Niigata, Japan - Getting wind that there's a rice bowl dish best suited for muggy days, I headed to the Honcho food centre in Niigata, which bustles with fish and butcher shops.
I entered a restaurant called Donya Ishii to find electric bulbs hanging from the ceiling over a stall-style counter with five seats. Owner Hideki Ishii, 63, welcomed me from across the counter.
Ishii devoted himself to becoming a chef after graduating from middle school and has stuck to washoku cuisine for more than 40 years.
In the past, he served squid okizuke (marinated squid with innards and seasoning) to eat with sake at an authentic kappo Japanese restaurant and later came to think, “This would taste fantastic if it was served on top of rice.”
In 2009, he opened a restaurant specialising in rice bowl dishes and added a soy sauce-marinated squid to its menu in summer of the following year. The bowl comes with miso soup, a small side dish and tsukemono pickles for 850 yen (about R70) (tax included).
Fresh squid hauled from the Japan Sea, mainly off Sado, Niigata Prefecture, are marinated in a sauce of soy sauce and sake for about three days and then frozen.
Ishii uses only squid caught between June and early August because, he says, “If they grow too big, their innards will be fatty and taste too rich.”
Regular customers at Ishii are said to look forward to this season every year.
A whole squid is sliced to top steaming rice; chopped daikon, carrot, cucumber and mizuna leaves are placed on top of it. The frozen squid begins melting on the warm rice to take on a crunchy texture, and the rich flavour of the seafood and innards spread in your mouth as you eat it.
Eating it with wasabi and soy sauce adds a pleasant pungency to the original flavour.
Each year, the dish is served until all the squid in stock is used up, sometime around November or December. Ishii serves other rice dishes that come in bowls such as grilled chicken and egg and deep-fried pork cutlets (both 750 yen including tax).
Washington Post-Bloomberg