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
Tag Archives: Sushi
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
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
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
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
Sushi Chitose (Redondo Beach, CA, June 2024)
I keep saying that I plan to post my write-up of our dinner at Tenant in Minneapolis at the start of June and also my remaining reports from Seoul in February and March—to say nothing of the last report from New York in May; but here again, instead, is another report from our current trip to California (which will end soon). There’s a whole bunch of these reports as well: after a week in Southern California, we drove north for another week and are now back in Seal Beach for a few days before returning to Minnesota and we’ve been eating out a lot everywhere in the state. I’d rather make a small dent in the pile of reports from these meals before getting back home and finishing up with that older backlog at leisure. Here, therefore, is another report from Los Angeles’ County’s South Bay, and it features sushi. Continue reading
Three Meals in Busan (Korea, Feb-March 2024)
Okay, it’s been more than two weeks since my last report from Korea. That was of a very pleasant morning spent at Mangwon Market in Seoul. Today’s report takes us out of Seoul for the second time (the first was of a meal near the DMZ), all the way to Busan. We took a fast train down to Busan at the end of February and spent a couple of nights there. It was a pretty hit-and-run trip and we didn’t really get a good feel for the city but enough to know that we’d like to come back again (and we almost certainly will in the spring of 2026). All our meals in the city were affairs of convenience and so rather than posting about each of them separately, I’m putting up a combo post that covers our first three meals out (breakfast was eaten at our somewhat functional hotel). The only solo report will be of our last meal in the city, which was eaten at the Jagalchi fish market. That’ll go up next week, probably, with a prolonged look at the market as well. Continue reading
Sushi at Momokawa (New York, October 2023)
Due to all my time being sucked up by the last bits of planning for the off-campus program I’m about to leave on in another few weeks, I’ve fallen further behind with my backlog of restaurant reports from our travels earlier this year. I still have a few reports from Ireland to come. I’d hoped to get at least one of those out this week but didn’t get around to it—the remaining reports are all quite image-heavy. And so here instead is another of the meal reports from the quick trip the missus and I made to New York in mid-October. I’ve already posted a report on our first lunch on that trip, which featured sushi at Gouie, in the Market Line at Essex Market. That was, on the whole, a decent meal, we thought. We ate sushi again for lunch the next day, this time up on the Upper East Side before a visit to the Met to take in the Manet/Degas exhibit, among other things. I’d asked around for recommendations and Momokawa seemed like a good bet. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Sushi at Gouie (New York, October 2023)
Here is the first of a few reports from New York City. The missus and I were there for a whirlwind trip a couple of weekends ago. She is on sabbatical, it was my midterm break and with kind friends willing to supervise the boys in our absence, it was a rare opportunity for the two of us to get away together. We had a packed couple of days, hanging out with friends, visiting museums and, yes, eating. It’s only the eating that I am going to document here. First up, is our first lunch, which featured sushi. Living as we do in the sushi wasteland that is Minnesota, we always look forward to eating sushi when visiting cities with better sushi scenes. That’s not to say we were looking to spend huge amounts of money eating a bromakase meal somewhere. A casual lunch spot with good fish served in the form of lunch special combos was what we were after. Looking around for spots in the general vicinity of where we were going to be that morning and afternoon, I hit upon Gouie at the Market Line, the basement food hall at Essex Market. I made what turned out to be an entirely redundant reservation and we met a friend for lunch there right as they opened. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Koi (Seal Beach, CA, December 2022)
Only a few more reports to go from our Southern California trip in December. We ate sushi at Nozomi in Torrance the day after we arrived and we ate sushi at Koi in Seal Beach two days before we left. One meal was a little more expensive than the other and one meal was not as good as the other, by some distance. Alas, the more expensive meal was the less good meal and that meal was this dinner at Koi. It was not bad per se—and, again, it was far better than anything available in Minnesota—but we were left wishing we’d just gone back to Nozomi for one more meal. Continue reading
Sushi Nozomi III (Torrance, Ca, December 2022)
Lunch at Sushi Nozomi was supposed to be our first meal in Los Angeles this December, to be eaten on our way from LAX to Seal Beach. But Sun Country screwed us over and we ended up eating dim sum instead at the new Torrance outpost of Lunasia (a meal that was good but not as good as I’d expected it might be). Nozomi is an altogether more reliable prospect though and I am pleased to report that our eventual meal there—lunch the next day—was just as good as we’d hoped it would be. The price, however, was not what we’d hoped/expected it would be—more on this below. But first let’s get to the good stuff. Continue reading
