Back to my reports from our brief trip to Japan, back to sushi in Tokyo. I’ve previously reported on three sushi meals: dinner on our first day at Yayoi Sushi; breakfast on the second day at Dokoro Yamazaki at Toyosu Market; and lunch on the third day at Yoshinuzushi Honten. No surprise: we ate sushi on our fourth day as well. Lunch that day had been outstanding ramen at Ramenya Toy Box. We’d then repaired to the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno and spent the first half of the afternoon there. The plan originally had been to go from there to Asakusa, visit the Senso-ji temple, wander Kappabashi (the kitchenware street) and then eat an early sushi dinner before heading back to the apartment. But this was our third scorcher of a day in a row and we decided to rest under air conditioning at home during the afternoon and then head to Asakusa in the evening when it would be a little cooler. Senso-ji is lit up in the evening and is less crowded—both of which sounded good to us. Looking around on Tabelog for places to eat sushi near the temple, I’d already identified the location of Hinatomaru near the temple’s Kaminarimon Gate and that is where we went.

If you look for information on Hinatomaru, you’ll see both that they have multiple locations and that these locations are described as small standing sushi bars: casual places where you eat standing up at a counter. As of last year this was an accurate description of the Kaminarimon location as well but at some point they went through a renovation and that location has now expanded to 20 seats (i.e actual seats, all at a counter that wraps around the central area where the sushi chefs do their thing). They do not take reservations. We arrived a little before 7 and found only about a third of the seats occupied. We therefore quickly got down to business.

Unsurprisingly for a restaurant located so close to one of Tokyo’s major historical sights, this location of Hinatomaru (and for all I know this may be true of the others as well) is quite easy for the non-Japanese diner to navigate. The chefs have English and all manner of English language and visual assistance is provided on the menus. They offer a number of sushi and other seafood sets and there’s also the option to order a la carte. The missus and the older boy got the smallest and largest nigiri sets respectively and added on more later. The younger boy and I ordered nigiri a la carte. He was not very hungry and just got four pieces; I got, um, quite a lot more than four pieces.

What did we eat?

The younger boy’s nigiri were as follows: akami (lean, marinated tuna), hamachi (yellowtail), sake/shake (salmon) and hotate (scallop).

The missus’ Yaesu set included nine pieces of nigiri: akami, chutoro (medium fatty tuna belly), katsuo (skipjack), hamachi, tai (snapper/sea bream), hirame (halibut/flounder), tsubugai (whelk/sea snail), hotate, and akagai (arkshell clam). She particularly enjoyed the bivalves and later added on a mini shellfish set that included two more types of clam (mirugai/giant clam and bakagai/hen clam) and octopus.

The older boy’s Tokusen set included some premium pieces in the nine pieces of nigiri plus six pieces of chopped toro maki. The nigiri included: akami, kanpachi (amberjack), chutoro, ama ebi (sweet shrimp), akagai, hotate, ikura (salmon roe), uni (sea urchin roe) and anago (conger eel). He added on a piece of hamachi when he was done.

I put together the following a la carte order, which was all served together: tai, ama ebi, hotate, kohada (gizzard shad), saba (mackerel), vinegared saba, aji (Japanese horse mackerel), kinmedai (goldeneye snapper, lightly torched), kanpachi, ikura, uni and tamago (sweet omelette). Saving the tamago for the end, I added on the following after I was done with the nigiri: first a single piece of shima aji (striped jack) and then a five-piece tuna nigiri set that presented the following together: akami, chutoro, otoro (very fatty tuna belly), aburi toro (seared fatty tuna belly) and chopped toro gunkan. A bit much, yes. I refuse to apologize.

As you can see in the slideshow below, as at Yoshinozushi, everything was presented in a largely unadorned manner, typical of the classic Edomae style. You can also see that the pieces were quite generously portioned. And if you peer closely at the menu and do the currency calculation, you can also see how cheap this meal was by American standards (or just scroll down).

The quality, I should say, was uniformly high. The highs were not quite as good as at Dokoro Yamazaki but it was easily superior to Yayoi Sushi and better as well, we thought, than our lunch at Yoshinozushi Honten the previous day.

As you can see, despite the younger boy ordering only four pieces of nigiri, this meal included a lot of very good fish. Leaving aside the maki and the miso soup that came with the sets, this was a total of 44 pieces of nigiri, with quite a few premium pieces among them. That averages out to 11 pieces of nigiri each. In the US 11 pieces of regulation nigiri of any decent quality would cost a minimum of $60/head, with that price rising sharply as you add things like kohada, kinmedai, shima aji, ama ebi, hotate, ikura, uni, chutori, otoro and various esoteric shellfish to the mix. What did we pay for all of this at Hinatomaru? A total of $102 or $25.50/head. As I quipped to friends on Facebook, I would die so quickly of mercury poisoning if I lived in Japan. Ah well—I guess I would prefer not to die quite yet.

Alright, what’s next from the parade of gluttony in Tokyo? If you can believe it, the next three meals did not include any sushi. Instead: ramen, yakiniku and more ramen. I should have reports on all three of those meals up this week.