Kyoto, Eaten Off Sticks

A Turk in Nishiki Market discovers that everything here also comes on a skewer.

In Istanbul we put everything on a skewer, so I came to Kyoto to find out who was copying whom. Answer: everybody does it; the Japanese just do it more neatly. Nishiki Market at ten in the morning is a long narrow roof of food, four hundred metres of it, and I ate my way down it like a slow-moving vacuum. Tiny octopus on a stick, glazed red, with a quail egg tucked in its head. Tamagoyaki, sweet and wobbling. Pickles in every colour a vegetable could possibly be ashamed of.

Lunch was at Kushikatsu Nikkō Ichiban, a counter on Pontochō where the cook fried things on sticks and handed them over one by one with a solemn rule: no double-dipping in the sauce. I would never. I thought about it once.

In the afternoon I walked it off along the Kamo River and across to Gion, where the Shirakawa canal runs between willows and old teahouses and everyone, including me, takes the same photograph from the same bridge. Then up the steps of Yasaka Shrine as the lanterns came on.

Dinner was yakitori at Yoru no Ki, eight seats on Kiyamachi: chicken hearts, chicken skin, a grilled rice ball brushed with soy. I told the cook about Adana kebab. He listened very politely and served me another skewer. Diplomacy.

Lived October 04, 2025.