A Farewell to Kiriko (Los Angeles, June 2022)
My penultimate meal report from our Los Angeles trip in June is of what was probably my favourite meal of the trip, and definitely the most melancholy. Favourite because, well, sushi and particularly the lunch sushi omakase at Kiriko has always been excellent (see here and here). Melancholy because a few minutes after finishing and pledging to once again start eating regularly at Kiriko on our Los Angeles trips we discovered that they were only two weeks away from closing for good. We kicked ourselves for our years of neglect—though I should add they did not close due to lack of business; rather, due to exhaustion borne out of the stresses of the pandemic. Well, as sad as we are to see Kiriko go and to know we won’t be able to eat there again, it was a wonderful last meal. That’s something. Continue reading
Kanpachi (Los Angeles, June 2022)
My meal reports from our trip to Los Angeles in June began with the first of two dim sum meals. Here now is my second report, on the first of two sushi meals. In my write-up of our dinner at Sushi Takeda in the winter I’d noted that on our next trip we were unlikely to go out to another expensive sushi dinner, given the escalating prices of omakases at the high end. And we stuck to that sort of resolution on this trip. For one thing, we only went out to sushi lunches, not dinners, and for another, we only ate the set lunch omakase specials at the places we went to. The first of these places is an unheralded restaurant in Gardena, the kind that does not show up on lists of the best sushi bars in Los Angeles: Kanpachi. It was a satisfying lunch anyway. Continue reading
Sakura II (St. Paul, MN)
Sakura was the last restaurant I ate at before the pandemic closures began in March 2020. I stopped in for lunch by myself, sat at the bar and had an enjoyable meal of not-exceptional but entirely acceptable sushi. That may sound like damning with faint praise but in Minnesota it’s actually saying a lot. Thanks to the pandemic, it took a little over two years for me to go back and this time I went with the family. In the interim they’ve stopped lunch service and are now only open for dinner. Our plan had actually been to eat dinner that Sunday at Kyatchi’s St. Paul location but they closed unexpectedly for a few days for Covid-related reasons. Our kids had been promised Japanese food and so we pivoted to Sakura. I am glad to report that it didn’t disappoint on this occasion either. Continue reading
Sushi Takeda (Los Angeles, December 2021)
Here finally is my last meal report from our trip to Southern California in late-December. Somewhat improbably, I have wrapped up all these reports in less than two months from the end of the trip (you can find all the others here). We had a lot of good restaurant food on this trip but this dinner, eaten on our penultimate night, may have been the true highlight. In this I suppose it follows the pattern of most of our recent trips to Los Angeles: we typically eat one expensive sushi meal as the splurge on the trip. After this trip, however, I’m not sure that this will always be the norm for us going forward. This is not because our dinner at Sushi Takeda was bad; far from it—it was in fact excellent. But the rapidly intensifying price race in the high end of the sushi market in Los Angeles makes it unlikely we’ll be able to continue to partake of it. Continue reading
Sushi Nozomi II (Los Angeles, December 2021)
If dim sum is one of things we most look forward to eating in Los Angeles, so is sushi. My views on Minnesota sushi being just about as beloved as my views on Minnesota dim sum, I will say no more about that. I will instead only reiterate that it is very easy to find good sushi all over Los Angeles county—you don’t need to go to the temples of sushi in order to eat very good fish served atop very good rice. And if you’re in Torrance one of the best choices for that combination is Sushi Nozomi. I’ve previously reported on a meal eaten there six and a half years ago, a bit on the run on the way to the Long Beach Aquarium. We stopped in again on this trip—Torrance being much closer to our new base of operations in Seal Beach than to our previous in Koreatown—and this meal was even better. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Red (Madison, Wisconsin)
And so I finally come to the end of my meal reports from our trip to Madison in August. I know it will be hard for you all to face the coming weekends without the succour of these brief reviews but somehow you will have to manage.
As I’ve noted in my other reports, we experienced variable weather in our three days in Madison, ranging from the sunny and extremely hot to the extremely rainy. Somehow, this only impacted one of our meals (we ate breakfasts in our hotel room). We managed outdoor dinner on the first night (at Strings Ramen), outdoor lunch and dinner on the second day (at Bandung and Ian’s Pizza) and lunch on the third day (at Settle Down) but there was no hope of eating out on the third evening. The rain was torrential and it was unrelenting. As we were unwilling to eat in with an unvaccinated child in tow it had to be takeout then. How did it end up being sushi and what was it like? Read on. Continue reading