Hiroshi Hiraoka, one of the most respected ramen chefs in Japan and the chef-owner behind Sapporo's Japanese Ramen Noodle Lab Q, is heading to New York City this month for a series of limited-time pop-ups at two Manhattan restaurants. The events will bring his refined "tanrei" style ramen, rarely experienced outside Japan, to diners at Towa in Flatiron and nonono in NoMad.
I grew up visiting this house. It originally belonged to my grandfather's older sister, and whenever I traveled down from Iwate, the northern prefecture in Japan where I grew up, this was where the family gathered. Later, I worked as a rehabilitation consultant at hospitals in Osaka and Yokohama. I moved, but this place was always in the back of my mind.
When the students or workers don't have money, it is easy to grab it and go. It's cheap, that's how we started it. When people don't want to spend a lot of money for lunch, it's five bucks, and you're satisfied.
Fall's scarlet and gold was fading from the mountains around Sapporo as I sat with a small group around a heavy wood table with a charcoal grill in the center. We watched a chef cook channel rockfish over the coals. This northern Japanese delicacy is cherished for its meltingly sweet flesh, which takes on a light pink color because of the species' shrimp-heavy diet.
Living in Japan in the early 2000s, Fralick fell in love with an Italian restaurant in the city of Shizuoka, where he ate Italian food, but with Japanese influences, like pastas made with uni and the fermented soybeans known as natto. "It really reminded me of home," says Fralick, who grew up in upstate New York and started his cooking career in Italian fine dining.
New York's pop-up pizza calendar just got a serious international upgrade. From February 24 through February 28, cult-favorite Tokyo pizzeria Seirinkan will temporarily swap Shibuya for the Bowery, taking over the kitchen at modern Japanese restaurant Sake No Hana for a five-night residency that blends neo-Neapolitan pizza with Lower Manhattan energy. If you're deep in the pizza rabbit hole, the name Susumu Kakinuma probably rings a bell.
Ninja vs. Unicorn is classified as a double IPA and offers a generous 8% ABV. "A golden haze speaks to the unfiltered, grapefruit-noted, balanced IPA's character with a shockingly low bitterness, considering how much hops go into the brewing," Horan says about what makes the brew so special. More than five pounds of hops are included in each barrel used to brew this crowd pleaser.
Sour like lemon, bitter like grapefruit, sweet like mandarins and tangy like oranges, yuzu might be the consummate citrus and it brings all of that complex magic to this light, clean noodle broth. Yuzu-miso soba noodle soup. Yuzu is a citrus, but it's not very common to find it outside of Japan. So mostly we can use yuzu juice. Add five cups of vegetable stock or vegetarian dashi.
Keep this red gomashio on your kitchen counter and sprinkle it with abandon on eggs, rice, potatoes, soups, and noodles. Made with toasted sesame seeds, crushed cardamom, chile powder and dried onion it's a fast way to season all your favorite staples. Gomashio is a simple Japanese seasoning made from toasted sesame seeds and salt. It adds crunch, nuttiness, and added nutrients from the sesame seeds.