Tokyo Food Tour

A couple of days before I left Toronto for Tokyo, I booked a Tokyo Food Tour for this morning, my first full day in Japan on this trip.

Before getting into that, I’ll admit to being a tad discombobulated today. While I was on the tour, it was still yesterday back home. Day here is night there, and vice versa.

My circadian rhythm was never a virtuoso. And for the past couple of decades, it has had a problem even keeping the beat. But last night it was positively discordant. I had trouble falling asleep. My body clock was screaming, “What the heck are you doing going to sleep now? The morning is just beginning!”

No, body clock. Night was just starting. I hate it when my body functions argue with me.

The point is, it took a while for me to fall asleep. I slept for less than two hours. After waking up, it took me a while to fall back asleep again. I repeated that pattern a few times before giving up and getting out of bed well before the alarm I’d set to make sure I’d get up in time to make it to the Tokyo Food Tour.

The upshot is I’m really tired. This and my afternoon post will probably be even more typo-laden than usual as a result.

(Aside: Often, a couple of weeks after I return from a trip, I go back and do a quick scan of the posts from that trip to try to find and fix some of the most egregious typos. So, if you’re reading this considerably after I get back from this trip, you might find fewer typos than people who read it reasonably contemporaneously.)

Choosing a Tokyo Food Tour

Regular readers of this journal know that food tours are a relatively recent, but now frequent, addition to my travels. Many, but not all of the ones I’ve been on have been with a company that runs them in several cities around the world, Secret Food Tours. (They don’t compensate me in any way for mentioning them here, but I’d be thrilled to accept such compensation if they ever offer it. That’s unlikely, but I live in hope.)

I’ve always been happy with their tours that I’ve been on. They have a Tokyo Food Tour, so I booked it. There are other providers of food tours in Tokyo. I looked at the ones I found, but the food stops and the location of the meeting point for the various tours seemed best with Secret Food Tours.

One thing that made me a little hesitant about Secret Food Tour’s Tokyo tour is its start time. It began at 10:40 in the morning, which felt like a weird time to start eating large quantities of food. I guess it’s supposed to be brunch. They also list a 3:00 p.m. tour on their website, but they were shown as “sold out” every day I’m going to be in Tokyo. My guess is that they aren’t really sold out, but rather they don’t run at that time this time of year, and, for whatever reason, the company didn’t want to remove them from the site. Your guess is as good as mine on that.

On the Tokyo Food Tour

There were only two other customers on the tour today. They were from the Boston area on a business trip. They work for a private academy in the greater Boston area. One was a fundraiser. The other worked in admissions. About half of their school’s students board there, with many coming from overseas. The two were on a recruiting and fundraising trip.

As has happened every time I’ve bumped into Americans in my travels since January of this year, Trump came up without prompting from me. He was discussed in very uncomplimentary terms. Unlike most of the other instances that have happened, they didn’t apologize for their president, but their sympathies were clearly with Americans who do.

On the food tours I’ve been on elsewhere, in addition to introducing customers to various foods and describing those dishes, the guides have generally also done a spiel about the neighbourhood the tour goes through, along with a bit about its history and character.

The tour today was strictly food. The guide led us to various eating establishments, ordered the food, told us what it was, and, for the most part, that was it. The food was, however, very good. And that’s what it’s supposed to be about. And the guide was generally very personable.

I’d prefer a little more colour commentary, but, hey, it’s not like me to whine and complain. As if.

The tour started with sushi. It was the traditional sort of raw-fish-on-top-of-rice sort of sushi. We had three different fish. One was salmon, I forget the other two. Maybe you can recognize them from the picture I posted near the top of this page. Whatever they were, they were delectable. (I hope that didn’t trigger involuntary salivation in any readers.)

The Tokyo Food Tour then moved on to the main course. We each could order whatever dish we wanted from the restaurant’s menu. I chose a delicious, melt-in-your-mouth steak item. (The menu didn’t use the word “delicious” or the phrase “melt in your mouth,” you understand. That was my evaluation.) It came with miso soup and some small accoutrements. The whole package was delightful.

After that, it was on to yakitori, grilled meat on skewers. The photo I posted shows two types of meat. There was a third, balls of ground chicken. It was on a separate plate that I didn’t capture in a picture. Of the two that are pictured here. One was chicken chunks that were some of the best chicken I’ve ever had.

The other pictured meat was chicken gizzard. It was inedible. I didn’t mind the taste, which was sort of like liver, but it was grizzly and so tough as to be unchewable. I ate about one and a half pieces on the skewer and couldn’t finish the rest. I was not alone in that assessment. Neither of the other two people on the tour liked it, and neither of them finished theirs.

The unpictured chicken balls were very good, but not as delicious as the chicken chunks.

The next stop was at a place where we had gyozas, which are Japanese fried dumplings. I showed two types in the picture, but we had four, each with a different filling. They, too, were terrific.

Next up on the Tokyo Food Tour was the first ot two desserts, soft-serve ice cream. We had a choice of vanilla, matcha, or swirled vanilla and matcha. We all chose the mixed version. I’m not a huge soft-serve ice cream fan. It was very tasty, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to get it.

The final stop was for a traditional Japanese pastry, manjü. There are a number of varieties available in Japan with different fillings. I forgot what the guide said was in ours, but it tasted vaguely lemony to me and had a pasty consistency. It was very good. According to the guide, the particular, small bakery, which had a streetfront counter, that we were at has been in business and run by the same family for I forget how many decades.

And so ended the Tokyo Food Tour. I’ll be back with a post about my afternoon activities later if I don’t fall asleep facedown on my computer keyboard. Talk to you then. Or not. Life is full of surprises, isn’t it?