In front of me sat a bowl of zenzai: a lacquer-dark soup of sweet red beans, breathing steam into the winter air. Across the table, a friend from Europe had ordered a towering matcha parfait.

We were both delighted with our choices.

I suggested that she try a spoonful of my zenzai.

She was the sort of traveler who happily tasted almost anything. Yet this time she shook her head.

It was made from beans.

Not because she disliked beans. She simply couldn’t reconcile the idea that beans were supposed to become dessert.

In the end, she returned home without ever discovering what makes anko so beloved.

If I could send a message back to my younger self at that table, it would be a simple one:

If you want someone to understand the beauty of something unfamiliar, you cannot argue them into it. You have to place the very best version in front of them and let it speak for itself.

The people of Nara seem to understand this instinctively.

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The Anatomy of a Nara Icon

Consider Mimuro Monaka, one of Nara’s signature confections.

Its structure is almost absurdly simple: anko enclosed within two thin wafers made from rice.

Yet the filling draws the eye first.

The bean paste glistens with a luminous sheen. It carries the flavor of azuki with remarkable freshness, as though the beans had somehow been persuaded to remain vivid even after becoming a confection.

The filling is primarily koshian—a perfectly smooth paste made by removing the skins from the beans—giving it an almost effortless melt-in-the-mouth quality. Folded into it are bits of tsubuan, whose skins remain intact. Those bits contribute depth, aroma, and a faintly crisp texture that keeps each bite interesting.

Sweet, certainly—but never aggressively so.

Its sweetness speaks softly to the brain. It eases tension. It persuades rather than overwhelms.

And then there is the wafer itself, which deserves equal attention.

Baked into an airy, delicate shell, it begins with a gentle crispness at the first bite. Yet almost immediately it dissolves across the palate, releasing a wave of toasted aroma and quiet sweetness.

A monaka becomes complete because of this shell.

Like the graham cracker crust beneath a perfect New York cheesecake, it supports the whole thing, both physically and spiritually.

Daibutsu Shōbai: The Great Buddha Way

I did not discover Mimuro until my twenties.

When I did, I could only stare in disbelief.

How had I missed a masterpiece that sat barely an hour away by train, waiting quietly for nearly two centuries?

And yet I had missed it entirely because the people of Nara had never felt much need to carry it beyond their own borders.

This was not because they lacked confidence in selling elsewhere, nor because they wished to preserve its exclusivity as a local treasure.

They simply had no particular reason to do so.

That disposition is one of the defining characteristics of Nara, and perhaps where it differs most dramatically from neighboring Kyoto.

We sometimes call it Daibutsu shōbai—the Great Buddha way of doing business.

About thirteen centuries ago, Nara was the capital of Japan.

The capital moved to Kyoto roughly twelve centuries ago.

Many people left, but some things remained—most notably, the great Buddhist monuments and sacred sites that had already made the region important. Those treasures continued to draw visitors on their own. With a smaller population to sustain, generations could make a living simply by preserving inherited traditions and cultural assets with patience and care.

An Offering for the Gods

In Nara, wagashi often feel less like products than offerings.

Mimuro takes its name from Mount Mimuro, the sacred mountain that serves as the object of worship at Ōmiwa Shrine.

The name itself is a clue. This is a sweet that seems, first and foremost, to have been made for the gods.

In Nara, one gets the sense that human beings were never the intended audience. Human beings merely happened to receive what was left over.

And yet, as I discovered for myself, encountering it for the first time can be startling. There is no trace of flattery in it. No attempt to chase trends, broaden its appeal, or explain itself to outsiders. Its excellence emerges from something rarer: the decision to follow a tradition faithfully and to make a thing as well as one possibly can, simply because that is the right way to make it.

The people of Nara still do not spend much energy selling Mimuro outside Nara.

Fortunately, the confection keeps for about a week at room temperature. Given enough determination, it can travel almost anywhere in the world.

The next time I find myself trying to explain the appeal of anko, I do not intend to make a long argument.

I will simply place a Mimuro Monaka in someone’s hand and listen for the crackle of the wafer.

I have come to believe that will be enough.

Having been entrusted with dinner following our lunch, I decided it was time to introduce her to the elusive concept of koku.

Koku is a complex tapestry woven around umami—a richness that extends beyond taste itself, lingering as a deep, fragrant aftertaste long after the food is gone.

