Uogashi, I confess, sounds terrible to me as a word. Let’s leave it at that. But the concept, ‘riverside fish market’ is appealing. This is the place on Kitchen Street in Tokyo Station that I’ve avoided for months and months and months because I wasn’t in the mood, and then when I was it turned […]
Author: Jon
Kobeya, Otemachi
A weird sort of deja vu, all over again. I could swear that I already wrote about my lunch at Kobeya, which was late last year or early this. I really enjoyed it at the time, despite the obvious failings, and I remembered it fondly enough that I went back again. For the better part […]
- Other treats
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Toritoku, Kayabacho (鳥徳)
It’s feasting season again…when the winds of change rise up, Putin rears his head and comes out of Russia into Alaska’s airspace, and the company randomly reassigns people to different teams with no apparent motivation or prior notice. Strange humors dwelleth in the heartseth of men, and the only solution is to get drunk and […]
- curry
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Curry House San Marco, Tokyo
There’s a little ramen street down at the end of the underground shopping passage on the Yaesu side of Tokyo station (First Avenue or something like that). The ramen area has 4 shops that are supposed to be famous, and I’ve been to three of them – the 4th, a tsukemen specialist, always has a long […]
Mangrove, Ebisu
Mangrove is like a funny corner of Bali stuck around the back of Garden Place (near Wansu, if that helps; it’s a cool little corner, and I think there are a bunch of other explorable places). On the day it was cold and rainy, so it was nice to get in and sit by the […]
- izakaya
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Omasa Komasa, Higashi Nakano (大政小政)
He means well. I want to preface all that follows with my emphatic belief that he does mean well. The waitress at Ranman (who was really lovely, in such a sweet and motherly way) told us it would take about 15 minutes to walk to Higashi Nakano, but warned that “It’s really dark.” While a […]
- izakaya
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Ranman, Nakano (らんまん)
No joke, after Okajouki we needed something more satisfying. (Nuts, did I really just write something that stupid? Well, you know the rules – no edits.) Ranman was it. In our party (which enlarged at this point) there was general agreement that this is one of the best pure izakayas ever. EVER! In the history […]
- izakaya
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Okajouki, Nakano (陸蒸気)
Well, I had promised to meet The Woodsman at 5 PM, after my bath. Due to excessive bathing and the sluggishness of mind that immediately follows it, it took me some time to get back up to the station and then start north along Nakano’s enormous, insane, pack-em-in covered shotengai. I didn’t even have a […]
Katou Spa, Nakano (香藤湯)
Well, after enjoying my dip at one of Fukagawa’s local furoyasan, I was a bit hooked. And I’ve never gotten out of my head the pictures that I saw years ago in a documentary about one of the last bathhouse painters – the guys who used to paint the traditional murals on the walls of […]
- izakaya
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Wajin, Meguro (和神)
Now, when I was heading out to Meguro this evening, one of my colleagues thought that was a very exciting place to go. She said there are lots of old-fashioned places to eat. Before I started looking around, I had been excited too, but I found it pretty difficult to find anything that looked especially […]