What I Ate in Asia (Pt. 1)

Three destinations, two countries, many meals

By day, I’m a television critic, and you can find my thoughts on that medium in polished, edited form under my byline at Variety, a top-notch magazine IMHO. (You can also find my sporadic thoughts on movies over on Letterboxd, a very good social app.) But those who know me know my other great passion in life is food, and until now, I haven’t had a centralized place to share my thoughts on the subject. That’s what this newsletter is for.

I just got back from a 10-day, exceedingly well-timed vacation to Tokyo, Okinawa, and Taipei. (My partner and I figured November 2024 would be a good time to leave the country, and turns out we were right!) Unsurprisingly, much of that vacation was spent planning and consuming meals. These are some highlights, organized chronologically.

Itsuka (Tokyo)

We over-indexed a bit on fine dining in Tokyo, because of the three stops on our itinerary, it was by far the most obvious place to get fancy. Okinawa is a laid-back vacation destination; Taipei is one of the world’s great street food meccas. Tokyo has the most Michelin-starred restaurants anywhere on Earth, and while the Michelin Guide is basically an extortion racket with dubious taste in my native California, it’s quite reliable in Japan.

So we picked our first big dinner basically at random from Michelin’s list of one-star —i.e. nice, but not too stuffy — spots, with the added specification that we were curious about the local dining scene’s take on Chinese cuisine. Japanese food is incredible, but there’s also something special about refracting other traditions through the culture of fastidiousness and attention to detail that gave us “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” and, by extension, “Chef’s Table.” You’ll see French and Italian elsewhere on this rundown.

This brought us to Itsuka, which made up in execution what it lacked in regional specificity. In L.A., we’re spoiled by the extremely specialized bounty of the San Gabriel Valley; Itsuka’s menu lumped together char siu pork and mapo tofu under the extremely broad heading of “Chinese.” But with highlights like the yuba-wrapped turtle above, served with watercress salad in a broth made from fresh green Sichuan peppercorns, we weren’t complaining. (That first photo is clam accompanied by an absolute sand-blaster of garlic, which I appreciated because despite my snobbish tendencies, I have a heathen’s palate that rewards assertiveness over subtlety — another reason to go with Chinese over, say, omakase.)

Finally, just look at the presentation on this abalone pie, before the shell got swapped out for paper sleeves so we could eat it with our hands. And that lamination! Paul Hollywood would be so proud.

Less than 24 hours later, it was time for another tasting menu.

Lature (Tokyo)

Thanks to our friends Nick, Jaya, and Johnny for this collective recommendation, a French wild game specialist that got the party started with a deer blood macaron plated atop a box of deer fur, which was in turn plated atop another glass-topped box filled with dried flowers and engraved with the restaurant’s name. Sometimes fussiness can also be fun!

Last time we were in Tokyo (just 18 months ago!) we had an incredible meal at Noeud., a somewhat similar locavore/tasting menu concept. Which makes the below somehow the second paté en croûte we’ve eaten there. Each meat encased in pastry is beautiful in its own way; this one came with various fruits and featured a fat circle of foie gras in the middle.

The deer theme came full circle with the final course: a venison steak served with an ultra-unctuous red wine sauce. You can’t really see them in this photo, but the highlight of this dish was actually the vegetables — one piece of each, perfectly cooked and tasting exactly like itself.

Thus concludes the fancy/$$$ portion of this roundup.

Kushikatsu Spot, Name Unknown (Tokyo)

The two meals above obviously took some advance planning, but the best part of eating in Tokyo is that you can’t and shouldn’t fill up all your meal slots in advance. It’s a place that rewards spontaneity in a way more tourist-crushed world capitals — looking at you, Rome and Paris — simply don’t, because there are so many tiny businesses with such a high level of craft and care. Shoutout to Hunter, my better half, for taking the time to master the interface of Tabelog, aka Japanese Yelp, which took some of the risk factor out of just stumbling into random places. We had an excellent izakaya meal the night we arrived courtesy of a Tabelog endorsement.

This place, on the other hand, was a true fortuitous find. We’d tried to go to You-En, a Chinese spot, in the neighborhood and struck out. After getting turned down by a few other places, we spotted a second-floor spot with a large party several drinks deep (a good sign) and some empty seats (a necessity). It turned out to be a restaurant specializing in kushikatsu: inelegantly, fried stuff on sticks. We got a sampler plus this grilled chicken, because we missed out on yakitori this trip so squeezed what we could into the margins.

The chef was Japanese, but our server was a middle-aged Romanian woman who had lived in Tokyo for 25 years. (The marriage that brought her there ended, but she liked the city enough to stay.) Hunter speaks a little Japanese, and while most native speakers would politely engage in limited conversation, she gleefully-if-lovingly made fun of his slip-ups. It’s funny the cultural differences within cultural differences you’ll encounter through multiple layers of international exchange.

This meal was great on its own, but also represented why restaurant dining while traveling can have so much more value than just the food. It’s a public space that crams you together with strangers and lends itself to interactions that take you a layer beyond the surface of a place, into its daily rhythms. And because so many businesses in Tokyo are operated by just one or two people, they feel like personal extensions of your hosts — like the listening bar in Shinjuku we went to after this, a room where one older woman poured drinks and played her jazz records.

This is getting long for a newsletter, let alone a debut, so I’ll end it here. Next up: Okinawa!

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