Tokyo Eats
Going to Tokyo anytime soon? Yeah, me either, but it’s fun to dream about, isn’t it? Budget Travel offers The Hungry Man’s Tokyo to fuel your dreams of sushi and green tea. But the article also explains that Tokyo has much more to offer than what immediately comes to mind.
After a quick run-in with plastic food, the author of the article, Adam Sachs, embarked on a culinary tour of the city. His trips to Tokyo begin and end in “depachikas, high-end food halls packed into the basements of the city’s many department stores.”
Sachs noted that restaurants in Tokyo generally offer only one type of food, focusing on a certain noodle or certain ingredient. He sampled “tonkatsu–a crispy piece of pork encrusted in bread crumbs” and concluded that “[y]ou could probably spend your entire life trying to determine the best tonkatsu restaurant in Tokyo without ever exhausting your options . . . .” Among the other specialty restaurants are those focusing on unagi, which is charcoal-broiled eel. “There are cheap, satisfying unagi places all over town (many are identified easily by plastic eel displays in the window).”
One particularly important specialty in Tokyo is the bowl of ramen noodles:
Consider something as seemingly simple as a bowl of ramen. Countless noodle shops around the city serve more than 40 regional varieties of ramen. And for the armchair ramen aficionado, there are competing ramen-rating guidebooks, ramen awards, ramen TV shows, and a heated ramen debate that seems to boil like a broth just under the surface of polite society. (Worldramen.net is a good place to follow the debate in English.)
While this obsession with ramen makes me want to jump on a plane to make up for all the wannabe ramen I ate in college (Sachs atoned for his with a visit to a ramen museum), one dish that makes me want to stay away from Tokyo entirely is monja-yaki:
Monja-yakiis a kind of food found in Tokyo that probably won’t be the next hot trend anywhere else. For one thing, it’s difficult to define. Imagine a liquid that becomes a solid that will probably end up in a gaseous state sometime later in the evening.
None for me, thanks! For more interesting and funny details on Sach’s tour of Tokyo, including his sampling of Sumo wrestler food and the required sushi restaurant visit, read the entire article here.
