I’d wanted to rent a bike and get a proper look around the city of Izumi, but after drinking too much on the first night, there was no way I could manage it.
I wanted to go somewhere with hot water — an onsen, a public bath, anything — and soak the tiredness out. But there was nothing like that near Izumi Station. The nearest onsen was a 30 to 40 minute taxi ride away. So I gave up on that and decided to just rest properly in my hotel room. Or that was the plan, anyway.
Then — there was a large spider by the head of the bed.
It’s not like I’ve never seen a spider before. I run into them at home fairly often. When I find one, I tend not to kill it. I scoop it up with a flyer or a notebook and move it out the window.
But this one was big. Big enough to get my heart going a little. I thought about how to get it out of the room. In the end I tried a few different things, all of which failed, and when the spider happened to climb onto the curtain, I stuck the end of the curtain out the window and shook it hard until the spider was gone.
This took a lot more time and energy than you’d think.
:: Fifty Years in Business — Ajidokoro Uomatsu, an Izumi Institution
Only after the battle with the spider could I lie down on the bed for a bit. Then, when I started to get hungry, I headed back out into central Izumi for dinner.
The alleys of Izumi at that hour, with the sun just dipping, were really lovely. But I had no energy left, so I couldn’t walk them and take pictures.
I made my way to a restaurant I’d looked up in advance. Not far from the hotel. It’s on the same alley as BASE&Co., where I’d been drinking until late the night before. The place is called Ajidokoro Uomatsu(味処魚松).
Ajidokoro means something like “a place of good taste,” a good restaurant. So you can just take the name as Uomatsu.
When I said I was one person, they told me to sit at the counter. First I ordered imo-shochu, soda-wari style. What came wasn’t a single glass but a whole go, as you can see in the photo. And they brought a glass of ice and the soda water separately. The make-it-yourself style.
I wasn’t in great shape that day, so I couldn’t finish that first go of shochu.
Oh, and next to the counter there were flowers congratulating them on fifty years in business. This year makes fifty, apparently. So it must be a fairly well-known restaurant here in Izumi.
The reason I came to Uomatsu was to eat the Izumi Oyako Steak Gohan(いずみ親子ステーキごはん).
Izumi is the most famous place in Kagoshima Prefecture for chicken, remember? And in 2019 and 2020, two years running, it was apparently number one in all of Japan for egg production.
To serve that famous, delicious Izumi chicken to visitors, well-known restaurants in the city got together and developed a menu — that’s the Izumi Oyako Steak Gohan.
Oyako-don(親子丼) is the parent-and-child rice bowl, right — the one using chicken and egg. They seem to have played off that name.
It’s literally a spread of various dishes made from chicken and egg. Since there are so many dishes to lay out, you can’t eat it at the counter, so I moved to a table.
Only three restaurants in the whole city of Izumi serve this menu, apparently. Having actually eaten it, the value is outstanding. A complete course from appetizer to dessert for just 1,800 yen.
It starts with a grilled chicken salad. The texture was chewy so I assumed it was thigh, but looking at it now it also looks like breast. Breast that could be mistaken for thigh — that’s even more impressive, isn’t it?
The jelly on top is soy sauce jelly, so you eat it together as a sauce. It was much better than I expected, which surprised me.
Next was a cold soup made with egg. Here too, the nuttiness dominated over any eggy smell, and the taste was clean.
Since it’s a spread rather than a course, they set out the dessert along with everything else. And down on the right is that famous Izumi egg.
They call it the Izumi Lucky Egg(いずみラッキーたまご) because the odds of a double yolk are so high. As you’ll see in a later photo, mine really did come out a double yolk, which surprised me.
Right, and this is the main event, the Izumi-dori steak.
They give you three thick pieces each of Izumi-dori thigh and breast. It looks like they were shaped and frozen after deboning. As you grill them on the plate, the parts where the bone was removed open up a little.
You eat the grilled chicken dipped in three kinds of sauce. I liked the one on the far left that looks like teriyaki sauce. Probably because I was tired. Normally I’d have gone for the salt.
Anyway, the breast isn’t dry and the thigh has a good chew to it. Each cut is good in its own different way.
Ah, but this steak has one problem.
You do have to have a flame going on the table. Which makes it hot to eat in summer.
As I put the last piece of meat on the grill, I asked for the rice and soup.
And when I cracked the Izumi Lucky Egg over the rice, it really was a double yolk. Lucky!
I poured the soy sauce over the rice and egg and mixed it well. Making that nutty soy sauce egg rice. Eaten together with the egg soup that came with it, it’s really good.
But I was already so full that I couldn’t finish that rice.
I moved on to dessert with more than half the rice left.
Pudding made with egg again. Come to think of it, every single dish used chicken or egg. That’s why it’s oyako(親子).
But the flavors don’t overlap. That’s the remarkable part. The chicken in the salad and the chicken in the steak taste different from each other. The egg in the soup and the egg in the pudding have different nuances too. And of course the raw egg mixed into the rice tastes different again.
It was literally a spread of all the different dishes and flavors you can make from chicken and egg.
After eating my fill, I felt my condition recovering a bit.
So I took a short walk through Izumi at night. The busiest part of Izumi seems to be around Honmachi(本町), and I was curious what it looked like after dark. I’d meant to walk the night streets, stop for a light drink if I found a decent-looking place, and then head back to the hotel — but that was too much.
It’s still early in the trip. And this time the schedule has me moving to a new city every single day, so I need to save my energy.
So I decided to wrap up day two of the trip like that.
