Back to Kyoto, back to eating sushi in Japan. We’d had reservations at Sanmikouan for lunch on our second day in Kyoto and we also had reservations for dinner. These reservations we had not made ourselves and, frankly, I can’t remember why I’d bothered to make them anyway. Maybe I was worried about hanging around in a line in the heat/humidity outside a good sushi place or not being able to get into one at all? At any rate, we managed to get a reservation at Sushi Komatsu, which was in the general area we were going to be in at the end of that day, not by calling them ourselves but by asking a Japanese colleague who happened to be finishing up a year’s teaching in Kyoto if he would kindly make it for us. He was happy to oblige and so we showed up knowing it was not going to be a hassle. Well, it wasn’t a hassle but it wasn’t exactly the most pleasant meal either. Read on to find out why. Continue reading
Category Archives: Japan
Sanmikouan (Kyoto, July 2025)
Back to Kyoto. I’d hoped to get this and another report from the city out late last week but things were a bit chaotic in Delhi. Among all the other mayhem, I also managed to screw up the site design and broke everything and had a panicked half day wondering whether I’d lost most of my images from the last 13 years. Thankfully, the folks at WordPress.com support got me back and running again without much hassle once I managed to get in touch with them. Anyway, here I am now with a report on the best meal we had in Kyoto in July, at Sanmikouan, a soba specialist. Continue reading
Tori Shin (Kyoto, June 2025)
Here, finally, is my first report from Kyoto in the summer.
After a week in Tokyo, we took the shinkansen to Kyoto (where we barely managed to disembark before the train continued to Osaka: the missus and I had dozed off and the boys were lost in their devices and the train stops for just a couple of minutes). We were in Kyoto for just three days before heading to Seoul. Our eating out in the city had not been scoped out ahead of time quite as much as our meals in Tokyo had been. We’d eaten lunch on the train—having picked up excellent bentos at Tokyo station—and after a spot of touristing it was time to think of dinner. The younger boy had not been able to eat much at Hinai Stand the previous week and so he put in a request for yakitori. As our plans were to wander the Gion neighbourhood after dinner, I checked Tabelog to see what the yakitori options in the area were and hit upon Tori Shin (or Torishin). After a bit of absurdist comedy on arrival, we had a nice dinner there. Continue reading
Breakfast Sushi at Toyosu Market II: Sushi Ichiba (Tokyo, June 2025)
Here, as promised, is my last meal report from Tokyo. We left for Kyoto by train before lunch on a Monday—almost exactly a week after we’d arrived. Our original plan had involved a light breakfast at home and then a bento-based lunch on the train. Well, the bento-based lunch on the train still happened (courtesy bentos from Ekibenya Matsuri at Tokyo Station) but the older boy and I had decided the night before that, if we managed to wake up early enough, we would head back to Toyosu Market for a farewell meal of breakfast sushi. So it came to pass. The missus and the younger boy elected to stay at home and eat sandos they’d purchased from the Mitsukoshi department store in Nihonbashi the previous day, while the two of us repeated our first Tokyo metro trip from the day before. This time we were headed not to Dokoro Yamazaki but to the establishment right next door: Ichiba. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Shabusen (Tokyo, June 2025)
Our tour of the major Japanese food genres arrived at a new stop at our last dinner in Tokyo: shabu shabu. I have to confess this is not my favourite genre of Japanese food but the missus loves it. As it happens, after this meal, the boys are big fans too. We ate shabu shabu at Shabusen in Ginza; they also have a branch in Yokohama. In Ginza they are now located on the 8th floor of the Exit Melsa building. They don’t take reservations but they’re open from 3 pm onwards for dinner on weekends and so we hoped that we wouldn’t have to wait too long around 7 pm. As it happened, we didn’t have to wait at all. It’s a large restaurant with two separate dining rooms and they had four seats together open in the smaller one. We sat down and got down to business. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Taimeiken (Tokyo, June 2025)
I’d hoped to finish my Tokyo reports this week. Thanks to some unexpected chaos at home—with two appliances suddenly requiring repair—I’ve not had time to get to all of that. As a result there are still two reports to come after this one, which covers lunch at a famous yoshoku restaurant in Tokyo: Taimeiken. Taimeiken has been around for a while—I believe the current owner/chef is from the third generation of his family. Among their claims to fame is their omuraisu or omurice, specifically their Tampopo omurice, which was developed by the restaurant for Juzo Itami’s film Tampopo in 1985. My good friend John B. was my roommate in graduate school for a few years and Tampopo was one of his very favourite films. As a result I think I’ve seen the film (in whole and in parts) several times. I wish I could say we ate at Taimeiken in tribute to John; the truth, however, is that the younger boy, having seen many videos of the preparation on Youtube, had really wanted to eat omurice in Japan and Taimeiken seemed like a good place to eat it as they serve a full spectrum of yoshoku dishes. Continue reading
