six-dollar ramen

twentyfive-course sushi meals

many tiny trucks

Tokyo is overwhelmingly busy, surprisingly quiet, incredibly expensive and yet, can be ridiculously cheap.  The mass transit map looks like an abstracted octopi orgy and, while you can get virtually anywhere in Japan by rail from many points within Tokyo, figuring out which platform will get you to a destination within the city can be a serious pain in the ass.  We loved it.

The food here did not disappoint.  Even our worst meals in Tokyo were quite good as decent food can be bought almost anywhere.

People take eating seriously here and there is excellent food to complement and serve all aspects of life, whether you are on your way to work in the morning or unwinding slowly after a long week.  For the former, there are stand up sushi bars, ramen bars where you order from a vending machine prior to sitting down, and even breakfast places where you can slam a bit of soup and an egg for about five bucks in five minutes.  For the latter, there are elaborate three-hour meals that embody the craft of cooking, regional cuisine, seasonality and the art of presentation. Tokyo is a city built to satisfy your needs be they chronologic, gastronomic, cultural or aesthetic in nature.

We knew the fine dining scene in Tokyo would be impressive.  There are more Michelin-starred restaurants in Japan than any other country. Regardless of your feelings on the whole rating system, this fact is a testament to how serious the Japanese are about food.

We tried our best to eat a wide spectrum of cuisines in varying price ranges and overall, I think we did pretty well.  People (myself included) like to dog on the cheap food that is available in America and usually it is well deserved.  The general quality of almost everything we ate in Japan, even on the lower end of the price spectrum, is several steps above what you would get in the States.  Fast food, or casual counter-service eateries serve up meals that usually look just as good on the plate as they do on the menu. Sloppy is an adjective of little use when describing even the least expensive Japanese food. Not to mention, it often tastes better than you might expect. Supermarket sushi is beautifully presented and packaged; even the California rolls you can purchase from a 7-11 for a dollar are about as tasty as what you might get from Whole Foods.  Wages in many of these food service jobs are low (some people we spoke to would argue too low) and this keeps the prices low as well, and the external impact of such cheap food has social and environmental costs that are probably difficult to quantify.  However, as a cultural difference, there seems to be very little tolerance for doing things poorly.  From an outsider’s perspective, it is not funny to do a shitty job here, it is not accepted, and it is not common.

For instance, at Namjatown, a totally bizarre amusement arcade-type place located inside a huge mall, there are several stalls selling different gyoza, each vendor specializing in one or two types.

The owners and employees all seemed to take pride in serving tasty yet inexpensive food even though the clientele consists of mainly teenagers and young adults.  Compare this to the food available at a mall, theme park, or movie theater that caters to the same demographic in the states where the vendors halfheartedly serve awful food that’s awfully expensive.

Also they have an ice cream shop with flavors like: eel, curry, crab oyster and beef tongue.  We got the salt, curry, eel, beef tongue, citrus and wasabi.

There are so many places to eat that picking one can be daunting, especially if you don’t know what you want.  Yet, it is just as bad if you decide on something specific in advance because you will invariably pass at least 237 places that look terribly enticing on the way to get what you were planning on getting.  There are a million different cuisines here and each one has 3 variations. By my math, that is 9.4 trillion options in Tokyo! (Now you know why I no longer work in geology.)

For the most part, we ate on the low end of the price spectrum in Tokyo. We had a few moderately expensive meals and a couple serious sushi extravaganzas that were pricy but worth every penny.  The cheap food is so good it really isn’t fair.

My Instagram posts cover the best of the Tokyo budget meals, but one place that stood out was Fu Unji. Jamie’s cousins, Adam and Louise, referred us to this place and we are both glad that they did. The chef specializes in tsukemen ramen which involves dipping the noodles into the broth rather than serving them together as one bowl of soup.

It cost about $8.00 and was served immediately upon sitting down. His broth is intense, reduced to a point best likened to being punched in the mouth by a yakuza enforcer whose fists are made of pork bones, dried fish and seaweed. I mean that in the most positive way…it’s a punch I would gladly take again, right now.