Pizza and Eels.

At the Emperor’s Birthday dinner the other night (boy, that sounds impressive, doesn’t it?), we were asked what we’d seen of Kyoto so far.  I mentioned a few shrines and temples…  “You haven’t been to Nishiki Market?  You must go to Nishiki Market!”  And M. was promptly given the following day off for this purpose.  So we went.

Nishiki Market is a centuries-old covered market in downtown Kyoto, filled with tiny stands selling all the various ingredients that show up in the Kyoto style of cooking: pickles, dried foods, fresh seafood, and vegetables mostly, plus also an apparently famous kitchen knife store that was founded by Aritsugu Fujiwara, a master swordsmith, over 400 years ago.  (I just found that out via wikipedia, but we did visit the store and it was pretty amazing.)

Things we saw:

Fish for sale. Those are splayed-out eels up top, with their spines all swirly. The pink blobs in the foreground are fish ovaries, still filled with millions of fish eggs. It seems a little weird, yeah, but if nature gives you a perfect carrying case for roe, why not use it? And of course oysters to the left. (Does anyone know what that white, brainy looking stuff behind the ovaries is? I haven’t a clue.)

Octopus tentacles.

And fresh eels! Ooh, squirmy.

When we reached the end of the market street, we turned a corner and discovered that it ajoined with a much more modern mall-type structure. So then we wandered through past movie theaters and food courts and eventually wound up at…

Shakey’s Pizza. I had never actually seen a Shakey‘s outside of that Southpark episode when Cartman uses stem cells to clone endless Shakey’s Pizzas. So it seemed appropriate to go for the first time in Japan.

We had the Lunch Viking (!) buffet. You’ll have to tell me how close this was to the American version, since I don’t know.

The pizza on the right is fairly ordinary pepperoni and green pepper. On the left is, I think, barbeque pork and corn. There was corn on a lot of their pizzas. Oh, and not shown is the surprisingly tasty custard and chocolate sauce pizza they served toward the end. There were also pastas and fried potatoes (which struck me as weird with pizza, but I gather they do that in the states, too?), and just in case none of this seemed like “real” food, they also had big pots of rice and japanese curry.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 1:19 pm and is filed under food, japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.