Oeshiki Festival: top foods
I've gotta get going, but I wanted to post this first! Briefly, this is a festival that's been happening at this temple for about 750 years now. You can read more about it here. It's to honor the death of the Buddhist monk who founding Honmonji Temple, along with certain chants that people at the time found too stringent. It's a three day long festival, starting with a smaller parade and two streets, culminating on the second day with the neighborhood being closed and more streets with vendors.
There were A LOT of people on the second day, so much so that they had special buses and trains to carry them all in. There was also a good variety of food, from Greek kebabs/gyros, to Korean chapchae, jijimae, and tukbogi. There was also cotton candy, shaved ice, ice cream, fried spaghetti, and churros just to name some non-Japanese items. And of course there were the usual takoyaki, okonomiyaki, yakitori and soba. Since there was so much food, I'm only going to highlight the top two things I ate there.
Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, this tops my list. And trust me, I ate A LOT of food here. They have a lot of gigantic potatoes, which is of course, a rarity in Japan. Here they bake and sautee it a bit in butter. Then, they give you a huge hunk of butter (about 1/3 cup), salt it, corn, and you have the option to add mayo (or at some places, miso). This was delicious obviously because of the butter (my motto is "Butter makes it better!"), but just because it's a classic and simple yet so good. I'm also a huge fan of potato, so win win!
A tie on this list is osakayaki. Pictured here is in it's uncooked form. Osakayaki is basically a snack sized okonomiyaki. Yet it was absolutely wonderful. It was fluffy and tasty but in a more portable size. A definite plus. Close behind was this really good omu-soba (soba in an omelet), but I only have so much room here!