Bubby’s Pie Company Yokohama

In New York’s Tribeca area there is a popular restaurant called Bubby’s Pie Company and soon this same restaurant will be here in Yokohama. In Sakuragicho, to be precise. It’s always good to have new restaurants to choose from and other places to get western style food. It will be opening on June 1st near Sakuragicho Station. It seems that it might just be open for two years but perhaps if it is successful it will remain longer.

I expect the menu to be altered slightly for Japanese taste and the portions may even be smaller than the Tribeca restaurant but who knows. They will be serving things like hamburgers, pies and pasta and other fare typical of American style restaurants.

Cafe and Restaurant
It looks like there may be two areas because according to this website (Japanese) there will be 43 seats in the cafe with 123 in the restaurant  and the cafe is open from 08:00 to 22:00 while the restaurant is open from 11:00 to 23:00. And believe it or not, it will be a no smoking establishment.

Lunch will be around 850yen, dinner 1500yen.

Link: Bubby’s Yokohama (Japanese)
Link: Bubby’s New York

Drink for Charity

I think that there are many people who don’t need the extra incentive to go out for a drink but this is incentive to drink at a particular place, Benny’s Place. Benny’s Place is a lively American sports bar near Motomachi in Yokohama. On June 5th they are hosting Beers for Books event where 100 yen will be donated to create a treasured book for children in Cambodia, for every drink that is sold on that day.

Yokohama’s first Beers for Books! Please come to Benny’s Place in Motomachi. Benny’s is an American style sports bar that serves beers, wines, and cocktails along with great barbecue, nachos, chicken wings, and many other delicious dishes. It’s just a 5 minute walk from JR Ishikawacho Station. At Benny’s you can eat, drink, play darts, and meet new people in a casual, friendly atmosphere.

You can find out more about the event on the Beers for Books website.

The Hub Comes to Yokohama

The British Pub franchise, the Hub, has come to Yokohama. This is great news for people living in Yokohama as the selection of pubs to choose from is pretty slim, especially in the area near Yokohama Station. I went there for a couple of beers on opening night when a pint of beer was just 480 yen. I may be wrong but I think that offer is on for the first week. There is another British pub near Yokohama Station called the Tavern which I like but it was expensive before they added a table charge. Soon another Hub will open up near the Tavern and I imagine that it will force a bit of competition.

The Hub Yokohama is very stylish and I imagine that it will steal a lot of customers away from both the Tavern and Captains as well as being more accessible to Japanese people. You should check it out when you just want to grab a beer and don’t want the hassle of an izakaya.

Red Brick Festival

The Red Brick Festival is being held down at the Red Brick Warehouses also known as Akarenga near Sakuragicho in Yokohama. Actually it has already started and I have even attended a little bit of it. The ice cream part. I took some photos of the cool and crazy ice creams that are on offer and to be honest the choice of flavors is amazing. And I chose the word carefully too because you ought to be amazed that they sell ice cream with flavors such as cow tongue, caviar, garlic, eel and wasabi. (See gallery below for more.) The one that attracted me most though was the stretching Turkish ice cream which I quickly ordered really hoping just to see it stretch. It didn’t stretch though and the flavor was a pretty standard vanilla. No complaints there. I didn’t try the other ice creams not because I was nervous about the strange flavor but just because I didn’t want to ruin my appetite.

There are a few other events at this festival including, I believe, some salsa and samba performances. You can find some information (in Japanese) on the Akarenga web site. It runs from July 25th to August 10th.

Okonomiyaki in Yokohama

Okonomiyaki is a type of savory pancake that is very popular in Japan. There are as many varieties of okonomiyaki as there are regions in Japan including. Okonomiyaki along with tako yaki are the quintessential Osaka dishes but can be found almost anywhere in Japan. Some are made with seafood, some meat, some vegetable and some are a mix. I even had a garlic okonomiyaki in Kyoto once. Delicious! Hiroshima style includes yaki soba (fried noodles). They are usually topped off with katsuo-bushi (dried bonita flakes), mayonnaise and a brown okonomiyaki sauce. You can make them at home and they are not all that difficult as long as you have the right equipment and ingredients but they always seem to taste much better in a restaurant with a draft beer.

