Japan Part 2: The food, oh my, the food

The food on this trip was good enough to merit its own post.  While in Japan, we had the best noodles, tempura, and sushi we have ever had.

In Niseko we found the Ice Bar which was this awesome igloo made of ice that you would crawl through a tunnel to get into.  Inside there were lights frozen into the walls and it was an awesome atmosphere.

There were limited drinks on offer, and after you got your beer and had a few sips the bar tender would top off your can of beer with a glug from a vodka bottle and then take a swig himself.

There were several rooms within the ice bar to lose yourself in a few icicles as well.

Now, on to the food itself.  Everywhere that we went, with the sole exception of the one Western style restaurant that we foolishly tried, had picture worthy food.

This one was our first lunch at a hotel at the bottom of the slopes.  For about $12 you got a whole tray of food, including some mystery dishes that we never quite figured out.  My meal wasn't pictured, but I'm sitting next to Chris eating a bowl of ramen the size of my head.

This next meal is another lunch just at a random place that we happened to walk by.  Our two trays of sashimi bento and tempura bento basically took up the whole table.  It was so good we went back there for dinner a few nights later.

The sushi itself had a starring role.  After leaving NY we were pleasantly surprised to find that the sushi in Sydney was a bit fresher, but the fish in Japan put it all to shame.  Even the stand up place in the Sapporo airport had better sushi then the best sushi we'd had before, with the exception of the fish that we've caught and sashimi'd on the boat.

These two sushi shots are from the little restaurants outside the Tokyo fish market, and yes, this fish was consumed for breakfast around 7 am.  All that Chris can say to sum it up is "best sushi EVER".

We also had the pleasure of eating many bowls of ramen, each one seeming even better than the last.  The one above was a king crab ramen that was just amazing.  

In Tokyo we managed to eat with some of the locals and our last bowl of ramen surrounded by a bunch of Japanese slurping their soup all around us.

In addition to the awesome raman, as you might expect, the gyoza was also far superior to anything that we'd had before.  Anyone else drooling over this bowl of ramen??  The search is on in Sydney now to find something comparable.