Kanazawa Eats

I had originally planned to write about the meals we had this weekend in the last Kanazawa post, but there was so many great things to see there that I didn't have room for food talk. My apologies that this post will not contain any restaurant names since everything was in Japanese. But if you ever find yourself in Kanazawa, message me and I will try my best to give you directions!

Kanazawa is well known for their seafood donburi (which is seafood on top of a bowl of rice). Thanks to a recommendation from Satoko's friend, we headed to a donburi place for a fresh lunch. The first sign that this was going to be a delicious meal was the fact that this restaurant was located in the fish market and we watched the staff bringing in fresh fish from the stalls. The second sign was that even though it was only 11:30 am, there was already quite the wait to get in (after half an hour or so, we were still waiting outside and the lineup to get in was at least 20 people deep). This place was worth the wait. In the donburi I ordered I got tuna, fatty tuna, salmon, shrimp, sea urchin, squid, caviar, and various white fish pieces. It was also possible to order donburi with gold leafing (of course!).




For dinner we headed to a tempura place near our hotel. The first good thing about this restaurant was that it had sake samplers. I have always been a sucker for samplers (in North America this usually involved beer) and it allowed me to taste a few different types of sake, for which Kanazawa is famed.



I thought that tempura is tempura. I mean that I figured of all the Japanese food that we have in Canada, that tempura would be the one thing that would taste the same here. But this tempura was phenomenal. We sat at the counter so we could see the chef. He had a homemade batter and made everything fresh to order. He passed us our tempura straight from the fryer and it was the best tempura I have ever had. Apparently there are two ways to eat tempura: with the sweet tempura sauce and with salt. I started off with the sauce, but the salt soon became my favourite topping. They provided three different types of salt for tempura: a sea salt from Osaka, a finer grained sea salt, and salt with pickled cherries in it. Everything was served on Kanazawa laquerware and pottery.




These pics are making me hungry just looking at them...