Izushi, where funny soba lives.

Just a little post. Japan is big on regional specialities. In a way that the UK just isn't. Everywhere you go, you hear that this region is 'famous' for a certain type temple, or mannerism, or flavour of Pocky or something. This focus on regional styles is big, running through food, fashion, language, local sights, in Tokyo one of my friends girlfriends was reading a hair magazine, and in there they had styles listed as 'Osaka', 'Tokyo', 'Kyoto' etc, even though (it seemed to me, but maybe I missed the subtleties of it) each style could be seen in any of those places. In fact today I found out that even every Bape store has it's own camo! So anyway, Izushi (apparently called 'little Kyoto' but that's a bit optimistic if you ask me) is famous for Izushi Soba, where me and my supervisor (below) went on Thursday.



Just as I was reading Chris' blog entry about Izushi, my supervisor comes up and is like 'let's go to Izushi and eat Soba tonight'. It's been a while since me and my supervisor just chilled and went somewhere. Rocking to Dave Brubeck in his car, off we went for the hour and a half drive. My supervisor is such a dude, talking bout Yoshitomo Nara, Final Fantasy which we both liked when kids but dont really play now, Vissel, London, we've got really similar interests. He works so hard (one important difference I guess) that its been ages since we just hung out and went somewhere.

We hit a very chilled resturant with fish and a little tree inside (??) which only served one thing, Izushi Soba. It comes on little tiny plates, and you mix up a sauce made of raw egg, dashi (fish stock), tororo (mashed up potato goopy thing), grated onion, spring onion, and a touch of wasabi. You dip the noodles in and they are delicious. You eat in multiples of 5 identical small plates, and apparently if you eat 15 you are a 'soba expert' or something. I could only manage 10 but it was enough. Only cost me Y1000 (fiver) as well. After that you add some hot water with a bit of dashi in to your cup of sauce and drink it.



That was Izushi.

Even though I think Bathing Ape is overdone, I still love their camo patterns, and finding they have city variations was pretty cool.Here are the camos of some places I've been.

Osaka
London
Sapporo
Aoyama
Harajuku
Yokohama
Hiroshima
Kanazawa
Kyoto

Also just booked up my flights for HK next month, with a 8 hour (gah) stopover in Taipei, which gives me the excuse to include this excellent purple camo:

Hong Kong
Taipei

(Obviously theres only stores in the bigger cities, but I wonder why there's no store in Kobe, even though more obscure places like Maebashi in Gunma have one. I guess maybe they think Osaka is close enough? Who knows.)