gaijin kuma desu: Beppu

Last week I was in Beppu (Ooita Prefecture) for the AROB 2011 Symposium. The trip was very enjoyable and the conference was quite interesting and quite unique compared to other international conferences. I took tons of pictures so will have to split it all into separate blog posts.

Lets start with the food. 6 people from our lab went to this conference, so we always ate together. Thus, it was an excellent experience of trying new things!!! First off, right after arriving in Beppu and checking in at the hotel, we went to eat dinner (quite late as it was already around 9pm). We basically went to a standard Japanese drink/food place but to me it was quite exciting since I've only been to one a few times. For the food, a whole bunch of smaller dishes were ordered to share plus some beer of course.

We walked along this small street that had tons of restaurants.

Finally settled on this awesome one. I'm slowly getting used to sitting on tatami... but I still can't sit for too long.

Dipping sauce for something... there were too many dipping sauces to remember ;P. And some mustard.

Nice sashimi of some local fish and some mushrooms in the back.

This tempura chicken is supposed to be a local specialty and it tasted wonderful!

Gyoza!

Here you see an assortment of dipping sauces.

Octopus sashimi:

Some tasty fried fish (quite bony but tasty):

Fried chicken:

A meal like this is typically ended with some kind of rice dish... so we got some onigiri and miso soup.

More onigiri:

I gotta say that I loved the miso soup over there - it was totally different tasting than the one in Nagoya. Much sweeter tasting white miso.

The table after we finished.

Next up is a belt sushi restaurant that was very close to the conference venue and we went there twice. Here it is on the left:

The name:

Inside it looked like this:

We got some delicious miso soup with clams inside:

Lots of clams.... this is only from my bowl:

And sushi kept coming...

I gotta say that it was quite tasty.

We kept basically ordering from the menu (well... I just said I'll eat anything so I wasn't involved in the selection process).

Mackerel on the right and squids in front.

Shrimps:

Now, this is interesting. I had it before but I thought it's some veggie. But see the black dots? Those are eyes! Basically it's some small Japanese eel like fish that grows to about that size. Awesome!

The light fixtures were interesting since the box was wood and the white stuff was paper - very Japanese:

For dessert a very tasty tofu kinda dessert but more like pudding... with some jam:

For the next day's dinner, 4 of us went to a yakiniku place which is the Japanese equivalent of a Korean BBQ. My first time to yakiniku so I was very excited! Each table had this huge venting over the grill.

This was the menu. Luckily I was with people that could read it ;P. We basically got an unlimited food / unlimited drink deal for around $40/person.

First things placed on the table were these things. Which were some kind of potato like bulb - tasted pretty ok.

And some awesome smelling dipping sauce:

The platter of raw meat arrived. What was interesting is that there were different cuts of meat in there and each tasted very different. Plus beers!

The grilling began...

Shrimp and veggies for the grilling:

Grilling in full force:

So good!!! Incredible taste.

We also got some octopus sashimi. I'm not too crazy for the texture of those, but it was ok.

Good good fire.

Group picture time!

Shrimp go on the grill. It's very much like a BBQ... gotta be careful to balance between undercooking and burning.

The front of the restaurant.

And the name:

At the hotel we were staying at, breakfast was included. I selected Japanese breakfast twice:

And western breakfast once. It was kinda western looking but the combination of things wasn't very western. Plus the ketchup didn't taste like ketchup! ;P

Finally, after arriving back in Nagoya from the airport (which took about 1 hr by train from the airport), we went to a ramen shop near a big train/subway station Kanayama. It was around 10pm. This place specialized in ramen (ラーメン) and tsukemen (つけ麺) which is basically noodles with a dipping sauce.