Hobby omakase at scale
Signature chopsticks from Japan, given to me as a gift
I remember as a kid I did a cello exam and I was told my playing was so-so, but my prima vista was pretty good. Prima vista means "seen for the first time", which basically means you can play whatever notes in front of you even if you haven't practised worth a damn (which I hadn't). Ever since I've thought if this is my secret super power (or if I'm just on the spectrum).
Later, I fell into the depths of Japanese cooking, because my then-girlfriend-now-wife told me she can't eat Italian food. I picked a cuisine with tasty recipes and ingredients which would fit the diets of both of us. However, there was a problem. I was not able to do all of the recipes that I wanted to do due to dietary restrictions.
This gave birth to my izakaya-themed dinner, where I cook literally over a dozen recipes for my friends. Typically in the vicinity of 12–16 small-to-medium dishes. Most recipes I have cooked for the first time ever, with this being my third year performing this dinner concept.
The rest of this post details through the dishes that I cooked this year and the prep work that was involved, with some pictures to show along the way. Hope you enjoy this as much as I did!
Preparations
My recipe books for this year
My very first Japanese dishes probably started from a Japanese-Finnish cookbook from the 80s. But it really took off when my wife bought me Phaidon's Japan The Cookbook. From there, I really started investing into Japanese cuisine. This year I have used recipes from six books in all. The recipes are measured for different audiences (ranging from 2 to 6 sometimes) depending a bit on the book. I had to re-scale most of the recipes and their ingredients for 4 people. Cue some whiteboard action.
My planning whiteboard
During the first two years, I found it a good idea to detail what are all the food ingredients that I have to buy. Due to the simplicity of Japanese cuisine, there is a lot of overlap in ingredients! This means that you want to map out the totals of ingredients that you are going to have to stock up on. For example, you tend to need a lot of dashi and soy sauce. This year, different fishes ended up being the heavy hitters.
For those wondering about my usage of the whiteboard here, I have (lazily) tried looking for an app that would manage all of this for me and combine the totals for me. I have yet to find a perfect app for my use case. I've tried ReciMe. However, I was not a fan of it. Physical whiteboard + Reminders (on iOS) is still a killer combo in 2025. YMMV.
Kitchen prep notes
Based on last couple years, I learned that even if I wanted to retain the prima vista aspect of the dinner concept, I needed to at least read the "notes" once and translate them from English to Finnish. Transcribing and summarizing the recipes in Finnish was key for success this year. This allowed me to execute the recipe with more ease and improvise in situations where I didn't have the time to open up the book. The whole idea of this night was to learn new recipes and taste it together with your friends, hence the R&D nature of this dinner concept.
Prep work ahead of dinner
It's mentionworthy that the notes included which plating a particular dish should be prepared with. This was an improvement from last year where I ran out of suitable dishware and had to improvise. All of this made it easier for me to keep company while cooking (an overlooked requirement of a hobbyist izakaya chef!).
Drinks corner
I asked my friend to get some ice and some drinks. It turned out to be a great idea to delegate the roles of cooking and preparing drinks to two different people, with mixed drinks based off of Suntory Whisky, Japanese Shochu, and Umeshu. My friend of course went all-in on this as you can see from the above picture, with enough drinks to inebriate a barful of people. To my absolute lack of surprise, nobody complained.
Menu with (surprisingly accurate) time estimate
This year I wanted to try out time estimation. It held up surprisingly well actually. There was not a lot to be done for the mains this year, some frying mainly. I had also prepared good instructions in advance. Maybe I also had more experience. Oh, and less deep frying! All of this definitely helps to keep the estimates manageable.
After all of the preparations, it was time to start cooking.
Snacks and starters
Lotus chips, from Tokyo Cult Recipes
Pictured above are two lotuses cut up with a mandoline slicer and deep fried over canola oil. Overall, as a potato chips enthusiast, I enjoyed the taste & texture of lotus in this format. My only mistake was not doing more than this.
Deep frying in action
For this year, I bought a Japanese deep frying pot with a thermometer. Being able to measure the temperature actively is a game changer, y'all. Strong recommendation.
Hamachi over shiso (above), Salmon roe over grated daikon (latter from Japan The Cookbook)
One of the more aesthetic dishes that day was the hamachi sashimi. I layered four slices of hamachi over a shiso leaf and sprinkled lemon rind & zest on top. I was very pleased with the taste and presentation overall. It was also purely improvised, so I was pretty happy how it turned out.
The salmon roe was served with chilled sake and the roe itself was delicious. However, the daikon underneath was very wet and noticeable. Will have to revisit this.
Nori tsukudani with wasabi, from Tokyo Izakaya
This mämmi-textured, barleyesque taste went down better once I told my guests to chug a beer together with this. Very exquisite taste! Could consider experimenting with, for example, by combining yuzu into the nori tsukudani (it is just cooked nori sheets with some basic ingredients) or by adding a piece of lemon to the dish.
By the way, pardon the potato quality zoom-in to this dish, at times we just forgot to take high quality photos of the food and focused on eating instead.
Tosa vinegar-marinated tomatoes, from Tokyo Izakaya
Up next, I was serving tomatoes. I wanted to make sure that I was using the best tomatoes in town. I also wanted to use mini tomatoes for this as they are sweeter, are easier to eat, and you don't have to eat the all of the tomato in one go. In the end, I went with Finnish Nams tomatoes. This was served together with umeshu spritz.
Preparing the tosa vinegar marinade
What really brought this serving together was the sourness of the tosa vinegar marinade, the umaminess of the tomato, and the sweetness of the umeshu spritz. It was definitely my favorite dish of the night.
