Hi! Do you like meat??
I know your mouth watering now haha.
One of the main purpose of travel is having local food there, right?
This photo is taken at my favorite yakiniku restaurant, Yakiniku Great in Tokyo(Kanda area). Oh…they have branch in HongKong… I did not know that.
This meat is awesome juicy, tender and very tastety.
Now we are having meat boom all over Japan. There are many new meat dish restaurants catching many gourmet guests. What is meat dish? for example, steak, yakiniku, shabu-shabu etc. I will give you one more shot!
(This meat is big enough… out of grill burner….)
Meet meat at Niku Festival
Not only new restaurants but many “meat” events are held in Japan now.
It’s called “Niku Festival”, which means meat festival. If you google ” Niku Fes”, you can find many festivals information all over Japan. In the festival, you can eat many kinds of meat dishes at reasonable price. I believe you will be surprised how many dishes, how exciting and eye-catching foods and how tastety there are in festival. The biggest event gathered about 420,000 people for 11 days. This is like music festival. Amazing! Unfortunately, there is no English site for Niku festival.
I hope this event will be held overseas some day. I am sure this will be exciting and popular like F1 event.
Why meat booming now?
I think there are some reasons for this meat booming. We Japan have many branded beef like Kobe, Sendai, Matsuzaka beaf. But we import more than half of our beef and pork consumption from US and Australia actually. New regulation with these countries enabled us to import more and better quality meat at more cheaper price. TPP may effect good trend for meat in future.
Also, red meat part of beaf is recently said to be good for health because of high protein though Japanese traditionally eat fish and sea food very often.
Thirdly, recent economic booming might boost beef consumption since beef is more expensive than other meat like chiken and pork. We Japanese spent more money on foods after long-term deflation. Some chain stores at cheap price are suffering big loss these days.
My suggestion
Going to popular tourist spots and fancy restaurant is really nice. However, joining the food festival makes your travel unforgettable.
Next big event will be in Moji Port in Yamaguchi Prefecture at the end of November.
Or you can go to my favorite Yakiniku Great instead of it!
