To Japan without a boarding pass

Travel lets you explore food. But nothing beats exploring new lands through food!

Last month, my fellow food adventurer Badhri and I had lunch at Teburu, a Japanese restaurant in Kalyan Nagar, Bangalore. It was my first experience with Japanese cuisine and I was quite excited.  The ambience was welcoming, with artificial cherry blossoms all around the room easing us into the very Japanese menu. (I would lose the 90's pop music, though, in favour of some Japanese instrumentals for the feels.)

Miso soup

Ever since I played the card game, Sushi Go!, I'd been curious to try Miso soup. So that was our first order. Miso is a paste made from fermented soybeans and it is added to vegetable stock to make the soup. Here, in Teburu, they served it with tofu and seaweed in it. The Miso Soup is unlike anything I've had before. In fact, that can be said for most dishes I tried that day. The flavours and textures are so foreign that I would be careful about whom I recommend it to. Japanese isn't everyone's cup of tea.

A pyramid of maki rolls; pickled ginger & wasabi hiding on the right

But even if you aren't the most experimental, this 'fried maki' is a safe bet. A maki is block of rice rolled up in seaweed ('nori'). The seaweed might make you hesitate but when batter-fried, the maki is a lot more approachable. The waiter showed us how to eat it - place a piece of the pink pickled ginger and a tiny pinch of the green wasabi paste on the maki roll, dip it in soy sauce and pop it into the mouth. I can still remember the burst of flavours in my mouth! (For the uninitiated, wasabi is horseradish paste with a sharp, pungent aftertaste, so you'd want to be careful with that 'pinch'.)

Adventurers that we were, for the main course, we ordered water chestnuts and black fungus. Don't turn up your noses just yet, fungus on a menu is  always mushrooms! This was 'teppanyaki', which meant it was cooked live in front of us on a heated, broad flat surface or a griddle.  The chef came down and showed off some cool knife- flipping skills before he chopped and sauteed the water chestnuts and mushrooms on the pan with a whole lot of sauces. 

I found the texture of the water chestnut fascinating. It felt a little like chembu/ arbi but a little  more fibrous, a bit of crunch to it. The chef explained that a lot of the ingredients they use in these dishes, like the black fungus, are imported. However, he had grown up eating water chestnuts, or pani singada as they called them, back in his hometown close to the Nepal border.  

One lesson we learnt: Don't ask the chef to make it spicy, because you lose the flavours of the ingredients. We also ordered noodles to eat  it with. 

For dessert, Badhri and I debated between his choice of 'rambutan lychee with ice-cream' and my curiosity for "Thapthim Krop", described in the menu as Thai red rubies with coconut milk. Thai red rubies are cubes of sweetened water chestnut and he was quite sceptical about having water chestnuts again. Badhri is the dessert king and I should have trusted his instincts, because, well, chewy jujubes in rose-flavoured coconut milk did not quite floor us.

Overall, I was happy with my virtual trip to Japan. There was enough variety in the menu. The waiter tried to teach us how to use chopsticks, and the obviously hilarious attempts surely added to the fun of the experience! The food is not inexpensive but it's worth a go. And if you do, do try the fried maki!