So due to some proposal writing and lots of edits, I find myself back in Tsukuba, Japan to do more work at KEK. But this time, for a year!
Now that the area around the lab is no longer new and fresh, it might be a bit harder to find new and exciting places to eat. However.... I promise that I can at least start off this year's blog off with a bang! To maybe whet the appetite while I write those, I can talk about my first couple of days.
Like I did last year, I started off my trip to Japan with an uni ramen with extra meat toppings as the first of many ramen I'll be having. As a reminder, this is at at Katsuryu Koukakudo where the restaurant serves ramen made with either uni or spiny lobster (椅子海老). To redeem my experience last year, I decided to start with the uni ramen but eat a normal human portion (250 or 300g of noodle) and just share some gyoza with a colleague who waited to have dinner with me! The noodles were super QQ (somewhere between al dente and chewy), the creamy brininess of the uni was exciting to indulge again, and the perfect cook on the medium boiled egg; it's ramen done right.
The most important difference though is the addition of a few drops of vinegar towards the end of the meal to cut through the monotonous heaviness, which is something that I've come to terms with eating ramen. Maybe the first time, I should do my best to eat the ramen without additional add-ins but.... the toppings are there for a reason.
The next day, when I had time to stop by in the office, I ran into a few colleagues who happened to be heading to a ramen joint called "Ichikawa." Following the minuscule growth in my ramen journey, a second round, and some company, and the lack of good ramen in Blacksburg, I've reunited with this bowl of anchovy-based ramen (or ramen using 煮干しだし).
I'm not too sure what was different this time but the noodles were perfectly al dente (like spaghetti, unlike the above) with the shoyu seasoning on point (maybe cause it was early on in the day), everything was in sync with the achovy forward flavor, and I was putting in a bit of vinegar to lift the dish up after the raw onion was gone. Also, ordering the kaedama, or this small additional bowl filled with a freshly cooked bowl of noodles, the tare, the onions, and another piece of meat (for like 300 yen maybe?) was a professional move I wasn't keen on the first time. From these descriptions from my experience with this bowl of ramen, maybe there's some philosophical mumbo-jumbo I should say but I'll just talk about food instead.
Lastly, before heading out to the reason why I came to Japan at the start of June, a few friends wanted to do a pancake day so here's a beautiful scene of this. I think my minimal contribution was a yuzu butter and maybe a strawberry jam. But the colleagues made some chocolate pancakes, the other American in the group cooked up some bacon, another person brought fruits, and I helped with dishes. Very chill time, me thinks. :D
Anyways, this concludes just a summary of a possible warm welcome one can have in Japan! What's better than homemade pancakes and two bowls of incredible ramen? Well...
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