The finest vessel for experiencing this is sake, and I thought I knew just the place in Kyoto to find it.

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Where Sake Leads

Our destination was Renkonya, an authentic izakaya tucked away in the Kiyamachi district.

With its weathered wooden facade, the tavern holds a mere twenty seats, yet it did not escape the radar of the Michelin inspectors. It earned its place as a Bib Gourmand selection back in 2023.

Shameful as it may be to admit, that accolade was the very reason I, someone utterly lacking the tolerance for it, discovered the establishment in the first place.

I cannot drink alcohol, yet I am intimately acquainted with the koku of sake.

The reason for this paradox will follow, but at that moment, the more pressing dilemma was how to alleviate the guilt of occupying a seat in an izakaya without ordering a drink.

To solve this, I summoned my partner who could drink.

And so, with science as our lingua franca, our three-person banquet commenced.

The Reverse Equation

The culinary experience offered here is not about using sake to elevate the food. Rather, it is about using the power of the dishes to make the sake taste as magnificent as humanly possible.

Plates arrived one after another: ginkgo nuts, combining the comforting warmth of a bean with the richness of a nut; steam-grilled scallions drenched in butter; and more sake-friendly creations than I could properly keep track of.

One dish in particular secured its place as her most deeply moving experience of the night: the shigureni. The beef was enveloped in a thick glaze of soy sauce and sugar, reduced until it felt less like a coating and more like a second layer of the meat itself. Its salinity was so concentrated that a single pinch felt capable of anchoring an entire bowl of rice, which left little doubt as to why it paired so beautifully with sake.

By the time the zosui arrived—a bowl of rice simmered in dashi and finished with a softly set egg—the evening had softened into that particular warmth that only rice, broth, and good company seem capable of producing.

When it came to the sake, my partner read her curiosity perfectly, ordering a diverse range of styles so she could experience every direction the drink had to offer. Ultimately, her absolute favorite turned out to be the nigorizake.

In the standard brewing process, the solid remnants of the rice that refuse to dissolve during fermentation are pressed out and discarded as sake lees. Yet, to discard the lees is to forfeit some of the very depth and lingering richness that koku describes.

Watching her develop a fondness for this intentionally unfiltered nigorizake, the true purpose of tonight’s dinner felt beautifully complete.

The Boiling Point of Comfort

She turned to me and asked, “When did you realize you had no tolerance for alcohol?”

“When I was a child,” I replied.

I decided to tell her the story of kasujiru, a traditional Kyoto comfort food. It is a thick, viscous winter soup made from those very sake lees—the kind of dish brewed to warm you to the very marrow of your bones.

If you step into Kyoto during the winter, you will notice how the biting, crystalline air renders the distant mountains vividly sharp. But in the next breath, you are forced to cast your eyes downward as the merciless cold crawls up from the earth, utterly ignoring your shoes to wrap itself around your ankles.

Yet, I found myself actually looking forward to this biting arrival. The reason was entirely down to one thing: it meant the return of kasujiru season. The moment my morning breath turned to white vapor, I would pester my mother to make it.

But there was a catch—brewing kasujiru for a family completely devoid of alcohol tolerance was always a rather thrilling experiment.

Sake lees retain a startling amount of residual alcohol. If you simmer the soup for too long, the alcohol vanishes completely, but with it goes the magical aroma—sweet, voluptuous, and silken—that this rice-derived ingredient acquired through the grace of fermentation. Conversely, if you take it off the heat too early, the flavor remains spectacular, but the soup threatens to make our heads spin.

When cooking kasujiru, my mother would peer into the steam with the intense concentration of a scientist, meticulously calculating the optimal moment of evaporation. She was aiming for that precise, fleeting second where the raw, jagged edge of the alcohol dissipates, while the fragrant soul of the refined sake remains imprisoned within the broth.

Occasionally, her calculations missed the mark.

On those nights, a peculiar silence would settle over the dinner table. One by one, the cheeks of every family member would flush a deepening crimson.

Though I could feel my heart pounding with a violence entirely unsuited to a child’s torso, I never uttered a word of complaint.

Lifting the bowl with both hands, I pressed my lips directly to the lacquer, tilting it to drain the warm broth to its final drop.