Near Yokohama Station underneath Yodobashi Camera there are several restaurants, one of which is an okonomiyaki restaurant. It’s called Fugetsu. I know. Sounds like something Tony Soprano would say. It’s a chain store and there are branches throughout Japan and even one in Korea. When you take a seat you will notice that the center of your table is a hot plate. After you choose your dishes (unfortunately the menus are in Japanese) a server will bring the ingredients to your table in bowls and proceed to mix them and then more the contents onto the hotplate. The come back periodically to check on them, turn them and add ingredients. They even tell you when you should eat them Pretty simple. Other restaurants just provide you with the ingredients and let you make them yourself.

Okonomiyaki is a Japanese dish that most westerners seem to like so if you are worried about eating Japanese food, this is a good place to start. You can learn more about okonomiyaki on Fugetsu’s English website.

Pepsi Blue Hawaii Drink

If I am to be honest, I really only purchased this drink because ot its color. Last year Pepsi gave us Pepsi Ice Cucumber which I thought wasn’t so bad. I had no intention of buying a second one but I rarely drink carbonated drinks these days. As you can see from the image the latest offering from from Pepsi is a deep blue color that reminds me of Listerine Mouthwash. Unforunately though, the taste also reminds me of it. In fact it tasted so much like mouth wash that I thought that I had drunk it too soon after brushing my teeth. A later test revealed this not to be the case. It is pretty vile stuff.

And something that I find mysterious is that it is supposed to be pineapple and lemon flavored which in my opinion wouldn’t resemble carbonated mouth wash. And why is it blue? There can’t be all that many people like me who want to buy it because it’s a weird color.

S for Summer! S for Slurp!

Summer has come. People gravitate toward cold and light food naturally. Soba, the thin noodles made from buckwheat flour, is one of the most popular summertime foods in Japan, and a prime choice for a quick meal. Here is how to prepare cold soba at home.

What to buy:

• A package of dried soba. 100 to 120 grams serves a moderate eater.
• Men tsuyu (Dipping soup for noodles) Concentrated type, like the one shown in the photo below is recommended. The letters say “Noh-shuku 2-bai” meaning that you need to diluted it with the same amount of water as the soup. Mentsuyu is very handy. You can use it not only for soba or other kinds of cold noodles, but for making soup for hot noodles or cooking meat and vegetables.

How to prepare:

1. Bring generous amount of water to boil in a big pot. Put soba in and boil for 5 – 6 minutes or as instructed on the product package.
2. Take noodles out into a strainer (ideally bamboo strainer), rinse and cool it immediately under running water. Drain very well and put soba on a plate.
3. In a small bowl or a cup, put the same amount of mentsuyu and water. It’s ready to dip and slurp!

The traditional condiments such as chopped negi (spring onions) or wasabi add sharpness to the taste. For occasional luxury, you can get a few choices of tempura to put on the side of soba. More to learn.

Shin-Yokohama station

The picture here is not the construction site for the Olympic Games in Beijin. It’s in front of the north side of Shin-Yokohama station. I don’t know what they are building. A huge dumpster for scrap metal??

Shin-Yokohama has been turned into a more passenger-friendly station recently. Although it is used by quite a few people every day as there are two JR lines, Tokaido Shinkansen and Yokohama-line, and the City Subway serving, there weren’t many services available before, and it was really just a station to pass by. Now a 19-storey commercial building rises above it. It contains a mall called CUBIC PLAZA, with more than 80 shops and restaurants, including a big bookstore, a mid-range hotel, HOTEL ASSOCIA with 203 rooms, and offices. The concourse is bright and spacious, the escalators and elevators are smooth, all the signs are in big letters and easy to follow. It’s only 12 minutes to Shinagawa, or 20 minutes to Tokyo by Shinkansen, and of course, you have easy access to any part of Yokohama from there. All things considered, it could be a good base for business or even pleasure trips.

When I was walking through the corridor, enjoying the new look of the station in a cheerful mood, the sign of a doughnut shop, “DOUGHNUT PLANT NEW YORK CITY” caught my eyes. Next moment, I was holding two doughtnuts in a paper bag, which cost me 770 yen, with a taint of regret for my adventurous and spontaneous shopping. Well, it tasted great and I was happy after all, but the 40-yen mini-doughnuts from a bakery close to my place is as good as those fancy ones.

What is your favorite Japanese Beer Company?

There are many beer companies and even more beers in Japan but these are the four most popular brands.