Umami Mart

Photo by Kelly Ishikawa, a San Francisco-based photographer and the co-owner of The Perish Trust. 

Happy New Year!  I can’t believe the holiday season passed so quickly, and now we are in 2012.  Soon we will be bitching about the hot summer. I was in Japan for the holidays, and had quite a few good food moments. I am really thankful to iPhone since I can now take pictures anywhere […]

Danran, a little sushi spot in the Sakurajosui station in Tokyo, is no stranger to Umamimart. Yoko introduced us to the place in 2008, and Tmonkey reported on it again later that year. Yoko took me to Danran for the first time several years ago, and I very much looked forward to visiting again on my […]

Teishoku is a pre-set meal — a main dish, always with miso soup and a bowl of rice, and it builds from there according the chef’s seasonal fancies (pickles, tofu, salad, etc). These meals are very popular during lunch, when salarymen and women can quickly run into a restaurant and get a warm, complete meal […]

Washio is one of my favorite nomiyas (watering hole) in western Tokyo. I spent an afternoon with fisherman, enka singer, bar owner extraordinairre Taro Washio and captured it all on video. For more enka pleasure, please watch this amazing music video by superstar Jero.

Danran, a sushi spot in the Sakura-jyosui neighborhood of Tokyo, is no stranger to Umamimart. It was frequented often when Yoko and Washi lived in Japan (on one of their very first dates!), and has been the subject of many a fine blog posts, here and here. Yoko and I visited Danran tonight, to say […]

By the time you read this, Yoko and I will be in Niigata, Japan, a prefecture three hours north of Tokyo, on the west coast, the side of the Japan Sea. It’s also directly west of Fukushima City, home of the Daiichi Power Plant. We will be visiting a sake brewery, as well as harvesting […]

My city has experienced the wettest summer in the recorded weather history of Denmark. Just this morning I woke up to a two hour thunderstorm with the most insane cracks, blitzes and a mustard yellow hazy sky. It felt like some aliens were landing on the planet in giant yellow spaceships. Unfortunately they didn’t, and […]

“Are we really doing this?” I asked, uncertainly nibbling on a grilled shiitake mushroom. Eriko paused before answering. “I know I was talking some pretty ambitious stuff the other night, but I think we should try it,” she replied. “We could end up pulling off something really cool.” I vividly recall the tipsy conversation that […]

The kawaii (= cute) world of Japan is a very positive dimension of happiness, beauty, bunnies, rainbows and ribbons. And not just something that contains characters, but also an aesthetic approach that appeals to your heart, with a rather feminine touch and usually a soft design that makes you go, “Awwwww, that’s so CUUUTE”. Girls […]