Japanese Lunch Special: Tonkatsu Lunch Set

Time for another informative post about Japanese food (have I even done one of these before??)! I’m gonna break a typical Japanese meal down for you into 8 easy parts with two sides of sauce. So here is the meal, we will be examining today.

Let’s jump right in and start with the dishes in the upper most left corner. One way you can always tell if a meal is Japanese, is if it has pickled vegetables, mainly pickled radish. If this is not included in your meal, then it’s not Japanese. I’ve never seen (or tasted) the appeal of cold soggy vegetables turned yellow or red from vinegar, but some people really enjoy this.

Next we have the unidentified dish of vegetables that look like they might have been soaking in soy sauce (shoyu in Japanese) or some miso sauce. These are probably some kind of mushroom, bamboo shoot, or tree bark soaked until it is edible and then mixed with carrots. Ummmmmm….

Thirdly, we have a mixture of black and brown. Anyone who knows anything about Japan knows what this future stomach ache is. It’s natto and nori! Natto is fermented soy beans with the smell and taste of a rotting corpse. Nori is a type of seaweed. I wouldn’t touch this if you paid me.

Moving right along, we have the homage to western meals with a iceburg lettuce salad with Italian dressing on top. Safe, secure, and usually no surprises lurking underneath the lettuce waiting for you to try and eat it.

In the center of the tray we have tonkatsu, which is deep fried pork cutlet. Don’t get excited, it looks better than it tastes. Maybe this wouldn’t be so if Japanese people didn’t also like fat and tendons as much as they like the meat. Tonkatsu has the potential to be one of the most delicious pork dishes in the world, and sometimes you get a really good piece, and those times are awesome.

Moving right along, we have miso soup. It’s also a typical part of all Japanese meals. There are three kinds of miso: red, white, and clear. …I’m pretty sure about the clear one. The one in the picture is white, obviously. They can include any number of things, like tofu, green onion, radish, potato, etc.

Almost to the end… rice. A staple of the Japanese diet, much like miso and daikon (radish). The yellow sauce is a spicy wasabi mustard, which can make you cry, mostly because water cups are the size of a kids bathroom cup and they are never filled or re-filled. So you just have to suffer. The brown sauce, oddly enough, is a bbq sauce.

Last but not least, we have the end all be all of Japanese desserts. Anko (sweet bean paste) wrapped in mochi. Mochi is made when you pound rice for so long it turns into a glutinous mass of, well, mochi. This is like a double dose of disgusting for me, but it’s quite popular and lots of people like it. ...piehole. lolz~

So there you go! Next time you visit Japan you can get the tonkatsu dinner set and know what you’re eating! Or would you have rather it remained a mystery?