Chik's Crib

25 January 2026

Wakayama: Osaka In Autumn 2026, Part 2

Travel January 25, 2026 0

We took a long train ride down from Amanohashidate to Wakayama. Wakayama is a peninsula that boasts of unfettered nature and the historical Kumano Kodō pilgrimage route. I envisioned ancient temples, stretches of countryside and small towns. So as we exited Wakayama station, I wasn't expecting to come face to face with a Louis Vuitton store. It’s quite the bustling city centre!

But as we collected our rental car and drove away from the city centre, orchards and other farmland gradually came into view.

We swopped landscapes of large orange globes of persimmon in Amanohashidate for the smaller mikan (Japanese tangerines) of Wakayama.

As we passed towns and the plots of farmland, we stopped intermittently along interesting spots to stretch our legs. We bought a box of mikan (2kg for 900 yen) from Morimoto Farm 森本農園, whose owner was a bit surprised to receive tourists.

We explored Momijidani Teien Garden and Wakayama Castle. The gardens are free to enter despite the signage, and a couple was taking wedding pictures as we came.

We also stopped at Bandoko Garden, a private garden by the coast.

Despite the reviews of people who visited Taniino Orchards 谷井農園, it seemed like most people don’t. The staff were really, really surprised to see us turn up. Most of their customers just order their mikan drinks online, as we later learnt.

There’s no sign posts or storefront to speak of, just a small quiet unnamed building in the corner, sun-kissed mikan trees in the soil, and not a single person to be found anywhere. We walked up the pavement to the strong sweet whiffs of cooking fruits, which came across almost caramel-like. There’s definitely some activity going on here. We poked around the ground floor of the building, but it was devoid of any people. The lights were on but there was nobody home. So where was the smell coming from?

We rather hesitantly climbed the stairs to the second floor (with flashbacks of Uketsu’s Strange Houses dancing in my head), and we found the most incongruent scene: a modern office with a lot of people in formal office-wear. Huh. Our unplanned presence threw everybody into a bit of a tizzy. It’s not a fruit shop/juice joint after all. It’s more like their head office. There was a bit of language barrier as well, but they finally understood that we just dropped by to buy a couple of bottles of their Mikan juices. They graciously invited us in to sit inside and wait while they fetch some bottles for us.

Each bottle costs about $10 USD (!!) and is about 100ml. Is this one of those Japanese things that’s meant to be gifted to business partners? It’s great, but the cost is really steep for personal consumption.

We drove on until the next town of Tanabe, where we took a lunch break. The breaded pork cutlet at Yoshihei Inari was terrific. The breaded exterior is wonderfully crisp and - surprisingly - even fluffy.

We visited Senjojiki Rock Plateau (千畳敷), Sandanbeki Cave and Hashiguiiwa Rocks before arriving at Hotel Urashima for the night.

Senjojiki Rock Plateau (千畳敷)

The main draw of Hotel Urashima is their onsen, some of which runs in the caverns under the hotel and on the beach. It was a pretty cool experience, but truthfully, our experience in these onsen were mid at best. It was pretty crowded with many other guests, and the onsen was quite dated. And somehow, there were mosquitos. I prefer my onsen experience to be more peaceful and clean.

While the rooms were decent and large (they were newly furbished), the rest of the hotel also did show its age.

We got up early the next morning to get to Nachi Falls, the Seiganto-ji Temple and the Kumano-Nachi Grand Shrine. We had to wake early to beat the crowd, but this was worth our effort.

The entrance ticket is a piece of token that you can keep with you.

A fountain under the waterfall allows you to take a sip from the waterfall with a sakazuki.

Over at the Grand Shrine, you write out a wish on a wooden token and carry it through a hollowed-out tree.

We stopped by Ōyunohara Sanctuary on our loop of Wakayama. The largest tori gate in Japan, Kumano Hongu Taisha Otorii, is on the sanctuary grounds.

