Chinatown / Yokohama
Yokohama was a bit out of the way, but it was interesting to see how different the Chinatown would be from others that I’ve been to before. I wanted to see what type of Japanese influences existed here. Mostly though, it was fairly unimpressive. I mean, by the size of it, it was a fairly sizeable Chinatown. I suppose the intentions of a good Chinatown where there; they had the dimsum restaurants, Peking duck, and picturesque ancient Chinese style architecture, but it was lacking a bit of the classic Chinese character. Where were all the Chinese people? I didn’t see any. And the people hawking goods- authentic or otherwise? All we saw were uninteresting gift shops. We also didn’t appreciate the pricing – everything seemed excessively expensive.
While walking around and exploring, we decided the only thing worth spending our money on would be the food. Even though we couldn’t fathom normally spending this much money on simple Chinese food, especially having just come from Hong Kong and China.
During our walk, we saw tons of 大包 [da bao], or big hearty meat buns. These things are big, but they’re not worth $4USD. I do appreciate a good steamed bun as much as the next person, and no matter how fluffy the bun is and how savory and meaty the filling is, I am still resentful of it’s price tag. I will give them credit for making them as big as my round face though.
other fillings like veggies and shrimp
piggie buns. literally.
Later, we also walked by this one place that had various types of small eats, like gyoza and 烧卖 [siu mai]. The aroma from their small pork buns demanded our attention and our wallets. Nice crisp bottoms, soft, succulent and warm insides, and sweet unidentified sauces with scallions and sesame on top. Where can you go wrong?
fresh buns
browning the bottoms
More buns in form of the lotus:
Do I really need to tell you that we ended up going to the fresh pork bun shop and getting another order?
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