Food Adventures Japan

In the past year or so there has been something of a bakery boom around Ningyōchō, a pan pandemic of sorts, practically pan pandemonium, pan being the word for bread Japan long ago borrowed from French. Despite the coronavirus pandemic, five or six new bakeries have opened recently, bringing the total, according to my count, to twelve, each shop offering something different in addition to standard bread products. Not bad considering the Nihonbashi area, the core of […]

The other day as I was riding down Shinohashi Dori past the site of the former Tsukiji wholesale (inner) market I saw that it now has a new use: a mass vaccination center. Thanks to the corona virus the site finally has found a new purpose. At least it will benefit the people able and willing to be vaccinated, although with the Olympics looking more and more likely to take   place, I don’t know why anyone would […]

Sushi Jin 鮨人 April 13, 2021 Today my wife and I had a big sushi lunch at a pop-up version of Toyama City’s Sushi Jin. A friend of mine really likes this sushi, and even took my wife to a previous Tokyo pop-up meal. This time the meal was in Azabujuban in the basement of Ozaki yukitaka (尾崎幸隆), a kappō style restaurant that serves nihonryōri (日本料理). I didn’t ask, but my guess is that Sushi Jin’s business […]

My wife and I recently went down to Atami, a small city on the ocean in Shizuoka prefecture just an hour—at most—away from Tokyo by shinkansen. Atami is one of those Japanese cities that looks like it was booming back in the bubble period but has since fallen into a state of disrepair, at least compared to cities such as Kyoto, Karuizawa and Tokyo. I can’t say for certain as I was not in Japan back in […]

Sunday, December 6, 2020. It being a beautiful late fall day, my wife wanted to go out and see and enjoy some local kōyō, known in English as autumn foliage. We didn’t want to leave the city, so we decided to head towards some parks in the Shirokanedai area or Minato-ku. Our first stop was Ikedayama Koen, a small park with a nice traditional Japanese garden built around a pond on the site of a secondary residence […]

Kara-age USA I was at Mitsukoshi’s main shop at Nihonbashi last night. In the basement food section in an area that always has various foods from all over Japan there was a shop selling what they billed as Oita Meibutsu kara-age (大分名物唐揚げ). It looked good, both the boneless and the bone in. I know that kara-age in Japan began at a shop in Usa, Oita, some time ago, and that the shop most famous for having the […]

A couple months ago after eating lunch in Kagurazaka at Kohaku, part of the Ishikawa Group of restaurants, my wife and I made reservations for lunch at Ishikawa’s nearby sushi restaurant Hatō (波濤). A friend had been once or twice and really liked it, so we decided to give it a shot. Despite the heat, I rode my bicycle to the restaurant and met my wife on the main street nearby. The restaurant is in a small […]

One of the longest running businesses in Ningyōchō as well as Tokyo, Coffee Shop Ron, has closed. What until a week or two ago was a coffee shop that offered simple yōshoku dishes (Japanese takes on western recipes) served by older gentlemen dressed in matching attire that included vests and bow ties and of course well sun-bleached plastic food in the front window is gone after 240 years, not all of which was as a coffee shop. […]