There’s junk shaved ice with artificial color around the tourist places, and there’s real shaved ice with quality ingredients in a real dessert place. The differences are night and day. Ochanoko’s shaved ice was great. Refreshing for a very hot day. Not too sweet. Everything just right, just like how good Japanese food is.
Mango shaved ice:
Kiwi shaved ice:
Some sort of jelly. We just pointed to what others had at the next table:
Their selection:
Nice relaxing place:
Tea for sale:
That shaved ice looks legit.
Do you know if they source their ice from Mt. Fuji?
I am not aware that they do.
How does shaved ice from Mt. Fuji taste?
In Hong Kong, we had shaved ice with ice imported from Japan. It was indeed fluffy and impressive.
Must have been costly to maintain the cold chain. What if they brought in water from Japan and made the ice in HK? No reefer containers or air freight required.
Definitely NOT the Japanese mindset.
It’s not just the provenance of the ice (just typing those words make me feel like such a douchebag, btw), but how the ice is formed.
It has to be formed naturally (not in a freezer) so that there are less air bubbles and (because it is from natural spring waters) has less impurities. This “natural ice” is the equivalent of using consommé to make soup, instead of broth.
The resulting shaved ice is both delicate and fluffy and has that melt in your mouth sensation, like cotton candy made from ice.
How do you ‘harvest’ those ice? Someone hike up Fuji and scoop a bunch of them into a cooler?
That’s gotta be some pricey ice. Even more so than harvesting saffron.
If nothing else, the Japanese are fastidious.
