Trip to Sapporo: Day 16 - Fine dining at Sapporo Grand Hotel

(Click here for first day, yesterday or for all trips)

One of the guys here at BUIE Gakuen works at one of the top four restaurants in Sapporo, Nukumi, and as he is a very ambitious worker (as most Japanese indeed are) he had decided to sample other top kitchens to better his own knowledge. He asked me if I would like to try it out too and of course I took the chance.
The Sapporo Grand Hotel is one of the finest hotel in Sapporo, built in 1934, and hosting several restaurants catering to customers that wants that little extra. Waraku is one of these, and their speciality is the Japanese kitchen. The reception and service was of that instant kind that I makes you feel an extra appreciation for the food.

The menu. You should definitely bring a Japanese speaking guide as the helpful explanations during serving and the details of the menu otherwise mostly gets lost. Still, ordering was mostly a case of choosing between one of four courses, in which I chose the "B", which had eight different dishes, while my friend chose the C, adding another one. The Japanese menu just held a more detailed description of every dish, which for a fine dining novice like me really didn't make a difference.
To this I tried some Plum wine, which was superb!, landing me on a total 9500 yen (630 SEK/100 USD)., which was completely fair when evaluating what I got for it.

Every dish was served in a unique way, with new and in itself exciting tableware. As it is with this level of dining, the amounts of food are smaller, but I found myself feeling satisfied in that sense too afterwards.

The white is fish roe looking like twisted yarn. Like much else served I was often surprised what hid behind for me unexpected forms.

This was another excellent example of the unexpected, at least for me as a westerner. What would you guess the above is? Pork? Well, it is something that I actually often enjoy back at home but then in this form:

Yes, it is sardine! But taken from a much larger specimen, and then treated more like meat. The skin is left and was all crispy like bacon. The olive looking things are sweet red beans, used often in east asia almost like a sweetener/dessert. You may also notice the white and orange balls, which were the daikon (swedish: rättika) and carrot (in some vinegar that heightened the taste and consistency). They was used in many of the dishes.

The red fish is tuna fish

This may look like a dessert but it is actually fish pieces (don't remember what) on top of daikon and carrot.

The rice, a dish on its own in Japan. In the background

This was my friends dessert.

When first tasting the dessert, with gold leaves on top, I was struck by a taste similar to the gruel you serve infants (in itself a pleasant taste), but then a sweet flavor followed. Another helping revealed bits of something like Turkish delight. Another crucial feature of this dish was the consistency, which I believe is as important a characteristic as the tastes of sweet, sour, salt, bitter (and umami). The gruel had a little lingering feel on the tongue more than the usual gruel has. This somehow prolonged the tasting experience. Again, hidden layers.

All in all, a really nice experience that I think one should enjoy a few times in life at least, even though the prices and time needed for it is not for everyday consumption. The element of experiencing Japanese cuisine beyond the all-pervading sushi haze of Sweden also was a big bonus. (^_^)

(click here for the next day)

Trip to Budapest: Day 3 - Handbags and Chocolate

For the start of this trip, go here.
Actually, first I would like to tell you about our late dinner att the Bock Bisztro restaurant, which we read about in the Micheling Guide. What the guide said was all true, the bread was top notch, the advice was great (we passed on ox cheek and lamb brain, but, hey, we *could* have eaten it if we wanted). It was one of the seven restaurants we had mapped out beforehand, and it wasn't until rechecking the map that we realized it was actually in the same building as our hotel (the Corinthia)! You actually need to book a week ahead to get seats, but I took a chance and asked them and luckily for us they had a cancellation yesterday. The visit was really worth it.

First we started of with assorted meats from chef Lali's pantry.

And superb homemade bread with butter/seasoned pork fat (nicer than it sounds)

I had crispy pork chops with the bone left. If I was to reflect on something I have seen on my trips to Romania, South Africa and Hungary, it is that they really do full, traditional meat dishes much better than us. All the stuff that makes you stay non-vegan, they do full out instead of doing bland meat balls and small fat-free meat that sometimes feels just somehow "correct" in boring sense. This is the "Original" experience in full (stomach) colorama.

And my wife had the very nice Angus beef filet.

All this for 250 SEK/40$ per person, which really isnt much for a place worth mentioning by the Michelin guide. Go there!

Today then started again with full breakfast, one we couldn't quite enjoy fully due to still being stuffed from the meal last evening, but that wasnt the hotel's fault...

We then visited the Alexandria book cafe with its nice Art Deco front, and a fantastic cafe on the second floor. We werent in the mood for it, but if you want to have a coffe break in a room looking like a palace, that's the place to go.

image from: welovebudapest.com

After that we went to the Parliament building. The queues were a bit to long for us, but we were impressed with its size and style, built a little more than a 100 years ago. Really, in general, if you like looking at historical architechure, Budapest is just glorious. Really, roughly 90% of the central city is just a bonanza of house upon house, often covering whole city blocks, in different states of need of repair, but so fun to watch. Statues and ornaments everywhere, too.

We then went to a modern shopping mall, the Westend shopping center, just at the Western Railway Station (Nyugati Palyaudvar). Its a modern three storey shopping mall with the usual mixture of shops, a cinema, bank, and restaurants that you find all over the western world nowadays. If you like handbags, this is the place to go, we saw (and visited...) probably 20 shops. From a neutrale male perspective, I would say the bags looked mostly nice and came at a nice price around 200-400 SEK (30-60$) each, with a few high-end shops too.
If I am to make a general observation on female fashion markers in Budapest I noted two things that stood out as different from home:
1. Bling bling and studs. The hungarians really seem to like them, they where on every other item, be it clothing or bags.
2. (Fake) leather jackets, often some kind of glorified biker style look (yes, thats my description, live with it..)

Bags, bags everywhere, and not a shop to skip...

Here I would like to comment shortly onreally the only dissapointment on this trip, and that is the cinema, or rather the lack of non-dubbed cinema. Both our excellent guide book and the excellent hotel personnel seemed to be quite convinced that "most of the movies" was shown both dubbed and in original language with just hungarian subtitles. This was not true, if you dont count 4 movies out of 30, non of them any of the current popular ones. The thing is, I know about the culture of dubbing all and sunder in Italy, Germany and so on, but there they are open about it. The disappointment here was saying one thing and then finding something else. Time to learn english, fellow hungarians, and the only way to do that is to listen to (and read) english!

Well, lets not stay on that small matter. On our way from Westend, I scouted one of those murkey alley shops that I so much love (and my wife dont quite like as much), it being a heavy metal t-shirt shop. My metal girl changed her mind after finding herself a cool dragon t-shirt. ^_^

We went down to the Donau, were south of the Margaret bridge there are several antique shops, but they were not in our price range, with prices starting at 700 SEK (100$) an going upwards. Probably quite OK prices, but not here and now for us. Instead we headed downtown to a lunch at Burger King. Having walked rougly 15 km in two days, we were beginning to feel it in our feet, so we went walking nearby to St Stephens Basilica, which was quite nice with a choir practicing just when we arrived.

OK, you latin nerds. Decode that and then read the answer here.

Just off the basilica square is the chololate store Hungaricum Dessert we visited yesterday. I cannot press enough that you should visit this oasis if you have time and like cholocate. They had maybe a hundred different small chololate sorts, some just newly composed, and you could get chololate to drink or even chocolate soup. (*And* they have nice toilets. I kid you not, toilets are not that popular in Budapest it seems, so treasure the ones you find...)

Anyway, we tried all kinds of tastes. the cost for 14 small candy treasures was roughly 100 SEK (15$), which of course isn't cheap, but well worth this one time experience.

Yummy!