If you have any interest in beer and an hour or so to kill, you could certainly do worse than checking out the Kirin Brewery in Yokohama, which is about a half hour train ride from Tokyo.
For one thing, you can’t beat the price: it’s absolutely free, and they give you a bunch of beer to sample.
Chestnut desserts don’t really get the respect they deserve back home. They basically don’t exist unless you really seek them out (and even then they’re difficult to find), and I don’t understand why. They’re quite tasty.
Add this to the always-growing list of line-based discoveries. The line-up at Yanagiya Taiyaki is pretty intense, even by Tokyo’s line-loving standards.
If you haven’t seen Kantaro: The Sweet Tooth Salaryman on Netflix, you need to rectify that immediately. It’s basically a sitcom crossed with a food/travel show, all filtered through a lens of grade-A Japanese weirdness. It’s delightful.
I’ll admit that I wound up eating at Hinoya Curry almost entirely due to its proximity to my Airbnb on the outskirts of Tokyo. I walked by it a few times, and eventually the delicious-looking photos posted outside of the restaurant wore me down.
There’s a bunch of places in Hong Kong that sell skewers of random animal bits; these things make for a pretty great snack.
This isn’t going to be the longest post ever, but there are a couple of facts that I need to point out.
Hui Wing Kee was probably my biggest surprise in quite a while. I hadn’t heard much about this place, other than a reference on a blog to the oyster congee being good (which I didn’t even see on the menu). Other than that, I could barely even find it online.
Though the traditional way of making the noodles for wonton noodles is to make them by hand and roll them out with a bamboo pole, almost no one actually does that anymore. It’s a time-consuming affair, and if a machine can do it almost as well with a fraction of the effort, what do you expect? Time marches on.
There’s a series of hiking trails in Hong Kong in the Kam Shan Country Park — which is also known as Monkey Hill or Monkey Mountain, thanks to the population of monkeys who hang out in the area.