If you love japanese food you’ll probably be dreaming about living in Japan and try all those fabulous dishes that you have seen at the movies, anime or manga. But let’s face it, besides visiting Japan as a tourist, very few of us achieve that goal, and you probably like other type of food, like I do. That’s why, when you are in your country, you’ll probably ask youself “What’s the best place to eat japanese food closer to my house?”. After visiting sevaral so called japanese restaurants in Spain for several years I have to tell that, not that long ago, the situation was far for being good, with plenty of fake japanese restaurants and the so called Woks trying to imitate with bad results that cuisine.
But, in recent years, things have changed for good, with several good japanese restaurants opening not only in big cities but also in the smaller ones. As an example of this I’m going to talk about the situation in Alicante, a medium size city for the standards in Spain. Alicante is well known by national and foreign tourists as it is one of the most visited cities in the Spanish mediterranean coast. That has provided us the opportunity to meet other cultures and their cuisine for many years, but Japanese cuisine was not as good as in other bigger cities such as Madrid or Barcelona. Of course you could walk into a chinese restaurant or Wok and find shushi and other japanese specialities, but most of them were low quality copies of the real japanese ones.
That was until not so many years ago when some restaurants opened their doors and showed us what real japanese food is. There are several examples but I’m going to talk about one specific dish: ramen.
For most of us, the closest we have been to ramen (without taking in consideration visiting Japan) was low quality noodles served in some oriental restaurant. But when I discovered Natsu Ramen last summer it was like going back to Japan and enjoy one of their most delicious food. Not only the chef worked in a ramen bar in Yokohama for two years but he also had great skills cooking ramen, creating his own variants. The success was expected and now is one of the places of reference for enjoying this meal, not only in Alicante but also in Spain.
The same story could be applied to other restaurants around the country and in several cities and that is excellent news for us, japanese cuisine lovers. Let’s enjoy this new era and see you around slurping some noodels, eating sushi or enjoying an Hiroshima Style okonomiyaki. Itadakimasu!