Nearby is 宮ずし, a sushi lunch spot. It was another good meal. The sushi’s fresh as usual, and the seared Kumamo beef was well-marbled and melted in our mouths even when served chilled.

The last stop in our Wakayama itinerary was the town of Koyasan (Mount Koya), and we reached just after lunch around 3pm. It’s a pretty large town, with several temples in the area. The most well-known one is probably the head temple Kongobu-ji.

And in the cemetery Okuno-in, where we took a quiet evening walk, we came across the final resting place of Nobunaga Oda. Anyone who had spent as much of their childhood playing Samurai Warriors (as I did) would need no introduction to him.

After all the driving around we did on the empty roads, this would have been a nice town to set up for the night, especially when some of the temples are offering a stay. It would have been quite the cultural experience.

If I could do one thing over again, it would be to tour Wakayama over three days instead of two. We optimistically (foolishly) thought that 4 hours of driving per day is manageable. It turned out to be quite a punishing schedule. Daylight was already in short supply in autumn, and we had to rush from attraction to attraction. And despite our best efforts to avoid driving at the night, we had to navigate through the mountains after sunset.

On our way down the mountains, we had quite a bit of a nerve-wrecking experience on a single lane, involving another car coming in the opposite direction while navigating a sharp turn with no roadside barriers between the road and empty air. We eventually inched our cars past each other, with our side mirrors folded in and my front car tyre precipitously close to the edge.

It was a road as narrow as this, but late at night, along a 100 degrees bend, with no barrier and with another car trying to make its way past you too.

Not a single person in the history of humankind had ever said to be pleased to see gridlock - except me. When we finally got down the mountains and into Nara city’s traffic, I felt immense relief at the familiar sights of city traffic once again.

Our rental Toyota Aqua shone here in the mountains. It was a wonderful car powerful enough to get us through the incline. And as a hybrid, its fuel economy was unreal: a 3/4 tank of petrol got us the 5 full days of driving going through mountainous terrains of Wakayama and Nara. And thank goodness for its small size: when our car was inching past another car on a single lane, I don't think a car larger than ours could've made it.

Wakayama was a wonderful experience, despite our scheduling mishaps. In future, I wouldn't schedule driving more than 2-3 hours per day. For people planning to visit Wakayama, this is one place where you would need to allocate more than 48 hours to see the best of this wonderful peninsula.

11 January 2026

Ine and Amanohashidate: Osaka In Autumn 2026, Part 1

Travel January 11, 2026 0

It's autumn. Bright orange globes of persimmon, hanging on gnarled branches, can be found almost everywhere we look in Amanohashidate. There are persimmon trees at every street corner. Loose persimmons - both Fuyu and Hachiya - sit unattended in small baskets outside storefronts, with a small sign indicating how much they were being sold for. As night falls, we bought two small sacks of persimmons at a pharmacy, and a kindly pharmacy staff brought us out of the store to show us how locals would hang the fruit out on their balconies to sun-dry. I'd forgotten how much the Japanese prides themselves on going ahead and beyond on their services, especially to slightly-hapless foreigners.

The sandbar is the most striking landmark of Amanohashidate, a swatch of land that cuts through the Miyazu Bay to connect both halves, and affectionately called the "Bridge to Heaven". We walked through the windswept sandbar. One side of the bay, enclosed by land, was calm and still; the other, wild and turbulent. The shrubbery were almost bent over from how relentless the winds were.

There's also a bridge to the sandbar Shotenkyo that swivels around in the waters to let boats through. I feel that it's not talked about enough online.

There are chairlift services on both sides of the sandbar, and we took a ride on both to get to the hills overlooking the town. The southern chairlift has superior views, and costs 2000 yen, even for people like us holding a 2-day Amanohashidate-Ine pass (which came together with a 5-day JR Pass). The northern one is free for pass-holders, though the view was only partial.