Then, peering up at my mother with a faintly glowing face, I would offer a quiet smile and repeat my usual refrain: “It’s beautiful, Mom. Please make it again.”

The Evolutionary Switch

Upon hearing my tale, she shared a story of her own homeland’s wine stews. Because they are simmered for hours, the alcohol burns off entirely, rendering them perfectly safe for even small children to consume. It had never occurred to me to draw a parallel between kasujiru and a wine stew, yet they are undeniably cut from the same cloth.

However, if one were to subject kasujiru to such prolonged boiling, the delicate, ephemeral nuances of the sake lees would completely take flight. To achieve sublimity, the secret is to keep it below a boil, introducing the heat only briefly. “And so,” I explained to her, “it is inevitable that a fraction of the alcohol remains. But we eat it anyway, because we crave it.”

There lay the delightful irony.

One culture, blessed with humanity’s original tolerance, meticulously boiled every drop of spirit out of their wine stews—while we, carrying the genetic switch for alcohol intolerance, willfully pursued a soup that retained it.

Fully aware of the risk, we have spent thousands of years cheerfully ignoring that switch whenever a flavor seemed worth the trouble—as though evolution had merely written a warning label that taste never bothered to read.

Between us sat the cloudy nigorizake she had fallen for. My partner was explaining the differences between the bottles with the earnestness of a scientist discussing a favorite hypothesis, while she occasionally compared a note or aroma to something from home. We ordered another round and continued talking long into the evening.

The switch, as always, was politely ignored.

Previously: [A Thousand Years, Still Warm], [What We Train Ourselves Not to Notice]

Next: [The Boiling Point of Comfort]

The next place I took her was a small udon shop near my university.

I wanted her to understand dashi.

Taste is only part of it. Dashi is less an ingredient than an underlying canvas—the background against which Japanese cooking quietly unfolds.

It is made by steeping kombu or bonito in water and then removing them, which can make the whole enterprise seem suspiciously theoretical to anyone raised to associate expense with tangible substance. And yet some of the most costly things in a Japanese kitchen disappear before serving.

High cost, however, is not always a guarantee of quality.

That, oddly enough, is what this little shop taught me.

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On comforting distance

The system here is straightforward: you find a seat and take it. Most tables are shared. Only the small tatami room in the back belongs, temporarily, to whoever gets there first.

By noon, a line had formed outside—mostly working-class regulars, weathered and broad-handed. We took our place.

When there was only one party ahead of us, the man in front turned and looked us over.

“Two?” he asked, gesturing toward the back. “The tatami’s free. Go on.”

He had guessed, correctly, that a shared table would only force everyone into a polite, uncomfortable silence. By surrendering his premium spot, he preserved the room’s quiet equilibrium.

We thanked him and went in.

Inside, she looked around with open interest, taking everything in.

Of all the options, it was the tempura bowl that caught her attention.

So we ordered it.

What looks like surrender

When it arrived, anyone expecting conventional tempura would have assumed some mistake had been made.

It was entirely submerged in broth.

The batter, which must once have crackled magnificently fresh from the fryer, had gone soft. The rice beneath it had disappeared under the same clear flood. To anyone raised on crispness as an article of faith, this would look like ruin.

But then, so would plunging a perfectly laminated croissant into café au lait. The French have somehow avoided being accused of negligence for this.

What looks like surrender is often transformation.

The broth enters the batter, and as you take that first spoonful, something curious happens. The trapped oil rises outward, melding instantly with the dashi. The fragrance of fried flour becomes suddenly larger, more aromatic, less contained. What had been texture becomes flavor. The richness arrives all at once, not heavy but fluid, moving across the tongue with a kind of improbable softness.

Even in Japan, this is not the preferred style. People speak of crispness with the devotional certainty usually reserved for moral principles. Freshly fried tempura is expected to announce itself.

This does not. It yields.

And in yielding, it lets the broth take over.

The shrimp itself was almost comically thin, little more than a suggestion inside its architecture of batter. Its purpose was not dominance but permission. It allowed the dashi to become the point.

And beneath it all, the rice. This may be the strangest part.

When hot broth reaches freshly cooked rice, the surface starch loosens and slips away. The grains separate. They become glossy and distinct.

Not waterlogged. Released.

