After a quick pit stop in Los Angeles for some asada fries
and a nap on the floor of my very generous friends Matt and Melissa’s house, we
were off to Tokyo. First time airplane
food was good as far as I can recall.
And perhaps it was my excitement for the trip, or my anxiety, but I
couldn’t sleep for a moment. I instead
played chess against the airplane computer for something close to 9 hours. I won’t go into who won all the games because
it’s not significant. What is
significant however is the city of Tokyo.
Like, largest metropolitan area in the world significant.
There are over 30 million people in the
greater area and 13 million in the city, which apparently grows in population by
3 million people on business days. The
shear mass of the city became obvious the moment we tried to navigate to our
hostel on the subway. Tokyo's subway map alone illustrates the size of the city. I have never
experienced such a thing.
Frankly, I have never been to a place that was completely overloading my senses in the way this city did. The entire place swarmed with people yelling at you through megaphones about their stores sale. Every surface that can be seen with your eyes has an advertisement on it. Odds are that it also is flashing or glowing with neon lights. Its hard to focus on just one thing when your brain is flooded every direction you look. One thing I could focus on however, was food... and it was everywhere.
As you might suspect from such a big place, Tokyo is home to
the largest number of Michelin starred restaurants in the world. Unsurprisingly to anyone knowing the
unreserved dedication and painstaking grind that is required to be “honored”
with such an esteemed award as a Michelin star, I instantly had a large list of
restaurants to avoid. Not to take away
from the talent of any of those chefs, I simply didn’t have room in my bag for
my designer suit or the budget for French technique in Japan. The plan was instead to eat what Japanese
people really eat… whatever that might be.
We stayed in a dormitory style hostel in an area called
Asakusa. Just 3 blocks from the largest
Buddhist temple in Tokyo and known for the ‘senbei’ shops.
Senbei is a rice cracker that’s cooked over fire and dipped in soy sauce. A food that seems undeserving of as much hype as a town being known for it. But these shops where easily 4 to a block and the rice crackers were pretty good and came in every possible style and combination hundreds of years of experience has thought up.
Past that and a giant market (I soon realized is the theme of every Asian city) the area of Asakusa was more a tourist hotspot than anything. But it was my first taste of the country. And after seeing beer vending machines...
24 hour curry bars, noodle bars, conveyor belt sushi bars, every sea creature caught earlier that day for sale in a market, pastas polyurethane coated and glowing under neon lights outside restaurants….
I realized I had arrived in a country that was anything but the United States. Just what I was after.
Senbei is a rice cracker that’s cooked over fire and dipped in soy sauce. A food that seems undeserving of as much hype as a town being known for it. But these shops where easily 4 to a block and the rice crackers were pretty good and came in every possible style and combination hundreds of years of experience has thought up.
Past that and a giant market (I soon realized is the theme of every Asian city) the area of Asakusa was more a tourist hotspot than anything. But it was my first taste of the country. And after seeing beer vending machines...
24 hour curry bars, noodle bars, conveyor belt sushi bars, every sea creature caught earlier that day for sale in a market, pastas polyurethane coated and glowing under neon lights outside restaurants….
I realized I had arrived in a country that was anything but the United States. Just what I was after.
The concept of noodle and curry bars everywhere is probably
the most convenient part about eating for cheap whenever you want in
Tokyo. You put about the equivalent of 4
US dollars into a vending machine and choose a picture (unless you read
Japanese, then I guess you read what youre actually getting) and it spits out a
ticket at you. You grab a seat and hand
the ticket to the kitchen and in the amount of time you would suspect they just
scooped it out from under a heat lamp, you’ve got yourself a world class meal!
Genius!
And as you can see I was all about it! Seems to be the equivalent to our fine staple fast food establishments in the states. The Japans got the idea better from a food point of view, but you can still hand it to ‘drive throughs’ for being a celebrity business model in our alarmingly profit driven homeland. Japans not far off in a post WWII society however. I mean it very well might be the only country where businessmen still wear suits. Common knowledge though. Speaking of common knowledge, sushi is pretty serious in this town.
And there is no limit to the type of raw meat they will lay over top of scrupulously prepared rice. I took a stab at a few on the more bizarre side of foods to an American. Herring row with crab innards was surprisingly delicious. Free wild tuna - good as expected. The welsh onion with unidentifiable fish egg - fantastic! My least favorite however was the horsemeat on the fact that it was quite the jaw workout.
You’re probably judging me right now for eating horse… but how often are you on a different continent with such an opportunity? As majestic as horses maybe, can you really watch an episode of Mr. Ed and not think that horse would probably feed more starving children then the amount of people that ever found that show funny? Like all our issues its really television that is to blame. And it wasn’t shark fin soup or a unicorn after all. I also had a lot of fish. More American households own fish than horses but I guess they just aren’t as cuddly. Back to Japan. Kind of badass how fluent these chefs were with seafood. We watched this guy butcher a whole tuna down using a samurai sword and a spoon.