Toss a ceramic token through the hoop, and your wishes will come true

It’s a sweet little town, and rather quiet despite the presence of a few tourist buses. We arrived in the late morning and subsided on roasted chestnuts and fish cakes turning over an electric grill by the side of a road. The chestnut soft and sweet, are almost like sweet potato in terms of texture and sweetness. There are a few shrines and temples in the area, including Motoise Kono Jinja, the first shrine of Japan.

This town requires an early start to your day, especially in autumn and winter when the days grow short. By 1pm, our designated lunch place(s) had either ran out of food, or were full and no longer accepting walk-ins. Don’t expect restaurants - except for a couple - to be open at dinner time too (Google map’s opening hours may not be reliable here). We were caught a bit flat-footed when the sun set at 5 in the evening, and we were on the opposite side of the sandbar from our hotel. We hung around for a bit longer, hoping to go a restaurant that was meant to open at 6. But 6 came and went and the restaurant remained dark. We finally decided to find dinner elsewhere. We hooved it back across the sandbar at night, which was an hour’s walk that the grocery store clerk did not recommend. But we were out of options - there’s no public bus was available (on Google Map) and the ferry service had also stopped by 5pm as well. It was surprising how fast the town emptied out by nightfall.

We made a few detours to other restaurants that were meant to be open but not, and we finally arrived famished on the doorsteps of 310. But there’s a silver lining to it: this is perhaps one of the best fine-dining meals that we’ve had in Japan.

We did not expect such a restaurant in a small town, but here it was. I need to gush about this restaurant for a bit. It was run by a couple. The food was bold and delicate in equal measure. Every dish came with a change of dinnerware (with each piece handmade by an artisan in Kyoto, tyvm). Between the two of them, they handled the entire dining experience top to bottom with no lapse in service. How did they do it?

My favourite was the Steamed Fish with Sake and Garlic (above, picture). The fish fillet was seasoned, breaded and fried, and then steamed. Each bite was incredibly meaty.

A thick slice of daikon with an accompanying yuzu sauce was served as an appetiser with the cover charge, was one of the best things I’ve eaten on this trip.

Vegetable dishes were cooked to excellence here. A humble bowl of assorted vegetables, beautifully presented and each steamed to perfection.

Because it was snow crab season, we also got the crab in claypot rice. That, alongside their Pork Rib mains, was definitely overkill for just a table of two. But it had been a long day for us: we had an early morning train ride to this town, we bounced around restaurant to restaurant the entire day trying to find something to eat, and finally walked over 23k steps in just one afternoon. We were famished, and we ate every grain of rice and every scrap of vegetable and meat.

We retired back to the hotel finally sated. The hotel foot bath overlooking the bay was a godsend. We rolled up our pants in the cold air, stepped in, plonked ourselves down on the bench and decompressed there.

The perks of living next to the sea is the abundance of seafood. We had free-flow salmon roe and sashimi in a soy sauce marinade, served as part of the hotel breakfast. My breakfast was a self-made chirashi don overflowing with ikura. There's also sashimi, which I'd added to my don after taking this picture.

And of course, a trip to Amanohashidate would not be complete without going into Ine. We took the bus up north, sharing it with a few students who were all headed to school in another town, and reached Ine within an hour.

Took a sightseeing boat out to the bay and watched the seagulls.

It was the town of turquoise ocean and red sake. The renowned, elusive Ine Mankai is from here, and we stopped by the sake brewery Mukai Shuzo. This delightfully pink sake was served at the 2019 G20 summit, and was made using wild red rice. It’s produced in such small quantities that bottles are entirely sold out within months, even in Ine itself. My sister-in-law who visited in April couldn’t find a bottle anywhere. Luckily, our trip was more fruitful, and we snagged bottles not just from the brewery (only 300ml bottles available), but also from a shop deeper into town.

A broad single lane runs through the coastal town, which was enough to service the entire town.

