In Tokyo, ramen is a playground for the culinary imagination. As long as the dish contains thin wheat noodles, it's ramen. In fact, there's a literal ramen playground called Tokyo Ramen Street in the...
If a Tokyoite knows anything about Nakano, it's likely to be Nakano Broadway, a shopping mall with several floors devoted to Japanese comics (manga) and animation (anime). It is geek central. I found...
But Tokyo offers cat cafes, a commercial solution to the problem of wanting to commune with cats but being unwilling or unable to have one at home.Iris's favorite cat cafe is Nekorobi, in the Ikebukur...
Tokyo boasts similar food theme parks devoted to ramen, gyōza, ice cream, and desserts. If you don't like takoyaki, you're not entirely out of luck: the stand we visited, Aizuya, also offers . You wou...
After lunch we went to have our feet nibbled by hundreds of tiny fish. Then, after that- just kidding, I'll explain. The onsen offers a skin treatment where you dip your feet into a shallow pool stock...
We ate three tiny, geometrically engineered appetizers, including a perfect cube of kabocha squash-flavored fish cake and an octopus salad consisting of one tiny piece of octopus brushed with a plum d...
We ate spiral-wrapped eel meat. We ate guts. We ate liver, which is somehow different from guts. We (mostly Iris) ate two bowls of of crispy fried eel backbones. We ate eel meat wrapped around burdock...
The ubiquity of great food in Tokyo is beyond imagination. It's not just that I'm interested in food and pay close attention to restaurants and takeout shops, although that's true. In Tokyo, great foo...
Finally, let's talk about those Kit Kat bars. There is no flavor that can be embodied in Kit Kat form and sold in Japanese stores. Green tea. Black tea. Miso. Cherry blossom. Soy sauce. Toasted soybea...
The hot case at a kombini features tonkatsu, fried chicken, (a breaded hamburger patty), Chinese pork buns, potato croquettes, and seafood items such as breaded squid legs or oysters. In a bit of int...
Japan isn't meat-crazed in the same way as the USA, but when the Japanese want meat, they want it as marbled as the Parthenon. The most popular topping for ramen is pork belly, streaked with fat, roll...
At Iris's direction, we enjoyed all sorts of skewered bits. While most yakitori places serve various cuts of chicken and a few vegetables, the menu at Yakitorino was all over the place, and nearly eve...
Now, back to Sapporo-ya. The place is deep enough below street level that the windows let in no natural light; harsh fluorescent lamps made everyone look ill. The walls are greenish-yellow. If you are...
We did go to a skeezy yakitori place, however, which is where Iris discovered , chicken tail, the fattest, juiciest bit of the chicken, and the best to grill on a stick and brush with sweetened soy sa...
So what does matcha taste like, if you've never had it? It's commonly described as tasting green, which is true, albeit begging the question. Good matcha is naturally very sweet, a plant sweetness qui...
The most obvious difference between Japanese and American ice cream bars is that if the Japanese bar promises something crispy, it will damn well be crispy. The Haagen-Dazs Crispy Sandwich, for exampl...
Before heading to our respective baths, Laurie, Iris, and I went to the food court and got lunch. I loved this food court, not because the food was especially good (although it was seventeen times bet...
Buying fish in the supermarket in Japan is a delight, even if the fish is displayed in styrofoam trays, as it is at Life. The most common supermarket fish, mackerel, also happens to be my favorite, an...
Yōshoku is the Japanese take on Western foods; much of it was created during the Meiji period (1868-1912), when, after centuries of isolation, Japan began importing goods and ideas from the outside wo...
Something about Tokyo's exuberant modernism made Iris and me feel like the city existed just to make us happy: the waving cats seemed to whisper. Iris and I came back with a list of Tokyo attraction...
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