#wagashi

Iced Matcha and Wagashi, Tokyo

This was at Rikugien gardens in north Tokyo which is well worth a wander about - it's a good Edo-era garden with a nice spread of seasonal flowers. They also serve somewhat fancier wagashi than the norm. Usually there's some kind of bean paste nibble, but these as you can see were beautifully styled to suit the season and delicately flavoured. The Iris motif contained red bean paste but lightly floral in taste, and the little yellow one was styled after a local type of citrus and flavoured the same. Very refreshing.

Now I'm going to off on one about matcha everywhere else. Hit J to skip. In Japan you can, of course, get all the same flavoured milky matcha boba ice cream drinks you can mostly find everywhere else which I have to confess, I'm not a big fan of. I don't HATE-hate, but a little goes a long way for me. At least most of the time, they're not pretending to be Oooweeee-Wowzers Top Shelf Tea.

When Pret brought out their matcha latte, when it was a lot less common, I was very excited for it, until i realised they used some kind of horrible green tea flavoured sugar syrup, insisted on making it with coconut milk (why? Also lady in the Russel Square Pret WHY was it an impossible deal to swap that for regular milk??) and then as an extra fart to Uji... dusted with cinnamon.

The Saddest Lemon, that day. I didn't have high expectations, but I don't think I could have predicted anything as wild as coconut milk.

That's not really the situation that chafes me hardest though.

I will hold my hands up and confess to being a food snob in many ways with this being the first hill I will die on - If you're going to go to the effort of getting a premium ingredient and marketing that as the primary feature or flavour (and fucking charge me accordingly), then WHY are we burying that product under a load of cheap shite?

This happens way too often in my opinion. If you wanna eat tuna with mayo, I have no issue with that. Go right ahead. Fill the can. You want to put that on some maguro? It's not traditional, but again, I'm not going to judge. Individual tastes can be as unhinged as the individual pleases. Their plate, their choice.

But for the love of god, restaurants, the emphasis is on CHOICE. If you are bragging about dishing up premium blue fin (by way of example, please hold for a separate essay about sustainability), and I am paying out the nose for that specific thing, do not serve it to me on some soggy avocado and drenched in sriracha egg slop and sesame oil. I will flip the table.

天の川ゼリー

IRODORI 琥珀糖（鶴屋吉信）

夏季限定羊羹「満天」- 彩雲堂（島根県松江市）

澄んだ夜空に星がきらめく情景を、職人の手仕事で丁寧に描いた“食べる夜空”。涼しげな見た目と繊細な味わいで、夏のひとときをやさしく彩ります。