Typical Food #4

Another very popular thing that you will see here is: curry. It is a little bit different than Indian food curry and I would say it has a taste all to its own.
Here there is a restaurant whose main dish is just this:



It is called Curry House CoCo Ichiban. The main dishes here are obviously based around curry and rice. When you get your meal though, it isnt a bowl or dish or rice with curry on the top of it. You get a plate. Part of the plate is cover with rice and the other part is covered with curry. You can also get meat or other things with your rice and curry.

Even though this places specializes in this, it isnt the only place you can get curry. I would venture to say that pretty much any chain restaurant in Japan would have a curry and rice dish on the menu. One of the restaurants that we ate at in the beginning of the year had an all you can eat soup and salad bar and part of that was rice and curry.
Last year when we would stay at hotels and eat team dinners, there would always be a pot of curry next to the rice if you wanted some.
To be honest I think there were even some times that it would be served at the buffet breakfasts in the hotels as well. I do like the curry, but for breakfast?....I think I'll stick to my eggs.
If you ever get to Japan though, along with the 3 other typical foods, I would give this one a shot.

Typical food #3

Ramen
If you read my first post about typical food in Japan you know that beef bowls are very popular. Another very common thing is a bowl of ramen. This differs some from the instant ramen many of you may have had in college or bought when you had to bring items to school for a food drive. I would argue (some of you may stongly diasagree after your ramen-loving earlier years) that a bowl of ramen here is quite a bit better.
 
There are all different types of ramen with different noodles, meat, eggs, flavor and thickness of sauce and various veggies. Each region in Japan has there own version/flavor of ramen. So, if you were traveling around Japan you would be able to order a ramen bowl probably everywhere you went and have something similar but get to taste the different regions idea or take on the dish.

Typical food #2 - Sushi (rice balls)

This is the second post in a series about typical food in Japan. You can find the 1st post here: Typical food #1 - Beef bowls
When you think of Japanese food, maybe one of the things you think about is sushi. You would be right in your thinking as sushi is a popular food here.  There are different places you can get sushi - fancy places, running sushi places (where there is a belt that goes around the inside - tables are just on the outside - with sushi on it - you pay based on what you choose to eat), and among others convenience stores. The sushi you get at convenience stores is actually a very common thing for people to eat. And, people stop at convenience stores quite a bit here. I think it is part of the culture. Whether to get a coffee or some sort of snack it seems like we stop at convenience stores a lot when I am traveling with a Japanese person (many people get lunch there). The sushi that is normally found at a convenience store is a rice ball, or in Japanese: onigiri (oh-nig-er-ee - todays Japanese lesson).
 
Most of the time it is a triangle form. It is rice wrapped with seaweed and has some sort of filling: tuna and mayo, teriyaki chicken, salmon, fish eggs, spicy fish eggs, more seaweed. Last year, there were many times where our players would have these for lunch before practice and we always had some in the locker room for games.
This got me thinking that this is a pretty easy thing to make and maybe to try. So, I included a 1 min youtube video on the correct and simple way to make sushi. Have a look.
 
Or, if that is not quite your style maybe you could find a different recipe online.

Typical food #1

A very popular and common thing to eat here is: a beef bowl (gyudon - beef bowl in Japanese)
Beef bowls consist of thin strips of beef and usually with onion (in some sort of sauce) and placed over a bowl of rice. This is a pretty inexpensive meal in Japan as you can get a beef bowl for about $4 - $5.
 
Places:
Yoshinoya
Sukiya
Matsuya
There are other local beef bowl restaurants but these are the 3 main chains that sell beef bowls and there always seems to be many people in the restaurants, even if only to scarf their food down and leave. (I think one of the reasons these places do so well is: you get your food really fast and even with chopsticks it is a relatively easy and speedy thing to eat).

You can get your beef bowl plain, with cheese on top, with a mayonaise sauce on top, or the one thats the most interesting to me: a raw egg on top. (yes the person who ordered the bowl in the picture got a lot a bit aggressive with the eggs.
How would you eat that you ask? In Japanese slurping is allowed and very much apart of the culture. Sometimes I think people might overdo it a little, because.......well, because they can. But with this dish the eggs would get mixed in before you ate it and not slurped off the top)