this-blog-%e3%81%93%e3%81%ae%e3%83%96%e3%83%ad%e3%82%b0%e3%81%ae%e5%b0%86%e6%9d%a5/feed/ 2 viking England http://iamaviking.com/2008/04/10/planet-tokyo-the-museosphere/ http://iamaviking.com/2008/04/10/planet-tokyo-the-museosphere/#comments Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:11:19 +0000 Tim http://iamaviking.wordpress.com/?p=321 ]]> Tokyo is much too big to stuff into one, or even two or three blog posts. I have broken down my excursion into six categories and will be posting them as a series over the next couple weeks.

The amount of galleries and museums in Tokyo is almost overwhelming. Even more daunting is the fact that a very large portion of them are actually worth a visit.

On Monday, while Laura, Don, and I were shopping in Harajuku, we happened upon a delightful art gallery hosting an exhibition of prints by mostly British street artists: the LaForet Museum in the famous LaForet shopping center. It was one of the coolest exhibitions I’ve seen in some time, not just because of the quality of the works and the fact that I was familiar with the visual vocabulary they employed, but because the actual display strategies properly framed the art as products of dynamic urban subcultures without feeling overwrought. The prints were hung on metal grids that looked like chain-link fences, which overlapped to give the impression of convoluted cages. White spotlights hung from the high ceiling gave the artwork a sharp clarity against the gallery’s black walls and floor. My favorite aspect of the display was the hip-hop background music, which could have been over-the-top, but instead it helped to place the art in its proper context. It just makes sense for artists like Banksy and Jamie Hewlett.

The next day we went to the Tokyo Photography Art Museum in Ebisu. There did not appear to be a permanent exhibition here, but instead three different special exhibitions on three separate floors. There is also a movie theatre. Entry is expensive–¥700 or ¥1000 per floor, ¥1400 for two, or ¥2100 for all three–but the exhibition we saw, on surrealist photography, was well worth the ticket price. While the display itself was fairly unremarkable, the collection was great and I’d recommend it as a unique option among major art museums in Tokyo. Plus, it’s located in the scenic Yebisu Garden Place, which has some interesting architecture and a variety of restaurants, including Joël Robuchon‘s three-story spend-o-plex.

On Wednesday, Don and I went to the Edo Tokyo Museum, a gigantic building that sort of reminded me of an AT-AT from The Empire Strikes Back. The interior is no less intimidating, with dim lighting and a huge entrance hall that features a life-size replica of the original Nihonbashi. From there, the museum leads visitors on a more or less consistent course from early modernity into modernity, beginning around 1600 and ending around the end of the Showa period. I say “more or less consistent” because of the completely unnecessary and baffling inclusion of costumes from David Bowie’s Ziggy Startdust World Tour, which were produced by a Japanese fashion designer and loosely (very loosely) based on kimono and armor from the Edo period. But besides this one kink, the museum presented a very comprehensive view of the past 400 years of Japanese history and material culture. I especially liked the section on printing, which included a collection of 18th-century cookbooks and menus and an ukiyo-e print broken down into each individual layer of color. The enclosed area on the Yoshiwara district was clever, too.

After that, we reconvened with Emiko and Laura, and then went to the Mori Building in Roppongi Hills, which, in my opinion, offers the best possible view of Tokyo at its 52nd-floor Tokyo City View. It also houses one of the best modern art museums in Tokyo, the Mori Art Museum, whose displays often act rather shamelessly as promotions for the companies that sponsor them (past exhibits have been on Armani, Pixar, and Virgin; the exhibit we saw was “Works From the UBS Art Collection,” and an upcoming exhibit is on “The Art of BMW” or some such thing. Personally, I adore the Mori Art Museum’s permanent collection, which focuses on contemporary East Asian artists and boasts work from the likes of Akira Yamaguchi 山口晃, Yoshitomo Nara 奈良美智 and Takashi Murakami 村上隆.