Each grain swells slightly, takes on broth, and slips down with an ease that feels almost illicit. It offers none of the meditative resistance of plain white rice, that slow pleasure of patient chewing.

This is something quicker, stranger, and perhaps a little less respectable. Which is precisely why it is so good.

How Curiosity Becomes Cuisine

We also ordered the shop’s curry udon, its other local institution.

As an act of mild extravagance, I chose mine with beef tendon.

The curry had been stretched with dashi until it lost all heaviness without losing depth. The tendon, after hours of cooking, had reached that miraculous state in which toughness ceases to be corrected and becomes luxury instead.

She took a bite and looked briefly puzzled.

“This is nothing like the curry I know,” she said.

Then she smiled.

“But it’s good.”

A moment later she added, almost to herself, “So Japanese people eat every cut of beef too. Like Italians.”

She told me that in Rome, her mother often made tripe stew.

And suddenly her ease with all this made perfect sense.

A doctorate is generally taken as evidence of intellectual curiosity. But then so is a civilization that looked at tripe and thought: perhaps, if simmered long enough.

At some point, someone noticed what patience could do to an otherwise neglected part of an animal. They told someone else. That person tried it, partly from skepticism and partly from hope, and discovered that the world had been larger than expected. Then they told another person.

This is how cuisine advances: not through refinement, at least not at first, but through appetite emboldened by curiosity. Tradition, when examined closely, is often just successful experimentation that has been repeated for several centuries.

Japan, I suspect, arrived at beef tendon much the same way Rome arrived at tripe.

Someone was curious enough to ignore common sense.

Everyone else was fortunate enough to follow.

The Price of Ordinary Things

It was November 18, 2024.

Above the counter, the television was showing news of the American presidential transition.

Inflation had become difficult, she said.

The plainest udon at this shop cost three hundred yen, about $1.92 at the exchange rate then. The beef-tendon curry udon I was eating—a luxury, by this establishment’s standards—came to $5.76.

“At $5.76,” I said, “you couldn’t get lunch in America.”

She laughed.

“You couldn’t get water.”

I smiled, assuming this was exaggeration of the sort inflation invites.

After we finished eating, I carried our cups to the self-service kettle and filled them with green tea.

Watching the steam rise, I began to suspect she had not been joking at all. Perhaps there are countries where six dollars disappears before the meal even begins.

That morning, at Ichiwa Ichimonjiya Wasuke, I had found her delight at complimentary tea charmingly foreign.

Now, standing there refilling our cups, I wondered whether I was the foreign one.

The water climbed slowly toward the rim.

And watching it, I found myself thinking about what people mean when they call a price reasonable.

I began to suspect that “reasonable” is often just whatever a country has trained its people not to notice.

Previously: [A Thousand Years, Still Warm]

Next: [The Boiling Point of Comfort]

Some time ago, an American friend wrote to ask whether I might meet a friend of his who was coming to Japan.

“She’s great fun,” he said. “And she has a Ph.D. I think you’ll get along.”

He was right.

This is the story of a day I spent showing her around Kyoto, the city where I was born and where, in the twenty-seven years up to that point, I had never lived anywhere else long enough for it to count as leaving.

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A Thousand Years, Still Warm

I began where Kyoto, to my mind, begins.

I took her first to Ichiwa Ichimonjiya Wasuke, where they make aburi mochi.

Kyoto has no shortage of celebrated sweet shops, and I have spent a fair amount of my life dutifully investigating them. This one has always felt less like a shop than an exception.

It has been there for a thousand years.

Not the sweet. The shop.

This is generally accepted without much fuss as the oldest confectionery business in the world, which sounds like the sort of claim people ought to argue about and somehow never do.

The approach to Imamiya Shrine announces it before you arrive. Somewhere ahead, rice cakes are blistering over charcoal, and the air smells faintly singed and sweet, as though autumn itself had caught at the edges.

Inside, we slipped off our shoes and stepped onto tatami. The room opened onto a small garden, green and luminous in that Kyoto way that makes even late autumn look freshly watered.

We sat for a while without speaking.

There is only one thing on the menu: Aburi Mochi.

In a city where Japanese sweets proliferate seasonally and philosophically, where each shop seems obliged to invent some new expression of refinement, this place has spent a millennium making exactly one thing and apparently sees no reason to revisit the decision.

