Indulge in Fermentation at the Umekoji Potel Kyoto — Hotel Edition

The Umekoji Potel Kyoto, with its eye-catching substitution of potel for hotel in its name, opened in 2020 in a prime location one station away, or 20 minutes on foot, from Kyoto Station. Built along the spacious Umekoji Park and next to the Kyoto Aquarium, an area always bustling with families, the hotel is designed so you can enjoy staying in Kyoto in a way that blends in with the lives of local residents, unlike the central area that is dotted with temples and shrines. It’s uniqueness does not end with its name. The hotel is a place for all kinds of people to gather, not just its guests, as it houses a fermentation factory that makes koji rice malt and a sento public bath with a throw-back retro design. This piece on the property is divided into two articles: the Hotel edition that describes the hotel and its focus on meticulously prepared food that makes use of all of fermentation’s goodness, and the Fermentation Factory edition that looks at the hotel’s Umekoji Fermentation Factory.

Dinner at Potel is a modern take on Kyoto’s obanzai home-style cooking

Sampling the food at your destination is a quintessential joy of travel. So a hallmark of Potel is its dinner, which begins with rows of appetizers in small bowls. What’s surprising is that the hotel offered a different dining style when it first opened.

Brand manager Shingu Kana explains. “Listening to customer feedback is what led us to adopt our current banquet-style dinner. Many of the guests who stay with us are families with small children, and they told us that the previous full-course dinner was difficult to eat at their own pace and that it was too formal. So we came up with a new banquet style that everyone could enjoy at their own pace. The dinner is a compact arrangement of appetizers, grilled dishes, palate cleansers, bubuzuke [a rice dish over which green tea is poured], and sweets — all centered on the concept of eating everything Kyoto has to offer.”

Breakfasts in which you can relish Japanese food culture and Potel’s banquet dining that reinterprets obanzai

According to the head chef, Seki Harunobu, who created the 12 dishes that are a joy just to look at, he took inspiration from Kyoto’s obanzai [traditional home-style cooking] while expressing Kyoto’s food culture in Potel’s own fashion.

“From the top left of the photo, we have cherry blossom-flavored Kyoto-style sesame tofu topped with chopped Kyoto pickles; boiled Kyoto mizuna greens, Tamba shimeji mushrooms, and Kyoto-style fried tofu with soy sauce; nama-fu wheat gluten in sweet dengaku miso paste; and finely chopped aji (horse mackerel) tataki using liquified salted koji and seasoned with salted koji powder. In the second row starting from the left, we have a fruit salad dressed with tofu and mascarpone; raw yuba tofu skin and asari clams in a chilled starchy sauce; bamboo shoot tempura in a batter containing salted koji powder; and puréed soup made with seasonal vegetables. In the third row starting from the left, we have one of our home-style dishes, sauteed Manganji peppers and chirimen sansho [small dried sardines with Japanese peppercorn]; grilled meat balls made from Kyoto duck and Kujo spring onions; watercress and myoga ginger dressed with Saikyo miso; and finally, dry-cured Spanish mackerel with fresh onions.”

Chef Seki Harunobu has an unusual background, having worked in a variety of kitchens, including Turkish, Italian and Japanese cuisine

The menu changes with the seasons to incorporate seasonal ingredients, so you can look forward to visiting the restaurant to enjoy not only the appetizers, which feature plenty of Kyoto ingredients, but also the grilled dishes and desserts.

Domestic beef sirloin steak marinated in salted koji and braised in red wine with grilled vegetables. In addition to the wide selection of natural wines, you can also bring your own alcohol purchased at the Umekoji Fermentation Factory, which is attached to Potel.

Bubuzuke is nearly synonymous with Kyoto. But Chef Seki, who has researched food from around the world, came up with a new-style of bubuzuke, pouring a dashi stock made from dry-cured ham over a generous heaping of sakura shrimp and shirasu whitebait.