On Thursday, we went to the Ghibli Art Museum in Mita, a sort of museum/funhouse showcasing the beautiful works of one of my artistic idols, Hayao Miyazaki, and his prolific animation company. The museum celebrates animation as art and as magic. The first room we entered was full of filmstrips, clever animation cycles, mesmerizing three-dimentional zoetropes, and animated dioramas; this room laid out the museum’s thesis that not only is animation art, it’s really elegant and complex art. On one of the displays something was written that perfectly and beautifully summarized why I love animation; I can’t remember the exact quote in Japanese, but it translated to something like, “Everything in the world is moving. Plants and animals are moving; the sun and clouds are moving; people are moving. So shouldn’t art move, too?” It was a lot more eloquent than that, but you get the gist. The museum also houses a small cinema that shows exclusive Studio Ghibli short films; we saw an adorable, touching, and very Miyazaki-esque cartoon about a lost puppy. But my favorite part of the complex were the rooms that displayed the many stages of the animation process, with sketches and storyboards scattered across rooms decorated to look like the actual Ghibli studio, complete with desks, art supplies, animation tools, and photography books. As an amateur cartoonist, these rooms had me feeling seriously giddy and inspired. And to think that I expected the coolest part of the museum would be the big, furry cat bus on the third floor, which turned out to be off-limits to adults anyway.

And finally, on Friday I found myself back at the Shinyokohama Ramen Museum, a monument to one of Japan’s most beloved foods in all its forms. Unfortunately, the didactic display has changed drastically since I did research there three years ago. The old display contained photos of some of the nation’s first ramen shops, an authentic ramen cart flanked by customer-luring charmera horns, a TV monitor showing ramen commercials from the 1960s onward, and cabinetfuls of ramen bowls and instant noodle packaging. It was colorful and emotive, and I’m sad it’s gone. But the new display is interesting, too, and more focused, if somewhat less exciting. Now, there are models of noodles and vials of wheat explaining the production of the noodles themselves, bordered by a floor-to-ceiling map of Japan explaining regional variations and a large section focusing on the ramen of one particular region. Currently, the featured ramen is Kumamoto ramen! This is a genre I know very well, and I was excited to see that the exhibit focused on Komurasaki, one of my favorite Kumamoto ramen shops (my very favorite is Ajisen, but I think it’s fallen out of favor among ramen tastemakers due to its rapid international expansion).

But of course, the real reason anybody visits the Ramen Museum isn’t for the displays on the thicknesses of various noodles or for information on their carbonate content. People come for shitamachi, a 1958 street scene built within a huge two-story area, complete with narrow alleyways, movie posters, fake clinics, a fake pachinko parlor, a fake onsen (which actually leads to the elevator), and a perpetual sunset. The nostalgia is palpable, and the quality of the scenery rivals Disneyland in its texture and attention to detail. It all serves as context for the ramen itself, which can be sampled at eight different shops tucked away in various areas of the display. I can’t think of a higher honor a ramen shop could achieve than being offered a place in the fond collective memory that is shitamachi.

One of my first-ever entries was a travelogue about Kumamoto City, a place that made me fall in love with Japan all over again over the course of three days filled with hospitable people, delicious and exotic cuisine, ska music, storied history, and beautiful art. I vowed to return; and I have – twice! I took my parents there last spring, and over the summer I took my friend Vijan, to let them take in its consummate Japaneseness: the castle, the garden, and of course, the beer, ramen, and horse meat.

I never did feel compelled to write about Kumamoto again, though, because I didn’t really have anything new to report after my subsequent visits. But this weekend, I travelled to the quite volcanically interesting far northeastern regions of rural Kumamoto for a much-needed countryside getaway, and the newness and excitement of the trip refreshed me in the same way my original visit to Kumamoto City did. So without further ado, here it is: Kumamoto, part two.

The first stop on our journey (by train, then bus) was Kurokawa Onsen, a hot spring resort area famous throughout Kyushu for its gorgeous scenery, especially in the fall, when the maple leaves glow red in the crisp, blue mountain air, and in the spring, when the plum and cherry blossoms burst open and their pale petals cover the mossy ground like snowflakes. Or that’s what I hear, anyway; we came a bit too early to see Kurokawa in all its exuberantly floral glory, but it was beautiful nonetheless. With time to kill before our check-in time, we took a leisurely stroll to admire the vibrant terrain around us after a surprisingly delicious lunch and a glass of refreshing Balsamic vinegar ginger ale at a cute little hilltop cafe.

