Tokyo

Eat Play Works: Yokocho 2.0

At a sleek counter, diners are perusing a menu of modern Vietnamese cuisine with a Japanese twist to be paired with sake. They might begin with something light – delicate rice paper rolls filled with shogayaki, ginger-fried pork and a Japanese home cooking classic – before moving onto a modest portion of motsuni, a dish of beef intestines stewed until tender. The chef smiles across the counter as he prepares the next dish, and then asks how they like the pairing with a robust yamahai sake. Just a few paces away, a similar scene is playing out at another counter restaurant and another, with diners hopping between them. Two floors of tiny restaurants are tessellated into a modern, stylish space. However, while the set-up might look like yet just another modern food hall, the underlying concept marks a growing trend within Tokyo’s dining scene to turn to the city’s past for inspiration.

Tokyo

Post-Coronavirus Tokyo: Reopening a City That Never Fully Shut Down

A grim sense of irony checked my delight at discovering one of my favorite restaurants had begun offering a lunch menu. Arossa Shibuya, a small, cozy restaurant that prides itself on excellent Australian meat and wine, stopped daytime service over a year ago, long before the coronavirus crisis. But as a sign of the times, they have resurrected their offering, beefing up the course and the price, likely as a bid to reel in more revenue. Watching the global pandemic unfold from Tokyo has jarred uneasily with a surreal sense of continuity across the city. Whereas several countries were under strict lockdown, Tokyoites were requested to show “self-restraint” and avoid the three Cs: crowds, closed spaces and close-contact settings.

Tokyo

Coronavirus Diary: Tokyo

As I sit down to write this on Tuesday, March 17, I am feeling uncomfortable. In truth, that’s mainly because I am overly full. Earlier, I cycled across town to a neighborhood I’ve never visited because a friend and I absolutely had to eat matcha cheesecake. We had been ogling it salaciously on Instagram and decided today was to be the day. Nowadays, lunches or café visits are done in small groups – normally just one-on-one with plenty of hand sanitizer. Home parties are on the rise. Uber Eats is apparently doing major business. I just passed a delivery man sleeping in the sun in the park. Exhaustion perhaps? Or making the most of spring, which is finally here?

Tokyo

Building Blocks: Tofu, Japan’s White Gold

On the forested Mt. Oyama, only one and a half hours away from Tokyo, the sleepy atmosphere is broken by a cheering crowd. It’s mid-March and women are sitting in a row on a stage, shoveling cups of tofu into their mouths as fast as they can. It is messy, distinctly inelegant and a whole lot of mad fun. These women are challengers in the Wanko Tofu speed eating competition, which also sees men and children compete in respective rounds. All this, along with a gigantic four-meter pot of boiling tofu and several other street food snacks, is part of the annual Oyama Tofu Festival, which celebrates the area’s long history of producing especially delicious tofu and marks its 30th anniversary this year.

Tokyo

Best Bites 2019: Tokyo

In a few years time, one might look back at the year 2019 and feel a bit sorry for it. That’s not for lack of delicious things to eat: record numbers of restaurants continue to open – although fierce competition means around half shut their doors within two years. But 2019 risks being forever overshadowed by 2020, when Tokyo will host the Olympics and Paralympics for the first time since 1964. It certainly is a preparatory year for the anticipated influx of overseas visitors. Fortunately, the city was able to lay claim to hosting the Rugby World Cup and did very well, both at demonstrating Japan’s omotenashi (hospitality) at its best and in the national team beating Ireland, causing one of the biggest upsets in the tournament’s history.

Tokyo

Ura Sablon: Noodle Chalet

Ramen joints are often easily recognizable, either by large windows illuminating slurping customers, a vending machine dispensing meal tickets at the doorway, or the brightly lit signs; usually it’s some combination of the three. When it comes to Ura Sablon, however, one might easily pass it by. The narrow entrance is tucked away between a storage locker and an air conditioning unit; a small notice, illegible unless up close, is attached to a traffic cone; and the paper lantern reading “tsukemen” – a kind of dipping noodles – could easily have ended up there by chance.

Tokyo

Mulberry Manor: The Great British Bake House

In a southwest corner of residential Tokyo, a British bakery shimmers into view – seemingly a mirage in the urban desert. This is not a hallucination of a nostalgic expat, but the second branch of Mulberry Manor, a bakery hailing from Lyme Regis, a charming town on southern England’s Jurassic Coast, which, as the name suggests, is famed for its fossils. It looks like 2019 is turning out to be quite a year for this bakery – this unlikely outpost in Tokyo will celebrate its first birthday while its mother store in Lyme turns ten. But it certainly wasn’t planned this way.