Japan
Getting a taste for oysters and izakaya culture
A raw food delicacy often downed whole in fine-dining restaurants, oysters are a revelation to be savoured in Japan’s informal izakaya bars, where they’re cooked and served steaming, and even wrapped in pork rashers. Words: Jo Davey
Folding into a small wooden seating space, barely two feet wide, I glance up at a chalkboard. Scrawled on it is today’s menu, an artistic rendering of a language it’s easier to recognise when written in a crisp computer font but trickier when handwritten. Typed menus aren’t common in izakayas, Japan’s traditional bar-restaurants that fall somewhere between a gastropub, tavern and tapas bar, but thankfully my local companion offers to make the order —as she does so I can make out the word ‘kaki’: oysters.
Whenever oysters are on the menu, I have to prepare myself. Rather than whinny with delight at an oncoming icy platter of briny bivalves, I see it more as something of an unpleasant necessity, albeit one worth being undertaken by any self-respecting gourmand.
To most people, though, oysters signal the finest haute cuisine and that’s certainly the case in Japan. The country’s almost 400 Michelin-starred restaurants are awash with them, raw, garnished and citrus-spritzed.
My companion tells me the oysters served here at Kakigoya, an izakaya in the Fukuromachi area of Hiroshima, are the best he’s had anywhere. I nod, pasting on a smile as thick as the ceramic dish that thuds on the heavy wood table in the customarily dimly lit venue. But there’s not a sparkling ice
