November 9, 2025 Breakfast - Restaurant Stella in Richmond Hotel. Lunch - Surugaya Restaurant. Dinner - Kushiage Kushinojo
We were given vouchers for the breakfast buffet at the Restaurant Stella in our hotel. It was an extensive spread from sausage and scrambled eggs to miso soup and pickled umiboshi plums.
Scrambled eggs, pork sausages, fried potatoes and fish
I first ate scrambled eggs with baked salmon and mackerel and a cup of miso soup with fresh wakame and tofu.
Then I ate several bowls of pickled burdock. Finally, I ate a bowl of seasoned rice to which an attendant added a small amount of roasted eel and another bowl of miso soup with tofu and wakame and nori.
We met six of the dozen or so members of our tour group and immediately became friendly with Leonard from Detroit and now Santa Fe and Bob now of Penasco. Both had gotten up early and hiked up to the Big Buddhist temple complex. There was also Gerry, a retired architect, and his wife Desiree. As it turned out Gerry was best friends with Harold Eisenman, who I went to camp with when I was thirteen, who is now a retired maritime lawyer and living in Houston.
After breakfast, our group leader, Kazz, who is Japanese, but makes his home in Santa Fe led us to the Narita train station where we boarded a regional train to the countryside and then walked about twenty minutes to Yamato no yu bath house, next to rice fields. It was a rainy day, so we all carried umbrellas provided by the hotel.
Men and women bathed separately in 106.7 degree water. I stayed in an outdoor pool about twenty minutes until the coldness in my joints and around my bones disappeared. That is the sign to me when there is no longer any pain in my joints. We arrived at 10:30 and I dressed and met Suzette in the lobby at 11:45.
My muscles were beginning to weaken from the hot water and walking, so we decided to take a taxi to Surugaya Restaurant in the old center of Narita next to Naritasan Temple. The restaurant was established as an inn in 1798 and now had converted into an eel restaurant. Bob and Leonard joined us. We had to wait about twenty minutes for a table because we did not wish to sit upstairs on the floor. So we walked along the very busy tourist jammed street around 359 Nakamachi, Narita, with its huge gate to the Naritasan Temple and souvenir and food vendors and then returned for a lunch of fresh water eel (unagi) grilled over charcoal and seasoned with an elegant, secret sauce that had the exciting flavor of a BBQ sauce but was not as sweet, heavy, or acidic. In other words the sauce flavored the char-grilled tender eel without interfering with the eel’s delicate flavor or texture. It was an illuminating experience. Also the rice that filled the bottom of the box in which the grilled eel was served was tender and fresh tasting and could be picked up in large bundles with chop sticks.
We were four and we ordered two specials that included a plate of pickled vegetables and all the green tea you wished to drink and an initial cup of broth flavored by a piece of eel liver and a decorated piece of fish cake. It was a lovely broth. Suzette and I also ordered two beers and a bowl of carp and miso soup, which turned out to be a bit excessive. I preferred drinking the matcha green tea with its visible green sediment and the carp soup was tough going with its thick creamy dense miso and the bone filled fillet of carp. I would put the carp and miso soup within the category of historic but requiring an acquired taste, whereas the grilled unagi, was clearly in another category of historic and elegantly gourmet.
Everything was wonderful but what caught my attention was the slice of pickled Daikon that was soft, almost creamy, and tender to the mouth, not the hard crunchy slices I make even when they are paper thin. I will try to find how that soft daikon is prepared. That was my Phil moment of several near Phil moments from bites of warm eel and rice.
After lunch we walked to the temple grounds located next to the restaurant. It was a vast multilayered complex of temples stretching up the hillside. After we reached the second level of four or five, Bob and Leonard, who had already visited the temple walked back to the hotel. Suzette and I continued our visit of the temple until we reached the top and I became sore and tired.
Then we made the long walk back to the hotel that really tired me and pushed me to over 10,000 steps for the day.
When we returned to our room around 3:45 we made cups of hot tea and rested until dinner.
We went to the lobby to meet the group at 6:30. At 6:45 Kazz lead the group to the small intimate Kushiage Kushinojo restaurant about a .3 mile walk up the hill from our hotel. Suzette and I took a taxi.
The restaurant served us about 15 locally produced foods in a variety of preparations from grilled ground chicken kebabs and BBQ’d pork sate to fried battered lotus root and fried giant green asparagus. The next to last dish was a bowl of freshly harvested local rice cooked with fresh small brown beech mushrooms. The meal ended with perhaps the most creative dish, a battered and fried chunk of banana served with a pastry floweret of flavored whipped cream topped with a small bit of chocolate cream in the center on a separate plate. We were served three or four different sakes from chilled 2 liter bottles into small glasses. The most flavorful sake to my taste was an unpasteurized one served near the end of the meal.
Suzette loved her sake glass that had an attractive design celebrating the 2020 sake festival in Narita. The owner was kind enough to sell Suzette one for 300 yen ($2.00).
We then walked home with Deborah and Kazz and I explained how I walk. He was very solicitous to me and really tried to gauge my pace and extent of my ability. Thankfully we were walking downhill and I had a belly full of food and sake, so I made it without stopping, although Suzette and I felt good about our decision to take a taxi the .3 miles uphill to the restaurant, because I was sore from the day’s extensive walking by dinner time.
We went to bed immediately at 9:45 after we returned to the room and drank a final cup of tea.
Today we ate one of the major foods we wanted to try on the trip, grilled fresh water eel (unagi). Our tab for lunch of 10,000 yen ($66.67) felt like a bargain. Bob and Leonard’s complete meal special at 6,600 yen ($22.00 each) was an amazing value, especially considering that we were eating at perhaps the best eel restaurant in Narita.
At dinner I sat beside Deborah, our other tour leader, who told me after my favorable comments about this evening’s dinner, “Wait until tomorrow night. You have just begun to taste amazing food.”
Oh boy.
Bon Appetit
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