What to Eat in Nara: Persimmon-Leaf Sushi, Pounded Mochi and Sake

Nara is landlocked and mountainous, and for most of its history fresh sea fish was not arriving here in any usable state. Kakinoha-zushi is the solution people arrived at: mackerel or salmon salted and cured, pressed onto vinegared rice, and wrapped tightly in a persimmon leaf.

The leaf is not decoration. Persimmon leaves have antibacterial properties, and the wrap kept the fish edible across the mountain roads from the coast at Kumano. What began as preservation became the regional dish, and it is now sold everywhere from department-store basements to station kiosks.

You do not eat the leaf. Unwrap it, eat the block, and notice that the rice has taken on a faint tannic note from the leaf. It travels well — it was designed to — which makes it the single best thing to buy for a train journey out of Nara.

On Sanjo-dori, the main approach street between the station and the park, a crowd forms several times an hour around a shop called Nakatanidou. Two men pound mochi in a wooden mortar — one swinging a heavy mallet, the other turning and wetting the dough between strikes at a rhythm that looks genuinely unsafe.

The speed is the point and it is not a gimmick: the dough is worked with *yomogi*, Japanese mugwort, and has to be pounded fast while it is hot to get the texture right. The finished mochi is rolled in kinako soybean flour and sold single, warm, for a few hundred yen.

Go for the demonstration, but eat it too — warm yomogi mochi is a different food from the packaged kind. The performances run at unannounced intervals through the day; if there is a crowd gathering, wait the two minutes.

Kyoto gets the reputation, but the technical history sits here. Shoryaku-ji, a temple in the hills south-east of the city, is widely credited with developing the methods behind clear refined sake in the Muromachi period — multiple-stage brewing, lactic fermentation, pasteurisation practices that the industry still runs on.

That lineage is still live. Nara Prefecture has a cluster of small breweries, several within the city, and a handful in Naramachi run tastings without ceremony or a reservation system. It is a markedly easier place to actually drink good sake than Kyoto, where the good breweries are out in Fushimi and the city-centre options lean touristy.

The other thing to eat here is narazuke — vegetables, usually gourd or cucumber, pickled repeatedly in sake lees until they turn amber and taste sharply of alcohol and sugar. It is an acquired taste and a direct by-product of the brewing. Buy one piece before you buy a box.

The rule in Nara is simple: the park feeds tourists, Naramachi feeds people. Around the deer and the Todai-ji approach you will find soft-serve, senbei stalls and a few large restaurants running set menus for coach groups. It is fine and it is not why you came.

Ten minutes south, Naramachi has the small places — soba counters, kamameshi rice pots, coffee in converted townhouses, and *kakigori* shaved ice in summer that Nara takes unusually seriously. Sanjo-dori, between the station and the pond, is the middle ground and where Nakatanidou sits.

One timing note: Nara is a day-trip town, and a lot of kitchens close early because the visitors leave on the 5pm trains. If you want dinner rather than lunch, check hours before you commit, and consider that staying the night is the only way to eat here properly.