Japanese cuisine guide
Where it comes from
Japanese cooking is organised around season and technique rather than around a sauce repertoire. The same fish is treated differently in spring and autumn, and the menu is expected to say so. Dashi — most often katsuobushi and kombu — underlies a large share of savoury dishes and is the reason so much of the cuisine tastes related.
Washoku was inscribed on UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list in 2013, recognising the practice around the food as much as the dishes themselves.
Allergens and dietary needs
The allergen picture is counter-intuitive for Western guests. Standard soy sauce is brewed with wheat. Dashi carries fish into vegetable dishes. Miso may be soy, barley or rice based. A dish that reads plant-based can carry two allergens that never appear in its name.
Japan also mandates buckwheat and walnut declarations that the EU list does not cover — if you serve soba, that is a field your European allergen data almost certainly does not have.
Naming it on an English-language menu
Romanise the dish name and follow it with a short descriptor on first mention: “Oyakodon — chicken and egg simmered over rice.” The guest learns the word and can order it aloud, which a translated name never allows.
State the count rather than pluralising: “Gyoza (6)”, not “6 pieces of gyoza”. Japanese uses counters, and machine translation renders them awkwardly.
Staple ingredients
- rice
- soy sauce
- fish
- seaweed