It was raining the entire time we were in Ine, sometimes heavier, sometimes lighter, but throughout. The drizzle added to the atmosphere of the small fishing village, and a small foldable umbrella kept both of us mostly dry.

Persimmons hung on window sills and balconies out to dry in the sun.

The brewery does not host tastings or tours. We had the sake: it tastes of red fruits on a background of grain notes. It’s overall quite an umami taste. Perhaps not everybody’s cup of tea, but pretty remarkable. Get them while they last!

27 December 2025

Charcoal Series: How to Have a Grill Party 101

Charcoal Series December 27, 2025 0

My ideal barbecue doesn’t involve anyone (me) standing over the grill for hours while everybody else sit at a table waiting for the food. I want to sit and eat too! I want the food to be hot and fresh (of course), but I also want to be tucking in alongside everyone else. It’s possible. Let’s get started from the top.

Your Equipment

I have a Weber Kettle Grill from Amazon. It is a beginner-friendly grill and a jack-of-all-trades. From grilling to smoking, it can do it all. It’s also one of the most popular grills ever produced, which means that for any issues that you run into, there’s a legion of people on Reddit or YouTube who had already came across - and solved - all these problems before.

A meat thermometer is essential for your cook: it saves you money a hundred times over in all the meats that you didn’t overcook. It saves you the time that you’d have otherwise wasted if you burn a cook. It saves you from the uncertainty of prodding at the meat and wondering if it’s cooked through. When in doubt, follow the FDA guidelines.

If you look at all my pictures, you can see the meat thermometer probes. Mine comes with 4 probes. There's one probe in each meat, and then one more to measure the grill temperature.

How to Arrange your Charcoal

Two-zone fire, with the meats being smoked on the cooler side of the grill.

A two-zone fire is the default for cooks shorter than 3 hours. All the charcoal is on one-half of the grill. Zilch on the other side. You cook your food on the cooler side (‘cool’ being a relative term, because it’s still pretty darn hot). When the internal temperature comes up to target, you sear it over direct heat for about a minute or so. If something is cooking a little too fast on the outside, you slide it a little more over to the cooler side so it can cook more gradually.

For huge cuts of meats planned for a long smoke (3-8 hours), a Snake Method can be used to provide hours and hours of low temperature cooking. It’s a little beyond today’s scope, but there’s a terrific video by America Test Kitchen on this topic, and I’ve used it successfully for pork shoulders.

You will often be asked to cover the grill with the lid to keep all the meat basting in the lovely smoke. The vents on the lid should be positioned on the opposite side of the burning charcoal, so the smoke flows past the meat on its way up.

Getting Charcoal

There are two main types of charcoal for a barbecue: lump or briquettes. Both are fine for a two-zone fire setup.

Lump Charcoal

Lump charcoal is my default for a two-zone fire. It burns hotter than briquettes, but also burns out quicker. I get my charcoal from FYRO, which is a great product. The charcoals are large enough to keep burning for up to three hours (some go roughly up to the size of my forearm). It’s also (largely) smokeless, easily available online, and has great customer service. I once ordered the wrong sort of charcoal, a mistake that was entirely my fault. They graciously gave me a refund and came by my house to collect the 10kg bag back. 10/10 recommended.

Briquettes arranged in the Snake Method

Briquettes burn longer and more steadily, but the temperatures may not reach the heights of lump charcoal. It’s still more than adequate for a two-zone fire. I exclusively use briquettes for the Snake Method for long hours of smoking, but that’s because lighting a whole lot of Kingsford briquettes for a two-zone fire produces such thick intense smoke that I’m sure gives my neighbours grief. Maybe it’s because I’m using Kingsford briquettes? Fyro has its version of briquettes, which it promises to be smokeless. I’ll like to try that as soon as I’m done with the 40kg of Kingsford briquettes I bought (In hindsight, bulk-buying perhaps isn’t always wise).

