Eating Tokyo: Kushiage Hantei

Kushiage was one of the many types of Japanese dining we experienced in Tokyo. It basically consists of deep-fried food on bamboo sticks, but that description doesn’t really do it justice. 

We had our kushiage experience one evening at Kushiage Hantei, a very gaijin-friendly restaurant in the Nezu area of north-central Tokyo. When you sit down at Kushiage Hantei you basically just order a drink (we went with shochu) and tell the server if there’s anything you don’t eat (they were happy to accommodate my vegetarianism). Then the food starts coming. After a small appetizer, the first set of kushiage arrives. The specifics depend on what’s in season. You can keep getting sets with new items, or you can re-order your favorite individual sticks.

When you’ve had your fill of kushiage, you tell them to stop the order. This was a hard call to make, especially knowing that we would never know what exciting foods we were missing out on – they do up to twelve courses, for a total of 36 unique items fried on sticks. I think we managed four or five courses. I actually kept a list of all the things we had, which I’m adding here for posterity: shrimp with shiso, asparagus, Japanese angelic spear (some sort of vegetable), egg, ginger wrapped with meat, rice cake, ginko nut, tomato and cheese, fish, lotus root, scallop, broccoli, carrot and yuba, onion, beef, another fish, sweet potato (yakimo!), eggplant, rice flour cake, oyster, mushroom, onion.

Next comes some rice. We chose the ochazuke, which is rice with seaweed and tea (served with some pickled vegetables). Meals in Japan often end with rice and pickled vegetables. I was not a big fan of these pickled vegetables on our first trip to Japan, but like so many other Japanese flavors (mochi, shiso, and salted plums come to mind), they began to grow on me, and now I kind of miss them. When do I get to go back to Japan?

For more information about Kushiage Hantei, check out this article in The Japan Times.