The dessert is yogurt cheesecake, with Parmesan cheese sprinkled on top for additional richness

“With our breakfasts, I’m particular about keeping the flavors light,” says Chef Seki. This is gentle on the body and a thoughtful touch when you are on a trip and often eating heavier meals. Many hotel guests arrive on the dot as the restaurant opens at 7 a.m.

The bright restaurant faces Umekoji Park, so you can enjoy your breakfast while bathed in the morning sunlight

The restaurant is particular about using Milky Queen rice, sourced from the Umeda Farm in Kyotango, Kyoto prefecture. Kyoto-style pickles go perfectly with the freshly cooked rice. Eggs are served with homemade soy sauce matured in barrels.

The Saikyo miso soup with a saké lees base is packed with seasonal vegetables, and warms both the body and the soul

Green tea is poured over charcoal-grilled rice balls cooked at the counter. The charred bits are delicious.

After your meal, you can sample a dessert of Kyoto-style confectionaries or a glass of seasonal koji water (pomegranate) to perk you up

Hospitality with Kyoto tableware that embodies the Japanese food culture that lives in Kyoto

An important consideration for Potel’s banquet dining, and its concept of eating everything Kyoto has to offer, is local production for local consumption. This concept extends from the ingredients and seasonings to the tableware. An essential part of this is fermentation. Kyoto, which is famous for its pickles, has had a deeply rooted fermentation culture for centuries. Chef Seki, who has studied cuisine from around the world, had noted this fermentation culture before. But in Kyoto, fermented foods are so common that they appeared on the menu naturally, without any conscious effort to include them.

“We are, however, conscious of the essence of Potel when we express and present our meals. For example, we don’t serve pickles whole. Instead, we chop them up finely and add them as flavor accents. Drawing on my experience of studying many kinds of international cuisine, I try using pickles like herbs or spices. If you add even a small amount of fermented food as a secret ingredient in a dish, it produces a real depth of flavor.”

Chef Seki expresses a new Kyoto food culture that can only be enjoyed at Potel through his small-plate dishes

Chef Seki was very specific when it came to selecting the tableware on which he serves his food.

“I thought it would be good to apply the concept of local production for local consumption not just to our ingredients but also to the tableware we serve our food on. I found what I was looking for in the works of Morisaki Masahiro, a potter in Sagano, a district of Kyoto. Kyoto has famous types of pottery such as Kyo-ware and Kiyomizu-ware, which have become brands in their own right, but there’s a pottery culture in Kyoto outside of these areas too. I want to help pass on this culture by letting more people know about these wonderful but little-known ceramics.”

Dinner is served on tableware created by Morisaki Masahiro. Each dish, masterfully glazed, has its own unique expression, so paying attention to the tableware is almost as rewarding as the food.

The chopsticks have been carefully selected to match the tableware. They are individually made by craftsmen out of Kitayama cedar. A chopstick case is included so you can take them home with you.

The intention in the name Potel is to create a place rooted in the community where connections are formed

The real question we wanted answered was: Why “Potel”?

Shingu explains. “Potel is a portmanteau of port and hotel. We actively source local ingredients for our food, so we are rooted in the local community. But at the same time, we wish to be a gateway for exchanges between people from Japan and abroad. In Japanese katakana characters, ‘po’ and ‘ho’ are differentiated by the addition of a circle. This circle in our name is emblematic of how things are connected in a circle, or en in Japanese.”

Potel, which aims to be a place of exchanges, came into being with the involvement of many people.

“The West Japan Railway Holonic company that operates Potel is itself a joint venture by the West Japan Railway Company, JR-West Hotels Development Co., Ltd., and Holonic Inc. Potel was also created with the involvement of many partners, especially local businesses, who devised ways to make staying here enjoyable. One of the features we came up with are the Awai no Ma themed spaces on each floor.”

The Book spaces on the second and third floors are lined with books selected by Horibe Atsushi, the owner of Seikosha, a Kyoto-based bookstore. New book discoveries await you here.

