G7 leaders will need gargantuan appetites when they meet in Hiroshima, where they will be treated to multi-course menus featuring regional produce that have reportedly been months in the making.
The provisional menus for the summit – copies of which have been seen by the Guardian – will include okonomiyaki, a signature Hiroshima dish that grew out of the destruction wrought by the August 1945 atomic bombing, and oysters, another local delicacy.
Producers in the Hiroshima area, each with their own proud culinary traditions, have spent months pushing for their ingredients to be included in four official meals over two days, with the summit host, prime minister Fumio Kishida, reportedly intervening to ensure that the menu reflected his personal tastes.
On Saturday, when Joe Biden will become the second sitting US president to visit the Peace Memorial Museum after Barack Obama, the working lunch will feature marinated salmon, Japanese rockfish and chicken ballotine, with a lemon semifreddo served with citrus cream and sake lees.
The working dinner, at a traditional ryokan inn on the nearby island of Miyajima, will open with a selection of seafood from the Seto inland sea, followed by a clear sea bream soup, with the main course of Hiroshima beef and eel sushi. A selection of traditional Hiroshima sweets will form the dessert.
The menu includes one or two items that could prove challenging for leaders with less adventurous palates. Saturday’s working lunch will include grilled taro root and sea urchin, stuffed with natto – fermented soybeans with a pungent smell and gooey texture – made at a Buddhist temple in Kyoto.
But other Japanese flavours will be more familiar to those who have ridden the global washoku wave in recent years, including edamame, wagyu beef and miso.
Kishida, who represents a Hiroshima constituency, has reportedly been heavily involved in the choice of food, liaising with staff for the past six months to ensure that ingredients from the city and surrounding area are properly represented, according to TV Asahi, which added that the dishes would be served with local sake.
They include okonomiyaki, a carb-heavy street food to which Kishida is partial. His fellow leaders will be served a version made with oysters at a “social occasion” on Saturday, in between steamed tilefish rice and cheesecake with strawberry gelato.