Manten-Sushi, Nihonbashi (Tokyo, June 2025)
One of the decisions we’d made ahead of our trip to Japan was that we would take the boys with us to every meal we ate out. This meant we were not going to do meals that were either very expensive or which were likely to feature too many things that they might not eat—they have pretty wide-ranging palates compared to most Minnesotan kids their age but they’re not exactly omnivores. Both these things therefore ruled out high-end omakase and kaiseki meals. (And, in any case, I also did not want to spend any time chasing hard to get reservations at places where you need introductions and special handshakes and so forth.) But this is still Tokyo we’re talking about: an accessible sushi omakase at the affordable end of the market is still going to blow out of the water any comparably priced meal in the US and challenge much more expensive places. So it proved to be at our dinner at the Nihonbashi location of Manten-Sushi. Continue reading
Kyushu Jangara, Akihabara (Tokyo, June 2025)
As I said in an earlier post, our main ramen desires in Tokyo were to eat good versions of our favourite ramen styles and, as far as possible, to do so in an environment that did not cause stress. Our first stop, at Ginza Kagari’s Roppongi Hills branch, gave us fantastic tori paitan ramen with zero stress (ordering via a multilingual ticket machine that took credit cards; very easygoing atmosphere inside). Our second stop, at Ramenya Toy Box in Arakawa, gave us fabulous shoyu (and pretty good shio) ramen but a little more stress in the ordering process (courtesy a Japanese-only ticket machine that accepted only cash) and a relatively austere dining experience. Our third stop, at Koukaibou in Monzen Nakacho, gave us outstanding pork bone and seafood ramen and a warmer experience. Our fourth and final stop was at the Akihabara location of Kyushu Jangara. They specialize in tonkotsu ramen and I am pleased to say that not only was the ramen very good, but the experience was also very easy. Here are the details. Continue reading
Yakiniku Horumon Arai-ya, Shibuya (Tokyo, June 2025)
Our fifth day in Tokyo was the first day of our trip on which no sushi was eaten (there was to be only one more such). We’d eaten ramen for lunch at Koukaibou in Monzen Nakacho and after lunch we’d gone back to Asakusa to visit the kitchen stores in Kappabashi St.. There I purchased a couple of kitchen knives at Kama Asa; and we also purchased some excellent nori from Numatanori. We then visited the Sumida Hokusai Museum (small but well worth a stop) and walked home from there to rest under air conditioning. The evening’s plan was to head out to Shibuya, wander a bit and eat some dinner. It was a fun evening—though the Shibuya Scramble may be the stupidest tourist attraction in the world—anchored by a very good dinner. Continue reading
Koukaibou (Tokyo, June 2025)
It’s an obvious thing to say but bears repeating anyway: there is excellent food to be found all over Tokyo. Why does it bear repeating if it’s an obvious thing to say? Well, there’s a foodie tendency to go far out of one’s way to eat at the purported “best” of some kind of food. In a city like Tokyo—or Hong Kong—I would suggest that there’s no reason to do this. For one thing, there’s no singular “best” anything. In Tokyo the baseline for everything is very high, and while you’re not guaranteed a transcendent meal at a random place you might walk into off the street, the chances of having a bad meal are pretty low. And excellent iterations of pretty much every kind of food can be found pretty close to wherever you are staying in the city. We were—as I’ve mentioned before—within 20 minutes walk of Monzen Nakacho/Mon Naka. We had excellent yakitori there at Hinai Stand; and we also had what was my favourite ramen outing of the trip at Koukaibou. Continue reading
Sushi Hinatomaru, Kaminarimon (Tokyo, June 2025)
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. Continue reading
Ramenya Toy Box (Tokyo, June 2025)
Here is my second ramen report from Tokyo in June. I’ve previously reported on glorious bowls of tori paitan (creamy chicken) ramen at the Roppongi Hills branch of Ginza Kagari. Here now is a quick look at some more glorious bowls of ramen, this time at Ramenya Toy Box in Arakwawa City. While I had been sure that we would not have much trouble getting seated at Ginza Kagari’s satellite branch, I was not very confident about our chances at Toy Box, which has neither any branches nor very many seats: just seven or eight around a small counter in a tiny dining room. But it’s not just the small number of seats that makes it a challenge; it is the fact that they have quite a bit of acclaim as one of the very best purveyors of shoyu ramen in all of Tokyo. And they don’t open for very long: 11-3 for lunch and 6-9 for dinner. Add to that the fact that we were a party of four and the odds of our being seated together seemed somewhere between slim to none if we were to just waltz up to the place for dinner. So we didn’t. Continue reading
Katsukichi, Nihonbashi (Tokyo, June 2025)
