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
Category Archives: Japan
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
Yayoi Sushi (Tokyo, June 2025)
If our first meal in Japan was eaten shortly after arrival in the airport itself (at Hanayama Udon), we didn’t go so very far for our second meal either. Well, that’s both true and not true. It’s true that our dinner was located only about 100 feet from our apartment’s door in Morishita (a residential neighbourhood in Koto City); but we only arrived there after having walked a long distance in the heat and humidity. You see, our original plan had been to eat at Hinai Stand, a well-regarded yakitori restaurant in Monzen Nakacho/Mon Naka, about a 25 minute walk from us. But on arrival we were disabused of the notion that we could just walk in without a reservation. (Why didn’t we have a reservation? As at many restaurants in Japan, you can only make one on the phone and you need to be a Japanese speaker for that. There are services you can use to get around that but we didn’t bother with all that on this trip.) We made a reservation on the spot for the next day (Google Translate is a lifesaver in Japan) and walked back to our neighbourhood sushi spot: Yayoi Sushi. Here’s how it went. Continue reading