Traveling in summer means going back and forth between two things: admiring weather and scenery so clear it stings your eyes, and then looking for somewhere cool to dry the sweat running down your face.
Once the sweat cools off a bit, you go find something else to admire, and when the sweat starts again, you look for somewhere cool. That pattern, over and over, is summer travel.
For me today, riding a bike got added into the gaps. A little cooler, and a little more sweat. Plus a bit of the romance a bicycle gives you.
:: Port Town Coffee Roasters, a Cute Cafe on the Akune Coast
I went around all over the Akune coastline. Among those spots, I went to check out Sunset Road, famous for its sunsets — to see what kind of place it was, and whether it was worth coming back at sunset time. I ended up drenched in sweat.
Now it was time to find somewhere cool.
What showed up on my radar was a cafe called Port Town Coffee Roasters(港町珈琲焙煎所).
Just seeing the word “Roasters” in the name, I figured I could trust it. This must be a place that roasts its own beans. If so, the coffee is definitely going to be high quality. Whether it suits my taste is another matter.
When I got there — should I say the cafe was much cuter than I expected? Or more stylish? Either way, it had a different feel from what I’d pictured, and that’s what I liked about it.
A cafe that suited Akune’s clear, sunny weather, I suppose.
I’d stopped in wanting a cold coffee, but looking at the menu, the condensed milk shaved ice made with Akune strawberries caught my eye. I really love shaved ice. Love it enough that I can put away even a huge bowl faster than most people.
So I ordered an iced coffee and the Akune strawberry shaved ice. It was good.
The shaved ice was sweeter than I expected, so it buried a lot of the coffee’s flavor. It made me wonder whether I needed to order coffee at all.
But when the sweetness got tiring and I took a sip of coffee, it rinsed my mouth clean and let me eat the shaved ice faster. So that was the reason the coffee was needed.
:: A French Restaurant Facing the Sea, Minato Restaurant La Bonne Journée
By the time I rode over the hill from Tobashira Natural Park(戸柱自然公園), it was lunchtime. As it happened, there was a restaurant nearby that I’d checked out in advance.
Minato Restaurant La Bonne Journée(みなとれすとらん らぼんじょるね). The name is the French greeting La Bonne Journée, spelled out on the sign as it sounds in Japanese.
I’d noted it down because it’s a place where you can eat a French lunch right by the water, looking out at the harbor. A French restaurant in a rural Japanese port town — that’s a pretty unusual feeling, isn’t it?
The sign, written in hiragana on purpose, is striking. Not only did they not write it in French, they didn’t write it in katakana either. Foreign words are normally written in katakana. I think it was probably a way of expressing that this is a friendly, approachable restaurant.
It was lunchtime, but I was the only customer. Inside, it was cool to the point of being cold. I’d been sweating a lot from cycling, so I liked that a great deal.
There were two lunch options. You choose between fish and chicken.
I picked the fish. I was curious what fish would come out. What kind of fish does a French restaurant in a port town use?
It was a lunch menu with a variety of dishes, but they weren’t served one at a time. Apart from the main fish dish, which came out a little later, almost everything was served all at once.
I started with the soup. It was a chilled cold soup. A soup that used plenty of corn at the peak of its season.
It was so sweet, so nutty, so smooth. After eating this soup, my expectations for the other dishes couldn’t help but rise.
Halfway through the soup, I started tearing off bread and dipping it in. A textbook baguette, crisp outside and moist inside.
The green salad didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary, but I liked that sauce. And the vegetables were fresh.
It seems like nothing, but they’d peeled the skin off the tomatoes. This is a lunch that has no choice but to be cheap, and I liked that they’d done the prep this carefully.
When I first saw it, I couldn’t really guess what the ingredient was, but once I tasted it I could tell. This was an eggplant dish. They’d poured a nutty sesame dressing over it.
Does it mean this is a French restaurant located in Japan? Or that it’s a friendly French restaurant in a port town?
A small plate came out that felt more like something from a Japanese meal than something French. But it didn’t feel out of place.
A very simple cold pasta, and this was really good. It seems like olive oil, salt, and pepper are about all there is to it, but the savoriness was good and the freshness of the olive oil was good too.
And then finally, the main dish: the fish. I asked the chef, and he said it was isaki(伊佐木), chicken grunt.
Wow, so at a restaurant by the sea you can eat chicken grunt too. You couldn’t call it a very expensive fish, but it’s still a fairly high-grade one. And because it lives in warm waters, it’s a fish that’s hard to come by in Korea.
The lightly dried chicken grunt was grilled well. Crisp, springy, and moist.
The sauce underneath was a white wine sauce. It’s salty, which makes it go even better with the fish.
When I finished eating, they cleared the table completely and then brought out dessert.
Three whole items, no less. Pudding, roll cake, and iced coffee. You can swap the coffee for green tea or something else.
The pudding and cake seem to be handmade. Desserts that fit perfectly as the close to a meal that was plain and yet full of care.
The truth is, nothing extraordinary came out. It was soup and salad, a light vegetable dish and pasta, and grilled fish. But these were dishes where you could feel a delicate hand throughout, and they were delicious.
That you can eat a meal made with this much care while looking out at the sea, for only 1,500 yen — it’s hard to believe. It was an excellent-value, satisfying meal. I thanked the chef, a man of few words, several times for the meal.
One more reason to like the city of Akune.
