I’m not going to lie, when I was younger I thought sushi was seriously gross. Uncooked seafood? Ewww, please keep that rubbish waayyyy over there! 😕
Obviously, that mindset has changed and eating different types of sushi is pretty much a favorite pastime of mine.
I am not a sushi aficionado, I simply sabi correct food.
Back to Kanazawa! When I got here, I seriously had to scratch my head small because I could not remember what made me book a night in the city. As soon as I checked into my guesthouse, my host informed me of Kanazawa been popular for great seafood and beautiful landscape gardens, Kenrokuen. The moment I heard ‘great seafood’, I started plotting the portion of food my stomach and pocket was about to handle. Hehe
I raced off to Omi-cho market, a seafood market, with a specific goal in mind; find a place that serves eel, unagi. A merchant pointed me the right way – unagi was surprising not as popular as I expected to find – and the rest was history.
Once I got a correct dish that understood my needs, nobody could tear me away from my rice bowl topped with unagi. I came short of licking my plate…
Alas, my stomach was still craving more seafood, so off I went in search of proper sushi restaurants. Below are the evidence of my level of grubido #ThouShaltNotJudge:
Oooh! I also got to try out uni, sea urchin. On sight I feared small for my taste buds, I poked my chopstick into the mushy tongue looking dish and took a quick swipe with my tongue. Let’s just say that I simply fell head over heels in love with it. What?! Why didn’t anyone ever tell about uni been so good?! I remember watching an episode of Top Chef and when someone started eating it right off the shell during a seafood challenge, I wanted to throw up.
Now I get it.
On first taste, I got a burst of savory and sweet at once and that was at odds with how it looked like. It’s funny how physical beauty evolves once you get to understand the layer beneath it. For me, the gross look of uni transformed once I realized how delicious it is. Let me just say that after this experience, I made it a point to order uni whenever a sushi experience came my way.
Once I was done gorging myself on some ridunk food, I had to balance it out by walking for 2-3 hours through the gardens, the castle, then walking aimlessly around the city until my newly acquired potbelly deflated to a sensible level.
Got back to the guest house, Pongyi, and a lady I met in Kyoto just so happened to be staying there too (Nitzan!). Small world!
Next morning a few of us decided to gorg on sushi, and as a professional grubido, I was ready for the ‘challenge’. Sushi vs. Zainob, round 2!
Random observation about Kanazawa, they love Gold here. A lot of the food have some flakes of edible gold adorning it; I noticed this in my first dish and some restaurants that I walked past. Quite a number of trinkets or souvenirs had a touch of gold leaf on the makings. Kanazawa’s name came from Gold Washing Marsh 😯
After a very hearty sushi breakfast, we went off to check out some city sites.
My time is Kanazawa was short and sweet. One night was just right for me, so by 12pm, I bid goodbye to my new friends and headed off to find a fabulous new experience in Ainokura village.
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