Powell Street Festival

Posted by Degan on August 5th, 2010

Note: this post was imported from EthnicEats.ca

I leant my car to a friend last weekend, so my fiancé and I spent a significant amount of time wandering around the city, part of which included checking out the Japanese Powell Street Festival. It was a first time for both of us and didn’t disappoint.

Of course the first thing I had to check out was the food. There was a takoyaki, yakitori and of course, sushi, as well as an okonomyaki station and several vendors selling ramen. We weren’t very hungry from the heat, but I couldn’t resist trying the yakimochi, BBQ’d rice cakes that looked for all the world like grilled soap:

Cooking softens it up considerably and served drizzled in soya sauce and wrapped in nori, it was quite tasty.

And then I saw the SPAM sushi. What?! Raw SPAM?! SPAM with rice?! I had to find out.

There were no surprises; slice of grilled SPAM with some teriyaki sauce, sandwiched between pressed rice and wrapped in nori. Wikipedia tells me that this is a popular snack in Hawaii and the large size of the musaba strikes me as similar to the grab-and-go fare that Michi Sushi use to have. I have a bit of a phobia about canned, processed meat but it turned out to be not all that bad…the Japanese version of a ham sandwich maybe.

Aside from the food adventures, we had arrived in time to watch a sumo tournament and walking home provided a whole lot of interesingness in the form of a self-guided historical walking tour through the old Japantown. I really want to spend some more time exploring the area but failing that, I’ll definitely be checking out future festivals.

More photos of the event on flickr.