Game, on the third floor, features boardgames from around the world that can be enjoyed by kids and adults alike. The games are provided by Tansan, a Kyoto boardgame maker, and the distinctive tables are shaped to encourage conversations.

Music, on the fourth floor, is a space where you are free to listen to the records on display, all carefully curated by bud music, inc., a Kyoto record label. The speakers reproduce the music at the highest possible quality. The space is purposefully not soundproofed. Instead, it has been designed to connect to the drink space one floor below via an atrium and to share music with people walking in nearby corridors.

The second floor has a drink space, while the third-floor coffee space has a hand drip coffee area supervised by Makino Hiroshi from Coffee Base, which handles its own roasted coffee beans in Shijo Karasuma in the heart of Kyoto. Experience the joy of selecting, grinding, and making your own coffee. The second floor drink space also has alcoholic drinks. (Check Potel’s website for service hours.)

Looking down at the second-floor drink space from the third floor. The atrium creates a pleasant space that invites you to linger longer than you intended.

Other spaces include Pomap — a map created by suggestions from staff members and guests about more out-of-the-way parts of Kyoto, an area with a ball pool and a ping-pong table that are popular with kids, and a rooftop terrace that offers a panoramic view of Kyoto.

“We hope staying at Potel gives our guests a chance to discover a new Kyoto. Of course, we want our guests to take their time and relax on the premises and enjoy the stay itself. In addition, we thought in the beginning that the hotel could be a place for interaction with the staff members as well. If we have time, we could join guests in playing a board game for example. In reality, this has proved to be difficult, but I’ve been asked by guests to join them in a game of ping-pong.”

Potel’s amenities don’t end with the Awai no Ma spaces. Among the 144 guest rooms are Aeru rooms decorated with traditional Kyoto art pieces and Garden rooms with terraces that overlook Umekoji Park. With various styles of rooms on offer, you can make new discoveries on each visit.

Poteyu is a new, old-style public bath that’s popular with the locals too

The Umekoji Poteyu public bath is open to guests and non-guests alike.

“We’ve recreated an old-fashioned public bath, so the showers are fixed and you have to adjust the hot water to get just the right temperature. But we hope people will enjoy these inconveniences. The murals were painted by Nakajima, one of only a few bathhouse painters in Japan. He painted the mural freehand with the idea of an imaginary Kyoto. The style of bathhouse paintings is to depict scenes that don’t actually exist.”

Enjoy the good, old-fashioned culture of public baths while taking in scenes that seem real but aren’t. “Be sure to search for the cow painted in the landscape.”

After bathing, check out the Umekoji Fermentation Factory, which is right in front of Poteyu.

The standing bar where you can enjoy a drink after your bath opens in the evenings. It closes at 9 p.m. on weekdays and 10 p.m. on weekends and public holidays, so be careful not to stay in the bath too long.

What is truly unique about the Umekoji Fermentation Factory is that it is part of a hotel.

“We certainly wanted to showcase the culture of fermentation, such as pickles and mackerel nare-zushi [marinated salted mackerel pressed into rice], that has long existed in Kyoto. But more than wanting to be a center to promote fermentation culture, the reason for the fermentation factory is that fermentation is woven into the fabric of Kyoto’s food culture. It came about naturally without any particular conscious thought.”

Experiences that pass on Japan’s fermentation food culture to the next generation

The reason why Potel has a fermentation factory, and why Chef Seki creates dishes with fermented foods, is that fermentation food culture is deeply intertwined with the city. So much so that these elements were incorporated naturally without any fuss or foofaraw. As Shingu says, many of Potel’s guests are young families, so it may be that fermentation food culture gets passed on to the next generation in a natural way through delicious, fun, and interesting experiences.

In Part 2, we introduce the many attractions of the Umekoji Fermentation Factory, which offers koji-making and seasoning workshops in addition to its standing bar.