Fantastic Wood Chunks and When To Add Them

I don’t routinely use wood chunks. I only do so if I’m intending to add the fragrance of smoke to my foods (as opposed to just grilling over high heat with charcoal.) The recipes that you follow will tell you if you are meant to add wood chunks. Common wood sources are hickory, apple, cherry, oak, pecans and mesquite. Any wood would do for a Weber grill; most people can’t reliably tell the difference. I use hickory from Weber.

Having A Drip Tray

Some recipes ask for a disposable aluminum tray placed next to the charcoal bed and right under the meats to collect drippings. Poultries like duck or chicken produce quite a lot of drippings and you would want a tray underneath - you certainly wouldn’t want the drippings to mix with the ashes and gunk up your grill! In other smoking recipes (for large cuts of pork, lamb or beef), some recipes may have you add boiling water to the drip tray for a gentler and moisture-laden cooking environment.

You may be tempted to add chopped potatoes or root vegetables to saturate in the drippings, but in my (limited) experience, they wouldn’t be exposed to enough heat to cook fully. The potatoes just dry up.

Lighting Charcoals (aka Am I The Bad Neighbour?)

As mentioned, I use lump charcoal for a two-zone fire. I form the charcoals into a large stack and then light a couple of chimney starters within it. (See this FYRO video here on how to do it, at the risk of sounding like a FYRO shill. I promise I'm not paid to plug their products!)

I stack charcoal about 3-5 pieces high, with some of the largest charcoals placed directly at the top where the heat is the strongest. It’s okay if the charcoals are stacked too high for the food grill to fit above it - we’ll break down the charcoal stack after the charcoals are ignited. The most important thing is to have enough charcoal lit. You can turn down the vents on the Weber grill to bring down the temperature of a too-hot grill; it’s takes far longer to add more charcoal to bring up the temperature.

I usually use two fire starters; one starter is just far too slow. I also place the burning fire starters on a small piece of charcoal, because otherwise the fire starters will disintegrate as they burn and fall through the grates after a few minutes.

Briquettes are easy to ignite with a chimney starter. Fill it up with briquettes then light a couple of fire starters under the chimney. (I imagine even tealight candles would work.) You can have a whole chimney starter’s worth of lit briquettes within an hour, but a chimney works even if you need just a dozen (~10 or so) to start your Snake Method. For some reason, a chimney starter doesn’t seem to work with lump charcoal.

Give yourself one hour to arrange your charcoal and to ignite them. Really.

Starting Your Cook: Indirect Heat

For two-zone fire, the charcoal should be arranged and ignited 2 hours before your guests arrive. It takes an hour for the charcoal to begin to light up, and another hour to smoke the first batch of meat - so they'll be ready just in time for dinner.

Give yourself an hour to arrange and ignite the charcoal. After the first hour (on the second hour), the fire starter should have all burnt out. Some of the charcoal would have been ignited and be burning white, but the fire would be unlikely to have spread throughout the entire charcoal bed. That's fine! You should still be getting some good heat. From this point, the burning charcoal will take another 45 minutes to an hour to spread to the rest of the charcoal. You can use the time to cook some meats over indirect heat (on the cooler side of the grill). Do not cook directly over the charcoal. Because of how the charcoal is stacked up, there will still be too many uneven hotspots for direct grilling.)

Unstack the top part of the charcoal just enough for the food grill to fit over the charcoal stack (no need to level the charcoal stack entirely. You want to keep as much of the charcoal stack intact for the existing heat within to continue lighting up the rest of the charcoals). Oil the food grill with a thick napkin dapped in a neutral oil, let the grill heat up slightly, then swivel the grill so the warmer part of the grill that was over the charcoals is now on the cooler side of the grill. Place your meats on the cooler half (over the half of the grill that was previously over the hot charcoal), then let the food cook gently.

