Words from an Irishman on his way home...

Sunday 28 December 2008

On Being a Tokyo Foodie...


I'm getting a kick-start on the New Year's resolutions: one of which is to get back into the blogging thing. Not having an Internet connection cramped my style there for a while, but I probably would have been just as lazy if my new Tokyo apartment had been access-ready when I arrived.
Work has been hectic: I cannot believe I've been in the new job two months already. With all the travelling and adjusting to lots of new tasks, the time has just slipped by. I'm on my end-of-year holidays now. It's going to be a lovely week-long chance to find my feet and consider what I've done.
I settled back into being a Tokyoite pretty quickly. Buying my beloved granny bike, Margaret ROTHARford, helped the process along no end. My free time is spent zipping around downtown Tokyo and hitting the cool cafes, restaurants and galleries.
The best thing about being back? Without question, the food! I just love it. I'm so assimilated that I even plan my meals like the Japanese now. One Friday night I was watching old Onion head, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi - this honey-lensed Japanese TV celeb who's about 250 years old, deliciously pre-senile, with amazing taste in wacky outfits and a massive black wig piled on top of her head like a big onion. On her program, she recommended this tofu restaurant in Tokyo's swanky 'Midtown' development. So there I was, the very next day, queuing up with the rest of the housewives to get my tofu 'teriyaki eel' and dry curry rice-bowls. I am one with the borg.
I love in such a big city, too, that you can be wandering through an area you think you know well and suddenly discover a completely new place to enjoy. This is what happened yesterday when I found a great Muji cafe just beside the Imperial Hotel. All that you can see in the picture above just cost 980 yen (8 euro). Pretty amazing... And the pink turnip Oden (veggies slow simmered in stock) was the surprise of the day: I never thought I would be writing a blog in praise of the devil's vegetable!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Followers