One of the most fun things about travel is trying the food and I am an omnivore in the worst sense of the word – fine dining to 7-Eleven junk food – I’ll eat it. This past July, we visited Japan, mainly to scuba dive, but I was on the Kit Kat trail, searching for those unusual flavors for which the country is known.
Green Tea Kit Kats are always available at the airport. For a year or so, I could find wasabi flavored Kit Kats evey time we transited through Narita. But those, like my favorite, sweet potato flavor, are no longer available. Not a great loss; I never thought the wasabi flavor was strong enough but they made a great novelty gift.
We’ve found Kit Kats in other countries but always in the usual dark and milk chocolate flavors. Japan is the place for the fun and wacky ones. Someone told me they retire old flavors and introduce new, all the time – don’t know if this is true but I also heard there had been over 200 different Kit Kat flavors introduced in Japan.
The strange thing is there never seemed to be one place that carried a variety. It all seemed to be quite random and scattered: Cheesecake flavor on Hachijojima Island, Raspberry in Izu, Strawberry Cheesecake at Narita. Alas, there was no time to carry out a dedicated search so we had to just grab what we could.
Our group of five rented a lovely apartment through AirBNB in the Meguro district of Tokyo and under the kitchen sink like some terrible joke, sat an entire unopened case of Kit Kats! Yan and I examined the box several times – why was it there, who left it, could we open it? But Ned insisted the box was placed there to “test” us and told us to leave it alone, so the mystery endures.
But there was a happy ending. At the Kusatsu Onsen, hours out of Tokyo, Richard scored the best: Chili Pepper Kit Kats and these actually had a zing to them!
We get another chance, later this year, to trot through the Narita and Singapore airports – for Mission: Kit Kat – no telling what we’ll find!