Udon? Check. Sushi? Check, check, check. Ramen? Check. Yakitori? Check. Next up on our tour of key genres of Japanese cuisine was tonkatsu or katsu. After lunch at Yoshinozushi Honten we had wandered Nihonbashi for a while and then headed to the Yanaka neighbourhood in Taito City where we wandered some more. We then cooled off in our apartment before heading back to Nihonbashi for dinner. Our port of call was a branch of Katsukichi. Founded in 1958, they also have locations in Shibuya, Marunouchi, and Hibiya. In Nihonbashi they are one of the many restaurants located in the Takashiyama S.C building, up on the 6th floor. None of the restaurants have any English signage but it wasn’t very difficult to figure out which the katsu specialist was and we were quickly at our table. Here’s how the meal went. Continue reading
Yoshinozushi Honten (Tokyo, June 2025)
We ate sushi for dinner on our first day in Tokyo (at Yayoi Sushi in Morishita). And we ate sushi for breakfast on our second day in Tokyo (at Dokoro Yamazaki in Toyosu Market). And so, as per Japanese law, it was required that we eat sushi for lunch on our third day in Tokyo. We were happy to do so. We headed out to a historic spot in Nihonbashi: Yoshinozushi Honten (also listed as Yoshino Sushi Hon Ten). It’s my understanding that “honten” or “hon ten” means “main office/branch”. I would normally think that means that they have other locations as well but their website does not list any others. I assume therefore that they mean to distinguish themselves from other sushi restaurants in the city with Yoshino in their names. For Yoshinozushi in Nihonbashi is not just another sushi restaurant in Tokyo with a good reputation. Given that there are so many good sushi restaurants in Tokyo, we could have been assured of an excellent sushi lunch at a number of places. But they’ve been open for more than 140 years—the current chef/owner is from the fifth generation of the family—and was the restaurant at which toro was first served and eaten under that name. And so we came here in search of not just a sushi lunch but also a piece of history. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Hinai Stand (Tokyo, June 2025)
Udon: check. Sushi: check, check; Ramen: check. Our tour of the major Japanese food genres continued at dinner on our second day with an excellent meal of yakitori or grilled chicken at Hinai Stand in Monzen Nakacho. Our apartment was located a 25 minute walk from Mon Naka, as the neighbourhood is popularly known, and we’d strolled down to Hinai Stand the previous evening in the hope of snagging a table without a reservation. These hopes were dashed but while there we made a reservation for the next evening and presented ourselves again at the appointed time. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Ginza Kagari Roppongi Hills (Tokyo, June 2025)
We began our first full day in Tokyo with breakfast sushi at Dokoro Yamazaki in Toyosu Market. Lunch featured ramen. If sushi was the thing that we were most looking forward to eating in Japan, ramen was a close second. We were more unsure, however, about how that would go. This because most of the highly-rated ramen places in Tokyo are very small (though most restaurants in Japan are very small by American standards) and it’s not easy to get into them. It’s not just that the popular places all boast long lines; ramen places are essentially built for solo dining. Which means that if you are eating with a friend you have to wait for not one but two seats together to open up. And we, of course, are a family of four. Add to this the confusion of the ordering process at the many places that require you to order and pay and receive a ticket at/from a vending machine before you enter the store, keeping in mind that the vending machine will likely only have Japanese text on it. What’s the way out if you want to eat good ramen without too much stress till the bowl arrives? Continue reading
Breakfast Sushi at Toyosu Market I: Sushi Dokoro Yamazaki (Tokyo, June 2025)
Jet lag is a real pain in the ass but when you travel from Minnesota to Tokyo there is at least one compensation: you are wide awake in the morning on the first few days and can eat sushi for breakfast—even before the sun rises. Of course, the vast majority of restaurants in the city are closed until the middle of the morning but this is not true of the ones in the Toyosu Market. As you may know, Toyosu Market is the new, larger and more organized home of Tokyo’s wholesale fish market, which moved there right before the pandemic from the better-known Tsukiji Market—which continues to exist as a tourist site for restaurants etc. even as the fish market which used to be the primary attraction is gone. There are still popular sushi restaurants in Tsukiji but some of the most highly-regarded ones moved to Toyosu Market as well. The best-known of these are Sushi Dai and Daiwa Sushi. Both open at 6 am but people—mostly tourists, I assume—start lining up at 4 am when the market opens. Now, I’m a little insane when it comes to food but I’m not that insane. Certainly not when there are other restaurants at the market that don’t require setting out quite that early (before the Metro even starts running) and which probably offer only very marginally inferior—if that—sushi. The leader of this second tier (at least in terms of Tabelog ratings) is Sushi Dokoro Yamazaki (3.59 on Tabelog to Dai and Daiwa’s 3.64 and 3.63 respectively, if you care about these things) and that is where we went on our first morning in Tokyo. Here’s how it went. Continue reading