Eating in Nara

In our post on sake tasting, I already said a bit about narazuke - vegetables pickled in kasu (sake lees).

Here they are, if you missed them the last time around.

But even beyond this very local specialty, Nara is a pretty good place to eat, as you can get a lot of the Kansai regional dishes for less than you can in Kyoto or Osaka.

A good bet is to stroll through the shopping arcades south of the Kintetsu Nara station and check out the plastic food displays. It seems pretty hard to go wrong - we didn't have a mediocre meal all weekend.

Nara is also a good place to try matcha (frothy, powdered green tea) and a variety of related Japanese sweets. Below is a cup of matcha with some simple matcha rice cakes. Alongside the slight bitterness of the matcha powder, the rice cakes are also a bit sweet from (I think) a kind of boiled-down rice syrup.

But the highlight of our Nara dining experience had to be the Japanese breakfast at the inn where we stayed, the Ryokan Matsumae.

Grilled mackerel, fresh fruit, a few mild morning pickles, veggies, salted seaweed, and some bits of oden stew - with the centerpiece a bowl of yodofu, a delicious and mildly sweet Kyoto-style tofu porridge. An absolute steal at 840 yen each.

Pictured below: some very happy customers.

I can sit like that for approximately thirty seconds before needing to stretch out my legs.