King oyster mushroom sautéed in soy-garlic butter (left), Nori tsukudani potatoes, from The Real Japanese Izakaya cookbook
I had planned to cook two separate mushroom dishes and serve those together. I chickened out at the last minute and ended up serving just the king oysters, with far too few to serve. As fate would have it of course, my guests declared this the best dish thus far.
The potatoes infused with nori tsukudani & butter were served alongside. They were... okay. One problem was that I had prepped them too much in advance (and placed them under a foil) when they should have been served immediately. Will have to revisit.
Tarutaru, from Tokyo Cult Recipes
This was the last entrée before the main courses. It was a salmon tartar infusing shiso, nori, mirin, etc. It was supposed to be made from tuna, unfortunately I had not visited the fish shop well in advance for the shop keepers to thaw some of that tuna for me. So, in the end, I went with Scottish salmon which was fatty enough for my purposes. This was a great entrée with an izakaya feel to it.
Mains
The main courses offering very meat-heavy, starting out with some marinated chicken, and finishing off with a fusion salmon dish slowly cooked in shio koji, herbs, and olive oil, with two pork courses in the middle. The nice thing about all of these were that they were quite easy to make. Deep frying always takes quite a bit of lead time with preparations and warming up, but I managed to make it work with a strategic sauna break.
Scallops with daikon and mayonnaise, a Japanese salad, from Tokyo Cult Recipes
Hotate salad is a Japanese classic. We've made potato salad for the last couple years now, so I thought it was time for a change of sub-scenery. It was really easy to make this salad, especially using a mandoline slicer. My guests also kept hyping this up afterwards. Will have to try this again, maybe I'll also remember to use my decorative-edible flowers which I forgot this time!
Marinading the chicken with simple ingredients
My next dish was an easy one to make, but it required some prep work. I marinated chicken breast using sake lees and the usual suspects (soy sauce, mirin, etc.). This ended up being an exquisite take on the ordinary chicken and made the prep work worth it. It was also my first time trying out sake kasu (sake lees). A very fun marinade ingredient that could lend itself into other recipes as well.
Sake kasu chicken, sautéed and flambéed & celery, from Tokyo Izakaya
Once again, scant offering, but so, so good. Worth revisiting another day.
Salad, with vinegar-and-sichuan-pepper pickling, from Tokyo Cult Recipes
Salad sides are always a must during an izakaya dinner. This time I went with pickled things. There's a kind of a running gag at work where our lunch restaurant's grated carrot is praised. This was my take on grated carrot (resorting to julienning instead) and cucumber, with a spicy pickling to top it off. However, I think I didn't use enough spices to make it really punch. Will have to iterate more.
Yuzu-miso marinated Iberico pork cheek, sautéed on a grilling pan, from Street Food Japan (Finnish book only)
For the second marinated main course, I used pork and yuzu-miso marinade. The marinade gave the meat a piquant taste, which was made even more delicious by using quality-grade Iberico meat. I was a bit surprised when visiting a local butchery / meat shop did not have this kind of quality Iberico meat, I actually had to pick this meat from a local hypermarket's freezer.
Marinading the pork
Yuzu kosho katsu, from Japanese Soul Cooking
Yuzu kosho is pickled chili and yuzu that absolutely works in between pork when breaded and deep-fried. This dish was definitely a crowd pleaser and a great snack after sauna.
By this point, we had reached peak meatiness, all cylinders were firing... almost! Compared to last year, people still wanted to eat. Limiting the plate sizes and seconds had definitely helped me, but had it helped me a bit too much? Luckily, I had a couple more tricks up my sleeve.
Shio koji salmon slow-poached in olive oil, served with white bread, from The Real Japanese Izakaya cookbook
Nothing like a fusion dish combining Italian and Japanese cuisine. What made this Japanese was of course the shio koji that I spread all over this fatty fish along with other herbs and spices like garlic and thyme etc. Here the recommendation was also to use tuna, but as that was not an option, I ended up using salmon. I topped this by serving some well-crusted, fresh white bread from a local bakery. And the result was prime goodness. Warm recommendation!
Shime: the final course
Ochazuke, rice served with marinated fish and hot dashi soup, from The Real Japanese Izakaya cookbook
Shime is the last course in a multi-course izakaya meal. Typically it is something starchy: either rice, noodles, or bread. This time I chose ochazuke, a rice-heavy dish which combines fish and soup (typically hot green tea or dashi) together in a bowl. This dish definitely brought everyone's hunger levels down. No seconds were needed! For the fish, I used leftover hamachi, and I had maybe way too little of it, wish I had had just like 200g more. Taste was great though, as the fish was marinated using a tahini-soy-based marinade.
Final words
A close-up of blanched and peeled tomatoes
It was a physically demanding night! I managed to cook 15 courses during that day. My time estimates had held up, I also did not run out of any ingredients this time. I also did not have too many leftovers. Apart from the mushrooms, the scaled recipes held up pretty well. Feedback I got was that the quality was consistent, however there were some complaints of being hungry (at least until I offered the starchy ochazuke). Having recipes that did not have too much complexity in terms of steps (or recipes that could be prepared well in advance) helped with that consistency, but also limiting the number of "seconds" probably contributed to the occasional hungriness level of my guests. It was all good in the end, luckily, but something to consider next year.
Ultimately, I did feel the night was very meat-heavy this year. This should probably be the focus of next few years, to achieve a more perfect balance†. It's also important to keep in mind the idea behind this dinner concept: to get ever closer to real Japanese cuisine together with my friends, to be able to experiment with many kinds of different dishes, and to rekindle my memories of Japan through food.
Until next year!
† For what it's worth, I have already made a small promise to myself to explore the recipes from my vegan Japanese recipe books. More on this later, perhaps!