Japan

I traveled with friends to Japan over the holidays and had a range of interesting meals, from many-small-dishes breakfasts to a few kaiseki-style set menus working through a formal progression of dishes, to excellent ramen in a museum, to dinners we cooked in a rental house in the mountains from the wide variety of product available in one of the markets. We came home inspired to learn and try to periodically cook in this style, and with some special rice from the rural Noto peninsula where we’d taken a side trip. ...

Quick summary: If you’re in Tokyo and you like coffee, you should really go to Be A Good Neighbor in Sendagaya near Harajuku. A cozy little kiosk with just a window counter, several different varieties of beans you can smell, moderately lightly roasted, and very friendly people. He asked what kind of flavors I like in my coffee and I said “citrus”, and he made me a great drip. I noted the Dandelion Chocolate from San Francisco and then we talked about Four Barrel, they gave me a free pin, and suggested which other coffeehouses (third-wave and traditional Japanese) to visit. ...

The morning of my flight home from Tokyo, I headed to Tsukiji market to find some delicious raw fish. Quick phone research on the train suggested Daiwa was very well regarded and known for their toro (fatty tuna), so I had a plan. Arriving, I saw a line into the street that folded back and forth on itself 8 times. 8. Looking back at the phone, my eyes caught the “only 11 seats at a counter… the wait can be two to three hours” bit I’d skimmed past. With a flight leaving in 5 hours, waiting, eating, and an hour or two on trains back to the hotel and then airport would be cutting it very close… and what if the wait were longer and I had to leave the line, hungry, at the last moment? ...

Striking a few ramen spots around Tokyo opportunistically on the first and last days of the trip (and at the end of the trip finding one amazing one whose name I still don’t know, in Southeastern Tokyo near the Daimon station). Many major train stations have a nearby food alley, and I heard Shinagawa station had a “ramen alley” Shinatatsu. After landing at Narita but before hopping a shinkansen to another part of Japan (Shinagawa’s conveniently one of the shinkansen connection points), I dragged my suitcase out the West exit and then South along a dark sidewalk. It felt like I was in the wrong place– an industrial sidewalk hugging the station wall, with no business or signs of life, and cars rushing by to my right. But just two blocks later, a glowing entrance beckoned me to step down to a wooden boardwalk below street level lined with 7 or 8 ramen shops. ...

The only actually good (as opposed to “huh, that was better than my low expectations”) food I’ve ever had in an airport– an excellent all-tuna sushi plate (with a range of grades of fattiness) at Sushi Kyotatsu near gate 36 in Narita: And, if you’re (un)fortunate to fly enough to have gold status on some airline in Star Alliance (United, etc), that also gives you complimentary access to the ANA lounge, which has light snacks and a serve-yourself range of sakes you can taste. ...

I was in Japan recently. I didn’t go in with a food plan or have much time to explore, but still had some great, mostly-cheap eats. One highlight was near Yurakucho Station in Tokyo: “One of Yurakucho’s most interesting draws is the lively restaurant district built up under the brick arches beneath the elevated train tracks of the JR Yamanote Line. Known in Japanese as Gado-shita, from “below the girder”, these favored watering holes of Tokyo businessmen occupy virtually all of the free space under nearly 700 meters of track.” ...