What sort of food should you be cooking at this stage? This low heat is ideal for a few recipes. As the fire and heat gradually builds up over the next hour, you may want to reverse-sear some steaks. In reverse sear, you cook the steaks gently at 120C for about 30 minutes to an hour, which is just about the time the charcoal needs to get ready. The grill temperature would likely climb much higher than 120C over the cook, but that’s alright. You can move the steaks a little further away from the charcoal, or just flip it over halfway to ensure even cooking. I wouldn’t fuss too much on the temperature climbing above 120C.

There’s nothing quite as grand as pulling out a thick tomahawk steak from your grill.

Other great options are smoked chicken, either whole chickens or chicken thighs. Smoked chicken thighs are honestly some of the best things I’ve pulled off my grill. The difference between oven-baked chickens and smoked off-the-grill chickens is like day and night. If you want to serve both smoked poultry and steaks but only have space for one on the grill, I’ll put the chicken on the grill and stick the steak in an oven.

Once the meat is thoroughly cooked (when the inside temperature has come up to target temperature. You ARE using a thermometer, aren’t you?), I would transfer them to the hot side of the grill for direct grilling for a brief minute or two before serving. If you timed it right, you should be ready to serve the food just as your guests arrive. If you like.

If I have time, what I prefer to do instead is to remove the smoked meats from the grill just after the internal temperature has come up to target, before the direct grilling step. I’ll leave them to rest at room temperature, and get cooking on other dishes meant for direct grilling (see below for examples). When more people arrive, I’ll return these precooked smoked meats to the grill for the 1-2 minutes of direct heat, and then serve them. That way, you can rush out a couple of kilos of cooked meat almost on demand.

Starting Your Cook: Direct Heat (Grilling)

Before starting direct grilling, you would want to fully break down the burning charcoal stacks and spread the charcoal evenly over half of the grill to avoid any hot spots.

The type of food to cook at this stage would be those that cooks rapidly over high heat, such as thin steaks, hamburger patties and pizzas. Yes, pizzas!

Ending the Cook

When you’re done grilling, cover the grill with the lid, making sure to close both the top and bottom vents. This will smother the burning charcoal. After the charcoal bed cools down overnight, you can salvage unburnt charcoal for your next barbecue.

Contingency Plans (How to Cook EVEN MORE Food For Your Barbecue)

It’s possible to start smoking huge cuts of meat first thing in the morning (via Snake Method), then transit to a two-fire zone for the actual barbecue. A Weber Grill can handle a full brisket (~7-8kg), or perhaps a combination of beef cuts and/or pork would suit a party menu better. This is possible, though it is quite a chore. If I’m fussing over a grill for most of the day, I would be too gassed out to socialise afterwards.

What I prefer is to hold a simple hotpot alongside a barbecue. A hotpot gives your guests something to occupy their minds and hands with as you barbecue. In the best-case scenario where nothing goes wrong with the grill, your guests feel useful and everybody gets a bowl of flavourful soup alongside what you have grilled. In the worst-case scenario where there are unexpected delays with grilling, there’s at least something hot for people to eat and drink. Imagine you’re hosting a Kaiseki.

And that brings me to the most important point of them all:

Relax

A grill is a heat source. So is an oven, or a home stove, or an air-fryer.

Cooking things over a charcoal stack is not special. People have been cooking food over a fire long before any one of us came along. Even as you’re manning a grill, you’re allowed to use the rest of the kitchen.

Take a deep breath and read the last part of the sentence again. Say it to yourself when you’re in the middle of a cook and the charcoals are not behaving like you want it to.

You’re allowed to use the rest of the kitchen.

It’s okay to sear the steaks over the stove. Or finish undercooked meats in the oven. Or cook the Portobello in the airfryer instead. The size of your grill may sometimes simply not be large enough to handle all the food that needs to be cooked.

Sometimes it rains. Sometimes the grill temperature just remains stubbornly low. Or too high. It happens to all of us.

You’re allowed to use the rest of the kitchen.

Now go and get ‘em, Tiger.