Tea arrived.

What surprised me was how delighted she seemed by it. She looked at the cup with the mild astonishment usually reserved for small magic tricks.

In Japan, complimentary tea is so routine it barely registers. Watching her react to it as though it were a thoughtful gesture rather than infrastructural fact, I briefly felt like a tourist in my own country.

Then the mochi arrived: ten small skewers, still hot from the grill.

The rice cakes were soft and lightly charred, glossed with white miso sauce. There was the fragrance of toasted soybean flour, the mellow salt-sweetness of the glaze, and beneath that the quiet grain of pounded rice itself, sweet in the way rice is sweet when left alone long enough to explain itself.

She took a bite and looked up.

“I’ve never had mochi like this.”

I knew what she meant.

Elsewhere, mochi usually means what we would call gyūhi: smooth, elastic, immaculate in a way that suggests engineering.

This was not that.

Calling the two by the same name is a little like calling Pringles potatoes—technically forgivable, spiritually suspect.

Real mochi has a certain resistance to it, a memory of grain. It tastes faintly of work. Gyūhi, for all its charms, is more polished, more eager to please.

When I told her people had been eating this here for more than a thousand years, she looked genuinely startled.

She is from Rome, where a thousand years is not generally considered an impressive age for anything still standing. But even Rome cannot offer many places where one may sit down and casually eat the same thing people were eating a millennium ago.

Stranger still, it is good.

Not historically interesting. Not admirable for its longevity.

Just good.

Human taste, it seems, has changed less than we like to imagine.

The Unknown

For all its peculiar distinction, the oldest confectionery in the world seemed to have escaped the world’s attention.

Most of the customers were Japanese. There were no queues curling into the street, no cameras held aloft, none of the breathless international urgency that tends to gather around places once they have been properly discovered.

The air had that early-autumn clarity Kyoto does especially well: the first suggestion of cold, just enough to sharpen the light.

Between us lingered the mild formality peculiar to first meetings, though the afternoon sun, falling across the tatami in broad pale rectangles, seemed to soften it on our behalf.

She told me that two days before flying out, she had suddenly thought: Why not Japan?

So she booked the ticket.

She said this with the same expression one might use to mention buying toothpaste.

Then she lifted her tea cup in both hands and smiled into the steam, as though this too had worked out rather nicely.

My friend had described her as brilliant and fun. What he had omitted was the ease of her confidence—the kind that never announces itself because it has no need to.

When I suggested several possibilities for lunch, she dismissed them all with a small flick of the wrist.

“You choose,” she said. “Anything.”

“Something familiar,” I asked, “or something completely unknown?”

“The unknown.”

The answer came so quickly it felt less like a preference than a reflex.

Just to see how far this extended, I asked whether raw egg would be a problem.

Without a word, she reached for her phone and showed me a photograph of the yukhoe she had eaten the night before, with the faintly pleased expression of someone presenting evidence in a legal proceeding.

At that point, things became clear.

There are people for whom unfamiliarity registers as warning.

And there are people for whom it registers as invitation.

We belonged, evidently, to the second category.

In the presence of that sort of curiosity, the ordinary logic of one’s upbringing—the little inherited cautions that shape taste and habit—tends to retreat rather quickly.

Once I understood this, there was really only one place left to take her.

Next: [What We Train Ourselves Not to Notice]

Why are so many Japanese sweets obsessives also obsessed with spiced curries?

I laughed, because I knew exactly what she meant.

The overlap is suspiciously large. I’m part of it myself.

At first glance, wagashi and spiced curries should have nothing to do with each other. One is quiet, restrained, almost ceremonial; the other is loud, restless, and gloriously chaotic.

And yet they trigger the same kind of fixation: flavors that unfold slowly enough to keep the mind chasing after them, until something in our thinking quietly shifts.

Japan’s spiced-curry movement fascinates me for exactly this reason.

It feels less like adaptation and more like conversation: a meeting point where unfamiliar ingredients are gently persuaded into harmony.

The Mandala Arrives

Recently, that curiosity took me to Nara.

Not for the Great Buddha, or the temples, or the ancient capital’s solemn beauty.

I went for a thali at toi 印食店, a celebrated Indian restaurant tucked into the old city.

