Location: Ueno, Taito-ku, Tokyo
Date of Visit: 1st May 2010
>> Step into the world where walking down narrow alleys in Tokyo city will bring you to the most authentic sushi restaurants that you can't imagine finding in such places.There are plenty of sushi restaurants all over Tokyo but I personally prefer this place than the rest.
How do you get there? Take the JR Yamanote train to Okachimachi station and use the North Gate exit. Look for the Jeans Mate store and walk into that little alley and you'll find Kappa Sushi. You may find a little queue lining up outside if you arrive later than 7pm. On the day of our first visit, we decided to go there for lunch around 1pm. There's no queue. We got in and took our seats in front of the counter. The only place to sit is in front of the counter!
The restaurant patrons are mainly locals and there are some Japanese from other parts of the country that came to this restaurant for a meal. Smoking is strictly not allowed in the restaurant which is a good thing as Japan is considered a smoking country. The place is not brightly lit like many modern Japanese sushi restaurants out there. The place looks rather shabby and old but that's not what patrons come here for.
Not for the environment but for that one thing... the freshness of the food that's being prepared! There are a total of 2 counters in the restaurant and each counter are manned by an Itamae. Itamae is the sushi chef that stands in front of the counter ready to take your orders. Our Itamae was an elderly gentleman who stood there smiling at us while we're trying to make our order. Then it struck us!
We noticed that the staff working in the restaurant does not speak a word English. So what do we do? We use fingers to point to what we wanted and whatever broken form of Japanese that we can mutter out of our mouths. At one point the Itamae was kind enough to tell us the fish names in Japanese, that we're eating. I manage to take a look at the Itamae's knife skill and his skill in slicing the fishes is superbly skillful.
We had plenty of nigiri sushi and also sashimi while we're at it. Mom's personal favourite consists of Sake (salmon) sashimi while Dad's personal favourite is the Toro (fatty tuna belly) sashimi. On the contrary, myself prefers nigiri sushi. We ordered Sake (salmon), Tamago (egg omelette), Uni (sea urchin roe), Maguro (tuna), Unagi (fresh water eel), Ikura (salmon roe) and my very personal favourite Toro (fatty tuna belly) nigiri.
Speaking of fatty tuna belly, it's a very expensive piece of fish that you can only eat it off at a cheaper price in Japan. This fish can easily costs you RM300 for 3 slices in Malaysia while it only costs ¥350 for 4 slices. Back home, we gave no honour to these fish slices as most of us would just lather the slice with soy and quickly chew it off because of the bad fish taste especially from fishes that they are not familiar with.
There are also etiquette on how to eat sushi too. You can pick up the sushi with chopsticks or with your fingers. You are only to lightly dip the fish, not the rice, into the soy. In Malaysia, people would dump wasabi into the soy sauce and then dunk the rice into the soy. Wasabi should be put directly onto the sushi, not the soy. The overall experience in a sushi restaurant in Japan is very surreal and I definitely wanted more of this the next time I visit.
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