However, even all of Kurokawa’s natural splendor couldn’t entice us away from Tairōkan 大朗館, our ryokan, once we checked in; the service, the food, and the baths were just too nice and too inviting to neglect. Despite hearty recommendations from six of our friends (three couples), we weren’t so sure about the place when we first got there. It was lodged awkwardly in a row of shabby, nondescript houses, and there was nobody there to greet us upon our arrival. And the lobby smelled of teacher’s room coffee – something I had really hoped to get away from during our trip.

But despite first impressions, it turned out to be a lovely stay. The baths were rustic, salty, roomy, and piping hot; the room was spacious, homey, and comfortable. The octogenarian owner told us that his ryokan had been in business since for 180 years – since the late Edo Period! The proprietors’ pride in their establishment’s history was palpable in the overall quality of the inn and in the courteous, smiling, and fretful service we received.

After a dip in a spacious, rocky bath overlooking a natural waterfall followed by a spirited game of Travel Scrabble, it was dinnertime. We knew there was going to be a lot of good food – there always is at these ryokans – but nothing could have prepared us for the amount of food brought up to our room, in three trips. I have never felt more honest in declaring gochisosama deshita (“It was a feast!”) than I did after this meal, which included, let me think… something like fifteen to seventeen different dishes. Plus ice cream. I won’t bother rattling off the whole menu (mostly because I don’t know what everything was), but here are some highlights: a hotpot piled with noodles, vegetables, and beefy duck meat, with a hearty depth that reminded me of homemade turkey soup; a cold salad in which the crispness of bamboo shoots were met with the lively, aromatic tang of creamy yuzu dressing; tender horse meat sashimi freshened up with sliced onions and grated ginger; and (probably my favorite) a teppanyaki course with eggplant, chicken, onions, and luxuriously marbled chunks of Japanese beef, sautéed to soft, browned, buttery perfection.

The meal was so large we had to take a breather halfway through to digest. Amazingly, we did end up eating everything, then relaxed in the taruburo 樽風呂 (barrel baths) before hitting the futon, thoroughly unwound and satisfied.

Huh. I just noticed this photo looks like a skull. Weird… anyway, up next: Kumamoto, part three: Aso!

If any foreigners living in Japan read this entry and would like help planning a trip to Kurokawa, please leave a comment and I will try to be of assistance!

Anyway, this is old news, but the Yokohama Curry Museum, one of Japan’s original food museum-parks, has closed. The museum offered some of Japan’s finest and most unique curry, and it was a major part of my senior thesis. Here is my obituary, cross-posted on Displaying Japan.

After more than six years serving curry from nationally celebrated restaurants to hungry visitors in a historicized context, the Yokohama Curry Museum has closed. The museum saw approximately 8.7 million visitors and hosted dozens of curry shops from its opening in 2001 until its closure last year.

The Yokohama Curry Museum, or as it was colloquially known, the YCM or karemyū was originally built as part of Namco’s “Nanja Town” entertainment complex in central Yokohama. The Curry Museum’s main attraction was an all-curry food court situated in a two-story recreation of early twentieth-century Yokohama Harbor, including a large, red lighthouse and the hull of a fake ocean liner. A corridor of educational cabinet-style displays, including Japanese curry-related miscellany and blurbs about the history of curry in Japan, could be found along the perimeter of the park’s mezzanine level.

The Yokohama Curry Museum was an example of the immersive eating environments usually called “food theme parks” that sprang up throughout the country following the success of the Shinyokohama Ramen Museum. Food theme parks sometimes place their foods in historical or cultural settings, as in the Curry Museum, but more often the settings are arbitrary or nonsensical, as in the Fukuoka Dessert Forest and Ikebukuro’s Gyoza Stadium. The Curry Museum adhered to the Ramen Museum’s blueprint more closely than most food theme parks, maintaining an important educational element and venerating curry as a modern national tradition connected to a transformative time in recent Japanese history – in this case, the late Meiji and early Taisho eras.

The Yokohama Curry Museum closed along with the rest of Nanja Town on March 31, 2007.