1207 Part 2: Food Travels

Here’s a full update to make up for the pitiful effort last night. Apologies for that, but I was in far too much pain to even contemplate writing more than a couple of sentences at the time. I was even sick. You really wanted to know that, didn’t you? Of course you did. BLAAAARGH.

Anyway, what I actually wanted to talk about in last night’s post was one of my favourite aspects of travel: food. I’m not necessarily talking about sampling local cuisine — which here in Toronto would probably be poutine, I guess — but wandering around and having a chance to sample some local eateries, and eat some interesting food that you might not be able to get back home.

Toronto is particularly good for Asian eateries of various descriptions. Yesterday we sampled two of them: the Banh Mi Boys sandwich shop, and Kinton Ramen.

Banh Mi Boys is a pokey little shop that often has queues extending out of the door. They serve a variety of Vietnamese-inspired food that includes Asian-style tacos — floppy rather than crispy — and steamed rice flour buns known as bao. They also do Vietnamese-style baguettes, the titular banh mi, which are a decent meal in themselves. We tried the tacos and the bao, both of which were delicious. I had pulled pork in my bao and some sort of spicy beef in my taco — there were several different options on offer besides these, including squid tacos, which I sort of regret I didn’t try now, even if eating them would make me feel a bit guilty towards Ika Musume-chan.

Kinton Ramen, meanwhile, is fairly self-explanatory. It’s a ramen shop. All they do is ramen and a few side dishes. They do do several different types of ramen, to be fair, but if you don’t want ramen this is probably not the place to come. I must confess to not being overly familiar with ramen, as it’s something we don’t seem to get all that much of back in the U.K., but the couple of occasions I have had it in the past have been thoroughly enjoyable.

For those unfamiliar with Japanese cuisine, eating “ramen” generally involves getting an enormous bowl full of broth made from pork bones (with the amount of fat used in it determining how “rich” it is) which is then filled with ramen noodles, vegetables such as beansprouts, nori and various other bits and pieces, and typically topped with a lump of pork. Some also have a whole egg in them — sometimes this is served chopped, but at Kinton, there’s just a whole egg dropped in it, which is quite amusing. You then proceed to consume the whole bowl using a combination of chopsticks and a wooden Japanese soup spoon. At Kinton, they take your photo if you finish the whole thing, which is actually quite an achievement — there’s a lot of food there, and due to the way it’s structured, it often looks like you’re not making any progress with it for a very long time. Like the Persona 4 beef bowl, if you will.

Anyway, that should hopefully make up for last night. And hopefully my headache will fuck off and die now.