Culinary Backstreets guide Mairi Wallace explains the differences between three Tokyo food tours: historic Yanesen, creative Kichijoji and community-minded Monzen-Nakacho, and what each neighborhood reveals about the city.

Ramen may have seen a worldwide boom in recent years, but when it comes to soba – Japanese buckwheat noodles – fans might say they’ve been unfairly neglected. “Soba have a history of at least 400 years, as long as sushi. Yet they’re almost completely unknown abroad,” chef Yoshinobu Saito says, pondering the concept behind his first ever restaurant. “I guess I don’t have a specific concept for the store. But I do want to promote soba worldwide.”

Many people think of miso as the soup that gets tacked onto every Japanese meal. We can still remember our first experience of Japanese food in the West, when the waiter brought the soup at the end of the meal, and someone thought he’d forgotten to serve it at the beginning. Any self-respecting Japanese meal, just about anywhere in the world, will end with miso soup. The miso used in the soup is a paste that will determine the flavor of the soup. There are basically three kinds of miso: red (akamiso), white (shiromiso) and mixed (awase), which has a brownish hue and is the most common variety used in miso soup.