Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo

by Matthew Amster-Burton

The pickle (tsukemono) section at a depachika is like a scene from a fresh vegetable market in Latin America that has been attacked by Bunnicula.

Texture is the last frontier for Westerners learning to appreciate Chinese food. Cross it, and you’re really inside. But the way there is a wild journey that will bring you face to face with your own prejudices, your childhood fears, perhaps even some Freudian paranoias.

“Shinjuku at night is one of the most deliriously beautiful places in the world,” he wrote, “and somehow the silliest of all beautiful places—and the combination is sheer delight.”

Negima is the single most popular yakitori skewer, chunks of chicken thigh meat interspersed with lengths of sliced negi.

Yaki onigiri are plain, triangular rice balls (no fillings or nori wrapper) cooked on a hot charcoal grill and brushed with soy sauce or miso.

“Tokyo isn’t beautiful at all, but it’s full of beautiful things.”

Oedo Onsen Monogatari is an onsen theme park on the island of Odaiba in Tokyo Bay.

she calls it “smacked cucumber,”

Mago-chan were transplanted to Seattle, it would land instantly on everybody’s ten-best list. In Tokyo, it is merely a neighborhood dumpling restaurant

izakaya is a loud, convivial joint serving drinks and a wide assortment of food to go with them. Izakaya are the exception to the rule that the best Japanese restaurants specialize in one type of dish. It’s common for an izakaya menu to run a hundred items long.

These no-name Tokyo holes in the wall could easily go head-to-head with America’s top seafood restaurants.

(Everywhere the U.S. Army comes ashore, Spam lands with it.)

We signed up for a home visit with a Tokyo family through a company called Nagomi Visit. For a nominal fee, we’d get to visit an average Japanese family at their house for lunch. We requested a family with kids, and the agency matched us with the Usui family of Saitama prefecture.

One of the joys of eating French pastry in Tokyo is availing yourself of French dessert artistry with a Japanese standard of customer service.

Just call me Leisure Sheet Larry.

There’s nothing wrong with a savory pancake, but it should never meet up with a doughnut, any more than a cupcake should be frosted with pesto. The Pon de Monja is dusted with shrimp powder and filled with a fishy jelly studded with cabbage and corn kernels. It looks like the contents of a diaper