23 October 2016
Famous food and plenty of parking
Local delicacy black ramen in Toyama
Toyama has more places to park than any other city I have seen in my life. Most of the city is dedicated to parking. Not multi storey parking buildings, just a patch of concrete exposed to the elements where you can pay to park a car.
Entire sections of main roads have no shops or offices, just parking concrete, with machines to pay, bollards to prevent escape without paying, and tyre shredding devices installed.
I have heard about people complaining that big cities have no where to park, and its very inconvenient compared to whatever place they come from, but how convenient does that become when it becomes all parking? Quite unbecoming I would imagine.
Aside from many empty parking areas, Toyama has 2 favourite foods, negro ramen, and creme brulee crepes. I decided to have both.
Negro ramen is easy to find, theres a number of stores in the city making the Toyama style version of ramen with a dark soup base, hence the negro name.
I couldnt really discern a different taste, even though I went to the all Japan ramen champion for 5 years in a row. It was nice enough, fairly small serve which is fine with me. That would leave room for the crepe.
I had eyed off a shop selling these crepes near my hotel. The creme brulee crepe takes the standard Harajuku style crepe, filled with custard, and then they take a blow torch and burn the top like a portugese tart. Only problem was the store was closed. It is only open during the day. This seems wrong.
Hopefully I can try and find the same thing in Kanazawa, where I am going tomorrow, it is part of Toyama prefecture, despite not being Toyama city. Which is confusing I realise.
Just a random small restaurant street I found near my hotel. They did not have a negro ramen shop here though.
The covered shopping street is no busier at night.
Nice statue. You might think this was the red light district. No. It is the front window of a department store.
I walked past the Toyama recent re-creation of a castle.
1/8 shutter speed hand held night, multi frame noise reduction, high iso, nice clouds.
My ramen.
The place is genuinely quite famous, I read about it on multiple websites. The good thing about these Japanese cities having no people is you can eat at these places without having to line up for an hour.
One of thousands of parking areas.
The closed crepe shop. I took a photo of the picture in case I dont find one somewhere else.
There is a store in Tokyo that is now doing this which was recently in the New York Times describing it as the worlds biggest food trend of the week. Long sentence was long, but not as long as the line. The line to the Tokyo one was 100 metres long, I saw pictures.