I have a confession: it wasn’t until I booked a trip to Sapporo for a snowboarding trip back in 2019 that I realized that Sapporo Beer was named after a real place, specifically the capital city of Japan’s northernmost Hokkaido prefecture. And if Hokkaido sounds familiar, it’s because it’s home to the best Hokkaido uni, …
If I’m being totally honest, my favorite dining experiences over 7 trips to Japan have not revolved around sushi, ramen, or tonkatsu, but around wagyu beef. Yes, a sushi omakase can be absolutely sublime, but the environment is typically a lot more subdued to pay respect to your sushi master. A premium yakiniku experience with …
Yakiniku translates to grilled meat, and chef Vanne Kuwahara’s yakiniku restaurant in Ebisu is my all-time favorite place to get it thus far. You can think of it as a meat omakase, where you get course after course of different cuts of the highest grade wagyu beef, with each one cooked meticulously over the charcoal …
I’ve been incredibly grateful to do 3 separate five-day trips to Niseko from 2019-2024, a world-class ski and snowboarding destination in the Northern Hokkaido prefecture of Japan, about a 3-4 hour drive from Sapporo. It’s known as the powder capital of the world as they get insane amounts of light, powdery snow every season. Besides …
Welcome to Part 3 of The Indulgent Travel Guide to Japan, which highlights my 2 week trip to Tokyo, Kyoto, & Osaka in October 2015. In this part, I’m focusing on tonkatsu, which is Japanese panko-breaded, deep-fried pork cutlet. It’s typically served with shredded cabbage and a thick, tangy tonkatsu sauce that’s similar to Worcestershire sauce. There …
This is part 2 in my Indulgent Travel Guide to Japan, which highlights my 2 week trip to Tokyo, Kyoto, & Osaka in October 2015. In part 1, I gave a recap of all the different kinds of ramen we ate during our travels. This time around, I’ll be focusing on Japan’s other noodles: udon and soba. …
It’s crazy to think it’s now been 9 years since our first trip to Japan, when I first wrote this guide. Back in 2015, we spent 2 weeks in exploring Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, with day trips to smaller cities along the way. And while we saw a ton of beautiful places and experienced many …
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