Tokyo Dining Diary
I had an ambitious agenda for Tokyo this CNY, wanting to visit a couple of three-star Mich restaurants and all that. Then it hit me that we were going to Japan, where there is no such thing as bad food, and where the Michelin guide is generally scoffed at. So we decided to revolve our dining adventures around our shopping itinerary instead—and that’s the way I would recommend anyone to do it.
One morning, we got up at 3:30am to queue up at Tsukiji Market for the tuna auction, which is a must for sashimi fans and the equivalent of Christians going to church, or Buddhists going to the temple—you get my point. The tuna auction itself, held in a massive warehouse with hundreds of ginormous frozen tuna corpses, is not the most educational (unless you actually understand the blur of men shouting and pointing fingers at each other). But it’s the mad rush for sashimi at the Tsukiji shops afterwards that makes the whole journey worthwhile.
I had heard so much about Daiwa Sushi (Tsukiji Market Building, Tsukiji, (+81) 3-3479-5820), so that was where we headed straight after the auction. Thank goodness it wasn’t a long wait, and within 15 minutes we were seated in the stuffy, cozy shop, watching an elderly chef whip up an omakase menu of tuna, sea urchin and prawn nigiri sushi. Seafood doesn’t get much fresher or tastier than this—although I was a tiny bit concerned about the hygiene here. The heat was on full-blast and the sushi display cases were fogged up with condensation—somehow, sashimi and hot temperatures don’t seem to be a good match.
We also went to Ginza Seryna (B1/F, Tiffany Ginza Building, Ginza 2-7-17, Chuo-ku, (+81) 3-3562-6211), a chic Japanese fine dine in the shopping district. Ginza Seryna served us some crazy appetizers that night. We were handed an exquisite platter of translucent jelly cubes—which contained fugu (blowfish) strips inside, the waitress casually told us. Last I’d heard, blowfish were the second most poisonous vertebrates on earth (after the golden poison frog—thanks, Wiki), and people actually had to be crazy ask for the dish themselves before a restaurant would even dare serve it. Chefs dedicate a lifetime learning how to dissect a blowfish, and people have died eating it. But apparently it’s no big deal at Ginza Seryna. Fearing the scorn of the waitstaff, who surely knew better than us, we didn’t question and just swallowed. And it was good; it tasted kind of like dried, salted squid. There were no casualties after our meal, I’m happy to report.
A quick Google back home tells me that blowfish (at least in Korea) is a common dish these days, so maybe we were getting worked up over nothing—or maybe there’s been a paradigm shift for food risk-taking that I missed. Another first for me that night was the shirako, or fish testicles. It looks like brains, tastes like… well, testicles, and goes quite well with steamed egg.The Seryna brand of restaurants has been around since 1961, the Ginza chain since 1987—and after our dinner that night, I understood why the crowds keep coming back.
We went for the shabu shabu menu, and the beef was just out-of-this-world. We chose regular prime beef instead of the special Kobe, and after the requisite “shabu shabu” in a pot of boiling water, the slices of marbled meat melted like velvety chocolate in our mouths. The fat-to-meat ratio in our beef was unbelievable, and I can’t even imagine what the Kobe would’ve done to us. The beef was easily one of the best I have ever tasted—and I was reminded again that at the end of the day, fresh and high-quality ingredients are all that matters.
We made our pilgrimage to udon chain Tsurutontan Shinjuku (B/F, 2-26-3 Kabukicho, Shinjuku, (+81) 3-5287-2626), where we had three scrumptious bowls of thick, chewy noodles paired with different sauces and broths. Even though it was dead of winter, I just had to have my cold udon, served on a bed of ice with soy sauce on the side. There’s nothing like chomping through scrumptious strands of noodles with no other distractions in the way.