Omu-rice and pork cutlet curry.
You may not think of fried mashed potato patties or beef stew served with rice when craving Japanese food, but these dishes of Western origins are popular in Japanese cuisine. Mari Kanazawa of Watashi to Tokyo explains the origins of some of these Japanese-Western dishes and where you're most likely to find them in Tokyo.
One reason I don't like eating street food in New York City is because I either have to eat it while walking or find a place to sit down before digging into my food as it gets progressively cooler. If I lived in Tokyo I could just eat ramen or oden in front of a cart on the side of the street, as seen in PingMag's feature on Tokyo's mobile food bars in which they interview a handful of food cart vendors about how they run their businesses.
Tokyo-based design magazine PingMag has a feature on the history and making of the Japanese snack cake ningyo-yaki, which translates to "fried dolls." These small cakes made by pouring batter into intricate molds—varying from Hello Kitty to a traditional lantern—are typically filled with red bean paste, but may also be filled with chocolate or custard. Grab a box on your next trip to Japan!
My first thought when seeing Jon Cheng's photo of o-toro (fattiest part of the tuna) in Tokyo was, "That's a big chunk of tuna." And then a moment later, "That's a huge-ass knife."
Having visited more than 80 restaurants in Tokyo,
June's Vanity Fair includes a great feature by Nick Tosches on Tokyo's Tsukiji Fish Market, its fish, and beyond to New York's most expensive restaurant, Masa. Tsukiji is the largest in the world fish market, moving more than 2,000 tons of seafood a day. New York's Fulton Fish Market, the second-largest fish market in the world, moves only 115 tons a year, an average of less than half a ton each working day. Worth reading all the way through, especially if you're a sushi lover.
Lee Hefter, Wolfgang Puck's right-hand man and the executive chef at Spago Beverly Hills and the steakhouse Cut, visits Japan for a week every year for inspiration and goes home with new ideas on how to prepare the food at his restaurants—on a previous trip, a meal at a Tokyo restaurant where a steak can cost $1,400 gave him the idea for the ultra-high temperature plus wood smoke process he uses on his steaks back in Los Angeles. This March, two LA Times reporters tagged along to document the experience; Hefter gets tips on where to eat from chefs like Nobu Matsuhisa and Masa Takayama and does a lot of research, so if you're visiting Japan anytime soon do your tastebuds a favor and take the list of restaurants from his trip along with you!
Fans of Japanese food, take note: One of Hefter's favorite places is a small tempura bar, where the chef treats the frying like art. Hefter says, pityingly, "It's amazing how many people go through life thinking they've had tempura," and I believe him. From the sounds of it, I've never really had tempura myself, and I've been to Japan. Perhaps more surprisingly, he only had sushi once on his trip, at an eight-stool sushi bar without a glass case or a list of fish to choose from because the chef only serves seafood that are in season.
Tien Mao visited Japan earlier this year and just posted photos from an early-morning trip to Tsukiji Fish Market, the world's largest wholesale seafood market, where millions of dollars and tons of fish pass through in the early morning six days a week. If you love food, it's definitely one of the places you have to see when you visit Tokyo. I don't know when I'll be there next, but I do know these red tentacles are making me really hungry.
Related: Rion Nakaya also has a lovely set from Tsukiji, taken two years ago. For more market scenes, check out her photographs from Bilbao's Riverside Meat Market and Fish Vendors.
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