Even arriving five minutes before opening wasn’t enough to beat the queue. By then, a line had already formed outside. I added my name to the waiting list and wandered the quiet streets until my phone rang.

When I finally sat down upstairs and ordered the three-curry thali, I knew immediately it had been worth the wait.

It arrived like a mandala.

Color radiated across a silver platter in careful geometry: small bowls, bright chutneys, textured vegetables, crisp fried elements and liquid ones, each placed with enough precision to feel inevitable.

So I did what felt right: I started carefully, one dish at a time.

Three Curries, Three Personalities

The oyster curry was astonishing.

The sea announced itself immediately.

It carried the same deep savoriness that good Japanese dashi often draws from seafood—clean, concentrated, and quietly expansive.

Three large oysters rested inside, perfectly tender—the flavor of the sea stripped down to its purest form.

The mutton keema was equally remarkable.

Lamb is my favorite meat precisely because it resists politeness. It insists on itself. Good lamb should retain some trace of wildness.

This one kept just enough of that edge.

The aroma of fresh herbs arrived almost immediately after the first bite, lifting the richness upward. The spice followed slowly, blooming with restraint. Beneath it all sat the quiet sweetness of vegetables and legumes, holding everything in place.

It was perfectly mannered without becoming tame.

The sambar, built from lentils and summer vegetables, seemed simpler at first.

Then it revealed itself.

The eggplant and tomato had collapsed into complete softness, releasing a sweetness so clear and clean that I immediately recognized it.

I cook often, and I spend an unreasonable amount of time trying to coax exactly that kind of sweetness out of vegetables.

One spoonful was enough to make me think:

Ah. So this is the answer.

The Potatoes That Stopped Time

Around these curries gathered their supporting cast: a crisp medu vada fragrant with herbs, bright achar, cooling pachadi, and a thin, lightly bitter soup whose flavor puzzled me at first.

Then came the potatoes.

The menu simply described them as a seasonal vegetable stir-fry.

I took one bite and froze.

For several seconds, I couldn’t continue eating.

I just sat there staring at the plate, trying to understand what had happened.

Eventually curiosity overcame manners.

I called over a server and asked, as politely as possible, if someone might tell me what was in them.

A few minutes later, the chef appeared.

This was mortifying.

In Japan, asking to see the chef usually signals disaster. A complaint. A problem. Something must have gone terribly wrong.

I had accidentally staged a culinary emergency.

Flustered, I explained that the potatoes were so good I simply needed to understand them.

The chef smiled.

Coarsely grated coconut, garlic, a little onion, and carefully chosen spices, he said.

That was all.

And somehow, that was enough.

It felt like revelation: proof that when ingredients meet exact technique, they can become something far greater than themselves.

I thanked him profusely.

Then he asked, smiling:

“Would you like another serving?”

Reader, I nearly wept.

He returned with more potatoes and gave me one instruction:

“Mix them into the soup with rice. Mash it all together.”

Keeping Cats and Birds Together

I obeyed.

And suddenly the bitter soup transformed.

What had seemed slightly unfamiliar—even austere—became the perfect counterweight to the potatoes’ sweetness. Together they created balance neither had possessed alone.

At that point, experimentation became inevitable.

I began mixing everything.

The oysters. The lamb. The sambar. The soup. The potatoes. Rice as mediator.

The result should have collapsed into confusion.

Instead, it became harmony.

Oysters and lamb should fight for dominance. Under ordinary conditions, one would overwhelm the other.

It would be like keeping a cat and a bird in the same cage.

And yet spice has an uncanny ability to tame.

It smooths rough edges without erasing character. It removes aggression while preserving identity.

The wild remains—but domesticated just enough to coexist.

That, I think, is the true genius of spiced curry.

Zimi-bukai

By the end of the meal—especially after the extra rice—I was completely full.

And yet I felt light.

No heaviness. No fatigue. Only the clean afterglow of spice.

In Japanese, we have a phrase: zimi-bukai.

It means something like deeply nourishing, profoundly flavorful.

It describes not just taste, but effect—the quiet feeling of having been restored by what you have eaten.

That meal was exactly that.

Even now, at my desk, I find myself thinking of those potatoes—of the oysters and lamb, of that silver mandala of tamed wildness.

Some flavors refuse to remain memories.

They insist on becoming destinations.

And I suspect Nara Station will be seeing me again very soon.