Add that to your culinary techniques to learn. Quite the party trick! Beside loving sea-creatures, Japan has a bit of a sweet tooth. We had some sweet rice dumplings on a stick that were rolled in peanut flower. There was green tea and pumpkin ice cream, sweet rice crackers, a sweet potato pancake stuffed with a sugared bean paste.
I guess it turns out just like in America, the Japanese figure that sugar makes most things taste good.
And as you can see I was all about it! Seems to be the equivalent to our fine staple fast food establishments in the states. The Japans got the idea better from a food point of view, but you can still hand it to ‘drive throughs’ for being a celebrity business model in our alarmingly profit driven homeland. Japans not far off in a post WWII society however. I mean it very well might be the only country where businessmen still wear suits. Common knowledge though. Speaking of common knowledge, sushi is pretty serious in this town.
And there is no limit to the type of raw meat they will lay over top of scrupulously prepared rice. I took a stab at a few on the more bizarre side of foods to an American. Herring row with crab innards was surprisingly delicious. Free wild tuna - good as expected. The welsh onion with unidentifiable fish egg - fantastic! My least favorite however was the horsemeat on the fact that it was quite the jaw workout.
You’re probably judging me right now for eating horse… but how often are you on a different continent with such an opportunity? As majestic as horses maybe, can you really watch an episode of Mr. Ed and not think that horse would probably feed more starving children then the amount of people that ever found that show funny? Like all our issues its really television that is to blame. And it wasn’t shark fin soup or a unicorn after all. I also had a lot of fish. More American households own fish than horses but I guess they just aren’t as cuddly. Back to Japan. Kind of badass how fluent these chefs were with seafood. We watched this guy butcher a whole tuna down using a samurai sword and a spoon.
Add that to your culinary techniques to learn. Quite the party trick! Beside loving sea-creatures, Japan has a bit of a sweet tooth. We had some sweet rice dumplings on a stick that were rolled in peanut flower. There was green tea and pumpkin ice cream, sweet rice crackers, a sweet potato pancake stuffed with a sugared bean paste.
I guess it turns out just like in America, the Japanese figure that sugar makes most things taste good.
We also did in fact do things other than eat. We walked around… a lot. Took the subway to several parts of town. Cheapest way to get around hands down. Makes sense why everyone uses it, and every
stop we got off on felt like a completely different place.
The whole city has somewhat of a divided feeling between the calm and traditional lives of some amongst an increasingly busy and westernized population zooming from work to karaoke and back again. The fast pulse of the city was noticeable by the number of locals asleep on the subway as they came too and from work. Seems like there isn’t enough time in a day for people in Japan just like the states. Given the short amount of time we succeeded at visiting a significant slice of the area and getting a feel for life in the city.
We saw the imperial palace, a few temples, the Harajuku girls, every kind of market imaginable, the neon district and some very old parts of town. We even managed to find the Hyatt hotel Bill Murray filmed Lost in Translation in. Nice bar and view of the city at the top if you are into $40 dollar soda waters. If you want food or wine, be sure to hand off the check to whomever you are accompanying with the lowest over draft fees. But the view did make it nearly worth the outrageous prices. There is however a civic center with a free and much better panoramic view. No photo can do it justice. Sky rise buildings to the horizon every direction you look.
Quite the site, but it did have me missing grass and trees by the time we were leaving, and the food had my companions missing a good American breakfast. So we had the closest thing before we headed to the airport. Buttered Texas toast, scrambled eggs with A-1 on it and of course what would an American breakfast be without onion soup. Right? Nice change of pace though, and they had coffee. Had to wake up for the journey after all. Which proved to be a challenge getting to the airport following an inaccurate map, but we made it with time to spare and reflect back on what a sensory overload Tokyo had been.
Next stop... Bangkok!
The whole city has somewhat of a divided feeling between the calm and traditional lives of some amongst an increasingly busy and westernized population zooming from work to karaoke and back again. The fast pulse of the city was noticeable by the number of locals asleep on the subway as they came too and from work. Seems like there isn’t enough time in a day for people in Japan just like the states. Given the short amount of time we succeeded at visiting a significant slice of the area and getting a feel for life in the city.
We saw the imperial palace, a few temples, the Harajuku girls, every kind of market imaginable, the neon district and some very old parts of town. We even managed to find the Hyatt hotel Bill Murray filmed Lost in Translation in. Nice bar and view of the city at the top if you are into $40 dollar soda waters. If you want food or wine, be sure to hand off the check to whomever you are accompanying with the lowest over draft fees. But the view did make it nearly worth the outrageous prices. There is however a civic center with a free and much better panoramic view. No photo can do it justice. Sky rise buildings to the horizon every direction you look.
Quite the site, but it did have me missing grass and trees by the time we were leaving, and the food had my companions missing a good American breakfast. So we had the closest thing before we headed to the airport. Buttered Texas toast, scrambled eggs with A-1 on it and of course what would an American breakfast be without onion soup. Right? Nice change of pace though, and they had coffee. Had to wake up for the journey after all. Which proved to be a challenge getting to the airport following an inaccurate map, but we made it with time to spare and reflect back on what a sensory overload Tokyo had been.
Next stop... Bangkok!
