Nicholas Coldicott » Kyoto

The Guardian

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:22:35 +0000

My debut in The Guardian. Five ways to enjoy Kyoto with spending much money. It’s certain to annoy some people by calling Katsura Rikyu a C-list attraction. But it is.

Amusingly, the obligatory maiko reference was illustrated with an image of regular women who happen to be wearing kimono. It’s a lesson to the real maiko that they needn’t bother with all that make up and hair hoo-ha.

Ryokan

admin — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 10:08:13 +0000

People always say that writing about drinks sounds like a dream job, but that’s because they’ve never crawled out of bed with a hangover and had to go straight to a tasting event. The best part of my job is when the Sydney Morning Herald hires me to write about some corner of Japanese culture. Most recently, the paper sent me to Kyoto to interview the ladies that run two of the county’s most famous ryokan, Miyamasou and the Hiiragiya.

Grab the pdf here

First Cabin

admin — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 22:55:03 +0000

Click the link, pay about 10,000 quid and you can read my article about First Cabin, the airplane-themed hotel in Osaka and Kyoto. I promise it’s worth it.

Pod hotels

admin — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 22:51:20 +0000

All my good stuff’s behind a paywall these days. This one’s for www.stylus.com, about the pod/bubble/capsule hotels – 9hours, Yotels, Sleepboxes and Dream & Fly Bubbles – offering a condensed but stylish hotel experience.

“… yet to find their first locations, Russian design firm Arch and Barcelona-based Dream & Fly have both developed all-in-one, standalone micro rooms designed for airports.

Arch’s Sleepbox will appeal to the Mac crowd with its all-white interior and curved edges, and comes equipped with wifi and fold-down laptop trays with power sockets. The boxes are designed to be self-sufficient, with payment made at a terminal. Sheets are wound around rollers, enabling them to be changed automatically.

Dream & Fly’s Bubbles are remarkably similar in design, and vary in size from 5m sq for single users to “family-sized” 10m sq. Each includes an LCD screen giving the latest flight info.”

Whisky Magazine Japan, Kyoto Special

admin — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 03:38:17 +0000

People often remark that being paid to write about drinks sounds like a great job, but the truth is that it’s a lot of hard work and not nearly as much fun as it might sound. Nah, just kidding, it’s the best job in the world, and for the Autumn 2010 edition of Whisky Magazine Japan, the editors and I spent a few days in Kyoto, eating, drinking, incense sniffing and even a wee bit of sightseeing. And then we made a magazine about it, which you can buy at any of these places.

Kyoto’s bars

admin — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 18:14:27 +0000

The Japan Times

23 April, 2010

‘Iyashikei is a rice brew, but it tastes like fino sherry. Omiji kijoshu is a rice brew, but it tastes like oloroso sherry. Ineburimaru is a rice brew, but it tastes like stout. If you thought sake was
supposed to be fragile and floral, you need to visit Sake Bar Yoramu. ‘‘An aged wine still tastes like it’s from the same category, but that’s not true of sake,’’ says owner Yoram Ofer. But then
nobody ever aged a wine like he ages sake. Ofer leaves namazake, the unpasteurized stuff they tell you to refrigerate, sitting on his doorstep for years. ‘‘If you keep it one summer out of
the fridge, nobody will know you did it,’’ he says. ‘‘It’ll be the same sake but with
more umami. Some go wrong, but then you just close it and put it back for
another year.’’ The results can be wild, but an evening here makes every other
kind of alcohol seem horribly limited. It’s sake, folks, but not as you know it.’

World’s Greatest Cities

admin — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:10:03 +0000

In 2009, Time Out published a coffee-table guide to the world’s 75 greatest cities. I wrote the Kyoto chapter.

“While most cities face the conflict of old versus new, Kyoto has proven adept at synthesizing the two. Wooden townhouses that long ago ceased to be practical as living quarters are finding new lives as restaurants, art galleries, coffee shops and hair salons. A one-time kimono warehouse has become a stylish cocktail bar, and a former backstreet bathhouse is now a café furnished with plush sofas and bath-tile walls.

The kimono, a garment as impractical as it is beautiful, is still an everyday sight in Kyoto, but these days it might be emblazoned with a Marimekko-style print and paired with split-toe sneakers.”

Follow your nose

admin — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:18:03 +0000

Sydney Morning Herald magazine, 10 September, 2009

“In Perigord and Piedmont they hunt for truffles. In Botswana and the Congo they dig for diamonds. But in Vietnam, it’s carbonised tree trunks that can make a person fabulously wealthy.

“Finding one good tree can set a person up for life,” says Yohei Yamada of Yamada Matsu Koboku, a 200-year-old store in Kyoto that buys the trunks, cuts them up and sells the chips at up to ¥30,000 ($400) a gram.

If you’re thinking you’d rather have an iPod than a thimble’s worth of wood, that’s because you don’t practise kodo, the Japanese art of incense.”

Time Out Kyoto Shortlist

admin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:16:18 +0000

In 2008, Time Out asked me if I’d like to go to Kyoto and spend a few months living in hotels, touring temples, drinking with maiko and eating kaiseki. I said I wouldn’t mind.

The first Time Out guide to Kyoto was published September, 2009.

Kanga-an: an intoxicating temple in Kyoto

admin — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:03:51 +0000

The Japan Times, 30 January, 2009

“Last April Kanga-an revealed a room it had kept secret for years: the bar. It used to be a private salon in which the priestess would entertain her friends. Now it’s open to all, every night of the week.”