Umami Mart

– THIS IS EVENT IS SOLD OUT – UPDATE 3/29, 8am PDT: There are no more tickets available for this event. The Umamimart Shop pop-up booth will be in session regardless, which does not require an event ticket. Stop by and say hi! Cheers, Kayoko Umamimart turned 5yo this year! To celebrate, we’re joining forces […]

Feeling out of the loop can make you feel old. I was feeling that way on Sunday night when I didn’t recognize a third of the bands and artists that took the Grammy’s stage. I didn’t know when Maroon 5 ended and Foster the People began… it was all just so confusing. By 10 o’clock, […]

By Shizuka Wakashita What do you drink when you go to a soba place? Beer? Sake? Shochu? I thought sake but I was wrong. I was converted into a sake lover about three years ago. Ever since then I almost always order sake when I go out for Japanese food, except for the occasions when I […]

Happy February, everyone! Umamimart turns 5 years old this month, and I thought it would be fun to celebrate NOODLES! We’re all fans of noodles here, and there are pages and pages worth of posts, since 2007 (!), dedicated to the almighty noodle on Umamimart. The column name “Great UM Noodletown” is an homage to […]

As 2011 draws to a close, I am not thinking about the Mayans. Rather, I am trying to decide what I will be eating over the weekend. PRIORITIES, people! I’ll be working on Saturday evening (apocalypse be damned!), but I’ll have all the accouterments ready to ring in the new year with Johnny and a bowl of toshikoshi […]

Aaaah, one of the things I really miss in London is a good bowl of ramen. Now that we’ve got a brilliant udon-ya for keeps, the next big thing will hopefully be ramen. Unlike in the States, we only have a couple of restaurants offering old school ramen which are alright. But considering there is […]

Ramen is all the rage here on both coasts in the US, and it’s still going strong in Japan. Strangely though, I didn’t eat too much of it during this trip to Japan. Unlike Sam White, the host of our OPENharvest adventure, who had upwards of 50 bowls of ramen during his month-long stay, I […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAxQCC8bVxI&feature=player_embedded I spent the weekend with my good friend Naoko in her cabin in the woods this weekend in Nagano. We had a wonderful time catching up, sleeping, going to the onsen (hot springs), reading, and of course, watching tv. This commercial is by far the best thing I’ve seen in a long time. The […]

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 […]

Ramen, as some of my fellow writers have observed, is totally taking over North America. People are obsessively eating, finding new shops, and eating more. New chains from Japan are opening like once a month here in New York City. Funny thing about ramen is it used to be really difficult to find recipes, but […]